Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 131 i Australian Muscle Car

It’s hard to believe that half a century has passed since the infamous episode known as the Supercar Scare unfolded. But the Supercar Scare itself is hard to believe. Were it to be written as a movie script, the film makers would probably reject it on the grounds that the story is just too far-fetched – even for a movie. A phone call between a journalist and a politician’s press secretary, and a newspaper editor on the hunt for a juicy front-page story. By random chance, these two elements combined to unleash a national public fury that was as irrational as it was uncontrollable. A little more than a week later and the Australian car manufacturing industry and Australian touring car racing would be changed forever. The planned 5.0-litre V8-powered…

Perfect timing Great story on Beefies and Chiefys! I received issue #129 while I was packing to head off to the Australian GP – perfect timing as it allowed a free two hours of uninterrupted reading to Melbourne. Came to page 84 and I was immediately transformed back to the mid ‘70s, being 17 and cruising the streets of the western suburbs with my mates in my red LJ Torana two-door. It had the wildest lumpy road cam, high compression head, dual point distributor and a two-barrel Holley – a wild piece of gear for the day… Big Chiefs was the place to go late at night. The characters there were only outdone by the wilder street machines parked around the place. We did witness the effects of diesel on…

The XU-1 V8 project began not long after the final round of the 1971 Australian Manufacturers’ Championship at Surfers Paradise in early November. Holden clinched the series but it had been another win for Allan Moffat and Ford, with Leo Geoghegan claiming second ahead of the Peter Brock and Colin Bond HDT XU-1s. The drubbing they’d received at Bathurst was still fresh in their minds. For HDT boss Harry Firth, the situation was untenable. Eventually he wore Holden’s motorsport liaison man Joe Felice down. Prototype number one was the pink car, fitted with a 253 cid V8. Ian Tate, the legendary race mechanic and long-time Firth right-hand man, remembers Harry had ‘a bee in his bonnet about having the car finished by Christmas’. “Harry had a beach hut down at…

Corey van Genderen grew up with this particular Fairmont, and it was gifted to him by his father, Tus, in 2011 after having provided much of the family’s transport since 1997. Corey’s aim with the car has been to restore it as close to concourse condition as possible. All the numbers match, including trim and paint, and it still has the original Queensland plates letters and numbers that were on the car when it left the showroom in late 1972. Corey has had them remade, but he has kept the original stone-chipped pressed tin plates. There were some logistical issues involved in the restoration as Corey today lives and works in Papua New Guinea, so the work – which began in 2017 – has been done largely by remote control,…

AMC: You made a couple of appearances at Bathurst after your last 1000 in 1997... Shiel: Yes, with Don Pulver in the 3 Hour production race. Once in a Subaru WRX (seventh in 1998) and in a Nissan 200SX (ninth in 2000). It was my first race after injuring my back. AMC: Going back a little further, there was an outing in a Volvo 850 at the Bathurst 12 Hour. TS: That was 1994 in the non-turbo Volvo with Kent Youlden and John English. That blew going up Mountain Straight. The hot oil caused a grass fire! AMC: You raced a couple of Mazda RX7 sports sedans for John Keene? TS: He originally had my old RX7 that the Stone brothers turned into a…

Stories about immaculate restorations of cars are the ‘bread and butter’ of AMC’s content, but tales of romance are not quite so common. Here we have both – the story of South Australia-based Jason and Jess Ackland’s Holden HX Sandman panel van and the wedding which followed its restoration. The fact that the van is named Eloped gives the game away. When completed in 2021, the pair literally did elope in it, took it to the Van Nationals show in Parkes NSW, picked up a raft of awards and got married while they were there! Jess recounts the day: “Keeping with a tradition of high jinks and April Fool’s day shenanigans, Jason picked me up at 6pm sharp on the first of April and we drove Elopedto meet our celebrant,…

Muscle Maniac Warren Trewin likes his race cars to look cool. And we think his Touring Car Masters Monaro GTS 350 might just be the coolest looking race car we’ve ever seen. What’s also cool is the back-story to the green monster depicted on the blue GTS 350 coupe’s flanks. When Trewin went racing with a TA2 Camaro a few years ago, before he settled on a paintjob he had a browse through some of the liveries being run by TA2 competitors in the States “I noticed one of them had this green monster along the side of the car,” Warren says. “I’m looking at it and thinking, ‘what is that?’” It turns out the monster has a name, Chem Tooler, and is the official mascot for Berryman Products,…

An ex-Peter Brock Holden Dealer Team LJ Torana XU-1 will go under the hammer at Shannons Winter Timed Auction in early August. It’s the Group C XU-1 which Brock used to win the Australian Touring Car Championship in 1974 (the XU-1 did the bulk of the work in clinching what was Brock’s first ATCC title, with the new SL/R 5000 coming on stream for the final two rounds). It was Brock’s Bathurst car from the previous year, where it infamously ran out of fuel on top of the Mountain, leaving co-driver Doug Chivas to push the car up pitlane. Without that fuel consumption miscalculation from the HDT, Brock and Chivas may well have made it back-to-back Bathurst wins for the giant-killing XU-1 model. The car was restored some years ago…

By the late ‘90s Amaroo Park Raceway was on the nose with the professional side of the sport due to the venue’s ‘inadequate’ pit and corporate facilities. Not that it seemed to bother anyone back in the early ‘70s – and back then, as this pic shows, there wasn’t even a single covered pit garage in the place (note Allan Moffat’s ‘Opera House’ style red-and-white tent). But whatever the shortcomings of the tight twisty little track in Sydney’s north west, it never lacked excitement, action or sheer atmosphere.…

After the trauma and dislocation of World War II, motorsport in NSW resumed surprisingly quickly. A hillclimb was conducted on part of the Mount Panorama circuit in January, 1946, and the full circuit was used for a race meeting in October. That was a whole five years after the circuit last saw any racing action. Then in 1950, ARDC foundation member Belf Jones took out a lease on the wartime airstrip at Mount Druitt, west of Sydney. Large drums were used to separate the cars (running in each direction on the strip) and form a long oval. Sometimes the drums were used to incorporate chicanes and to introduce sweeping corners. The drivers of the time were glad to be able to race again after the war, but even so they…

Somehow it’s now half a century since Allan Moffat pulled off his second straight win at the Great Race. You can have your own commemoration of this feat with a gold version of the winning GTHO. Because golden anniversary, right? The 1:18 scale model features soft rubber seats. They feature a racing harness with detailed buckles and strapping. The engine has an outstanding level of detail including finely moulded hoses and graphics. Superb chassis detail with working suspension and steering. The springs, sway bars, wheel rims and brakes feature nicely. You’ll notice the car has a full interior – for the younger among you, that’s how they raced – they were literally production cars, some were even sold as ‘used cars’ after the race! While there was only one Allan…

‘Come out to Parramatta, and walk down Auto Alley!’ – that’s a line that should have instant recall with anyone living in Sydney back in the late ‘80s and ‘90s as the lyrics to the jingle in the ‘Auto Alley’ TV ad. Auto Alley was the section of Church Street from the northern end of Merrylands up to the intersection of the Great Western Highway at Parramatta. As the name implies, Auto Alley featured wall-to-wall new and used car dealerships on both sides of the street (apart from the odd exception, like the Bert Jones Racing Cams shop and the Lee Brothers’ ‘Nut House’ nuts-and-bolts emporium). For many years Auto Alley had not one but two Holden dealers. They were situated just up the road from one another, which must…

Sunday, June 25, 1972 The late Evan Green is a significant figure in Australian motoring and motorsport history. The multi-talented Green was an accomplished rally driver (in everything from Minis to a HQ Monaro GTS 350 four-door, and even a Leyland P76 V8 in the 1974 World Cup Rally), a first-class motorsport TV commentator, motoring journalist and, in later life, an acclaimed Australian fiction author. But from his long and varied career he is best known for just one tiny, but infamous, chapter: a news story which he wrote for the Sydney Sun-Herald newspaper. It made for a front-page headline that would change the course of Australian motoring history. That one story triggered an unintended chain of events which within little more than a week would kill off the XA…

Back in the early 1970s a young New Zealander named Doug Jack took the plunge and moved to Australia. Like so many Kiwis did back then (and still do today), Doug crossed the ditch in search of a more rewarding life than what seemed to be on offer in the Shaky Isles. An accomplished Grano worker, Doug ended up finding employment in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia – which was pretty much as far away from his home country as was possible without actually leaving the Aussie mainland... It was in that Western Australian mining town that he bought himself a near new E38 big-tank Charger, in Hot Mustard duco. One of the reasons Doug opted for the ’71 Bathurst-pack Charger as his daily drive was because he was a motorsport…

Making home tracks So, you have reached the point where slot racing on the floor is literally and figuratively a pain in the backside? The time has come, as Lewis Carroll’s Walrus might say, to build a home track. In this month’s column we will take a look at ways to go about it and some of the popular options that are available. None of it is a set of absolute rules, but worthwhile considering before you invest time and money. The process will most likely start with working out where you are going to keep your track and how much room that will allow you. With that decided, already that starts to place some restriction on what is possible. If you are really tight for space, you may be…