There’s a good chance that Warren Brown’s 1928 Dennis fire engine holds a lap record at Australia’s Eastern Creek International Raceway (now Sydney Motorsport Park).
In 2007 he lost a race against a friend’s 1949 AEC double-decker bus and, in doing so, he likely posted the slowest time ever recorded at the New South Wales circuit.
The risky face-off – the bright-red truck makes do with unassisted brakes, on the rear wheels only – wasn’t pointless, though.
Warren, who is also a cartoonist for Australia’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper, took the opportunity to create an audition tape for the Australian adaptation of Top Gear, and it landed him a role on the television show in 2008.
Warren Brown’s WW2 M3A1 scout car is parked next to his army Land-Rover, a Vietnam veteran
Today, he also owns a 1933 example, another one of the 70 Dennis 250s imported by the NSW government when they were new.
Warren can trace his love for them back to a family holiday in the 1960s, when he saw a rusty fire engine parked at a petrol station.
“I was only three, but I remember standing on the running board,” he says. “It had a big, brass radiator, separate headlights, all that sort of stuff – I marvelled at this thing.”
