BERT WINTERSWIJK AND THE FASTEST FIAT IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
A life-changing move, an 1100 horsepower Fiat and a pay cheque that depended on a full grid of race trucks – this is the story of Bert Winterswijk
Bert Winterswijk racing his Fiat race truck at Calder Park
Photo: Peter Weaver Motorsport Photography
Bert Winterswijk has done it all. He’s been a truck driver on two continents, owned multiple businesses, driven a race truck in front of 40,000 people and made tens of thousands of freight deliveries. And he’s still driving trucks through outback Australia today.
We had the pleasure of chatting with Bert a couple of weeks ago, only hours before his next trip from Queensland to the Pilbara. Born in Holland in the early 1940s, his life has never strayed far from the transport industry. And it’s a lifestyle he’s still loving after almost seven decades at the wheel.
Bert is a wonderful storyteller, and he has no shortage of anecdotes from a life on the move. In this article, we’ll look back on Bert’s history in transport, his involvement in the arrival of truck racing Down Under, his crucial contribution to the sport and what life has held in more recent years. We take our hat off to you, Bert. Enjoy the read.
The early days
Bert was born in Holland during World War II, and his father owned a transport company.
“I started driving semi-trailers when I was 16 years old,” he begins. “I used to cart goods from Holland to Italy, Yugoslavia, Sweden and Denmark. We used to pick up horse meat, because they would eat that in Belgium. And I’d drive all over Europe.”
Bert and his Scania Vabis at Rotterdam Harbour in the late 1950s
Bert chased white lines on European roads for a couple of years, before making a life-changing decision to pack up and start a new life 16,000 kilometres away.
“I decided I wanted a bigger place to go, and I looked at Australia and said, ‘well, I wouldn’t mind going there for a couple of years’. So I did.
And so, he arrived in Sydney on Australia Day in 1961.
“You Australians are still celebrating my arrival here! I said ‘hang on, you’ve all thrown a big party for me,”’ laughs Bert. “It was a big change. In Europe, I used to drive modern Scania trucks, and when I came here, I thought I had gone back about 50 years in transport. Australia was so behind at that time.
“My first truck here was an old Leyland Beaver. I started driving for Rex Overnight, which later became IPEC. We used to do Sydney to Melbourne in 10 and a half hours in those days, and it was a very dangerous run.”
Bert dressed for the trip to Melbourne 1961
Bert with his truck in Yass in 1961. He was carting 45-gallon drums of oil to Melbourne.
Settling in Down Under
“I soon started driving semi-trailers, and I drove them for many years, which was mostly long-distance,” reflects Bert, thinking back to a very different industry in the 1960s. “I used to drive old Leylands, and other trucks that couldn’t go over 80 kilometres per hour.
“It was very hard work,” continues Bert. “People often look back at that time as the ‘good old days’, but we used to have to load and unload trucks by hand. We didn’t really think that was tough, but now people look back and realise that it was a tough life.”
Bert then moved in a different direction. He became involved in supplying fuel for trucks, rather than steering them.
“I drove for the same company for a long time, but I wasn’t going to do that forever. I ended up buying a service station in New South Wales, and then had more service stations.”
But Bert was never going to stay out of the transport industry for long.
“After that, I started a transport company called ‘Quicksafe Freightlines’. We used to run general freight from Sydney to Adelaide and Sydney to Perth.”
The early days of Quicksafe Freightlines
In Bert’s Quicksafe fleet were a few of the last Fiat-badged trucks built and sold in Australia. And one of them was destined to go fast.
The dawn of truck racing
Truck racing was new to Australia in 1987. But it wasn’t new to Bert.
“I was always interested in truck racing,” he recalls. “I knew a few people in Europe that had started truck racing, and it was growing fast.
“We were a bit later in Australia. An English company came here to start truck racing in 1987. They ended up meeting me and a fella named Laurie Gough. Between us, we virtually started truck racing in Australia. We sat down with them and wrote the standards for truck racing, because they came here with European standards that just didn’t work here. They had written the rules and regulations for single-drive trucks, which were common over there, but they weren’t here.”
Bert didn’t just draft the rules. He was a competitor in the very first meeting at Calder Park Raceway in Melbourne’s north in 1987.
“I didn’t know anything about Calder Park,” he laughs. “I lined up in my Fiat, which was also carting freight in my company at the time. I had raced motorbikes and cars before, but I thought it was unbelievable how we could get around in a truck at 160 kilometres per hour and keep it all in one piece. It was something completely new, and I was hooked to the point where I wound up my company to focus on promoting truck racing.”
Bill Sieders (left) and Bert Winterswijk (right) at the first truck race in Australia in 1987
Bert’s weapon of choice
We asked Bert about the history of his Gough & Hunt Engineering-sponsored Fiat race truck.
“It was one of the last Fiats to be built in Australia, before they closed the factory down. It was built in Lidcombe in Sydney.
“It originally had a V8 Fiat engine in it, which blew up in 1985,” he continues. “That’s how I got in touch with Laurie Gough, who was one of the most brilliant diesel engineers in Australia. He put a 903 Cummins in it for me and built it up to about 1100 horsepower. It was one of the fastest trucks on the road.
The Fiat in its early days
“When truck racing started, we painted it green in Gough & Hunt Engineering colours,” Bert recalls. “It went back to general freight overnight from Sydney to Adelaide after the first event, but I had to pull it off the road. My drivers always used to love driving it, but it used so much fuel after all the development we did. My drivers used to go up one particular hill, and on the way down, they’d start at 80 and by the bottom they would be over 110.”
Bert told us just how fast this bogie drive Fiat prime mover was.
“It was capable of 196 kilometres per hour, and I know that because on Castlereigh Road, the police once closed the road off for me to give it a run against a V12 Jaguar that Laurie had. On long legs, the Fiat used to nearly outdo the Jaguar!”
Rocking the motorsport establishment
The diesel monsters made a big impact on race tracks, literally and figuratively.
“The English company was here for two meetings; the first was in 1987 in Melbourne, which was a huge success. We then went to Sydney and brought 40,000 people into Oran Park. That was the biggest crowd they had ever had back in 1988, and it was virtually the biggest motorsport in Australia at the time. We had Dick Johnson, Denny Hulme, Barry Sheene and Allan Grice.
“After the English company left, I took over the promotion of truck racing. I used to go to companies all over Australia and talk to them about building a race truck. My wife and I started ANTRO, which is the Australian National Truck Racing Organisation. Our lives were all about the number of trucks on the circuit, because the contract I had with the race tracks required 16 trucks to line up on the grid or else I wouldn’t get paid. On Saturday we used to have qualifying, and I’d say to the drivers, ‘please don’t crash it or else we won’t get paid!’
Bert’s Fiat at Oran Park in 1987
Truck racing also became a big hit across the ditch.
“A couple of people from New Zealand came out to see our racing, and then we started the Trans-Tasman series,” says Bert. “But we didn’t have enough trucks to give to New Zealand, so Don Hodge, who was a well-known truck dealer at the time, donated four identical International trucks. Laurie and I built them up with roll cages and set them up for racing. Denny Hulme drove one of those trucks, and I remember him saying, ‘I like this better than Formula 1. It’s seat of your pants racing.’
“We took our trucks over to New Zealand and raced there. The first event we did was at Pukekohe, and that was another huge success. We out-rated the All Blacks on TV by three points! We had big street parades and pulled in the biggest crowds they’d ever had at Pukekohe. But we stuffed the circuit, because in those days we raced bogie drive trucks.
“We ended up running that for a number of years. It was very successful.”
A cheaper way to race
There were thousands of potential race trucks out on the road, but with the move away from bogie drive trucks and the engineering effort required to build a big banger within the rules, truck racing needed a more affordable entry point.
“I always used to say to the fellas, ‘all we are is clowns to entertain the public, and as soon as you stop entertaining them, they’ll be done.’ A big part of the attraction was the field size. I couldn’t get too many more A-Class trucks built, so Laurie Gough and I sat down and tried to figure out something a bit cheaper, because it was $150,000 to $200,000 dollars to set up an A-Class truck.
Laurie Gough (left) and Bert Winterswijk (right) in the early days of truck racing
“We then designed the Isuzu SBR class. We built all the roll cages ready to fit to the trucks, and we could put one of those on the circuit for about $12,000 at the time. And the most important thing was that they were competitive. That gave me more trucks to put on the circuit, so we were able to get 25-30 on the starting grid come Sunday.
“The first one was built by Villawood Trucks. Laurie and I built all the safety gear, so you only had to come along, buy the truck and within two weeks it could be on the circuit ready to race.”
Upside down in an SBR
Bert didn’t just build the Isuzu SBR race trucks. He also raced one. Hard.
“I remember running an SBR at Sandown, and even in a smaller truck, it was a fast circuit. As you came off the main straight, you would approach turn one at 160 kilometres an hour.
“In one of the races, as we were approaching the left-hander, somebody rammed me and flipped me end-over-end three times. The truck was virtually written off, but funnily enough, that’s not the moment that stands out to me.”
The safety crew extracted Bert from the mangled cabin, and he started the long walk back to the paddock.
“I was strolling back along the main street with my helmet under my arm, and as I walked past the grandstand, everyone started going berserk. A fella near the top of the grandstand came racing down to the fence and yelled ‘hey, hey, hey.’ I thought he wanted an autograph, but he handed me a Mintie and said, ‘its moment like these you need Minties.’ Everybody burst out laughing.”
Bert’s mangled Isuzu SBR at Sandown
An engineering controversy
“Everything was going really well, but it started to change when the HQ Holden competitors came in,” says Bert, reflecting on the state of play in the early-to-mid-1990s. “They had a lot of troubles with HQ racing rules and regulations, so they started buying SBR trucks. The problem was, they also bought the problems from HQ Holdens at the time and started complaining about the regulations. Then CAMS became involved, and it started getting messy.
“We had a race in Brisbane, and I had a very competitive Isuzu SBR. We used to get 650-700 horsepower out of that truck. But they made my SBR truck ineligible. Laurie Gough was a very innovative engineer, and while we couldn’t have twin-turbo, he put a turbo in the exhaust to get rid of the exhaust gases to eliminate the black smoke. Everybody was complaining that it was twin-turbo, but it wasn’t. We only had one turbo for turbocharging, and the other one was just to get rid of the exhaust gases.
“I said that was it, and that was the end of truck racing for me.”
Life outside a roll cage
Unsurprisingly, Bert hasn’t slowed down since calling time on his truck racing career.
“After truck racing, I started other companies, including selling fifth-wheelers,” he says. “I then started carting fifth-wheelers for all the manufacturers from Sydney to Perth and delivering them to people. I’ve retired three times, but every time, I’ve realised I can’t just be sitting at home.
“A great friend of mine owns a transport company, Aboods Transport, and these days, I run huts from Brisbane to the Pilbara. It’s easy for me, because I don’t have to load or unload. It takes me four or five days to get to Western Australia, and most of the time I come home empty. It’s very easy.”
Bert is still driving trucks long distance today
It’s fitting that a man who has seen so much change in the transport industry still chooses to spend day after day behind the wheel. Keep on trucking, Bert!
If you want to see more of our ‘Classics Week content’, check out the Australia section of our website. You’ll find all our retro stories at the top of the page.