Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 111 i Australian Muscle Car

Old Ford Fairlanes aren’t exactly a common sight on Sydney’s city streets these days. So it was hard to miss the white ZB Fairlane that rumbled past the AMC office recently. But what really attracted our attention was the signwriting on the old Ford’s bootlid and flanks. Across the doors was a company logo, ‘finlease, with the accompanying slogan on the rear quarter panels: ‘Finance with the quality of service of a bygone era. Intrigued at what appeared to be a 50 year-old company fleet car, we picked up the phone and rang the finlease 1300 contact number. Turns out that Finlease is a finance company, based in North Sydney, and the Fairlane is indeed a rep’s car for the company. Finlease boss Mark O’Donoghue told us that employing such…

Jim Richards has won the Great Race seven times. The only driver with more Bathurst wins than that is Peter Brock. And three of Brock’s nine wins were shared with Richards. Richards joined Brock at the Holden Dealer Team at Bathurst in 1978. It was the New Zealander’s first experience with a factory team – not that Jim Richards in the late ’70s was some kind of undiscovered talent. Four years earlier he’d finished third on debut at Bathurst in a shoestring-run privateer Torana L34 (inset right), and from there made a name for himself at the wheel of the Sidchrome Mustang and then Big M Falcon Hardtop Sports Sedans. At the same time he was fielding his own touring car effort, a Falcon XB GT Hardtop backed by Melbourne…

Sixth placed Scotty Taylor and Kevin Kennedy scored the best result of their decade-long Bathurst 1000 partnership in ’79 – but it could have been even better. The pair were running third with an hour to go when car #15’s brakes failed. They struggled on to the end as part of Torana’s lockout of the top eight positions. After 30-plus years in hiding, this car resurfaced earlier this year and adorned the cover of AMC #107 (available as a back issue from mymagazines.com.au). Next time you see this car, it’ll be back in race livery. Seventh place Barry Seton and Don Smith’s race was hampered by the after-effects of a sizeable crash earlier in the week at McPhillamy Park, with Seton at the wheel. While seventh was well short of…

It is one of the greatest achievements in Australian rallying across the last six decades. Against a line-up of some of the world’s best rally drivers and teams, the Australian-run and crewed Ford Falcon GT team finished third, sixth and eighth in the 1968 London-to-Sydney Marathon. In doing so the Aussie Fords eclipsed both German and English factory Ford teams to capture the team’s prize. When the editor mentioned to this writer that one of those three works Falcon GTs had surfaced at the recent Falcon GT Nationals in Adelaide, and that he wouldn’t mind following up a story on what appeared to be a genuine original survivor car, it was an invitation too good to pass up. The car in question is indeed an original, the very car used…

Allan Moffat’s Rebel Yell When Carrera produced their first IMSA series Chevrolet Monza slot car, I was hopeful that we would be getting something close to Allan Moffat’s 1976 Championship winning sports sedan. The car was extremely important to Moffat’s career, and was his first GM racer after a career that up until that point had been almost exclusively in Fords. It was a provocative move and, less than 12 months after getting the Chev, Ford did another one of their motorsport U-turns and openly supported him again. Sounds a little familiar, right? The car Moffat imported to Australia was one of DeKon’s first-generation Monzas which had made its debut in the American IMSA series in late 1975. Unfortunately, Carrera seem fairly committed to its version of the second-generation car…

Some muscle cars are bought by loving owners who pamper them like members of the family. Other muscle cars, though, aren’t so lucky. Some get stolen, smashed or thrashed. Some get parked and lost under a layer of dust in an old shed, others get left outside to brave the elements and slowly rust away. Sad, but true. We eyeball plenty of beautifully maintained and/or fully restored muscle classics in AMC, but as serious car pervs we have to admit there’s few things more intriguing – or exciting – than spotting an old classic in a paddock, or a shed, or under a shady tree, that’s seen better days and in need of some TLC. Some are beyond saving, but they all have a story to tell. So, get out…

It’s a great shot in the arm for General Motors’ Aussie outpost, which has been reeling from poor sales and bad news ever since local manufacturing ceased late in 2017. The Corvette is a great headline right now, but it promises to be an even better car when RHD examples of the all-new C8 start rolling from the Bowling Green, Kentucky, assembly line into Holden showrooms in either late 2020 or early 2021. While HSV has been supplying locally-converted Camaros to Holden, Corvette will mark the return of a factory-supplied rear-wheel drive V8 drivetrain to its showrooms for the first time since the locally developed and manufactured Commodore sadly disappeared from sale. Obviously the Corvette won’t be an exact replacement for Commodore. The C8 is the first mid-engined Corvette and,…

Australia’s oldest continuously operating permanent circuit will celebrate a pair of 60th birthdays this year at its much-loved annual Historics meeting. Baskerville Raceway, 61 years young itself, will mark 60 years of both the mighty Mini and Elfin sports/racing cars at its 20-22 September extravaganza. Over 20 Minis will hit the track and as many Elfins will be present. The event will see the two Elfin 400 V8s of Bill Hemming and Mark Goldsmith on track together. In keeping with the big banger theme, Hemming is also bringing his ex-Vern Schuppan Elfin MR8 (#11), which competed in the AGP 1978 and ventured off-shore to the USA during the centre-seat Can-Am era. Hemming’s former Bob Jane Elfin 400 Repco fuel-injected 4.4 litre V8 (#4) was driven by many famous drivers including,…

There’s never been a Bathurst classic anything like the 1979 Hardie Ferodo 1000. The decimation of the field by the Holden Dealer Team’s #05 Torana A9X is unprecedented in this fabled event’s long and colourful history. The best way to put the HDT’s result into perspective is to compare the six-lap win to the margins of victory of other years. Since 1963 no fewer than sixty 500 mile or 1000 kilometre races have been held at Mount Panorama. On 45 occasions (75 percent) the winning margin has been less than one lap. A further 12 years the victors had a one-lap advantage when the chequered flag flew. Then there are the occasions when a car finished two laps ahead at race end, 1975 and 1984. This leaves 1979 as only…

Results sheets and race reports only partly convey the Brock/Richards Torana’s sheer domination of the 1979 Hardie-Ferodo 1000. To paint the full picture, here AMC graphically illustrates – quite literally – how #05 left the field in its wake. Admittedly, our line graph is a bit ‘left field’ as a concept, but bear with us here. Imagine if that year’s Great Race started on the Great Ocean Road at Warrnambool and finished 1000 kilometres north east in Bathurst. The #05 A9X is shown at the end of the line receiving the chequered flag at Mount Panorama, with the runners-up, #19, at that same moment near the town of Blainey, trailing 37km behind. Fifth place (Rogers/Stevens A9X) is still 67.8km from Bathurst at the little village of Lyndhurst and Willo’s class-winning…

This issue’s Bathurst 1979 content has so far covered-off the top eight finishing cars, and examined the reasons why Ron Hodgson Racing didn’t replicate its fighting ATCC form on the Mount, and addressed the abysmal Ford team challenge. Here, with the help of previously unpublished images, we hope to highlight other talking points and entries. Our never-before-seen images come from two primary sources. Firstly, Project Pictorials photographer Jeff Nield was commissioned to shoot the event on behalf of its client, race sponsor Hardie-Ferodo, the automotive brake pad division of James Hardie Industries. The late Nield also had an eye out that day for some of the smaller capacity class cars, including the Celicas and Corollas. One Celica in particular was very prominent that year – and it wasn’t only because…

Eyman Ahmed Car: 1968 Chrysler VE Valiant Hometown: Sydney, NSW What is it? “It’s a 1968 VE Valiant, 225ci, three-speed. It’s the base model, what was essentially a taxi pack.” When did you buy it? “I bought the car in May 2002.” Why did you buy it? “I wanted to restore and work on a car. I had a Subaru WRX at the time and it was an all-Ninja, Japanese turbo missile at the height of their infamy as ram-raid specials! So I wanted something that was ‘analogue’; something pretty basic I could wield a spanner on and understood better. I really wanted an American car, but the budget didn’t really stretch. So the closest thing I could get to an American car was the Valiant. I’d always had a…

It’s part of the red lion’s fabled history at Mount Panorama that A9X Toranas filled the first eight positions in the 1979 Hardie Ferodo 1000. That little factoid is well known to Holden enthusiasts and blue bloods alike. Incredibly, by AMC’s reckoning at least, all eight of those history-making Toranas survive today. What are the chances of that? Somewhere between, as the saying goes, yours and Buckley’s. We are still awaiting the resurfacing of the car which Barry Seton and Don Smith drove to seventh place on September 30 that year, but, last time we enquired, Torana experts tell us it’s around, possibly being restored. In a nutshell, here’s a rundown on the whereabouts of the other seven Toranas. It would be great to say definitively that more than half…

Allan Moffat’s Trans-Am Boss Mustang 302 might just be the most significant touring car Australia has ever seen. Not only was this a state-of-the-art, brand new Trans-Am racer purpose built for Ford by Kar Kraft in Detroit, it would also be the car that launched the career of Allan Moffat. The battles between Moffat’s Coca-Cola-backed Mustang (bottom) and rivals like Bob Jane and his 7.0-litre Camaro ZL1, the Mustang GTA of Ian Geoghegan and ‘Stormin’ Norm Beechey’s HT Monaro GTS 350 are the stuff of legends. It was an era of heavy metal touring car muscle which, while short lived, remains for many the highwater mark of touring car racing in Australia even 50 years on. From his exploits in the Mustang (including his earlier testing work with Kar Kraft),…

Growing up in the 1970s as a car-obsessed boy in single digits I used to love accompanying my Dad to the service station. In those days it was part of my father’s Saturday routine – before kids had multiple weekend sports commitments or other organised activities – to prep the car for any Sunday family outings and the working week ahead. My Dad worked as a sales representative for a manufacturer of copper pipe and hardware fittings. His working week was mostly spent driving a white Ford Falcon 500 to visit hardware stores, plumbing supply companies and other customers. Having the car topped up and ready to go before a new working week was important to him. Dad always referred to a service station as a ‘garage, an apt description…

Peter Brock and John Sheppard were already individual stars of Australian motorsport, but when they came together under the Marlboro Holden Dealer Team they were simply irresistible. Through 1978 and 1979, Brock ascended to superstar status, though it wasn’t all plain sailing – relations with Sheppard soured, and a plucky privateer named Bob Morris was a sharp stone in Brock’s bright red race shoes. By the time Bathurst came around in October 1979, the rivalry was headline news. After Morris’ David act versus the factory team Goliath in winning the Australian Touring Car Championship, Brock was bent on revenge. Fully recovered from his unexpected and inspirational victory on dirt in the Repco Round Australia Trial – the same dirt he’d metaphorically rubbed Sheppo’s face into after the race team boss…

The key facts surrounding Ford’s challenge at Bathurst in 1979 don’t make for happy reading for blue bloods. The first Falcon home was the Jim Keogh/John Mann XC hardtop in 14th, a full 25 laps behind the race winners. That black #12 machine was one of a dozen big coupes to come under starter’s orders, yet was the sole example classified as a finisher! With the Cleveland 351-powered hardtops having had six previous Bathurst starts, conventional motorsport wisdom would suggest these cars would at least be reliable by 1979, especially with dry-sump engines permitted that final year. No. One finisher from 12 starters! Houston we have a problem... make that two: reliability and speed. Yes, the hardtops were long in the tooth, having debuted in ’73, and the all-conquering A9X…

This beautifully restored machine is a genuine Holden Racing Team Holden Commodore VN. But it’s not, and never was, a racecar. It’s also a genuine VN Commodore Group A SS, and yet it’s not one of the production run of 300 cars Holden sold to satisfy Group A touring car racing homologation requirements. It’s also, as you see it here, the HRT’s original VN Commodore SS display car. The car’s centre-lock HRT race wheels, roll cage and stripped interior are for appearance-sakes only – under the skin it’s a stock Holden Commodore VN Group A SS. That being so, it’s still far from your average race team show car. This car started life as one of the two factory pilot-build VN Group As, both painted white (making them the only…

FPV GT-R Spec Police Car. Pretty soon all the Australian-built police cars will be gone – they tend to keep them a couple of years and then sell them so with local production now having finished, well, it can’t be too much longer. Biante tells me these models sell really well. I wonder if BMW 5 Series and Chrysler 300s will too? Time will tell. This bad boy is made in resin, so no opening parts, but the price is a bit lower – just under $200, probably. Keep up to date at www.biante.com.au Torana LX A9X in Madeira Red his is the road-going version of the A9X T Hatchback. And it looks fantastic in this colour. Sold by Biante but branded as Autoart, this die-cast model should be out…