A road sign paying tribute to the six-times Bathurst 1000 winner and former Formula 1 driver Larry Perkins has been stolen from his hometown of Cowangie in northwest Victoria.
Mr Perkins, known as ‘The Kid from Cowangie’, noticed the Mallee Highway sign – which featured the Bathurst winner and four of the Holden Commodores he raced – was taken sometime last week.
Perkins won the first of his six Bathurst 100 victories in 1982 with the Holden Dealer Team driving with Peter Brock, winning three in a row before three more victories with his own team in 1993, 1995, and 1997.
The sign paying tribute to Mr Perkins, famous not only for his driving success but also as skills as a gifted engineer, was first erected in 1993 and has been updated several times since.
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Previous signs have been auctioned off for charity to fund community projects in Cowangie, which according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has a population of 33 people.
Son Jack Perkins, who has forged his own path in motor racing, told CarExpert it may have been stolen by someone heading back from this year’s Bathurst 1000, which took place the previous weekend.
Adding weight to the theory is the fact the sign was taken from the eastern side the town, while the other sign on the western side remained proudly in place.
“A lot of people said it’s a surprise it’s lasted this long, and maybe it is timely that people heading home from Bathurst decided that they wanted a souvenir,” said Jack Perkins.
“It’s just disappointing that there’s crooks out there, really.”
Cowangie is currently in harvest season, one of the busiest times of year for the town, making the missing sign more conspicuous – but there’s no rush for a replacement just yet.
“We’re prepared to give the crook a bit of time to get his head around being a crook, and if his mates come around and see it hanging up in the shed they might, you know, give him a clip around the ears and say, ‘Hey, that’s actually not yours’.
“The more we can spread the word, the more someone’s going to be feeling a bit guilty, and if anyone does see it lying around somewhere, call your mates out or just bring it back.”
There was further mystery around the needless effort used to pinch the sign in the way the thief (or thieves) did – cutting the four poles the sign was mounted on.
“It just makes it even more disappointing to hear that someone cut them off with a pipe cutter,” Jack Perkins said. “But it goes to show they’ve got some expensive equipment in the back of their ute.
“If you had an angle grinder, you could have nicked them off in five minutes, but this job with the pipe cutter would have taken a bit longer. It’s an odd way to steal a sign, but quite often high levels of intelligence aren’t necessarily blended in with people that steal road signs.”
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