Remembering Roly
Michael recalls a lunch he had with legendary New Zealand racing driver Rollo Athol Levis shortly before he died on 1 October 2013 at the age of 88. Michael Clark caught up with Roly and members of his family over vegetable soup
By Michael Clark
Roly’s recall was as sharp as his reflexes had been many decades earlier. “My brother Murray was two years older and raced around grass paddocks on the family farm in an old Studebaker.” The farm was in Morrinsville, and the brothers’ affection for Studebakers never left them. By the time he was 14 or 15, Roly was also joining in the fun, even though “our parents were dead against us racing one another”. But then Murray went into aircraft maintenance and, at 15, Roly left Hamilton Tech to work in a service station in Hillcrest. “I was pumping gas, greasing cars …” But he was soon driving a milk truck and, at 17, took over the milk run. After a stint in the army, Roly got into panelbeating. “Cars were cheap and I’d restore them, but it became serious when a car painter friend talked me into joining forces in Putaruru.”
Roly eventually established his own business. “I built a workshop at 6 Neal Street and stayed there nearly 20 years.” His opportunity to go motor racing emerged when the wife of a friend put her foot down. “They had four kids, and he was told he couldn’t race anymore, so his Midget became my introduction to motor racing in the 1951/52 season.” Roly himself was married by then but says, “I never got any pressure from my wife to stop.”
He recalls, “… doing all right at New Plymouth, but I never got to Western Springs. I raced in Hamilton, but that track was too rough”. The Pushrod Chev was replaced by a highly modified Willys, but with the advent of a Grand Prix at Ardmore, Roly’s motor racing aspirations changed. “I went to the first Ardmore [in 1954] — that was my first car race, and I was particularly interested in the mechanicals of the cars. I’d been doing grass track racing, so I was probably thinking I’d like to have a go at circuit racing if I could afford it. I tried to make an old Riley do something it couldn’t.”
The RAL Special
Roly had started work on his own car, an RAL Special that was ready for the 1955/56 season. “The chassis was a copy of the Lotus Elite. Road & Track wrote about the chassis and suspension.” Roly lapped it up and said he also built the engine.
“It was intended to be Ford powered although initially, it ran with a modified Morris Minor, but eventually I imported a Willment cylinder conversion from England — the only one of its type in New Zealand.” Roly and his glamorous wife would drive the Ford 10-powered car to the circuit, unpack, and he’d go racing. “I could only afford to go motor racing because I was doing it all myself.”
In 1960, he was offered an F2 Lotus 16 at Wigram. “It was a dog of a thing. A bloody mongrel with an old Climax bored out to about 1.8. They kept saying it was a 2.2, but it never was.” Unimpressed, Roly elected not to race it, but better options were on the horizon. “It must have been over Christmas 1960 that I did the deal with Feo [Stanton] to buy the Cooper.” Denny Hulme had brought a Formula Junior Cooper home with him after his first season in Europe and Roly sold the RAL in order to buy it. “I took it to Ardmore, and the gearbox failed. They gave me a spar,e and I never had any problems again. I ran at Levin, scooted off the track in the wet at Wigram, and then did Dunedin.”
Roly casually refers to the crash at Levin in 1962 as his “first major circuit accident” but, given that he was closing in on 37 with a young family and small business, one could be excused for thinking he might have used the opportunity to take a break. But what did he do? During the rebuild of the crashed car, he replaced the 1.0 BMC with a 1.5 Ford engine “for more power”. Back at Levin the following year, 1963, he distinguished himself with a fine fourth place against GP cars driven by current F1 drivers.
Looking back on the aftermath of the ’62 crash, he recalls, “The car wasn’t bad — and I wasn’t too bad at the time”. Roly is prone to understatement. He’d broken a leg, and the car had landed on top of him. “We had no safety belts — both my knees were damaged. I went to Palmerston North Hospital and then to Hamilton in the back of a friend’s station wagon. I suppose I spent quite a while in hospital.” As for any thoughts of stopping: “I never gave it a second thought. Because it was a mechanical failure, I never worried that it was human error.”
Third place at Waimate in 1963 confirmed the obvious. He needed a new car. “It was an awful thing to drive — it went reasonably well at Waimate because Bruce [McLaren] gave me a couple of wheels off his car. I adapted the brake drums for the new wheels and made it a totally better car.” But as he recalled: “I’d had a gutsful of the Cooper. Lotus were the form cars.”
Buying with blind faith
An advertisement was placed in Autosport following which “there were phone calls to England — but I was buying on blind faith. The first time I saw it was at the Auckland wharf”. Because New Zealand never formally adopted Formula Junior, a car could be shipped out of England without the 1.1-litre engine and fitted with something a little more powerful. Pushrod Fords of 1.6/1.7-litres were an option but when young Wairarapa farmer Andrew Buchanan arrived home from an OE with a Ford (Lotus) twin-cam powered Formula Junior Brabham, Roly was smitten. He became a devotee of the Ron Tauranac-designed car from the moment he clapped eyes on it. “Compared to Andy’s BT6, the Lotus wasn’t a good car. If you braked as you turned in, it would always swap ends.”
To cater for the increasing number of twin-cam powered open-wheelers, a championship was devised exclusively for them. Although known as Formula B in North America, both Australia and New Zealand called the category ‘National Formula’ with a 1.5-litre limit.
Roly went to Sydney to check out the only two options. “Alec Mildren had a BT6 that had been driven by Frank Gardner, plus I was also looking at a Lotus 27. I took the Brabham to Oran Park and did a few laps, came back in to change a few things, and then took it out the next day, and it was as good as gold. I offered a few pounds less than the asking price and was on the receiving end of a lecture that I’ll never forget.”
The deal done, Roly took the Brabham to Sydney’s Warwick Farm. “I liked the track very much and did all right against Greg Cusack, Leo Geoghegan, and Frank Matich — they were all talented locals.”
I wondered which was the most noticeable difference, the twin-cam versus the Pushrod or the Brabham versus the Lotus. “The twin-cam made a difference, but the [Brabham] chassis was considerably better. It was a very good car.”
Back home, Roly prepared for the 1965 Tasman and the inaugural National Formula or ‘NF’ Championship. Nephew Roger Levis recalls the 1965 Grand Prix meeting being his first and a “hammer and tongs” battle between his uncle and Australian Geoghegan in the NF curtain-raiser to the GP. For Roly, though, it was Levin that stood out as he scored his first Tasman point for sixth and, crucially, his was the first NF car. He was sixth again at Teretonga, and with the NF title in the bag, he decided to take the Brabham across the Tasman for the February rounds before returning for his 40th birthday.
The New Zealand’s National Formula Championship
New Zealand’s National Formula Championship was the proving ground for young up-and-comers — Graeme Lawrence, Ken Smith, Laurence Brownlie, Graham McRae, Bill Stone, David Oxton, and many others cut their teeth in this wonderful category but, as Brownlie wrote on the death of Roly Levis, “No matter how good you thought you were, you still had to beat Roly. He wasn’t just the benchmark; he was ‘the’ man to beat.”
For some of this group, Roly was closer in age to their father and extraordinarily helpful to newcomers — here is Ken Smith from his biography: “After he [Roly] rebuilt my Lotus 41, I told him it wasn’t tracking like it should, so he came and watched me. When I came in he said, ‘Get a pillow’, because he reckoned I was leaning too far forward — and of course he was spot on.”
Roly was National Formula champion three years in a row and combined the third in 1966–67 with the Gold Star championship aboard his Brabham BT18.
“That car came via Howden [Ganley], who also arranged for chassis and suspension parts to be sent out,” Roly told me.
Roly sold the car to Christchurch car dealer Tony Shaw but recalled that the Cantabrian “… was disenchanted. He offered me the car back to drive, gave me a Mk3 Zephyr tow car and trailer, and said I could keep the prize money.”
Back to Brabhams
Despite being north of 40, Roly hadn’t given up hope of racing in Europe.
“Age wasn’t a consideration for me. Castrol said they’d like to talk to me when I got to the UK but some of the boys said it was hard going over there.”
He had no regrets about turning down the opportunity of stepping up to the 2.5-Climax–powered brigade with the Rothmans Cooper.
“I didn’t have much time for the car — the wheels were rejects from Cooper.”
In 1968, Roly saw what would become his final racing car advertised in Autosport. Inevitably, it was a Brabham.
“I got the bug again when I saw the (F2) BT23C advertised at the sort of money I could afford. I liked the size of the car so I phoned the number. Frank Williams answered and told me it had sold but that he had another one, although at almost twice the money. However, he could get it to Southampton in a couple of days.”
Roly did the deal that had won the Monza but didn’t quite get all the spares that had been promised.
Graeme Lawrence also had a F2 FVA-powered car, and with Jim Palmer on the sidelines after the first round, it quickly became obvious that these two would be the main protagonists for the Gold Star. Roly recalled the first two races as being “a disaster. Making it stop was the big issue”.
Roly might have seen the opening rounds of the 1968–69 Gold Star as a disaster, but he had, in fact, won them both, although he was looking for more grip. The late ’60s was when wings sprouted on racing cars, and Roly was open to the concept.
“I was convinced wings would help — but, of course, I had no point of reference.”
In the final round before the January internationals, he made it three from three with a victory at Pukekohe.
The final race of 1968 was the Monaco International at Bay Park on 28 December; it marked the first appearance of F5000s in New Zealand.
“Awful bloody things”
The crowd may have loved these Chev V8–powered open-wheelers, but after starting sixth but finishing second, Roly’s initial impression of them never altered: “Awful bloody things!”
It was not an unsurprising response from a self-confessed purist.
“I was a small car driver; I much preferred thoroughbreds.”
In the internationals that also counted towards the coveted Gold Star for local drivers, Lawrence’s McLaren had the upper hand in the North Island, but at both Wigram and Teretonga, Roly starred with two sixths at a time when the opposition comprised a pair of works cars from the might of Ferrari and Lotus.
Roly modestly recalled a technical mishap: “We went quite well at Teretonga, but only after I discovered that a mechanic had put the wing on upside down. I only did a lap, but it was skittering around trying to lift the car off the ground.”
The Levis team were Australia-bound, but only after the final round of the Gold Star at the Levels track near Timaru. Despite a couple of spins, Roly finished second to secure his second Gold Star with 47 points to the 44 of Lawrence, who was the clear winner on the day.
Roly was seventh at Sydney’s Warwick Farm a week after the Timaru race and repeated that result at Sandown near Melbourne, but there was more international travel in store, as well as the longest races in which Roly had ever competed. He and Lawrence were invited to compete in the Grands Prix of Singapore and Selangor, a week apart in early to mid-April. Roly recalled how the ‘Air New Zealand’ team — also comprising Graeme’s father, Doug, plus mechanics Jim Murdoch, Dave McMillan, and John Nicholson, all three becoming top drivers soon after — struggled with intense humidity.
Roly explained, “The circuit was very narrow, flag marshalling was a joke, and I probably enjoyed the social side too much. Consequently, I didn’t perform as well in the race.”
The Kiwis started from the front row. When the clutch in Lawrence’s McLaren gave problems, Roly pounced and soon built up a good lead.
“I’d changed all four plugs when only one was necessary” — necessitating a pitstop; “That dropped me to fourth.”
I sensed Roly was still irked by it all those years later.
Despite the gruelling heat, Roly ended up second with a new lap record. Determined to make amends the following weekend in Malaysia, he made a tyre switch.
“I’d bought a set of tyres off the BRM people because I wanted to go back onto Firestones. They were bloody brilliant.”
In Kuala Lumpur, they were greeted with a permanent circuit approximately 3.3 km in length, and even the modest Roly recalls being “quickest by a long way,” but his pole position came to nothing when the engine refused to fire.
“I started at the back of the field and came through to finish second behind Graeme — but I still got the lap record.”
Taking on the F5000s
From Southeast Asia, it was onto Japan, where Roly was the sole Kiwi in an unofficial Australasian / New Zealand team. The circuit sat in the shadow of Mount Fuji and was significant for its 30-degree banked first turn and a 2km straight. Roly dispensed with the ‘bi-wing’ set up on the Brabham.
“The track dipped down at the end of the front straight, and the change of angle was so steep that I couldn’t see through the front wing.”
With such a long straight, Roly needed to optimise top speed.
“[Kevin] Bartlett, Leo [Geoghegan], and Garrie Cooper all had 2.5-litre V8 Tasman cars, so we were always going to struggle.”
There was nothing wrong with Roly’s fitness in Japan’s heat over nearly an hour and 20 minutes as he paced himself to finish second. That wonderful memory was slightly tarnished when the prize money failed to materialise.
“I’d won half a million yen — about US$12,000 — but never saw any of it.”
Back in New Zealand, the BT23C was readied for the 1969–70 Gold Star, where Roly would be up against F5000s. In the opening round, he took pole and led, but ultimately finished second to Dennis Marwood’s big Eisert. I was left in no doubt that he was still annoyed at letting that win slip through his fingers. The Brabham was sold, but Roly remained involved.
As Kenny said, “He couldn’t help himself; Roly was a perfectionist. He came into open-wheelers relatively late but had a hell of a lot of ability and was bloody quick. He was also very good on the engineering side and never left anything to chance.”
