Pitpass' Eoin Young pays tribute to David McKay, who passed away on December 26.

David McKay was a motor racing writer with a difference in that he was a racer as well as a writer. He died of a cancer relate illness aged 83 in Australia on Boxing Day.

I suppose David was something of a silver spoon racer, starting at the top with the aid of family finances, but he was a popular character, one of the Aussie lads, with his trim moustache and his distinctive stammer. He made his debut in the 1950 race at Bathurst in an MG TC and ran there for the last time in 1979 with a Volvo 242 GT. In 1955 he was a member of an Aussie sports car team of DB3S Aston Martins in Europe but it was the year of the Le Mans disaster and many of their races were cancelled. His best result was 2nd in the 12-hours at Hyeres, sharing with Tony Gaze.

In 1959 he founded his Scuderia Veloce team and in the 'sixties he drove his own Coopers and Brabhams, fielding a Brabham for Graham Hill on occasion and a 250LM Ferrari for Jackie Stewart. It was McKay who gave a youthful Chris Amon a chance to spark his career in a Cooper single-seater. Amon later drove a Ferrari CanAm spyder for Scuderia Veloce.

"He was a significant influence in the earlier stages of my career," Chris remembers. "Scuderia Veloce was also of considerable assistance when I was racing the Ferraris on the Tasman series. Without David's assistance we wouldn't have got very far."

He wrote two readable autobiographies - "Behind the Wheel" in the late 1950s, and "Scuderia Veloce" in recent years - but perhaps his most talked-about achievement was knocking down the circuit 'dunny' (a.k.a. a toilet in another part of the world) at Warwick Farm when he spun his Cooper into the infield.

David was a total enthusiast and rallied as well as raced, competing in the early Redex trials round Australia and led a team of Holdens in the first London to Sydney marathon.

In 1960 he won the Australian Touring Car Championship at Orange in a 3.4 Jaguar and between 1960 and 1963 he held the lap record for the Bathurst mountain circuit in the Jaguar.

For many years he wrote on motoring and racing for newspapers in Sydney and also wrote for Modern Motor magazine. In later years he married Annie and lived in her home town of Geneva during European summers, covering all the Grand Prix races and returning to his family country property at Exeter, a two-hour drive from Sydney.

David McKay (1921 - 2004)

Eoin Young