Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 128 i Australian Muscle Car

In 1970 Niel Allen’s 5.0-litre Chev V8 McLaren M10B was threatening to lift off the ground and flip over backwards on Conrod Straight at 270km/h. Back then there was no Caltex Chase to slow the cars before Murray’s Corner, and the straight – and indeed much of the rest of the track – was lined not by concrete walls designed especially for motor racing circuits, but by wooden post-and-wire farm fencing of the type designed to keep sheep and cattle from escaping the paddock. But aerodynamic lift at high speed on Conrod was only one of the problems Niel Allen faced at Bathurst that Easter weekend. The strain on the Formula 5000’s aluminium monocoque chassis on a quick lap around the Mountain was extreme: it was actually shaking loose the…

Now this could get a tiny bit confusing here, but stick with us. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the start of production of the 30th Anniversary EL Ford Falcon GT. In fact, according to reports of the time, job one emerged from the assembly line on February 18. All that also means we’re around the mark for the 30th anniversary of the 25th Anniversary EB Ford Falcon GT. Confused? Look, it’s simple, really. The legend was born when the first Falcon GT appeared in 1967 as a Bathurst 500 V8 special based on the XR model. It then became a full-time member of the family through the XT (London to Sydney rally), XW (the arrival of the HO), the XY (the GTHO Phase III), XA (sedan and two-door)…

Did you hear the one about the taxi driver, the mechanic and the ambulance driver? No? Well, it’s actually not a joke – rather, it’s the background of the Garard family, who helped pioneer Holden’s participation in 1960s rallying. They were also among the fastest rally drivers of the decade, and they, together with ace Victorian rally drivers Bob Watson and Tony Roberts, literally laid the foundations for Holden’s success in rallying in the 1970s with the Holden Dealer team. Brothers Greg and John Garard, along with younger brothers Don and Ross, as well as patriarch Jack, cut a swathe through NSW rallying back in the day. As a measure of how good they were, it was Greg Garard who broke the vice-like grip Barry Ferguson had on the coveted…

The McGees did their best to clear the myriad of hurdles placed in front of them by their opponents in the American drag racing scene. The last straw was the 1997 Top Fuel and Funny Car rule change that limited engines to two valves per cylinder and single camshaft – the very essence of what the McGee engine was not. “When we first began this project there was such a variety of engines being run,” says Phil. “Then all of a sudden you could see it narrow down to almost a spec class, like you see today. We saw that happening, and to be honest our engine did not meet the criteria of the future of the NHRA. At one time the NHRA had Jim McFarland, vice president of Edelbrock,…

The McGee family retains its connections with motor racing in the USA, aside from sponsorship and mechanical support of numerous competitors in a wide variety of disciplines, though it now operates (since 1998) as two separate businesses. In the late 1990s the McGees became heavily involved in building components for Junior Dragsters (quarter-scale dragsters powered by small single cylinder flathead four-stroke engines raced over an eighth-mile by children – in Australia aged eight to 16). Originally these were all built around Briggs and Stratton engines, but in 2003 Phil received NHRA approval to build aftermarket versions. He made 1800 of those over the following few years and he has handed that business over to Chris, who still makes them today. Because of their wealth of knowledge with non-rocker arm camshaft…

Holden A9X Torana 1978 Sandown 400 winner Nothing is more certain to be popular than a Peter Brock Holden. And the A9X is possibly the most popular of Brock’s many winners. This 1:18 scale model will be no different. There’s just so much detail – with full opening parts. The driver’s racing seat features soft textured padding and racing harness with individual buckles. At the heart of the engine bay is a 308 V8, fed by twin Weber carbies. Details include finely moulded hoses and metal bonnet hinges. Superb chassis detail with working steering. The engine sump, cooling system, suspension and exhaust system are accurately moulded. The chassis bears an individually numbered etched metal plate which is the edition number of your model. As usual, the cigarette advertising is missing,…

Fancy Allan Moffat’s ’78 Falcon Cobra Group C Bathurst race machine for the princely sum of just $25,000? Or the sister car, the black Federation Insurance/Camel Filters Hardtop which Moffat drove the following year, for another $5k? Or those two, plus the Cologne Capri and Chev Monza Sports Sedans – all for only $135,000? The fact that all four of these machines were on the market at the same time shows how dire Allan Moffat’s financial situation was in late 1979. It had not been a good 12 months. Ford had reneged on a commitment to return to racing with the release of the XD Falcon, leaving the already cash-strapped Moffat struggling to field a competitive XC Falcon against the onslaught of a slew of well-funded Torana A9X teams. The…

The weather in the NSW central tablelands is notorious for not adhering to the four seasons. At Mount Panorama in early October you can get pretty much any kind of weather conditions: rain, hail, sunshine, blistering heat or a cold snap with temperatures down in the single-figures for most of the day. Then there’s the wind. It can get windy up there, and when it does on race day it becomes an issue as competing cars end up with radiator intakes clogged by bits of paper, cardboard and plastic debris which the wind has gathered up from the spectator areas. The 1971 race featured what must be Australia’s most famous cardboard beer carton, as Allan Moffat circulated for hours with an empty slab stuck across the front of his Falcon…

Uniquely, Alex Davison is a contemporary driver who has driven and raced both S5000 and Historic Formula 5000. He drove the ex-Theodore Racing Lola T332 (the car Alan Jones raced in Australia in 1976) at two race meetings in 2015 – for six wins from eight starts. In 2019 he raced an S5000 at Sandown in the first event for the fledgling series. Davison’s best effort was a fourth in the second heat; he crashed out of the feature when hit by another competitor. “In the Lola the first thing you notice,” Alex explains, “particularly when you are over six foot tall like me, is that there is not a great deal of room. The anti-roll bar and steering rack is directly over your shins. “The dash, bulkhead and hoop…

It was clearly meant as a show of unity and strength, intended to stare down Supercars’ detractors. After two years of serial crises and Houdini-like escapes, Supercars held a press conference at which senior executives of Ford and General Motors sat side by side, smiling and full of praise for each other’s commitment to the third generation of Supercars’ silhouette touring car formula in 2023. “We want to win, let’s be clear about that,” Ford Australia and New Zealand boss Andrew Birkic told a large pack of grizzled motorsport press. “But we want the series to be competitive and we want to work towards a formula where it’s competitive, it’s entertaining, it’s relevant and fans can connect.” His opposite number at GM Australia and New Zealand, Marc Ebolo, was equally…

AMC: What impact did Mike Burgmann’s death have on your career? Mal Rose: Mike believed I could go on and be the next Tony Longhurst. Without him, I had no guidance and no manager. Unlike Glenn Seton and Mark Skaife, I had no connections. AMC:What is the significance of number 44? MR: I liked the shape of 4. I asked for that at my first supersprint at Amaroo but it was taken. I said, what about 44? So that became my number. AMC: You had a great relationship with the late Formula Ford guru Steve Knott. MR: Yes, he helped me in Formula Ford and then my first V8 Commodore Supercar. He and his wife assisted with most of my Nurburgring drives as well. AMC:What happened after…

The HR 186S today is a little appreciated and largely forgotten Holden. But it was a significant model in 1967: the first Holden to offer not only a floor-shift, four-speed manual transmission, but also a limited-slip diff. Under the bonnet, the former X2 twin Stromberg carby setup (which according to Bob Watson, then a Holden engineer as well as a part of the Victorian Holden Dealer rally team in ’66, gave no more power than the standard single-Stromberg) was replaced by a (much better) single, twin-choke Stromberg, combined with an excellent three-into-two exhaust header system. With almost 110kW (up nearly 30kW on the stock 186), the 186S HR was a full second faster down the standing quarter mile (400m) than the standard three-speed 186. But the LSD and four-speed box…

When it comes to muscle cars, rallying often takes a back seat but, in the case of the late, great John Bryson, he would have preferred it take a left-hand seat. John Bryson, who died on January 15, was one of the top navigators in Australian rallying in the ‘60s and ‘70s, often alongside some of the world’s best drivers and in some of the most muscular rally cars of the era. Probably the most famous of the muscle cars Bryson co-drove was the Leyland P76 V8, which he shared with Evan Green, in the 1974 London-Munich World Cup Rally. In the rally they set fastest time on a stage around Sicily, on the old Targa Florio course – prompting Leyland Australia to create a special edition P76 Targa Florio.…

“The world is larger than Bathurst – and television rights can take us to the world.” That was Bathurst mayor Les Wardman speaking in October, 1976, not long after the dramatic, emotion-charged victory in the Bathurst 1000 for Bob Morris and John Fitzpatrick in their Ron Hodgson Motors Torana L34. But the mayor wasn’t talking about a global TV deal for the Great Race. His ambitions for the Bathurst region and the Mount Panorama circuit were rather more grandiose than that: what he had in mind was a World Championship Formula 1 Grand Prix at Bathurst in 1979. With the benefit of 45 years of hindsight, the idea appears absurd. But like anything a bit left-field, one needs some context to understand the rationale behind this bid. Even before the…

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that Sydney-based Shannon Marshall is a Ford enthusiast, especially of Falcons with 351 V8s under the bonnet. Apart from the violet XB Fairmont featured here, he also has an XY Fairmont 351 and a Tango Orange four-door XB Falcon GT, both of them immaculate. The Ford thing clearly runs in the family. Shannon’s father has an XY GT which he’s owned since 1986, and the fact that Shannon’s mobile phone number ends with ‘351’ is no coincidence and speaks for itself. And so does his wife’s… So what’s the story behind Shannon’s unique Falcon? For those old enough to remember, Kwikasair was a large logistics and interstate road transport company, established in 1958. Its trucks were a common sight on…

Former V8 Supercars chief Tony Cochrane famously once said that there are no sacred sites in Australian motor racing. He was, of course, wrong. As everyone else knows, the Bathurst track is a sacred place – and it’s not even the only ‘sacred’ Australian motor racing site. Ask any Holden fan with a deep sense of history, and they will point to their shrine: the building at 35 Queens Ave in the inner-east Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. This was home to Harry Firth’s Holden Dealer Team from its 1969 inception until the end of 1977. This modest brick structure was the headquarters of Holden’s racing effort during that time; it was within these walls that Firth and his team helped develop and race the HT Monaro GTS 350 and the…

The people’s team Looking back over the course of my time providing columns for AMC, I am surprised I haven’t done more on cars from the Dick Johnson Racing garage. After all, my first time at Bathurst was 1980, the year Dick hit the rock. There is a plaque that commemorated the Ford/Channel 7 public donations appeal, and on it you will find my name amongst the many donors that contributed to rebuilding this team of the people. So, now is the time to redress my slot car neglect. There have been quite a few Scalextric DJR cars starting with those primitive XR3s that were discussed in the Aussie cars review I did some time ago. Similarly, we covered the AU XR8 that was amongst the first Aussie touring cars…

Nitro-burning engines make their huge horsepower outputs because of the nature of the fuel. Nitromethane doesn’t burn well at atmospheric pressures, but under compression tends more to explode than burn (nitro is used in the manufacture of some explosives). It produces extreme temperatures in a cylinder (around 2400 degrees C) and the only real way to keep this under control is with a very rich fuel load. The advantage of nitro as a fuel is that it chemically carries a significant amount of its own oxygen, so the fuel/air charge can be much richer than a normal engine, which helps the cooling, but if you cross below a critical level the result can be the melting of internal engine parts (valves, especially the exhaust, heads and pistons) and, given the…

Geoff Wood has been at it again. This time, a brace of 1:18 scale Mustangs, both modern interpretations of Allan Moffat’s iconic 1969 Trans-Am. Geoff used a pair of the current models as bases and a donor car, the earlier Welly 1969 car. “Yep, l built me a modern version of Moff’s ‘69 Trans Am,” Geoff says, “surgically implanting all of the Welly donor components into a 2015 body shell which features the appropriate flared guards to complete the look. I also reprofiled the rear quarter windows to give it the full retro appearance. “This now sits alongside my other 2015 Moffat Mustang concept which you previously saw as the Scott McLaughlin Shell Supercar ‘piss take’ l built in protest of the monstrosity they ended up racing with. So now…

Covid might once again be playing havoc with event planners but the Mustang Owners Club of Australia was able to see in the new year in fine style – as can be seen in these pics – by hosting its All American day at Macarthur Square, Campbelltown, in Sydney’s south west on January 16. Over 200 cars were displayed, and $6500 was raised to donate to Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation Westmead. Big celebrations are planned for next year’s event, which will the 40th All American day.…

Get rid of your car and get on that plane. We would have thought an ad campaign in a specialist car magazine urging readers to sell their pride and joy on wheels so they could jet across the skies to Europe for a few months’ holiday was being a tad optimistic, but that was the message from Qantas to readers of Modern Motor in 1972. Then again, maybe such was the alure of international travel in the early ‘70s. Because with the late ‘60s advent of large passenger jet aircraft like the Boeing 747, the ability to jet around the globe was suddenly no longer the preserve of the rich. We do think, though, that Qantas was also being optimistic in its calculations that its customers could live in London…