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[island]

Hi!
Three Gold Stars and two NZGPs under his belt. Had a good technical understanding,
I have read. But how good was as a driver ?
As good as Matich? How do you rate him, Ray?

[Ray Bell]

Let's put it this way: Once talking to him about Longford, he said "I never raced there." Strange, I thought, he lived in Tasmania... Then he said: "I drove there, but I never raced there..." and went on about the danger of the place. Fair enough, one could say, he was a driver of the seventies, even though he raced int he sixties.. but he didn't come out of Tasmania, essentially, until the seventies... out of the quiet backwater of Symmons Plains and Baskerville.
Then Matich had said something like (in a magazine article): "If he's the standard you judge the current drivers by..." and you can guess the rest. It alluded to blocking rather than racing, and was written in the wake of McCormack winning his first NZGP.
I can see that McCormack drove some good races in his career, and that he thought an awful lot about his racing. He kept going to fight a lone battle in an Elfin against the hordes of Lolas, and beat them sometimes. I would have to say that on his day and on a circuit he liked he was better than just good. But you would not count on it, in retrospect.

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Life and love are mixed with pain...