Soft and furry by name - but not on the road

Rallying legend Possum Bourne has come a long way since the day he totalled the car his mother had just given him to get to his classes as a mechanic's apprentice.

For starters, he's won a record six Australian Rally Championships and is the only driver to have taken out all three Southern Hemisphere-Pacific region championships.

He also has taken the giant leap from competitor to team owner and is famous enough within the sport to have earned the distinction of being asked to help perfect an electronic rallying game for the Playstation 2.

Despite his success, the 45-year-old's easy self-confidence never runs into arrogance and he comes across as a terrific guy who is eager to achieve success through hard work and, above all, passion.

Mind you, he doesn't seem the type who would take rubbish from anyone and this gets backed up by his scorn for all-British racing teams that seem to suffer from an inbalance of too many egos and not enough grafters willing to dig deep.

Bourne's rallying career began in New Zealand in the late 1970s when he took a Mark I Cortina to third place in his first race. That decided his ambition - to be a professional rally driver "and be New Zealand's best."

He got his big chance when Subaru got behind him in 1983 and the man with the cute and furry nickname showed he was no soft touch in events in Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Britain, Africa, Argentina, China, America and Hong Kong.

The 1990s were Possum's decade with seven Championship titles between 1991 and 1999, a total he boosted with Australian successes in 2000 and 2001.

It has not always been smooth sailing, however, and the death of his co-driver Rodger "Roj" Freeth in 1993 still clearly hurts him.

In a typical accepting way, Bourne says that he can't change what happened and his way of dealing with the tragedy is to talk about it. He still talks to his old mate while driving - "if I need to get a move on I say 'come on Roj I need a hand' and his car carries the number plate ROJ".

Possum Bourne Motorsport now has three cars and Bourne seems to have made the leap from just being a driver to being a driver and the owner of a racing team.

Some of the biggest headaches, he reckons, are with the logistics of having everything needed for three cars. Going from two "easy enough" to three cars was not a 33% increase in workload, but more like "100%".

He uses as an example the items the outfit needed for the recent rally in Perth. Each car needs seven sets of tyres, not counting practice ones, and the team has to carry around that number of the three different compounds needed for a rally.

He says the only way to make sure the team has everything it needs is to ensure there are systems in place to "cover your bum". And to make sure you have a great team.

But, despite the organisational and managerial pressures he "loves it all".

Does he like it better than driving? "That's a passion."

Does it interfere with his driving? "No, I switch off."

And clearly switching off does the trick as Possum Bourne is a competitor with few equals and intends to continue racing for quite some time.

So, want to know why he's called Possum (his first name is actually Peter)?

It goes back to the apprentice days when young Peter was zooming along in his Humber 80 (he'd only been given it two days earlier) and decided to swerve to avoid a pesky possum in the middle of the road.

The car began to spin so he overcorrected, then overcorrected again and wrote the old beauty off.

His workmates decided the only thing was to nickname him Possum.