The Birth of a Rally (and Model)

By Noel Standfast

Some time ago (!) we had an interesting call from one of our founding members now the late (as of March 2021) Rick 'fueller' Scouller who was quite a character and was very active in the early days of the club. Rick owned many big Healeys but his favourite was his beloved 100S, AHS 3909, finished in Old English White with Lemans style racing stripes. He drove the 100S spiritedly at every opportunity, including to work, in club competition, shopping and to national rallies as far afield as WA.

During a cleanup at his Caboolture home, Rick came across one of the 100S 1/43 scale models the Queensland club produced as a limited edition national rally fund raiser for the 1982 Brisbane rally. Rick kindly donated the model to the club and agreed that it would be professionally assembled and fitted to a new club trophy for the member who attended the most club events in a Healey.

This model was very rare as only the same number of models were made as 100S cars originally built and the story of how they came about is quite interesting.

During the planning meetings for the 1982 Brisbane Rally the club was looking for fund raising ideas to subsidise the rally and we came up with the idea of producing a run of 50 die cast models to be numbered with the original chassis numbers and sold as a limited edition run. At the time we could not find any other 100S models in production so Joe Jarick went to work to modify a Dinky Healey Hundred to produce a master for casting. We enlisted a mate I worked with who was a railway modeller that had a mate who could do them in die cast using the lost wax method. All went well until the modeller moved to New Zealand half way through the project taking our prototype with him. After a few phone calls and pleas, we managed to retrieve the prototype and find another modeller to complete the castings.

We then set about producing a kit with assembly instructions drawn by Joe, handmade plastic windscreen, axles and wheels etc sourced from various model shops around Brisbane. I remember a working bee under our house at Buranda with Joe, Peter Cowen and me cutting up the base plates and hand stamping the chassis numbers on each plate. The resultant kit, although fairly crude by today's standards, sold like hot cakes for the princely sum of 25 dollars. Surprisingly, the funds raised helped us stage a successful national rally.

Interestingly, the New South Wales club later copied the assembled model but this time in brass and sold many more than we originally produced. These brass models occasionally appear on EBay and sell quite well due to their rarity.

Many of our older members still have their model kits yet to date I have never seen one of ours assembled and painted.

It was good to see one finally finished and adorning a new club trophy.