Originally posted by Steve Holmes
OK, who is driving the Plymouth?
There's a bit of a funny story about this car...

A few years ago I was living near Caboolture, north of Brisbane, and a local bloke had bought a similar car and intended to do a bit of street-dragging. He told me he went to the local motorcycle shop to get a helmet.

"As soon as I pulled up out the front," he told me, "the bike salesman came out and started raving about the car, that he had driven the one like it that Ash Marshall had imported from the wharf to Brookvale without registration."

In the meantime, he related, the various mechanics and so on from the shop came out and started lampooning the salesman. "He's always making up stories like that," they told the Plymouth owner. So he decided to let him keep on talking, he knew Ash Marshall and eventually the bloke would say something that proved either he was being truthful or bunging it on.

In the end he proved himself honest, the Plymouth owner asked him a question that could only come from someone who knew what it was all about and the mechanics etc retreated with their tails between their legs.

Having heard this story and recalling that Bob Levett, my flag-waving companion at Warwick Farm, and I used to always get the latest gen on Marshall and his doings from a workmate, I called Bob and told him about it. "Who was it that we knew who worked for Ash Marshall and kept us informed," I asked him. "That was Bruce's brother..."

So I phoned Bruce and learned that his brother was now on Bribie Island, only about 15kms from where the motorcycle shop. I had ascertained that the salesman had been a kind of hanger-on at Marshall's yard and had just happened to take the trip to the wharf the day the Ramcharger cars had arrived.

Marshall was unwilling to leave the cars on the wharf overnight and that's how he had come to drive the car back to Brookvale. I got the guys together, it was the first time they'd seen each other in forty years.

But getting back to Caelli and the subject Plymouth, he did run it for a few meetings, I think that included a Hume Weir, certainly a Calder and a Sandown, and he also drag raced it. Today the car is in WA and still goes drag racing.