CUSSO KING

JIM KERR LIVED AN INCREDIBLE LIFE OF CUSTOMLINES, TOP FUELLERS AND RESTORED FORDS

- DAVE COOK

SITTING under the stuffed head of a cape buffalo in a house full of the mementos of a life well lived, 80-year-old Jim Kerr regaled us with tales of hot rodding and drag racing exploits that began in the early 1960s. Now, a few months after Jim’s passing after a long battle with leukaemia, those stories paint a vivid picture of the formative years of the sport in Australia – from street-racing Customlines around the fringes of Sydney to near-200mph laps in a blown Hemi dragster.

Life for Jim had become quieter when we sat down with him back in 2018 to talk about those earlier times, but his advancing years saw no retreat into TV antiques shows and sleeping in comfy chairs. He was busy with a pair of restored ’34 Fords (a coupe and a roadster) and a Thunderbird, with a rare-model Mustang awaiting its time to be tweaked back into shape and a stack of replacement parts for sidevalve Fords that needed machining. Not to mention his engine-building work for fellow enthusiasts.

Jim’s life as a petrolhead really began when he was 19 in 1960. He’d seen a ’48 Mercury in a car yard in the Sydney suburb of Petersham, but a mate beat him to buying it. In frustration, he bought a ’46 Chev instead. But when he drove it up Parramatta Road that night, the bearings quit, so he soon traded it in on a Ford Customline – and became a Cusso man for life.

It wasn’t long before he was hanging out at the now-legendary fast-food joint and hot-car mecca Beefies on Parramatta Road. “That’s where I met a lot of the people I’m still friends with now, people like Flemmo [John Fleming] and the Shifters Hot Rod Club,” Jim recalled. “That’s where drag racing in NSW started.”