STORY 58
Gordon’s Bay, circa 1962 to 1965, was a small, quiet coastal village at the foot of the Helderberg — a harbour, beach, fishing community, a handful of streets climbing the lower slopes above False Bay. It was not, by any measure, a place one would expect to hear racing engines.
For at least one extraordinary weekend, somewhere around 1962, that is precisely what you heard.
The road that climbed steeply above Gordon’s Bay toward the municipal waterworks, a utilitarian service route that existed to give maintenance vehicles access to the infrastructure on the slopes above the village, was temporarily transformed into something else entirely. Marshals took up positions at the bends. A start line was marked at the base. Cars were brought up from Cape Town and the surrounding districts on trailers and in the backs of bakkies. And the mountain, which had been looking down at Gordon’s Bay since long before any road crossed it, became a racing circuit for the day.
Hill climb events were a well-established tradition in the Western Cape by this point. Cape Town had been running them since 1912 on Camps Bay Drive, Signal Hill Road, Kloof Road timed runs up mountain roads where drivers competed against the clock rather than each other, one car at a time, the mountain as both obstacle and audience. By 1962, stricter regulations and growing traffic had ended that era on the city’s famous roads. But the tradition had not entirely died. It had simply moved around the corner.
The cars that came to Gordon’s Bay ran under Formula Libre classification, Free Formula, meaning no single set of technical regulations, no mandatory engine size, no prescribed chassis design. Any machine that could make the climb safely and quickly was welcome. Formula Libre was not a compromise. It was a philosophy. It created a living laboratory of motorsport engineering in which club-built specials ran alongside modified production cars and purpose-built racing machines, each one representing its builder’s particular theory about the fastest way up a mountain road.
Among them were single-seater racing cars of the type that any follower of motorsport would have recognised from photographs of Goodwood or Brands Hatch, open-wheeled, low-slung, stripped to essentials, with the large oval air intake sitting between the front wheels that was the unmistakable visual signature of the Cooper and Lotus Formula Junior machines of that era. These were not toys. They were genuine racing cars, tubular spaceframe chassis, small-displacement engines tuned for maximum output, drivers sitting so low in the cockpit that their helmets barely cleared the bodywork. The drivers wore leather helmets and goggles, the standard equipment of the day, in an era before full-face helmets and fire-resistant suits became mandatory.
The format was simple. Each car was released individually from the start line. A marshal raised an arm. The car went. The clock ran. At the top of the course, the time was recorded. There were no barriers between spectators and road. There were no grandstands. People stood on the rocky outcrops above the road, leaned against parked cars on the verges and positioned themselves at the bends where you could see the cars longest before they disappeared into the next section of the climb.
The mountain, it turned out, was an exceptional natural grandstand. The engine note of a racing car climbing a steep gradient under full power is not a sound that is easily forgotten. It echoes differently off rock face than it does across a flat circuit. Before any car came into view, the spectators on the upper slopes could hear it coming, the sound preceding the sight, building anticipation, the whole mountain briefly holding its breath.
What makes this story recoverable at all, what gives it a life beyond the memory of the handful of people who were there, is a young man from Somerset West named Theo Naudé.
Theo was one of three partners in a newly established Somerset West business called JMT Studios — Jimmy, Marines and Theo, the initials giving the business its name. Founded around 1962, JMT was a film and photographic studio at a moment when both disciplines were changing rapidly. 16mm film had made documentary and promotional filmmaking accessible to small studios and the appetite for local content was real. JMT was not a home movie operation. It was a professional outfit and Theo and his team came to Gordon’s Bay with a professional purpose: to make a film of the hill climb for distribution and screening.
The result, shot on 16mm black-and-white film stock, cut in the studio, intended for cinema screening as a short or newsreel, captured what no written account has survived to describe. The cars on the mountain road. The spectators on the rocky outcrops. The marshal’s arm rising. The single-seaters disappearing into the climb and reappearing higher up the slope, engine notes carrying across the valley toward the sea.
From that footage, JMT Studios produced something else: a large-format black-and-white photographic enlargement, roughly two metres by three metres, that was displayed for years inside the studio premises in Somerset West. A photograph so large it was closer to a mural. The image of a racing car on a mountain road above Gordon’s Bay, printed at a scale that made it impossible to ignore.
A small child visited the studio with his family and carried the memory of that photograph for the rest of his life.
That child was four years old. He did not know then what Formula Libre was or what a Cooper chassis looked like or why the large oval intake between the front wheels was significant. He just knew it was a racing car on a mountain and that his uncle Theo had filmed it and that the photograph was enormous and exciting and somehow important.
He was right on all three counts.
The Gordon’s Bay hill climb of circa 1962 sits at an intersection of several histories simultaneously. It is part of the history of Western Cape motorsport — the tail end of a road-racing tradition that stretched back fifty years and would soon be regulated out of existence. It is part of the history of South African film and photography — a professional studio in a small-town producing work of genuine documentary value that has largely vanished from the record. And it is part of the history of the Helderberg itself — a community that was, in its unassuming way, engaged with the wider currents of its time, producing art and sport and enterprise in the shadow of its mountain.
Somewhere, perhaps, a 16mm reel survives. Theo Naudé and his partners made it with care, with professional intent, for an audience they expected to find. That audience may yet find it.
The mountain is still there. The waterworks road still climbs above Gordon’s Bay. On a clear morning, if you stand at the right bend and look back down toward the harbour, you can still see the line a racing car would have taken.
This story is contributed from family memory and oral history. Readers with knowledge of the Gordon’s Bay hill climb events of the early 1960sor of JMT Studios and its film archive, are warmly invited to make contact through The Helderburger.
Between You and Me:
My uncle Theo filmed a motor race on a mountain road above Gordon’s Bay in 1962 and I have spent my entire adult life being slightly irritated that I was only four years old at the time and cannot remember it properly. The photograph I remember. Two metres by three metres of black-and-white racing car on a mountain road, hanging in a studio in Somerset West, seen through a four-year-old’s eyes. The photograph is gone. The film may still exist somewhere. If you know where it is, please get in touch. This is not a casual request. It is the earnest plea of someone who has been looking for that image for a very long time. I further suspect that “Giant Killer” had something to do with the race.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: built by hand, run by heart — the theatre that Somerset West refused not to have.
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