The Huntingdale Auto Club has been servicing grassroots motorsport for Melbourne’s south east suburbs for more than half a century.
With no intention of slowing down in the near future, club secretary John Rosengrave spoke with motorsport.org.au about its diverse and rich history.
What are the origins of the Huntingdale Auto Club?
The club was created in the early 1960s in and around the south east of Melbourne– mainly Oakleigh and Huntingdale – hence the name.
The initial membership was a mixture of people competing in motor racing and flag marshals who supported those competitors. We were one of two flag marshalling teams throughout the 1960s.
Has the club always been involved with motor racing?
We started off that way, as well as providing officials to events at Phillip Island and Winton, but we also did hill climbs, motorkhanas and khanacrosses too. I believe we were also one of the first clubs to do supersprints within the state.
In the 1970s, we began to get an influx of rally people and so then, for the next two decades, we were heavily involved in the Australian rally scene and we were quite prominent too. One of our members, Jeff Beaumont won the Australian Rally Championship
three times.
As for membership, with so many different disciplines, there would be quite a diverse group of people involved now?
We are diverse but we don’t have as many members as we used to. While we had up to 150 at one point, we now have 40 club members.
This happened because a lot of the rally people left to join other clubs as we are not a professional club. Although we still had some very notable people part of the club.
On top of Jeff Beaumont, our alumni consists of two Motorsport Australia founders - Donald Thomson (DKT) and Maurice Monk, as well as 2019 Australian Motorkhana champion Aaron Wuillemin and 2019 State Motorkhana Champion, Michael Exell.
With Thomson and Monk, they joined us because they appreciated the way we were doing club events and how we maintained a club atmosphere instead of going professional. They were both members until they passed away.
How come the club moved away from rally?
The club itself supported the rally people by officiating at their events. We also ran clubman type rallies ourselves, particularly as it was a lot easier to do it in those days since events could be based closer to Melbourne.
Once some of our rally members became a bit more professional and moved on to other clubs such as a Light Car Club and the Historic Rally Association, we stepped down a gear to focus on motorkhanas, which we have continued doing since the 1960s.
The club has obviously had its fingers in a few pies over the years, but are there any notable events you run each year?
Absolutely. Our biggest event has been our Interclub Motorkhanas, which I initiated in 1969. Last year, we celebrated the 50th Interclub Motorkhana, which I believe made it one of the longest running motorkhanas in Australia.
It’s always been a popular event - our biggest Interclub event featured over 160 entries on eight test areas down at Avalon. It was incredible.
Last year’s event was also special personally as I was involved as Director at first one in 1969 and then again at the last one, 50 years later. A pretty good innings if you ask me.
So will the club still run motorkhanas in the future, once COVID-19 restrictions relax more?
Unfortunately, I don’t think we will be organising any more events of that sort any time soon – certainly not to the scale of the Interclub Motorkhanas. We’ve lost a few key people who were responsible for officiating at our major events over the past 10 years. It will be the first time in 10 years we have not run a State Championship or Interclub motorkhana.
In that case, what is the focus now?
Like some other clubs, we are going down the line of social outings, including cruises and pub nights. Obviously we are on hold now, but we will soon get back to that. We’ve stepped back from organising motorkhanas for the immediate future and are
doing more social interactions.
With that said, we’re still going to be involved with other events, just not running them. We have always had strong links with motorkhanas and we have won the Victorian club championship for 10 consecutive years until the Mini Car Club of Victoria
won it last year.
What makes the club unique?
We’re a proud club. We have reunions every five or 10 years and I believe we can continue existing well into the future. We also have a very high percentage of active, competing members, and support junior drivers with driver training programs such as Ricciardo’s Racers.
The friendship, camaraderie amongst members and low cost, which is pretty important at our level, are the main factors behind our success and why we attract people. Adult membership costs $35, which is very affordable. We’re not just a club that puts on events.
We like to support our members with social events and training.
What are the benefits of being involved with Motorsport Australia?
It’s a good support network to be associated with. We also see our affiliation with Motorsport Australia as a legal requirement to conduct recognised motorsport.
We have had an ongoing relationship with Motorsport Australia from the start and have one of the highest ratios of registered officials to member numbers of any club. We probably have 20 per cent of our membership as licensed officials, so the club considers Motorsport Australia essential to do our sort of motorsport.
