Big wheel

Bob Jane pursues life and business the way he took to the race track, with his foot to the floor. Larry Schwartz meets a driven man who staked his tyre empire on fulfilling a dream.

You want to win. So you drive hard, until the car is a mad thing, tearing up the track at close to 300 kilometres an hour. When you come down the hill, you keep your foot flat on the accelerator.

You go over the top. And then you brake. And then you turn.

Glory days behind the wheel of a Holden Monaro GTS. Grandstands packed. Crowds so big, police close the gates by 10.45am.

“I’ll tell you something,” Bob Jane says. “You’re driven to win. On Monday morning you’re saying, ‘God damn, what a day! Thank God, I’m still alive.’

“When you look back and remember what you were thinking up the back straight flat out and the bloody car lurching and jumping at once … you think, ‘God damn, I’m here’.”

Bob Jane is still here. Competing with an aggression that characterised his time at the top as a racing driver (five Australian Touring Car Championships plus four Armstrong 500 wins), he still has his foot to the floor. At a stage in life when others might ease up, he powers on with canny abandon.

His is the story of a man, lacking educational or other opportunity, who fashioned his own world. Friends say he has his feet firmly on the asphalt. Yet not so much so that he has not taken risks to pursue his dreams – defying the gods, from whom he wrested prosperity, with his extraordinary Calder Thunderdome enterprise on a disused drive-in theatre site on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Almost a decade after its completion, he says it is nearly out of debt. Others still wonder at the amount of money borrowed for a venture that could have become Jane’s folly, a gamble that might have brought him to his knees.

It’s been a ride on the back of a tiger, says a close friend. “If you hang on and don’t fall off, it can’t eat you.”

Jane was born into a lower middle-class Melbourne family and a broken home and though he now makes light of an estimated $50 million personal wealth, it never came easy.

He is perhaps Australia’s most successful automotive industry retailer. He heads a family business ranked 78th in BRW’s recent listing of top 500 private companies. One in five tyres sold in this country comes from a store bearing his name. His is an enterprise that boasts a $220 million annual turnover.

Thirty years ago, competitors laughed at the idea that there might be any promotional value in his name. The smirks are long gone. There are now 123 Bob Jane T-Marts in Australia as well as ventures in Asia.

Once Jane ran a car yard from a disused, church-owned tennis court in Brunswick. Now, 45 years on, he is chief executive officer of the tyre chain, Calder Park and Adelaide International Raceway, which he bought from his good mate and former Hamilton Island owner, Keith Williams.

Such is their friendship, the two men have an understanding that they can depend on each other if ever in financial strife. A bit of an insurance policy, as Jane puts it.

He has drawn inspiration from legendary US car manufacturer Henry Ford. He called his earliest ventures American Luxury Seatcovers and New York Motors. The Thunderdome was inspired by a 1964 visit to a similar circuit in Charlotte, North Carolina. His has been an antipodean update on the American Dream.

Along the way, Jane has been married three times. He has nine children and three grandchildren. “Age means nothing,” says wife Laree, at 28 almost 40 years his junior. “As they say, you are as young as you feel. Bob doesn’t act like a 66-year-old person.”

Grey hair combed back, he is a short, blunt, pugnacious man. The day of our encounter, he’s recovering from a rare bout of flu. Standing beside his Thunderdome, the race track he raised $59 million to build, his blue eyes are watery in the brisk mid-morning breeze.

The Thunderdome is his monument. For years, people driving along the Calder Highway, across the open basalt plain north-west of Melbourne, watched in wonder as the mounds of dirt and rock grew. And then, just as with a small boy’s sandpit, a sloping racetrack was formed out of the dust. It took tonnes of soil, rock and broken concrete from the demolition sites of Melbourne to build a home for Auscar, the local version of American stock-car racing. It is the only such venue outside the US.

The result isn’t pretty, but it is functional. Jane is impressed by his own achievement. “To build this is a minor miracle, I tell you,” he says.

Later he adds: “I’m not a king or anything like that. If you’ve got a big opinion of yourself, you might build a pyramid to be remembered … But, you know, maybe this is my pyramid out here.”

He has a reputation for being “a bit of a wild man”, erratic and difficult to deal with.

An old racing rival and long-time friend, Norm Beechey, twice winner of Australian Touring Car Championship, remembers late-night, high-speed chases through relatively quiet city streets when they were both younger – Beechey in his Chevrolet Impala, Jane in a Jaguar.

Along with the likes of Peter Manton, Jim McEwan and the Geoghegan brothers, Ian and Leo, they were heroes before the kind of corporate involvement and media attention that would later make Peter Brock a household name.

Beechey, who made his fortune from cars, trucks and property, sees Jane as a hands-on style entrepreneur, daunting in the workplace. “I don’t think any bastard would run in any direction without Bob tells them or they’re following Bob,” he says.

Robert Frederick Jane had no easy breaks. He was born on 18 December 1929 and spent his earliest years in Middle Park. The family lived at 4 Fraser Street. As a schoolboy, he had a 6am newspaper round and every Friday he would go to Victoria Market with a Chinese hawker to buy fruit and vegetables to sell the next day.

ON SUNDAYS, he’d use a billycart rigged with a mast and square sail to collect bottles along the beachfront at Port Melbourne.

In his teens, he would wait for American servicemen and trade icecream, biscuits, chocolate and fruit for cigarettes. “For a packet of American cigarettes, you could get almost anything,” he recalls. It wasn’t long before he was taking home more money each week than his father, an SEC clerk.

He kept his prized cartons of Camel and Chesterfield cigarettes in his bedroom, but his father confiscated his earnings, which were hidden beneath the rear flap of the old, wood-framed lavatory.

Just before his 14th birthday, his mother wearied of her husband’s drinking and took her three children (Patricia is a year younger than he, Bill four years his junior) to Brunswick. She opened a milk bar in Sydney Road. Jane quit school and got a job at a leather factory owned by an uncle.

Rejected by the navy because of a spot on the lung, he spent three years thinning saplings at Mount Gambier and felling hardwood at Tanjil Bren, near Mount Baw Baw. When he returned to Melbourne in 1949, he was sturdy, broad-chested, 16 kilograms heavier than when he left town. He made leather seatcovers before opening a car yard with his brother.

He quickly learnt how to cope with threats. He took a girlfriend to the movies one night and stopped at the car yard when confronted by seven men. Jane had a bike chain handy.

“You’ve seen ‘High Noon’,” he says. “Same deal. Standing on the footpath with seven guys spread out like that. So what do you do? Just walk towards them . . . ‘Who’s first?’ ” They fled.

Bob Jane will tell you he is not unduly aggressive. “You ask me about (being) tough?” he says. “If you ask anybody that knows me, I’m certainly not . . . But if you want to give me S.H.I.T, well, I’ll give you some shit back. You know what I mean? That’s me. I’m a mirror.”

Jane’s 24-year-old son, Rodney, pulls up outside the main office building and starts to unload his ute. Father and son talk quietly for a while. Also a racing driver, “Rocket Rodney” has vowed to teach his six-year-old stepbrother, Robbie, the business if their father dies before he gets a chance.

Laree Jane cruises into the car park at Calder in a silver-blue Mercedes 560 SEL. It’s a short drive from home, a 160-hectare farm where her husband keeps his automotive collection. There is a red McLaren he had built in the UK in 1971. He has a Cadillac Del Rado custom convertible, a Bentley, two Aston Martins. He gets around in a V8 Commodore.

He has no use for speed these days. “A lot of food, you’re not hungry any more,” he says. “A lot of sex, you are tired of it. Not that I have too much sex. I am just being explanatory.”

Back in his office, he has framed photographs of some of the cars in which he sped past chequered flags. “That’s my original Jag. It was quite famous. I still have it. My Monaro. My Chevrolet. This won two championships. That won a championship. Up the top there: the McLaren.

“Just old pictures,” he says as he gestures about his office walls. There’s a photo of his daughter, Rodney’s older sister, Georgina, just 20 when she died in 1991 when the car in which she was a passenger overturned in country Victoria.

Father and daughter were close. A week before her death, they sat in the sun in the gutter outside the Jane dealership, Southern Motors, and spoke. There were moments of warmth but a strictness too. If only she had listened to him and not left with her friends. If only.
“I didn’t see enough of her and she got in with the wrong people. She got involved with drugs and that was her downfall. I have a lot of regret. In hindsight I could have done something more.”

MENTION mortality and he turns the question around. He’s not the only one who’s going to die. “I’m asking you the same thing. Because look, death is relevant to all of us.” One of his framed photos shows the Australian-made Elfin sports car he once drove in which a 22-year-old driver, Bevan Gibson, died at Bathurst in April 1969. He grieved for the youngster.

There were others too. “I went to the Melbourne Grand Prix and met Betty Hill, Graham Hill’s widow and Damon Hill’s mother. We just hugged each other and cried because of the good old times we spent.

“My dear friend Bruce McLaren, my son’s godfather, is dead. So it’s everywhere . . . Lex Davison. There have been a number of significant deaths which bring you back to earth.”

Jane himself is lucky to be alive after twice losing control at high speed and spinning off the track. He was flung from his FJ Holden when it struck trees at Phillip Island in 1961. The impact snapped his cotton-webbed seat belt and for 10 days, he lay in a coma in the Alfred Hospital with a cracked skull and broken limbs.

He shows you the scarred wrist where a hand was all but severed. “See, the arm’s still buggered.” The doctor told his mother and then wife to pray that he died. He woke to find his mother and a good friend at his bedside. “I opened my eyes and looked at them and said, ‘What are you crying for?’ And my mother went hysterical because I spoke to her.”
Five years later, almost to the day, he was back at the Alfred, paralysed below the waist after crashing the Elfin at Sandown. But within three months, he was on the grid at Calder for the 20-mile, 1500cc racing car championship. He finished second. After the first accident, a doctor had told him he was amazed at his recovery.

But Jane attributed it to general fitness and a diet influenced by a naturopath friend. He still favors cereal, fruit, wholemeal bread, molasses, supplementary vitamins and chicken and fish rather than red meat.

Before he turned to motor racing, Jane was a professional cyclist. He draws up a corduroy trouser leg to reveal a bulge of calf muscle. His record for 1.5 miles at the North Essendon velodrome still stands. Riding wide on a bend at Shepparton on New Year’s Day 1951, he had finished second to the Danish champion, Carl Koblauch, who crashed into the fence a few metres further and died. Jane emerged from the resulting pile-up with a fractured arm and leg. He and an uncle made a bundle betting on the races, but he quit after a call from a cycling promoter one night in 1955 to say the bookies wanted him out.

HE AND LAREE met in October 1987. Then 58, Jane was VIP judge at a beauty contest in Bathurst. She was the 19-year-old legal secretary about whose shoulders he draped the runner-up sash.

They danced and dined. Jane kept in touch, she remembers. “He kept ringing me and saying, ‘Please come down to Melbourne. Please come here. Please come there.’ Then he asked me to the Grand Prix at Adelaide. I said, OK. Six weeks later I was down to live in Melbourne.”

Later, she accompanied him to a motor event in New York. “We were about midway through the trip and I knew this girl was for keeps,” he has said. It was on a Los Angeles-bound Boeing 747 that Bob Jane proposed marriage to a girl in her late teens who would soon become his third wife.

He sees late fatherhood as a second chance. He likes the children to read to him; shares an interest in stamp collecting with their oldest, Courtney, 8; teaches Robbie about cars. They build wagons and things with wood and nails.

And Charlotte? “She’s only three and-a-half,” says Laree, “So it’s daddy, please cuddle me and kiss me.”

Nor is he fazed to be married to one so young. “Quite often, people who don’t know us mistake her for my daughter,” he says. “They all mumble and fart around and someone realises she’s my wife and they go, ‘Oh sorry’.”
At first, her mother feared that Laree was involved with a married man. “That was alarming to her,” Laree says, “but when she found out that wasn’t the case, she took him as a human being.”
He taught his young wife how to waterski at their holiday estate at Yarrawonga. They have a 30-metre cruiser called Jolly O at Surfers Paradise, where he bought a penthouse a year or so ago that once belonged to Christopher Skase. He has a twin-engined, eight-seat Bell Augusta helicopter to travel interstate.

He jokes that he may well be worth the $50 million estimate of his personal wealth, but it counts for little when, as he did recently, you take your wife to a restaurant but leave the wallet at home.

The day of our visit, Jane has been up early, attending to visiting Chinese businessmen in the boardroom. He can’t recall if he wore a tie. Hardly your average tycoon.

Years back, other dealers would take him to task for his casual dress at meetings. They told him it seemed he didn’t care. “I said, that’s not right. I want to come here feeling comfortable. I want my neck open so I’m not bloody choking with some rotten tie. I do care but I don’t show it the way you do.”

Then came a meeting with top GMH executives. This time, he dressed for the occasion. “I turned up at this function and about five dealers went, Aaaaagh! (hands grasp at the throat) because they weren’t wearing ties. They all jumped in a cab and went and bought ties.”

He attributes his success partly to a willingness to “watch what the other guy does and then do the opposite”. He says this practice is just one insight learnt from the example of Henry Ford, whose approach was to cut the price, increase volume of sales, improve production efficiency.

Ford and the Lord are all but mentioned in the same breath. He is sketching on a piece of paper to make a point now. “This is like teaching you about religion,” he says, “about the God of business. Now when Henry Ford built the model T . . .”

He is wary of being misrepresented on this point. “I’d like you to be careful about how you write about this. It could be misconstrued. I believe in God. But I believe more in Henry Ford from a business point of view than I believe in God from a physiological point of view.

“I believe there is a God and I’m respectful about it all but I’m very passionate about Henry Ford to an extent that his disciplines, his thinking in business, is everything I’ve ever done.”

Jane is grounded, more concerned with the here than the hereafter. Ask him what he wants to achieve and he answers without a moment’s hesitation: “I want more T-Marts. I want more tyre sales.”

He has a reputation for being passionate about people and causes (anti-smoking, for one), tough but honest.

Once feared among street gangs as “the worst bastard in Brunswick,” he can still be frightening in demeanor at first encounter. But he is soft, generous and unselfish when you get to know him, says Lloyd Beck, who was director of manufacturing at General Motors Holden, at a time when Jane ran its biggest dealership.

Beck, who went on to head Nissan’s Australian operation, now lives on the Gold Coast. He remembers Jane as a “hard-boiled” businessman with an intuitive grasp of the workings of vehicles that had enabled him to advise manufacturers on ways to eliminate flaws. As a driver, he was “not beyond a few unconventional things when striving to win”.

Once, determined to reduce the weight of his vehicle, he persuaded Beck to provide sheets half the conventional weight. His rivals never guessed.

Motoring writer, Graham Smith, characterises Jane as a renegade in an industry in which he brought about fundamental change.

He had defied competitors to introduce tyre discounting and brought the formula one grand prix to Australia, playing a major role in the race being staged in Adelaide.

Lloyd Beck says his friend has hardly slowed his pace. Ever on the lookout for new opportunity, “He will continue to run at 100 miles an hour, knowing that time is slipping away and he has much to do.”

Jane says that he and his brother, Bill, have earned a reputation for integrity. “Now the car business isn’t a pleasant business,” he says. “There are a lot of bad things in there, a lot of crooked sales men and what-have-you. It’s a good industry but there are some bad people in there. Our reputation, is perfect.”

He also prides himself on a reputation for fierce competitiveness. “It’s well known in Australia, if you want a price war with Bob Jane you better be ready because he’ll have one with you and you’ll be sorry.”

Almost 30 years ago, factory-fitted tyres created a handling problem on the Jaguar he raced, so he imported tyres from Germany in 1964 before retailing them himself in 1966. He credits adman Phillip Adams for suggesting, at a time when the Jane brothers were investing in films, that he use his high profile as a racing driver when naming the business.

Otherwise we might have had Bill Jane T-Marts with his brother’s face on the logo.

The first T-Mart opened in Sydney in 1965, when a dealer paid him $3000 for a franchise. Competitors in the tyre business, as he recalls, lay down on the ground “kicking and laughing” at the thought of good money going to use the Bob Jane name.

Now, he says, banks consider Bob Jane T-Marts to be in the same league as McDonald’s. “So who’s crazy, them or me?”

The Sunday Age, 22-Sep-1996