FRANK AMOROSO’S LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

Sitting down with an icon of the Australian transport industry for Classics Week

Frank Amoroso at Calder Park in 1989
Photo: Peter Weaver Motorsport Photography

It’s not often you get to chat with a legend of an industry. And as we dialed Frank Amoroso’s phone number of a sunny Saturday afternoon in Melbourne last month, the butterflies in the stomach were fluttering as fast as one of Frank’s trucks delivering air freight on the Hume Highway. Frank is, after all, a member of the National Road Transport Hall of Fame and a legend of Australian truck racing.

It’s hard to do a story like Frank’s justice – a man who carved out a life doing exactly what he imagined, and then a whole lot more. So, our best bet is to say as little as we can and let the Melbourne-born transport icon tell stories like only he can.

This is the first article of our two-part series covering Frank’s history in transport as well as his four decades in truck racing. For Classics Week, we’ll cut this part off at the new millennium, but if you’re interested in what Frank has been up to more recently, we’re already working on the second part, which we’ll publish next week.

But we’ll start off in Melbourne’s inner-north in the mid-1950s.

Born to be in transport

Frank was the youngest of six siblings, and the only one born in Australia. Like thousands of other Italian families, Frank’s parents, and his five older siblings, immigrated from Italy to Australia in the mid-20th Century. And it didn’t take long for the youngest’s lifelong interest to ignite.

“I was bound to be in the transport industry,” begins Frank. “I grew up with trucks. My brother, Peter Amoroso, ran Amoroso Transport. I started off at nine years old in rolled up overalls greasing trucks. And I was driving trucks unlicensed interstate from about 13 years of age. I’d go with the drivers, and while they were asleep, I’d be driving.

“I had some problems with truancy, and I was the first kid in Australia to get an exemption from school at 13 years of age. Ultimately, I knew what I wanted to do from such an early age. I wanted to be a mechanic, and I wanted to have my own truck. I was destined to do it.”

Oil-stained overalls and inventive repairs

When he left school, Frank was a long way off being able to drive trucks legally. That meant he didn’t start out steering vehicles for a living. Instead, he spent each day repairing them.

“The mechanic who taught me was named Alvio,” says Frank. “He didn’t just teach me mechanics. In those days, nobody bought parts. You rebuilt everything. We’d always be rustling through old bolts and bits and pieces and cobbling something together. And those skills have stuck with me for life.

“Alvio also made me eat a raw egg for breakfast every morning – you’d put a hole in the egg and suck it. I had to do it, otherwise he’d throw a hammer at me! He was trying to teach me about life and looking after yourself. It was an old Italian tradition. The whole environment was completely different to these days.”

As adulthood approached, Frank turned his attention to earning a living in the driver’s seat.

“I wasn’t allowed to drive for my brother,” stresses Frank. “My mother watched my eldest brother go through hell day and night. She wanted me to be a doctor or a solicitor, and she threatened my brother with death if he let me drive for his company!

“I ended up getting a job with another fella named Danny Spalinga, who owned Kadima Transport. And I started driving interstate on the day I turned 18 in 1974.”

A hard charger on the Hume

Kadima Transport was based in a laneway behind the Astor Hotel on Melbourne’s Lygon Street, which was, and still is, the lifeblood of Melbourne’s Italian community.

“They would load the trucks to the height of the doorway, out into the lane, and they’d top them up with the boxes over the top. We’d go out and the rigids were 14-foot long, and no joking, there were about 14-foot high,” laughs Frank. “They were nearly touching the tramlines in Carlton!”

Frank’s duties weren’t limited to driving trucks when the sun went down. He was also responsible for keeping them on the road.

“I wasn’t just a driver at Kadima. I was also the mechanic there. I lived in Canning Street in North Carlton, and Danny would come knock on the door and get my mum to wake me up at lunchtime. He wouldn’t ask me to come and do some mechanical work. Instead, he’d just sling me $50 or $100 to go and do it before we headed off that night. It was a sh*tload of money back then.”

It was in these days that Frank built a reputation on the famous Melbourne to Sydney route.

“The first truck I drove was a little D750 Ford,” he recalls. “That was a fast truck back in 1974. Then I went into a TK Bedford, which was an absolute rocket ship. I was one of the only blokes who used to get into trouble for travelling too quick. I was always in on time, before the place ever opened. It got to the stage where the depot would open at 6am in the morning, and the first thing Danny would do is put his hand on the rocker cover and see how cool it was to figure out what time I had gotten in.”

Frank continues, “I was always a hard-charger on the Hume Highway and was one of the best-known up there, I suppose.”

It was FATE

After a couple of years and many thousands of deliveries, Frank left Kadima Transport, which set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to his iconic trading name.

“My brother convinced me that I should get off the express stuff, so I did two years on general freight and aged about 10 years! That was bloody hard work – you spent more time loading and unloading than you did driving Melbourne to Sydney.”

It’s fair to say that Frank wasn’t going to do that forever. His passion was for driving.

“Danny from Kadima called me one day and said, ‘I want you to go and buy a truck and work for me’,” recalls Frank. “So, I went and bought my first Ford Louisville in April 1979. That was when I started the FATE company. How FATE came into it was I couldn’t use the Amoroso name, because my brother was already using that. So, my sister-in-law said to me, ‘why don’t you make it FATE?’ I said, ‘What do you mean, make it FATE?’ She said ‘Frank Amoroso Trucking Enterprises’. And that’s where it came from.”

A truck known as Nightrider

Kadima Transport was soon bought out, so Frank and a group of other drivers started a company called Transett Express with 17 credit cards, each with a $5000 limit.

“Around that time, I bought my second Ford Louisville,” says Frank. “And I said to Cummins that I wanted to buy an LTL, but I wanted to put a V903 engine in it. We eventually came to the agreement that it would be done.

“That night, I was travelling in the fog following a couple of mates. And as we were dawdling along into Yass, my mate went over the crest, his taillights disappeared, and I lost track of where I was,” Frank recalls. “The fog was so thick that you couldn’t see two inches in front of your nose, and the steer wheel fell off the edge of the road. I was always taught that if you kept your foot buried in it, the thing wouldn’t tip over. The next thing, the truck is in the air, and there was no way in hell I could save this truck, and it went on its side.

“The wheels were turning at about a million miles an hour, but I lifted the door of the Louisville up, stood on the fuel tank and opened the door back up to put my foot on the brake and stop the wheels. The next thing, my shoe comes off. With the fear of fire and being hurt, I was able to lift the door up and get out. But when I got back in to get my shoe, for the love of God, I couldn’t get that door open while the truck was on its side. I ended up kicking the windscreen out to get out of the truck.

“Anyway, while the truck was on the side of the road, on its side, I had Brian Ginger from Re-Car on the phone, and we were discussing rebuilding my truck! I figured the only way I could get what I wanted was to build it.”

The Louisville was damaged, but Frank didn’t approach the rebuild by halves.

“I ended up converting it from an LNT9000 to an LTL. That was a feat on its own, because the LTL had only just come out, and there was only one on show at Oakleigh Ford on Blackburn Road. I had to go down there, takes the spare parts salesman by the hand and say ‘right, I need this bonnet, those hinges, and this and that and that.’ We pulled the cab back 27 inches, and we made plenty of other changes to get about 35 more horsepower out of it. It became known as ‘Nightrider’.

Frank’s custom Ford LTL9000

“Unfortunately, that truck had a tragic history,” says Frank, pausing for a moment. “In December 1987, a bloke was going around a corner too quickly at Jugiong and he landed on top of the truck. My good friend, Ian McDonald, was killed. ‘Gobby’ was a fantastic bloke. I nearly went out of business because I was that broken-hearted. It was a horrible, horrible accident.”

In grief came a new pursuit

Frank had loved motorsport from an early age, but didn’t pursue it as a career because “there was just no money in it back then.”

But in 1987, truck racing arrived on Australian shores at Melbourne’s Calder Park. Frank had a Kenworth K100 Aerodyne at the time, and only two race meetings later, his everyday truck was trading paint with some of the biggest names in motorsport.

“It was like racing a three-storey block of flats,” laughs Frank, responding to our question about his first taste of track time at Calder Park in 1988. “The Aerodyne was a 10-tonne truck, and we had about 900 horsepower coming out of it. But the truck handled fairly well, all things considered.”

When the green flag waved for the first race, Frank acted on a reflex from the road that gave his bogie drive competitors a head-start in the opening stages.

“My trucks have always been set up with police scanners, radar detectors and the whole lot,” he says. "When it came time to race, the one thing I forgot to turn off was the radar detector. In those days, the coppers used to stand at the end of the main straight at Calder and hit you with the radar gun to make sure we didn’t break the 160 kilometre per hour limit.

“On the first lap, when the radar detector went off, I just automatically jumped on the brake pedal. You have to remember that I was an interstate truck driver at the time, and it was just normal instinct. It’s fair to say lost a bit of ground coming into turn one!”

The FATE Kenworth K100 Aerodyne at Calder Park in 1988
Photo: Peter Weaver Motorsport Photography

Race on Sunday, freight on Monday

Frank couldn’t afford to do much damage on a Sunday afternoon, because all his income depended on the big Kenworth.

“I’d race it on the weekend, shut the fuel tank back and then go back to work on the Sunday night or the Monday. That was how I paid the bills. The only place I didn’t race it was Oran Park. I looked at the wall at Oran Park and thought if somebody whacks me and I end up in there, I’m going to be off the road for a while. And I couldn’t afford to lose that income.

“I had to take the truck down to Re-Car in Sunshine, because we had to find a way to build a roll cage without destroying the inside of the cabin,” explains Frank. “While I was there getting the roll cage put in, Dick Johnson came in and was getting some stuff done to his Ford Cargo!

“The original Aerodynes back in those days only had two-and-a-half-inch front brakes. There was a road train axle at the time that had 7-inch brakes, so we fitted the other axle underneath it, made the roll cage and went to Dunlop to get some low-profile tyres. We had bigger injectors in it, the fuel tank was opened up to the shizen housen, and we fitted a new turbo to it. But the stuff I put on for racing, I left on the truck. The only thing we’d do before putting it back on the road was shut the fuel pump down.”

That meant the freight could get from Melbourne to Sydney in a matter of hours, theoretically speaking.

“One night after the racing, I took it away with the low-profile tyres, the engine still opened up to 900 horsepower, and it pulled like a 15-year-old, I can tell you,” jokes Frank. “At the time, I was carting rolls of material, t-shirts, pantyhose, and any type of clothing for some of the best-known brands in Australia.”

A two-truck team

Frank raced the Aerodyne for a couple of years, but bogie drive trucks were soon banned because of the damage they did to tracks. That meant his Aerodyne was retired to everyday duties on the road, but the truck racing dream was anything but over.

“In 1990, I went up to the Army auctions and bought a bogie drive 1971 Diamond Reo. It had only done 21,000 original miles. That truck would come in every month and get a service, even though it hadn’t been anywhere. It was like a brand-new truck to drive. But my wife even said to me at the time, ‘what the hell have you done?’

“Once again, we went down to Re-Car and turned it into a single-drive race truck. In my first race in the Diamond Reo at Oran Park in 1990, I took off down pit lane and by the time I got to the end of pit lane, I had no front brakes! The original brakes were only two-and-a-half inches, but thank goodness it had a retarder on the automatic gearbox. I was using the retarder pedal to slow it down.”

With grid sizes swelling in the early nineties, Frank pulled out the chequebook again.

“Not even 12-months after buying the Diamond Reo, I bought the W-model Kenworth that I have today. I was one of the few that ran a two-truck team. I drove the W-model on my own, and there were two drivers for the Diamond Reo. The W-model is the original one that Allan Grice drove back in 1987. It was a brand-new truck back then. Richard Blackney bought it off Re-Car but never actually raced it, and I was able to do a good deal and bought it off him.”

The FATE Racing team

And yet, the race trucks weren’t the only eye-catching machinery in the FATE Racing squad.

“I also bought a bus to save on accommodation, which was painted up with all the FATE colours. It had eight seats in it, six beds and a little kitchenette. That way we weren’t paying for hotels. Marie would do all the cooking and everything else. I wasn’t going to go broke to go racing, and we always found a way.”

When the trucks raced on the Thunderdome

One of the most famous Australian truck racing race meetings took place in December 1990 at Melbourne’s Calder Park Thunderdome. Predictably, Frank was right in the thick of it.

“The stock cars had something like 10 degrees of camber in the left wheels, because the angle of the track was atrocious,” he reflects. “I ended up lowering the seat of the truck to the floor, because you could only see about four foot in front of you. I hit the wall in the Diamond Reo earlier in the week, and it was a bigger hit than Elvis Presley. I was just lucky not to have done it on the weekend.

“My wife also had a drive of the truck earlier that week, and showed us all how it was done. She’d drive road trucks as fast as I would, and when we raced at the Thunderdome on the Wednesday before the races, she wanted to have a go. She jumped in and among of all of us there that day, she was the quickest around the Thunderdome.”

Truck racing on the Calder Park Thunderdome in 1990
Photo: Peter Weaver Motorsport Photography

Frank recalls some of the carnage that unfolded when the green flag waved a big field of trucks into battle on the steep banking.

“Rodney Crick had a big accident that weekend in one of the MAN trucks that belonged to the Sieders boys. We all stopped to pull him out of the truck, and I can tell you, he was black and blue. Paul Freestone also took the start lights out. We pulled a huge crowd there during the peak time at Calder Park, but we were blowing steer tyres after a couple of laps. It was very dangerous, because they wouldn’t let us bend the axles like the stock cars.”

Settling scores with the Kiwis

Truck racing was a big deal across the ditch, too. And it only made sense to ship the trucks across the Tasman to see who could do it better.

“If I remember right, we had the Trans-Tasman event in Sydney in 1994, and that was the only year that the New Zealanders won. That year, I missed out on qualifying, so I was the next spare truck to either be on the Australian or New Zealand teams. And then one of the New Zealand trucks broke down, so I became the New Zealander.

“I’ve been well-known for blocking over the years, and the Kiwis were a bit concerned over whether I was going to play to their advantage or not,” laughs Frank. “But when the New Zealanders won, Jim Richards came over and said, ‘you deserve this’. I said, ‘what did I do to deserve it?’ And he said, ‘if it wasn’t for your ability to block, we wouldn’t have been able to win it! The trophy is yours.’”

Frank preparing to race

Frank in the paddock at Oran Park

Oran Park heartbreak

As the nineties drew to a close, the trucks still attracted thousands of race fans through the gates at Oran Park. They weren’t short of entertainment on the hill, either, as Frank came close to a stunning win in 1999.

“One of my most upsetting rounds was one of the Superprix races in Sydney that year. We put a new camshaft in it, and we had the W900 absolutely cracking. We were fighting with Rodney Crick, Robbie Russell and some bloody good drivers.

Frank continues, “I actually led the race for about two thirds of the way, and Rodney could not get past me. The problem was, I had a nylon airline, and it was nowhere near the exhaust, but it ended up getting that hot that it put a pinhole in the airline, and it slowly started losing its air. And then it gave up the ghost. That was upsetting, because that race was mine. To be let down by a nylon airline was so disappointing. It clearly had an impact, because to this day, I still have a phobia about nylon airlines anywhere!”

That’s it for the first part of our chat with Frank Amoroso, taking us through to the end of 1999. Keep an eye out for part two next week.

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