MG Car Club of South Australia
T
AN EVENING WITH STUART BOWES
here will be a Friday night event at the clubrooms on the 24th November were Stuart Bowes will have his WRC Toyota Rally car on display and give a talk on his experiences as a motorsport photographer and rally driver.
Stuart Bowes is a middle aged guy with a passion for rallying that ' s taken him all over the world for more than 30 years.
Starting his working career in the road transport industry straight out of high school in the late 1970 ' s, a family friend and local South Australian motorsport identity, Jeremy Browne, introduced him to rallying and he ' s never let go.
Initially competing in the South Australian Rally Championship with his brother, Angus, during the early 1980 ' s, the costs began to bite and he was determined to find a way to enjoy his passion and have someone else pay the bills. Chasing sponsors was not his thing so he decided to start a motorsport photo agency.
Ed Ordynski opened the doors at Mitsubishi and the Whitten family in Victoria started a dedicated rally magazine, Australian RallySport News. Well known Australian motoring journalist, Paul Gover, introduced him to the people at Toyota and this was the start of something far bigger than he ever imagined …..
Travelling the globe at " someone else ' s expense " he shot the World Rally Championship for more than 20 years, the Australian Rally Championship for slightly longer, Formula 1 races all over the world for close to 10 years, rounds
30 of the World Touring Car championship, International Motor Shows, the Australian Off Road Championship, classic rallies in Europe, in fact anything that involved motorsport except our home grown V8 Supercars!
Juggling two professions, Stuart is the joint owner with his brother of Adelaide based engineering business, Broons, which specialises in the manufacture of specialised heavy soil compaction equipment used on some of the largest civil engineering projects on earth
These days he ' s pretty well hung up the cameras and turned his focus to classic rallying. Renown Adelaide car builder, Garry Kirk has spent the last 3 years building a Mercedes 450SLC 5.0L gravel rally car, a tribute to the cars that ran in the World Rally Championship during the late 1970 ' s. Recently the car had it ' s first outing in the Heartland Rally where Stuart finished on the podium in 2 nd outright after more than 30 years since he last competed in an event.
His other passion is scouring the world for cars from the World Rally Championship to add to his collection. The car Stuart has brought along is a 1996 Group A Toyota Celica GT-Four, one of the last cars built by the factory rally team in Germany, Toyota Team Europe( TTE).
It ' s the final evolution of a Group A rally car before the introduction of the World Rally Car formula in the late 1990 ' s. These cars were based on an evolution of a production car, the last time ever a Manufacturer built a dedicated car with the sole purpose to compete in mo-