HAWKESBURY mechanic Tony Williams was a very happy man when he won a big drag boat race in Victoria last month.
The 62-year-old won the national title and the Bill Davis Memorial Race in the top alcohol class at the Australian Drag Boat Championships on the Mornington Peninsula.
“We have won it six times. We have got the most wins on the Bill Davis Memorial trophy,” Williams said.
“It is a race in honour of a bloke who died racing quite a while ago.
“It is pretty good that we have the most wins especially considering the amount of times we have contested it. We can’t always make it down and have missed it the past few years.”
Williams, along with wife Robyn, runs T. H. Williams Automotive in Richmond, and has been there for 26 years.
He has raced boats far longer than that.
“My cousin used to have a race boat and I ended up buying it and it all went downhill from there,” he said of his introduction into boat racing.
“I do it because I just like going fast.”
Williams said he favoured the drag races, where his supercharged alcohol fuel injected boat can do a quarter of a mile, or 400 metres, in about seven seconds.
Despite the ludicrous speeds he raced at, Williams said he was always at ease inside the sealed cockpit of his boat.
“You are strapped down inside and you only have limited vision,” he said.
“You just focus on the countdown lights and then you take off and focus on the finish lines and deploying the parachutes.
“Everything happens so quickly. It is all over before you know it.”
Williams said in well over 30 years of racing, he had never had a serious accident.
“We've sunk once and we ran up the bank once, because we didn't get the parachute out in time on a very short track,” he said.
Unsurprisingly for a mechanic, Williams said he was a huge petrol head.
He said he loved drag racing, both with boats and cars.
Williams said he could no longer drive down to the Mornington Peninsula for races and back in one weekend like he used to when he was younger.
He said, however, that because he did not race as often, the trip down had become a family holiday.
Indeed, his wife Robyn said after one of his Bill Davis Memorial wins, they had a choice of leaving either the trophy or one of their kids behind because the car was so packed.
“Either one was an option,” Robyn said.
Williams said his crew of Vince Dellaciopa, his nephew Brook Hosford, Dave Lord and Mick Sammut were always on hand to help, and in the not too distant future they would strip down the engine on Tony’s boat to ensure there were no problems with it.