FOR DECADES I believed Hell was a kind of fiery Final Solution lying in wait for most of us as soon as the old ticker gives out. I was wrong.
Hell happens once a year at the beginning of October in the NSW western plains city of Bathurst where they hold Australia's most important motor race, the Hardie-Ferodo 1000. The exact location of Hell (which even experts have been unable to pinpoint until now) is not in the bowels of the earth but some 850 metres above sea level at the top of Mount Panorama, in
the dead centre of the Sulman Park camping area.
In motor race spectating circles, you're not a man until you've spent at least one Hardie-Ferodo 1000 weekend among the broken glass and the drunken trumpet players of Sulman Park - much the same as in the army, where they used to say you were just a lad until you'd had the clap.
Well, I'm a man now, baby; maybe a man twice over because I've survived a couple of days in the mouth of Hell and I've found that the flames of derision really blister your buttocks if you drive in and out of Sulman Park in a stripey John Goss Special Falcon Hardtop after
a H-F 1000 which The Fords Didn't Win. The bucketing you get is plain incredible.
Looking back, the saddest thing is that before the event, it all seemed such a good idea. After all, the top of the Mount gives you quick access to some of the Bathurst circuit's best - some of the world's best - race-watching spots, the idea of camping appealed to a normally smogbound flat dweller and even the prospect of living on Chiko Rolls and meat pies was appealing because it was different.
Going to Bathurst in the Goss special (hereafter called the Goose, because that's what the guys from Ford PR call it, except on official occasions) seemed a good idea, too, because it would provide docile, effortless transport for the speed-limited 210 kilometres from Sydney to the Mount. Besides, it might be fun to run through the inevitable speed traps at a serene and legal 98 kmlh in the mobile Christmas tree and 0bserve the cheated expressions of the bulging blue uniforms standing at the roadside peering at their radar scopes.
In spite of the combined efforts of the NSW Minister for Mines and Energy (Mr Freudenstein) and the oil refinery workers who jointly tried to stage a holiday weekend petrol famine, the Goose, staff photog Warwick Kent and I escaped from Sydney on the Saturday morning, hoping to set up camp in time to see most of the afternoon practice session. We headed out along the Bell's Line of Road \toward Lithgow, there to link with the Great Western Highway, the road to Bathurst.
