Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 124 i Australian Muscle Car

Enjoy life! That was one of Peter Brock’s signature phrases – and those two words pretty much did sum up the way he lived his own life. It was certainly true of his later years. After his retirement from racing in 1997, Brock could easily have opted for the quiet life, resting on his not-inconsiderable laurels. Instead, he threw himself into a whole new phase of activities, including the Brock Foundation charity and various other worthy causes and mentorships. He also got back into competition, at a lower level, in tarmac rallies and racing in Nations Cup. Brock’s 1976-‘77 privateer Torana operation, Team Brock, was reprised, and was run out of the Brock farm out the back of Hurstbridge. In a way it was like returning to his roots. It…

On the Saturday night after the day’s racing action, Powercruise and Tuned take over with live music, food and high octane as Tuned hosts one of its fabulous Show’n’Shine street meets on the Figure 8 circuit, while Powercruise brings its best cruisers, drifters and drags to the track and main straight. Get ready for the Powercruise Top 150: hand-picked metal and mind-blowing machinery on the main straight and on display. There will be drifting, drag racing and cruising on track all Saturday night, as a band pumps out tunes on the rooftop of SMSP’s main pit building, and Tuned displays their best show’n’shine cars on the Skidpan and under the Grandstand. Cruising will kick off at approximately 5:30pm, followed by Powerskids, Dream Team drift demos, more cruising, then Street Outlaw…

Records continue to be set for auction sales in the classic muscle car market – although this latest price topper is no real surprise given how extraordinarily unique this particular Torana A9X is. According to Lloyd’s Auctions, it’s not only a rare surviving road-going version of the limited run of 33 specially race-prepared A9X shells (the so-called GMP&A shells ones that were meant to be turned into Group C touring cars), it also said to have clocked a mere 475km. It went under the hammer online at Lloyds on June 26, and was sold for more than $800,000 after a 15-minute contest between an online bidder and a phone bidder. “We are not surprised at this result because this is the holy grail of Holden motor collector cars in the…

A Brock VZ Commodore In the late 1990s Derek Bode started up a motorsport engineering course at the Box Hill TAFE in Melbourne’s north. Bode thought it would be good for the course if it had a mentor. He thought about it for a bit, and quickly came to the conclusion that ideal person for such a role was Peter Brock. “So I just walked up to him at Sandown one day,” Bode says. “I told him about the course and asked him to be involved – and he loved the idea. “Pete was brilliant like that – he would take on those sorts of things selflessly. He didn’t know me from a bar of soap at the time, but he listened to what I had to say and he…

Early days Leffler grew up with a love of motorcycles – Indians and Velocettes. It was whilst riding one of the latter at the age of 19 near the Royal National Park south of Sydney in 1959 that he chanced upon an Engadine service station owned by the Jemison brothers. As he recounted to Mini historian Craig Watson in 2007, the Jemison’s were very big in motorsport. “Mainly motorbike, but they did cars as well like Curly Brydon’s MG and even Arnold Glass’ BRM,” Leffler recalled. He pestered the brothers for a job and they finally relented. “I worked my backside off, because I just loved being involved. I just took a passion to it… but (when it came to race cars) I was allowed to look but not touch.”…

Prototyping the Mustang Casting around for a new slot car to build usually brings to mind a set of criteria that I work with. Can I get the decals? Are the right wheels available? Can I find a donor body? If not, can I find something suitable to modify? Is it a project within my skill-set? Will it interest you, the readers? The build for this issue had some of those questions answered when I saw an article by Dominic Grimes, the president of the Australian Scalextric Racing and Collecting Club. Dom pointed out that when Scalextric designed the most recent Supercars Commodore, the rear wing was attached by a neat tab that should allow it to slot solidly into the boot of the (at the time) new GT4 Mustang…

AMC’s favourite kit-maker and scratch-builder Geoff Wood sent us pictures and some details of his latest project. Geoff is a mad Allan Moffat fan – indeed, his fandom has crossed over into friendship with the Great Man. “A new year finally brought me the opportunity to build my long-held ambition of Allan’s complete set of all RX7 variants he raced from 1980 to 1985,” says Geoff. “For over 10 years l had been accumulating the 1:43 donor models required for the build and here is the result. Three Bizarre, two Kyosho, two Biante and one Hi-Story model make up the set. They sit, in chronological order, on a custom-made turntable (yep its ‘rotates’!) with a handmade full-scale rotor as the centre piece, adorned with an image of each car. A…

You could probably blame it on Allan Moffat. Or maybe it was Holden’s and Harry Firth’s doing, with the fibreglass flared guards, front spoilers and bonnet scoops on the Torana L34 and A9X. Either way, if you were young and into cars in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, the cool thing to do was to tart your daily drive up with fibreglass flared guards, maybe a front and/or rear spoiler, a bonnet scoop, perhaps – or the ultimate fibreglass enhancement of the day, the ‘Monza’ front end. The bolt-on fibreglass craze was so big that it spawned a plethora of body kit makers keen to cash in. And not just at the muscle car end of the market – if one wished, one could enhance the look of one’s Cortina with…

With its different wheels, bespoke aero enhancements, the special grille treatment and the distinctive side and bonnet striping that harks back to the original late ‘60s Mach 1 Mustang, Ford’s new Mach 1 Mustang on the road won’t easily be mistaken for its more-staid Mustang GT cousin. Which is fitting, because this is a different type of Mustang. What’s also fitting is that the resurrection of the Mach 1 name plate is being employed in 2021 in much the same manner as it was originally when Ford adopted the name for it higher-performance Mustang offering. Today the new Mach 1 fills the gap between the Mustang GT and the Shelby GT350 – which in any case isn’t available in Australia. Essentially it’s a slightly more powerful, but far sharper edged,…

In what must be a record, this year’s Queen’s Birthday Australian Honours has seen no less than six motorsport related awardees (seven if we were to include Mark Beretta, although his Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) was not for service to motorsport television commentary but rather ‘service to the community through charitable organisations, such as the Tour de Cure charity cycling event. New Members of the Order of Australia (AM) Larry Perkins (right) and John Bowe (top) need no introduction, and nor does former Supercars Australia chairman Tony Cochrane, even if these days he is far removed from motor racing in his current position as chairman of the Gold Coast Suns AFL club (in any case, Cochrane’s AM wasn’t awarded solely for his role in transforming the Australian…

Not like the old days I’m a very big fan of Australian Muscle Car mag. I’ve had a great passion with cars and motor racing since I was about 11 years old (now I’m 74) so I have been around the block a couple of times. My first race meeting was at Warwick Farm were Norm Beechey’s dark blue Neptune Racing Team Ford Mustang was having a run. Wow – what a sight! I also remember Catalina Park, where Bob Jane destroyed his white number 7 Shell Ford Mustang – just in front of where I was spectating! In 1972 I was at Bathurst for their Easter meeting and that’s where I saw the best touring car race ever without question – even though for most of the race there…

Alan Langworthy owns the first Brock Enhanced Holden, a Group 3 VX SS Ute (#001). In fact, he was there right from the start, when the idea for the run of 100 Brock Enhanced cars was first being formulated. “I was at Wakefield Park at one of the Team Brock Driving Life days,” Langworthy explains, “and while I was talking to Peter I asked him the question: ‘have you ever thought about going back into building Brock Commodores again?’ And he said, ‘well, you know I have thought about that. He told me that he was disillusioned with what HSV was offering at the time, describing it as ‘all show and no go. He realised he could do something cheaper and better.” It was Langworthy’s initial commitment to purchase the…

Allan Moffat winds on the lock on his Trans Am Boss Mustang as he battles with two of his greatest foes (and most bitter rivals, as Moffat was not on good terms with either Bob Jane or Norm Beechey). Here Beechey leads at Calder, the Monaro GTS 350 driver having stormed through the field from a lowly grid position. However, a clash with a lapped car would force Beechey to stop, and with Jane having to make a stop for tyres in his Mustang, and Ian Geoghegan’s version losing a wheel, Moffat was left to score a fairly easy win in Calder’s opening round of the 1970 Australian Touring Car Championship.…

Barry Sharp started the Great Race just the one time. This is somewhat surprising given Sharp clearly was a capable steerer, and on top of that a handy mechanic – meaning he was in possession of the two main prerequisites for a Bathurst co-driver in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He was denied a start in 1971 by his then employer, Jack Brabham, who, according to Sharp, declined to enter their Falcon GT on the grounds of costs. This was a shame as it meant we never got to see how a well prepared and driven ‘conventional’ XY model GT would have fared against the mighty GT-HO Phase IIIs in a 500-mile contest on the Mountain. Sharp himself reckoned the GT would have given a fair account of itself, as he…

It has been a long and winding road for the new S5000 openwheeler category. The journey has taken all of six years, involving two different prototype cars and three different specification V8 engines. There’s even been three different potential names for the category! It’s surely been the longest gestation period for any motorsport formula in Australia. However, from what we’ve seen from the four rounds that made up this year’s inaugural S5000 Australian Drivers’ Championship, it’s been worth the wait. In S5000 we have a V8-powered ‘big banger’ openwheeler category that reprises all that was good about 1970s Formula 5000 without also bringing back the bad – the appalling unreliability, the high running costs, and the chassis construction so flimsy that there is even a phrase to describe the permanent…

Holden VR Commodore 1995 Bathurst Winner – 25th Anniversary in Silver Livery No one was as happy as Larry Perkins at the end of the 1995 Bathurst 1000 – apart from his race-winning co-driver Russell Ingall, of course… This model’s an absolute must for Larry Perkins and Russell Ingall fans. With Larry getting tangled up on lap one with some upstart flash-in-the-pan called Lowndes, the Castrol car got a flat tyre and needed to pit. The stop (and the slow lap into the pits) put them a lap down. That Perkins and Ingall fought back to win is one of the great stories in Bathurst 1000 history. The silver livery celebrates that it’s been (just over) 25 years since this feat. The interior features the dash with digital display, bias…

The Sydney MasterBlast event returns to Sydney Motorsport Park this Fathers’ Day weekend – September 4-5 – after a Covidenforced pause in 2020. The Sydney MasterBlast, featuring the Australian Muscle Car Masters, celebrates our great Australian motor racing heritage: the glory days of the Bathurst 500/1000 and the cars that took on the Mountain in the Great Race, as well as the potential Australian motorsport stars of the future. Seven racing categories will feature across the two days. Heritage Touring Cars (Historic Group C & A) represents a direct link to our Bathurst and touring car history as these were the actual machines that competed during the Group C era (1973-’84) and international Group A (1985-‘92). The Sydney MasterBlast will host a round of the national series for Heritage Touring…

If things had gone to plan it would have been the only Holden ever to race in the Le Mans 24 Hour. Instead, it became a Group C touring car and, in the hands of Peter Janson and Larry Perkins, was best of the rest behind the Peter Brock/Jim Richards six-lap rout in the 1979 Bathurst 1000 (after having finished third in the Sandown 400 a few weeks earlier). This singularly unique A9X (in Janson’s hands it was also one of the only two ‘Torana SS’ hatchbacks to race during the 1980 touring car season, the year the Commodore model made its racing debut) is currently available for purchase at Australian Muscle Car Sales. This A9X was one of two GMP&A Torana race shells Bob Forbes acquired for his ambitious…

For all keen young Sydney car enthusiasts with a taste for the fast and the unconventional in the early 1960s, the place to hang out was at 696 Parramatta Road, Lewisham, the city’s first drive-in hamburger restaurant. Its proper name was Lee Gordon’s Big Boy Beefburgers, but to all its temporary inhabitants it was simply ‘Beefies’ (in the same way as that decades-later drive-in hamburger restaurant by the name of McDonalds are universally known here as ‘Maccas’). At Beefies you could get to see the latest in hot street machinery, sit and talk cars and modifications with all the cognoscenti and grab a glimpse of the latest import magazines such as American Hot Rod or Rod and Custom straight from the newsstands. It was a heady mix for young and…

S5000 has been criticised in some quarters for not being fast as some were expecting. Indeed, at the Phillip Island and Eastern Creek rounds this year, the S5000s did not beat the existing lap records for F3 cars or the old Formula Holden. But, Chris Lambden says, to criticise the category thus is to miss the point: “With the development of the new Gen3 Supercar, I saw a quote the other day from Supercars that said, ‘absolute lap speed is not the answer. That’s it, exactly. We set out to build something fast enough to be a challenge to drive, but also economically achievable within the Australian motorsport economy. “Formula 5000 was great, but it died because costs spiralled out of control. In the modern world you have to keep…

Victory with Jim Richards at Bathurst in 1978 capped off a fairytale return to the Holden Dealer Team for Peter Brock. Three weeks earlier Brocky had won the Sandown 400, after also having won the Australian Touring Car Championship. But Brocky didn’t win everything that year. In a season that was one to forget for Ford, there was at least a little late-season joy for the blue oval with its victory in the Australian Manufacturers’ Championship. The win came not via Moffat’s Ford Dealers XC Falcon Hardtops or Dick Johnson (then a prominent privateer Ford driver), but from the class winning efforts of Ford Escort drivers Rod Stevens, Bill Evans and Graham Mein, who between them won the under 2000cc class in all five rounds. The Escort drivers were helped…

Some great pics from the spectator areas at various Bathurst 500/1000s in the1970s from Steve Falconer captures the atmosphere of the Great Race back in the day perfectly - and reminds us just how rudimentary things once were at Mount Panorama. Even by the mid-late ‘70s the inside of the circuit on the run across and down the Mountain was more or less as it had always been, with a bare minimum of amco rail fencing to prevent a car going off and over the edge - and that’s if it didn’t hit one of the many trees that still lined the left side of the road.…