Melbourne-based Darren Forrest and Mount Gambier’s Paul Razum (‘Razz’ to his friends) made it to Bathurst in 2021 (and will again this year) after the original plan to run it in 2020 was thwarted due to the pandemic forcing the race’s cancellation.
Their car is hard to miss. It’s painted in the colours and markings of a World War II Royal Australian Air Force P-40 Kittyhawk fighter operated by 76 Squadron in New Guinea and the islands to north.
The reason? Darren Forrest’s grandfather.
Darren describes himself as ‘a dreamer who always wanted to race at Bathurst in a Holden V8’ to pay homage to his late grandfather, Cliff Elms, who served with 76 Squadron as ground crew during the war.
RAAF squadrons had their own two-letter code at the time, followed by a single letter to identify the individual aircraft. 76 Squadron’s code was SV and Darren has used P as the suffix, for ‘Pop’, his pet name for Cliff, thus SV-P on the car along with the Pacific campaign RAAF roundel with the red dot in the middle deleted. This was done so that friendly gunners wouldn’t see a red circle, think the aircraft was Japanese and try to shoot it down! And yes, it happened. The tails of most RAAF fighters in the Pacific were also painted white to further help identification, and this is reflected in the white on the rear of the car.
Darren and Razz co-own and co-drive the VF ClubSport R8 Black Edition (number 114 of 350), and Razz built the car in his Mount Gambier workshop.
Family influences
Darren’s Pop was a humble man who didn’t ask for anything from anybody, remembers Darren.
“He suffered many demons from his war service, which he carried with him until only days before he died when he revealed some of them to me.
“He broke down and
