Jem’s Aussie Sidecar Story…

My story starts in the same place as many of my guests, as a kid in the pits.

My dad, Rodney Anshaw, is a New South Wales based historic road racer and in the mid 80’s he begun racing sidecars. I was born in 1988 and while he had his two weeks off work, he finished building the 1962 Norton Atlas sidecar we currently race.

I was a few months old when I attended my first race meeting and many of my childhood memories through the 90’s revolve around racetracks. Many are from Amaroo Park or Eastern Creek, but a particular incident at Oran Park in a way shaped the future of my dads racing career (if I can be so bold as to think it). I remember walking around the pits and podiums, sitting in Chivo’s workshop, and watching dad run the sidecar up and down the driveway at home as he was working on it.

The outfit was shelved in the early 2000’s as my siblings and I started exploring our own hobbies and dad decided to renovate a house. Life got in the way, but sidecars were always a lingering thought.
Every now and then the outfit would come down, dad would fire it up and we would talk about what could happen. Around 2018, those ‘what if’s’ became reality.

In July of 2019 we entered The Big Chill in Stanthorpe, Queensland. It was an interesting race meeting to say the least, I broke a helmet on Saturday, and on Sunday, well, Sunday was a story for a podcast… But the point is, I had done my first race meeting and dad and the outfit were out of retirement.

As we started spending more time around racetracks again and attending Annandale Leichhardt Motorcycle Club meetings it became very clear how hard sidecars were finding it to build grids and promote their events.

As I have said a few times on the podcast, I don’t have the finances to sponsor all the sidecar teams and get them back out on track, nor do I have the mechanical knowledge to work on them with the same goal.
But what I do have is the ability to talk so decided to put that to use with a podcast.

Aussie Sidecar Stories may not be perfect, it may not be polished within a pixel of its life, but it is passion and it is real. It aims to bring the human element of the sport to light, and it is about preserving the memories of a sport that has meant so much to so many.

Aussie Sidecar Stories is a family project…

My husband Ian edits the podcast, and it is his voice you hear on the intro as well as sometimes reading the events at the end of an episode. He also does videos, photos and records at race meetings to help with content for the podcast.
At race meetings he is dad while mum is out on track or getting roped in to various other tasks at any given event, or helping out where he can working on the outfit.

Xander is our 11-year-old son and he reads out the events at the end of each episode. When we started talking about doing the podcast he was excited and wanted to be a part of it and this seemed like a perfect way to involve him.