John Mann: Champion driver whose life has spanned the greatest period of Australian motor racing
In November 2019 I met John Mann at the Island Magic meeting at the Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit in southern Victoria. John has a long and illustrious career in motorsport so it was great to have a chat.
John, who is now eighty and despite a battle with cancer, is still racing.
In the chat John covered
- His first car, an open wheeler, he made himself
- The many cars he raced
- He nursed about eight of the current supercar drivers when they were babies. Craig Lowndes’ father was his pit crew manager.
- As a young mechanic and he made a mistake that costs a world champion bike rider the race. He had to escape and hide out for a while
- His Friendship with Barry Sheene and his own fight with cancer
An edited version of the interview appeared in the Overdrive radio program first broadcast on 7 December 2019.
We also produced a video of several other characters who were racing at the meeting “Reflections from Phillip Island”
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Jonathan Daly: Measuring your real responses to how you feel about where and how you travel
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Bathurst 12 Hour – How Mercedes sees and uses this great race
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Movie Rush – 1976 F1 Championship
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Prof David Hensher shows a better way to pick transport projects
About Author
David Brown
David Brown started his working life as a Civil Engineer but you would not want him to design a bridge you wanted to safely walk over. His passion was in traffic engineering and transport planning which is all about how we use our transport systems not how we build them. He soon became involved in commenting on issues through all avenues of the media. He is now a motoring and transport journalist. He test drives a new car each week but his ultimate measure of how good a car is relies on his 12 year old and the Hayden Brown “Will you drive me to school in that car” factor.