Only three Australians have won a Formula One grand prix. Two of them, Sir Jack Brabham and Alan Jones, became world champion - Brabham three times.
In the week of the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, hopes are rising - indeed racing - that Mark Webber, the only other winner among the 14 Australian drivers to start a GP, can do the job on home soil on Sunday.
Webber finally broke through in his eighth season of GP racing last year, winning in Germany, and then again in Brazil.
Winning in F1 is no easy task. The world's biggest car manufacturer, Toyota, spent eight years in the sport before bowing out without a victor's trophy.
Webber labored for seven years with a series of, by F1's torturous technological standards, sub-standard cars before the Renault-powered Red Bull RB6 took him to the top step of the podium - after that delirious celebration in his cockpit - at Germany's Nurburgring last July.
Even now Brabham, Jones and Webber's success is appreciated much more overseas, especially in F1's European heartland, than in their home land.
So too the career of Tim Schenken, the only other Australian to have even scored a point in the F1 world championship.
Schenken raced in 33 GPs.
On August 15, 1971, he sprayed champagne on the podium, having finished third behind the polished Swiss driver Jo Siffert and Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi.
Siffert was killed in a GP crash two months later. Fittipaldi was to become world champion the next year and again in 1974. Later still he won the Indianapolis 500 in the US twice.
Schenken had no motor racing bloodlines, but from the time his family moved from Sydney to Melbourne when he was 12 he became infatuated with the sport and dreamt of becoming F1 world champion.
He began racing in an Austin A30 in the early 1960s.
Then he moved up to a Lotus 18 and drove for Lex Davison, the winner of four Australian GPs long before the race became an F1 world championship round.
In 1964 Schenken won the Australian hillclimb championship.
He took his talent to Europe and in 1968 won the first British Formula Ford Championship as well as the British Formula Three Championship.
He remains the only driver to have won those two prestigious junior titles in the same year.
"I drove 68 races that season and won 48," Schenken recalls. "I won the first 12 Formula Ford races on the trot."
The next year he drove in F3 for Jack Brabham, then Formula 2 for Brabham in 1970.
It was to be the triple world champion's last year in F1. Even at 44, and well established as a car constructor, Brabham was still a title-contending driver but luck deserted him.
It turned out to be a horror season. New Zealander Bruce McLaren, the British aristocrat Piers Courage and Jochen Rindt, the Austrian who was to become F1's only posthumous champion, all died in horrific crashes that year.
Schenken replaced Courage, driving four GPs in a De Tomaso car for Frank Williams, who was to take Jones to the world title in 1980.
When Brabham retired from race driving he invited Schenken to replace him and partner Graham Hill, Britain's dual world champion.
It was in a Brabham-Ford that Schenken notched his third placing in Austria.
He also was sixth in the German GP that year and fifth in Argentina the next season, when - after Bernie Ecclestone took over Brabham's team and Schenken doubted he had the business acumen to run it - he had joined the team of another champion, Britain's John Surtees.
After seven GPs with tail-end teams ISO and Trojan in 1973-74, Schenken realised that, with seven world championship points to his credit, his time was up as an F1 driver.
He then enjoyed several stellar seasons in sports car racing, driving - and winning regularly - for Italy's revered Ferrari.
While he did not reach the heights of Brabham, Jones and Webber in F1, none of that trio can boast of having been a Ferrari factory team driver, albeit not in GP racing - and it is now one of Jones' great regrets that he rejected Enzo Ferrari's overtures.
Later Schenken became a racing car constructor with New Zealand contemporary Howden Ganley. Together they built more than 400 TIGA cars in Britain.
By the 1980s Schenken had returned home and become the racing boss of the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport.
In that role he has been the sporting director of the Australian Touring Car Championship, now the V8 Supercar Championship, and - for all but two - has been the top Australian official - called clerk of course - at the F1 GP in Adelaide and, since 1996, in Melbourne.
He has performed a similar role at Singapore's new night GP the past two years.
Working in the race control centre Schenken likens to the bridge of a ship or a flight control tower. "Generally it goes pretty smoothly but there are times of big stress," he says.
Like the day in 1991 when the GP in Adelaide had to be aborted after just 14 laps as cars crashed everywhere in torrential rain.
It was the shortest race in F1's history and left a gaping hole in TV schedules around the world.

But, just as Schenken's father never believed his son could be paid to drive racing cars, the boy who dreamt of becoming world champion still cannot believe his good fortune at having spent his life in the sport he came to love - even if he didn't get to be its champion.

The Australian Motor Sport Foundation is celebrating Schenken's career at Melbourne's Park Hyatt Hotel on Thursday night, March 25, with monies raised going to support selected young Australians pursuing their racing dreams overseas.  Now 66, Schenken deflects even the slightest suggestion of retirement. "I'm in the prime of my life and just about on top of this clerk of course/race director role!" he jokes.

(Australia's Formula One drivers - Sir Jack Brabham, Alan Jones, Mark Webber, Tim Schenken, Vern Schuppan, Frank Gardner, David Brabham, Dave Walker, Larry Perkins, Paul Hawkins, Tony Gaze, Paul England, Warwick Brown, Ken Kavanagh. Gary Brabham and Brian McGuire twice tried to qualify for GPs but failed.)