Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 117 i Australian Muscle Car

Motor racing is a complex sport, especially at the professional level. The reasons manufacturers spend so much money risking their reputations on the track are many and varied. For some, just being involved in competition is itself enough: a chance to show off their products in a sporting light, and in a very public way, and to attach a sense of excitement and glamour to their brands. But in the end it usually comes down to one simple thing: winning. And for Ford and Holden in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, winning was the primary objective of their not inconsiderable investments in Series Production car racing – especially when winning also meant defeat for your direct marketplace competitor. This was never truer than at Mount Panorama, Bathurst, every October.…

“The point was, with the Toranas, we started using the GTR in rallying and because the smaller Torana was better suited to rallying than the Monaro. Out of that it became our motorsports car.” “We wanted to stay in racing, and the Torana was the only way we could do it,” Felice says. While from the outside it looked like Holden was out there all guns blazing in rally competition and on the track in racing, within the company the situation was difficult. It wasn’t just that GM’s global policy was not to go motor racing. There was a solid camp of anti-motorsport people within Holden itself. As Felice explained in our Muscle Man feature last issue, the then managing director at Holden, Bill Gibbs, was firmly against motorsport (former…

Holden didn’t want to race it, and therefore it missed its chance at Bathurst, but a HG Monaro GTS 350 did find its way into Series Production racing. Towards the end of 1972 Keith Hanson raced this bronze HG GTS 350 in Series Production races at the Sydney circuits. Hanson was only a mid-pack runner, but with his Mona Vale Smash Repairs-sponsored car competing in the twin-heat NSW Production Touring Car Championship at Warwick Farm on November 5, 1972, the only HG to race was also the last Monaro to race in Series Production before the category was wound up at the end of that year, to make way for the new Group C regulations.…

Drama at Amaroo Park’s Dunlop Loop shortly after the start of the opening round of the ’74 Sun-7 Chesterfield Series. This seven-car melee was triggered when John French unsuccessfully tried to go down the inside of Bo Seton’s Escort (car 53) on the opening lap. Seton spun in front of the pack, and this was the result. Behind Peter Brown’s precariously parked Alfa is George Garth’s XU-1 and the Escorts of Geoff Leeds and Bob Holden. French’s Alfa and George Morrell’s Escort are out of frame. In the background Colin Bond and John Goss start their second lap – of course, there were no Safety Cars back in those days, but somehow they both managed to complete the 15 laps at full racing speed without crashing into the wreckage!…

A circuit like Hume Weir could never happen today. And even if it did, it would never be deemed worth of hosting top-level racing, such as Supercars, TCR, S5000 or even the second-tier likes of Touring Car Masters and Porsche Cup. But back in the day the biggest names in Series Production, Improved Production, Group C, Sports Sedans and Formula 2 open wheelers had no qualms about competing at the tiny Albury track, a mere 1.4km in length. Bob Jane, Norm Beechey and Ian Geoghegan were among the many stars to race here; the track was also a happy hunting ground for a young Peter Brock in his Holden-powered Austin A30 before he got the call from Harry Firth. Allan Moffat raced his Cologne Capri Sports Sedan here, although his…

Slot Car Collections For this issue, Slot Addiction sat down to talk with Dominic Grimes, president of the Australian Scalextric Racing and Collecting Club. Dominic also describes himself as a slot car ‘custodian, so his views on slot car collecting are informative and entertaining. AMC: How would you define a slot car collection? DG: I see a lot of collections, and to me a collection can be 10, 20, or maybe 2000 cars. It’s whatever somebody has as their thing. It may be a particular driver they saw race back in the day. And that’s why collecting is a great part of the hobby – it makes the hobby very social. You might be at someone’s place for a race, and you get to see their collection of slot…

The best race ‘performance’ for the six-cylinder D&P Traders Torana XU-1 Sports Sedan came at Oran Park, when it was only narrowly beaten by Pete Geoghegan’s Super Falcon Improved Production machine, as Gillard explains: “There was a huge crash at BP Bend on the first lap, cars and crap going everywhere. I managed to get through all that OK, and passed a lot of cars. Then when the dust settled about four of five laps into the race, Darcy’s holding out the pit board saying ‘POSITION 2. So with all the crashing on the first lap, I’m now in second place behind Pete Geoghegan’s Falcon, which is about 20 seconds up the road. “Then I notice that I’m catching him. I’m catching him in funny places, and normally I wouldn’t…

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…

A Holden Dealer Team Monaro race car that never raced at Bathurst has sold for the unprecedented sum of $750,000. While the figure falls short of Lloyds’ own pre-auction prediction of more than a million dollars, the sale has set a new record for the highest price ever achieved for a Holden at auction. The HT Monaro GTS 350 in question might have no Bathurst history but it happens to be the first Holden Dealer Team Monaro to race, the Spencer Martin/Kevin Bartlett car from the ’69 Sandown 3-Hour. The first race start for the Harry Firth-led Holden Dealer Team was not to be an auspicious occasion, the car meeting an untimely end in a fiery crash after the brakes failed. But the lessons Firth learned from that drama helped…

I hate SUVs. There, I’ve said it. These jacked up contrivances with their high centre of gravity, compromised handling, poor fuel economy and average luggage space make no logical sense compared to station wagons and estates. And don’t get me started on SUV ‘coupés’ like the BMW X6 and Mercedes Benz GLE Coupé! They are the answer to a question that only those perverted product planners in Munich and Stuttgart dared to ask. As a family man, I see the rationale of owning a wagon. They are lower to the ground, lighter and most have oodles of luggage space. Performance or muscle wagons? Count me in. Who said you can’t have your cake and eat it too? Australia used to do muscle wagons well. The first main stream V8 wagon…

Bob Morris was a young star on the rise at the end of the ‘60s. As part of the factory Toyota team he’d won his class in Corollas at Bathurst in 1968 and ’69. Those performances would have been in the back of Harry Firth’s mind when Morris and his father Ray purchased one of the HDT Monaros from the ’69 Bathurst 500. “When I bought the Monaro off Harry he said that if you go alright in this there might be a Bathurst drive with us next year,” Morris says. “That was his master plan: we’ll give you this car, we’ll help you a bit – not that he helped us much – and if you do a good job in it you can come on board with us…

Harry Firth is commonly regarded as the father of the Torana XU-1. In reality, the Holden Dealer Team boss was probably more like a kind of XU-1 midwife, or even foster parent. It was Firth who made sure that the XU-1 package Holden delivered was the best it could possibly be, but opting for a smaller, lighter six-cylinder Bathurst challenger in the first place wasn’t his idea at all. When Holden signed Firth to head up the new Holden Dealer Team in May of 1969, the basic specs of the Monaro which Holden would be running at Bathurst that year were already in place. It would be Firth who supplied the finishing touches, in the form of a series of minor yet crucial upgrades to the HT GTS 350 package…

It may have been the ‘Command Performer’, according to Holden’s advertising campaign, but it’s the car that never got to perform. Not only was it never put to the test against the GT-HO Phase II at Bathurst, but the true nature of its performance potential wasn’t revealed publicly in the motoring press until after the 1970 Bathurst 500 – which was some four months after the model had been released, and only about a month before it was discontinued! No one, it seemed, was in any great hurry to sing the praises of the latest model Monaro in mid 1970. All the attention was on the remarkable little XU-1 and, as detailed in the HT GTS 350 Buyer’s Guide in AMC #46, it’s not as though the press would have…

Well, Whaddayaknow? Back in 2017 when we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1967 XR Falcon GT (AMC #96) we pondered the fate of those XRs that raced in that year’s Bathurst 500. The white GT of Ian and Leo Geoghegan that finished second survives and a replica of the winning Harry Firth and Fred Gibson green GT has pride of place at the Australian Motor Racing Museum at Bathurst. However, the whereabouts of the five remaining GTs, including the three GTs finished in the iconic GT Gold that competed in that year’s Great Race, remained unknown. Indeed in our 50 reason to love the first GT feature we joked about the #59 machine of Ken Stacey and Bruce McIntyre saying; ‘save for number panel and drivers names is completely…

Ian Stewart Taswegian reader Ian Stewart got in contact with AMC after our Craven Wild cover story in issue # 116. Ian was at Symmons Plains when the Morris/Grice Commodore made its race debut in early 1980, and fortunately for us he’d brought along his Kodak tele instamatic camera (anyone remember those?). We’ll let Ian tell the story: “The weather was rubbish that weekend, but I was totally looked forward to seeing the ‘new generation’ Group C cars. In the pits, I made a beeline for the new ‘dream team’ and was impressed. The two cars looked great and I managed to get pics of them both and side by side and individually. I had to admit that the (few) Commodores looked really plain, and it wasn’t until later in…

Perhaps buoyed by Gillard’s strong results in the six-cylinder XU-1, in 1972 Darcy Peck decided to upgrade to a V8 version. However, the D&P Traders V8 XU-1 would be a classic case of bigger not in fact being better… It was, Gillard says, a ‘horrible’ car. “I had nothing to do with building that car. That car’s the reason I didn’t stay with them. Darcy did a lot for me so I don’t mean to bag him out, but this was just a badly made motor car. It nearly killed me a couple of times… When I first drove it, Darcy says to me, ‘OK, what’s wrong with it?’ I said to him: ‘I’ll tell you what’s right with it – bloody nothing!’ “I was told Don Holland came and…

Lastly, the podcast is the latest iteration of citizen journalism. And Australia’s model car scene is not to be left out. The V8 Sleuth’s Aaron Noonan and Dmitiri Comino from Motorfocus have teamed up to bring you an all new podcast! Tune in to hear all about new releases, models just landed, model discussion, special guests and Q&A sessions. Each episode will be up fortnightly on a Thursday. We hope you listen in, and send any questions you would like answered. Have a listen at https://www.motorfocus.com.au/podcast/…

Win on Sunday, sell on Monday. It’s a hoary old cliché of motor racing, but back in the Series Production era of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s it really did hold cache for both manufacturers and their dealers. Take Fair Deal Car Sales, one of two Holden dealers in Church Street, Parramatta, later to be known as ‘Auto Alley.’ It joined the motor racing fray in 1969, supplying an HG Monaro GTS 350 in Kashmir White for Digby Cooke’s first frontline assault on the Bathurst 500 (see this issue’s Muscle Man profile.) The Monaro raced on into 1970 before meeting its maker during the Easter Bathurst meeting, where if suffered total brake failure and careered through the inside fence at the bottom of Conrod Straight. Undeterred, the good folk…

The Supercars season swung back into action at Sydney Motorsport Park in June, bringing to an end a Covid19 pandemic-induced hiatus of some four months. Like all professional sports getting back under way amid the pandemic, the Supercars raced at the Eastern Creek circuit in front of empty grandstands, with a reduced number of crew members and no media (other than TV) in attendance in order to satisfy government Covid19 restrictions. The lack of crowd no doubt did little to dampen the elation at Brad Jones Racing, however, with Nick Percat making the most of a clearly excellent setup on the BJR cars (Todd Hazelwood was also very strong in the sister BJR Commodore) to deliver a masterful display to win the second of three 130km sprint races. Scott McLaughlin’s…

Hatching a coup I loved the story about the Super Chicken HQ van, it looks incredible. l just can’t get enough of stories about our local car industries quirky one-off production models and the prototypes that didn’t make it. The WB Kingswood and Premier sedans and wagons are very interesting examples of the latter. There are pics of the one that got away residing at the National Motor Museum in Birdwood in South Australia. With looks that only a mother could love, I reckon it would have upset plenty of people who shelled out big coin for a HZ Statesman. I have read stories about it from the various people involved with it. Leo Pruneau had plenty to say about it and no doubt still does, and Evan Green who…

The late ’60 and early ‘70s was the era of the dealer entrants in the Bathurst classic. Back then the race was still inexpensive enough for motor dealers to get involved, either by running a car themselves or sponsoring a privateer with parts and maybe the odd mechanic and apprentice. In 1970 the majority of entrants were either full dealer entries or carried dealer support. So did Holden lean on the dealers to forsake their Monaros in favour of Toranas? Not according to Joe Felice, who says it was more a simple case of the dealers being good team players. They were getting on board with XU-1s because Holden had declared the Torana to be its ‘motorsport’ car. One Holden dealer-entrant who did want to stick with the Monaro for…

Looking back, Ian Tate concedes that an upgraded GTS 350 might have been a better option at Bathurst in 1970 than the XU-1. But that doesn’t mean he thinks that the HDT could have won with the Monaro. The Monaro was not without its shortcomings; according to Tate, the success Colin Bond had achieved in the HT model Monaro only flattered to deceive. “We did win Bathurst and we won the Surfers 12 Hour race,” Tate says. “But I think we had a bit of luck at Bathurst in ’69. Those Monaros were under braked to buggery; they were heavy. And we certainly needed more power. “Harry had plans for a HG Monaro in 1970 and he spoke to General Motors about those plans. He had envisions of improving the…

David Sheldon featured in the previous issue of AMC as the co-creator of the Holden six-powered Mini Sports Sedan, the ‘Molden’. After the Molden experiment Sheldon opted for a more conventional avenue of racing: a HT Monaro GTS 350 in Series Production. The plan was to compete in the 1969 Bathurst 500, with Don Holland as co-driver. The plan hit a snag in practice when the engine started blowing smoke. While their lap times were getting quicker as the two drivers settled into the weekend, at the same time the Monaro’s top speed on Conrod Straight was getting slower and slower. “They were having a lot of trouble with rings in those engines in that first year,” Sheldon says. “This was when Nick Petrilli was putting Ajax down the bores…

As the saying goes, behind every good man is a good…. Digby Cooke’s better half Gwen is a case in point. She is a true motoring enthusiast and has been her whole life. Her story is almost as fascinating as that of her racing husband. “I first caught sight of Digby at his workshop when I was still at school,” reminisces Gwen Cooke today. “It was when Ash Marshall was there. I used to watch him prepare cars. I was always into cars. We went off and married different people (sadly Gwen was widowed a few years later.) In the mid-1960s I was working in public relations doing fashion promotions for the likes of David Jones, Bankstown Square and others. I got to know Alec Mildren and his staff and…

Ken Stacey always had an interest in cars. As a teenage tearaway in the early 1960s he had an FJ Holden that he hotted up and raced around the streets. He graduated to a Morris Cooper S – white with a red roof – in 1965 when he was a member of the Citizen Military Force (CMF) now better known as the Army Reserve. Together with a CMF mate the Cooper S was entered in a lot of local rallies organised by the Mini Car Club like the popular Mini Monte as well as events with the Eastern Suburbs Car Club where he met fellow Cooper S owner Mal Henderson. Stacey and Henderson pooled their resources and entered the white and red Cooper S for the 1966 Bathurst 500. The…

King Street, Newtown, is renowned as Sydney’s uber-cool high street, the height of inner-west Sydney chic. But back in the early 1970s Newtown had none of the cafes, restaurants or designer fashion retail stores for which it’s famous today, and generally was rather more working class. At the top end of King Street in 1970 was the famed motorsport tuning and preparation business, Malcolm Motors. Down the other end was D&P Traders, suppliers of racing karts and equipment. ‘D&P’ stood for the husband-and-wife duo Darcy and Pat Peck. Pat had raced karts in the ‘60s before graduating to cars, running a near-standard 327 Camaro in Sports Sedan racing. The Pecks dabbled briefly with a Falcon GT-HO in Series Production racing before opting for a Torana XU-1. Two XU-1s, in fact:…

Holden HG Monaro Street Machine Some people like to spend lots of time and effort modifying their model cars. If you’d really like a hotted-up die-cast Monaro but lack the time (and amazing skills) to do it, this might be your next-best thing. As with Biante’s earlier HK and HT Monaro Street Machines, the HG also includes a supercharged V8 engine, quick shifter, gauges, customised number plates, larger retro wheels and tyres, modern big brakes, revised exhaust system and custom suspension. This combination of features together with the low ride height gives this street machine an impressive and intimidating stance. It’s painted a nice satin chrome that gives it a bare-metal look – certainly it’s eye-catching. Like the Rally Red car, it’s due out later this year. It’s got opening…