“Bunch of heroes” with roll cages

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33095, 9 December 1972, Page 46

“Bunch of heroes” with roll cages

New Zealand’s leading international midget-car driver, B. L. Butterworth, of Auckland, is highly critical of the New Zealand Auto Cycle Union for permitting the use of roll cages in speedway competition.

“Now that the drivers are allowed to use roll cages on their cars they have gone crazy — the danger is unreal,” he said. Butterworth is in Christ-

church preparing his Offenhauser racer for his meeting with the New Zealand champion, T. Morris, also of Auckland, at Templeton this evening. “The car I will use has a roll cage, but it is only there because it was fitted before I bought it; I don’t intend to keep it, so I have left it on until I sell it,” he said. The car he intends to use in the big races later in the season has no roll cage, and Butterworth has no intention of fitting one until he is forced to.

“You can’t get away from the fact that they protect a driver in a roll, but they have given drivers a false sense of safety. They have all turned into a bunch of heroes.”

Butterworth said that the New Zealand A.C.U. should have noted what had happened in Australia when the cages were permitted. Speeds had immediately gone up 20 m.p.h. and drivers, feeling safe from injury in the centre of their iron cages, had all started taking ridiculous risks. Instead of being a

safety factor, the cages had actually made the racing far more dangerous. The cages also detracted from the appeal of midgetcar racing. The appearance of the cars was spoiled and, for the spectator, the element of danger seemed to have been eliminated. The danger was actually greater, but the average spectator was not going to believe that and was not going to watch something he felt he. could do quite safely himself.

There was also a danger for those drivers not using

the cages. "You get a belt from the iron bar of somebody else’s roll cage and you know all about it.” Butterworth is convinced that the A.C.U.’s next step will be to make the cages compulsory. This will be a step backwards, he says. "If a driver is not capable of driving a midget car without a roll cage, he should not be driving at all.”

Golf.—P. E. Lloyd (Rotorua), aged 66, won the New Zealand veterans’ golf championship yesterday when he beat his clubmate, J. Carswell, 2 and L