Why do you keep racing? It's a question that every racer has asked him or herself at some time, and usually there is no perfect answer, and for most it probably lies beyond the limits of vocabulary. However, no matter how deep seated the desire to pursue this passion there are occasions when persistence passes the point of fixation, and your hobby becomes a matter of survival. Brisbane Wild Bunch racer Darryl Woods can tell you all about it, after a trip from hell, to Townsville and back in March and April earlier this year.

Woods was booked to compete in a Wild Bunch race at the far north track on March 30, so began to prepare early for the 2700 km round trip. He bought himself a fresh Toyota Dyna, fitted with a 202 Holden engine, the third such tow rig he'd owned. His satisfaction with the previous set-ups encouraged him to go for another time round.

This time, however, he decided to set the engine up for LP gas, and the truck wasn't ready to begin work until the Monday before they were due to leave. That morning Woods decided to do the right thing and tow the outfit down to the local weighbridge to check that it all fitted within the towing laws, and on the way the radio in the truck burnt out.

"It wasn't much, but I should have known then that it would have been wiser to stay home," Woods recalls with perfect hindsight. On the way back from the weighbridge the starter motor burned out, but he managed to get home and fit a fresh unit.

Of more concern, when he got home, was the lack of the new set of pistons needed to finish the 429 Ford motor for his Falcon Wild Buncher. They'd been in Sydney on the previous Friday and should have been in Brisbane by the Monday. After waiting through Tuesday they showed up on the Wednesday, and the motor was ready for assembly by 5 pm.

That night it was found that the new pistons hadn't been honed to suit the pins, so four-and-a-half hours were lost getting them machined, and it wasn't until 12:30 pm Thursday that the engine was fired and the race car loaded into the trailer. At 4:30 pm that afternoon everything was ready and the car and crew of John Mol and Bruce Prouse headed out for the trip north.

Everything went well until about five hundred km north when the engine began to run rough and the team limped into Gladstone at 11:30 pm to find a broken distributor after the springs on the advance weights had broken. They changed the distributor, and welded up a crack they'd found in the extractors and were on their way again at 12:45 am.

At 3:30 am a water pump hub sheared on the Holden engine and it put the fan through the radiator on the Marlborough section, north of Rockhampton. They managed to scrounge up a not very classy replacement radiator and limped on, after losing nine-and-a-half hours.

A little further up the road they had to stop while they removed a badly vibrating tailshaft and tightened the gearbox hub, and got themselves into Sarina, just short of Mackay.

By this time the engine was boiling frequently due to the many holes in the radiator, so they were having to stop every 50 km. After a few of these the starter motor, newly installed before they left Brisbane, burnt out. Boiling every 50 km, stopping on downhill inclines to cool and then clutch starting they struggled on to Mackay.

When this proved to be a nuisance they rounded up eight Coke bottles which they filled with water and they took to driving along and every 20 minutes lifting the passenger seat and pouring one of the bottles full of water into the radiator to reduce the number of required stops.

There they had seven holes in the radiator repaired and headed out, still doggedly pointed north, at 5:30 pm. At 5:45 they blew a hole in the exhaust, and shortly after managed to find a garage, just as it was closing, which had a replacement starter. At 8:15 it packed it in. Almost unbelievably, at 10:30 pm they struggled into Townsville.

On Saturday morning, before heading out to the race track, they bought a new starter motor, exhaust gasket and muffler bandage.

At the race meeting things didn't get any brighter. The Falcon fried the gearbox and its converter. The pin came out of the rear bumper which broke and then damaged the left rear guard. That was the first run.

They missed the second round of racing when the car wouldn't start when the fuel pump drive fell out, which damaged a piston, and a rocker stud stripped, and on the third the gearbox, already damaged, found a bunch of neutral not far off the line.

It hadn't been the most successful of race meetings, but feeling consoled that they were at least heading home, on Sunday morning they left Townsville, headed south.

Things looked good - for 50 km - then a head gasket blew. They pulled the head off and after six-and-a-half hours of work were back on the road. At Ayr, still only 90 km out of Townsville, the latest starter motor burnt out. After clutch starting the truck they headed off and got all the way to Marlborough, 240 km south of Mackay, when they found they had no clutch when they went to stop. The constant clutch starting had taken its toll and the springs had come out and jammed against the flywheel bolts, preventing it from disengaging.

By this stage the two crew members, showing a remarkable, but understandable lack of tenacity, began pleading to just abandon the whole thing on the side of the road and fly home.

They managed to tow start the outfit, using a chain, though in the process they damaged the front bumper of the Dyna and unwilling to do other than plough on towards home managed to get as far as Gladstone by 1:30 am without a clutch.

After spending the night there with friendly drag racers they began on Monday morning by removing the gearbox and replacing the clutch, they pulled off the extractors and starter motor, fitting a new starter, cast iron headers and a new exhaust system, and at 4:30 pm they headed out, hoping by now to get home in peace.

Just 90 km south the tail shaft fell out, taking out the gearbox, a PTO drive used to operate a hydraulic hoist to lift the race car, the new exhaust system, the second crossmember of the chassis, the bellhousing, flywheel, ring gear and, to add insult to injury, bent a selector arm.

Admitting defeat Woods and his exhausted crew had the whole rig towed back into Gladstone where they hired a car - at a cost of $197 - and drove comfortably home to Brisbane.

Of course, the race car and its transporter could not just be left 570 km up the coast, so the following Friday Woods and his dogged crew loaded a new three-piece tailshaft (to replace the two-piece unit), hoping to reduce the load on the front bearing and a "bodgie" bellhousing into his wife's Ford Spectron van and drove back up to Gladstone to repair the mess and get it home.

Just to prove that factors such as luck don't just run with race cars or any other single vehicle, on the way north they blew a tyre on the van, and the steel belts ripped the wiring harness out of the back of the car.

After battling into Gladstone they fifted a new flywheel, bellhousing, starter, clutch, PTO hub and tailshaft to the Dyna. It was then that they found the number two tailshaft hub was bent and this made the rear shaft run out by about 2 inches. The vibration made it impossible to drive over 5 kmh. After spending most of Saturday looking for a hub they returned to the garage where the truck was being kept to find that the vibration from the driveshaft had taken its toll on the gear-box, and there was oil leaking all over the place and the PTO shaft seal had let hydraulic oil run unstopped into the gearbox. They opened the drain plug and let 35 litres run out.

They soaked the clutch in petrol to remove as much of the oil as possible and managed to knock the damaged tailshaft hub into good enough shape to get under way and, seemingly impossibly, reach home at 5:30 pm on Monday, April 8.

It was two full weeks since this story began.

At least the starter was still working!

In concluding, Woods explained that he puts most of the problems down to the decision to put the engine onto LPG, in conjunction with the fitting of a set of extractors.

"The way the extractors were built they were very close to the starter, and I've since found that LPG cars run a lot hotter in the exhaust. It was so hot that the heat from the extractors was melting the lead out of the starter motors, which caused them to keep failing, then all the clutch starts damaged the clutch and ultimately the centre bearing on the driveshaft."

Of course, all great achievements are possible only with the assistance of others, and Darryl Woods' ultimate arrival back in Brisbane, with his race car, was possible only through the assistance of Midas Mufflers in Rockhampton and Gladstone, the crew from Benaraby Raceway in Gladstone, especially Mark and Mary Jane Condren who provided a bed for the night when it was most needed.

Who said running a race car was cheap? Now you know why racers ask for travel money.