MARATHON MAN!

A YOUNG NICK LENTHALL WATCHED THE FIRST LONDON-SYDNEY MARATHON CIRCUS ROLL THROUGH SOUTH AUSTRALIA, AND WENT BACK OVER 50 YEARS LATER TO SEE THE RE-RUN

- NICK LENTHALL

It's 4.00am and I'm standing on a lonely gravel road near Mt Arden outside of Quorn, 300 kilometres North of Adelaide in the Flinders Ranges. It's December 15, 1968, the eve of my 13th Birthday and my dad has driven us here in our Mk II Cortina to see the world's best race and rally drivers at speed on what is one of the final days of the London to Sydney Marathon, the biggest event of its kind the world has ever seen.

The crews have come from all over the world, rally drivers like Roger Clark, Rauno Aaltonen and Paddy Hopkirk, Le Mans Winner Lucien Bianchi, as well as Australia's best and the 1200-strong population of Quorn has more than doubled for the event.

I hadn't grasped at the time the madness I was watching. 5660 kilometres in three days. Do you want me to say that again? Frankly, it's incomprehensible, even by today's standards of hi-tech machinery. Neither did I realize that I was watching a pivotal event, an event that would affect the lives of so many motorsport enthusiasts.

A few years later at Flinders Uni, I met some blokes who had also been to Quorn to watch the event. We became friends and within a year we were crewing on another student's rally car. Before long two of us were contesting the local championship. We were an example of how much the experience had affected those who witnessed it. One of those blokes - Ed Ordynski - went on to become Australian Rally Champion. It was therefore no surprise when I travelled to Quorn again this year for the Perth to Sydney Marathon to find so many others who had been directly impacted by that 1968 experience.