Ian English lives on the South Coast, just north of Wollongong and his navigator, the Blue Mountains, and when their modified Datsun 240Z broke down in Dubbo while on a charity rally, he said the community rallied behind them.

“We had a slight mishap, a few items going astray, we’re running sophisticated, old carby’s, and they didn’t play nicely for the first couple of days so we started trying to get some fixes in Coonabarabran, limped across to Dubbo to get some parts in so we can re-join the rally somewhere between Broken Hill and Griffith,” Mr English told Dubbo Photo News.

“It has a 100-litre fuel tank and it uses fuel exceptionally well.”

The high-performance sports car was set up to generate high-performance fundraising for the trek4kidz but this 240Z, originally equipped with twin-SU carby’s as standard, has been fitted with a set of triple 45 Webers topping off a fairly worked engine.

“The rally is Trek for Kidz (trek4kidz), it’s supporting the Starlight Foundation, we’ve been doing it for 25 years. Trek for Kidz is a completely volunteer organisation so nothing we raise is used to run the event, we’re all volunteers and we’re up to almost $275,000 this year alone and we donate the whole lot to Starlight,” he said.

“Starlight Foundation provides rooms in hospitals, totally volunteer, totally self-funded, everything is charity-based, no government funding.

“The Foundation does absolutely terrific work for kids – I’m fortunate, three kids, no issues but a lot of the guys who are on the rally have lost children, or had kids through the process so they’re very, very closely attached to the importance of raising funds and it’s the sort of thing where you see a kid go into a hospital and the problems that they have and you see what Starlight does, it just raises them out of it, it just changes the atmosphere from a hospital to an exciting day and takes their minds off what they’re going through, it really helps.”

Mr English said everyone they’d encountered in Dubbo had wanted to help, from motels, the people trying to source parts and get them delivered and everyone in between.

“People have been fantastic and that’s one of the things about doing runs for charity, it doesn’t matter where you go, if you need something, people are really helpful.”