Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 134 i Australian Muscle Car

Muscle Sport Weary travellers arrived at the Warwick Farm race course in early November to complete the 2022 Perth-Sydney Marathon, a two-week journey which commemorated the 1968 London-to-Sydney Marathon by retracing the exact route of the Australian leg from Perth to Sydney. The ’68 Marathon featured the first international motorsport foray for Holden (as well as a three-car Australian Falcon team led by Harry Firth – for more on that, check our Ian Tate Muscle Man profile on page 70) and delivered a controversial finish as the rally-leading Citroen was eliminated in a head-on accident with a Mini at Nowra, just a few hours transport stage still to run, and therefore victory assured.…

There are many challenges when it comes to testing and developing a new car. But being chased down a mountain road by an irate bikie probably isn’t the first that springs to anyone’s mind. That’s the situation in which Steve Hoinville and John Bowe found themselves on a test drive of HGT2, the first rolling prototype of the 30th anniversary Ford Falcon EL GT, or Project 064 as it was known. In those days Hoinville was the chief chassis engineer at Tickford Vehicle Engineering, Ford Australia’s high performance vehicle partner. Bowe was one of Australia’s pre-eminent racing car drivers and a consultant to TVE since early 1995 on all-things performance when it came to the road cars under development. So on this particular day Bowe was driving down Pinchgut Lane,…

For the Maltese lads in the migrant hostel in Melbourne in the late 50s, cars, cars and more cars were what made their hearts sing. Many of them worked at the Holden plant, smuggling paint home in their Thermos flasks until the boss cracked down – don’t use the paint colour on your old cars until the new model Holden flaunting that shade is on the market. A simple request and one that was respected, even by those who were not Holden people. “My uncle taught me how to drive in a 1948 Ford Mercury, and I became a Ford dude – and I still am,” says Joe, who is now 83. “So, of course, when I wanted to buy a car to build as a race car, it had…

Leaving aside the 2021 Covidinterrupted motorsport calendar, the annual Bathurst 1000 is traditionally held in the month of ‘Brocktober’. So what better place in Australia for the Brock Commodore Owners Association to host their annual weekend away than Bathurst? Brock Commodores of various Groups and colours assembled at Mount Panorama the week after this year’s Great Race, which dovetailed nicely with the final Bathurst 1000 win for Holden (even if the Supercar version of the ZB Commodore maybe doesn’t quite have the cache of a genuine ‘80s Brock HDT version. If you’ve got a car club or rally happening and would like to get the word out in AMC, contact our club directory manager Mat Clancy – mclancy@nextmedia.com.au…

MuscleManiac The Qantas Bomb Hoax of 1971 was an audacious attempt to extort a large sum of cash from the airline. This infamous episode in Australian crime history is probably the down under equivalent of Britain’s Great Train Robbery. And the perpetrators – Peter ‘Mr Brown’ Macari and his accomplice, Raymond Poynting – might have got away with it had it not been for their love of muscle cars. Using the alias ‘Mr Brown’, Macari put a call into the Department of Civil Aviation. He told them an altitude bomb was hidden aboard Qantas Flight 755 from Sydney to Hong Kong, and it would explode when the aircraft descended below 20,000 feet (6000 metres). To show it wasn’t a crank call, Macari also told them there was an identical bomb…

MuscleSport It might have been a Bathurst 1000 to forget for Dick Johnson Racing, but 2022 would still be a triumphant year on the Mountain for the Johnson racing dynasty. Where the Dick Johnson Racing Mustangs lacked the pace to run at the front in the Great Race, five weeks on Steven Johnson had speed that none of the other Touring Car Masters drivers could match, with Johnson dominated the penultimate round of the Gulf Western Oil Touring Car Masters Series with victories in all four races in his Boss Mustang. Johnson wracked up his 50th TCM career race win on the Sunday morning in wild, wet conditions. It dried out later in the day, but behind Johnson it was still an event-filled race, with Benn Dunn’s Monza shedding a…

Muscle Mail Mountain out of a Mulvihill 1 Thanks for bringing the memories flooding back with every issue of AMC produced in some way or another. Especially issue #133 and the story on Tony Mulvihill. I worked for Tony’s company, Mulvihill Security Group, back in the 1980s. When Tony owned the company, I can truly say what a pleasure it was to work for him. My father also worked for him and would often say how spoilt we were to have such a good boss – and how true his words were. I was only a teenager when I started working for Tony but he treated my family and I with respect and dignity while I was there. When I became aware that he drove in the Bathurst car race,…

In July 1989 Nissan Motorsport Australia was the ‘nearly team’ of Australian touring car racing. Always there or there abouts, but never at the pinnacle of the sport. The just-concluded 1989 Australian Touring Car Championship was a case in point. Lead driver Jim Richards and his Nissan Skyline HR31 GTS-R was only fourth in the ATCC, 50 points behind the champion, Ford hero Dick Johnson. Richards’ best results were two second places, but he was a non-finisher at the team’s best outing at a wet Winton. Here George Fury and a younger understudy by the name of Mark Skaife came home first and third. In that same month a bright red Nissan Skyline graced the cover of Wheels magazine with the headline ‘Skyline Supercar’. This was the R32 Skyline GT-R,…

Yankee doodle dandy Ever since Scalextric announced the Chevrolet Camaro I have been anticipating getting my hands on one. Well, the wait is over with the arrival of that body shape and I was keen to get working on Kevin Bartlett’s iconic version. It is worth overviewing the story of KB’s car to see how it impacts my build. At the time, the Camaro was a car that threatened the touring car establishment, a result of Kerry Packer’s desire to see KB in the touring car limelight with Channel 9 Sports sponsorship. KB chose a foreign car to be different, something that under the proposed rules would have room under the guards, a tidy weight distribution and Chevrolet engine he knew well from its F5000 use. A simple inspection reveals…

Channel Seven hasn’t always been the host broadcaster of the Bathurst 1000, and indeed currently is the ‘junior’ member of a telecast partnership with Fox Sports. But in the early days, as a financial partner in the event alongside the ARDC and the Bathurst council, the network played a crucial role in helping to develop the annual October classic into the extravaganza we know today simply as The Great Race. Of course, along with having a direct stake in the success of the event, Seven invested heavily in the cutting-edge technology it brought to the television coverage. It was in the ’79 James Hardie 1000 that Seven pioneered in-car live cameras with its ‘Racecam’ (although as reader David Roberts enlightened us in Muscle Mail in AMC #113, Seven’s claim is…

These days it’s burnout utes and stadium trucks. Back in the day it was stunts like this old Pontiac Chieftain, which the Oran Park crowd is about to see fly like no Pontiac ever has flown before. This was part of the sideshow entertainment at the May 1972 Angus & Coote Diamond Trophy meeting (where in the Sports Sedan races Peter Brock gave the Torana GTR XU-1 V8 prototype its last race). It looks as though the ’55 model Chieftain’s landing (note the sponsorship from Grace Brothers, Castrol and Dunlop) was cushioned by a bed of straw or grass (which presumably had been curated especially), but even so we’re not sure we’d like to have been aboard the 1.7-tonne V8 Pontiac at the point of impact when it did return…

He might have been denied a start in the 2020 Bathurst 1000 on the grounds that his racing resume wasn’t yet up to standard, but two years on no one can dispute the racing bone fides of Nathan Herne. He’s just 20, but at the Bathurst International meeting in November Herne secured a second consecutive National Trans Am Series win. He did it in style, too, topping all practice and qualifying sessions and going on to win the opening two races as well as the Turtle Wax Trans Am 100, the final event of the Trans Am season. With Herne having gone to Bathurst fresh from victory in one of the S5000 races on the Gold Coast, the youngster is showing that he has the ability to win in pretty…

I the previous issue we plotted the meandering course that had to be negotiated in order to arrive at the 1993 touring car rules. It was an arduous journey of some 18 months, and it ended up more or less where it began. In simple terms, what CAMS decided upon was a package based very much on the existing homologated VN Commodore – or VN Commodore SS Group A SV, to give it its correct title. The main difference – and it is a big one – was the move to the Chev 5.0-litre V8 (in line with Ford’s request to be able to use stronger, non-production Ford Motorsport NASCAR engine components for its 5.0-litre V8 race engine). In essence, the new category was piggybacking off the engine performance parity…

Utes weren’t always sporty, high-performance vehicles. I say this from personal experience, from back in the early ‘80s in my then pride-and-joy, a 1974 model XB Falcon ute, with 4.1-litre six and three-on-the-tree manual. It was an ex-electrician’s work ute, and it’d had a hard life. But it did have a reconditioned engine, so the thing was pretty strong in a straight line. Less so in the corners, however: with the lack of weight over the leaf-sprung rear axle, traction was an ever-present issue. To be fair, it was probably as much to do with the driver being still in his teens as it was the result of poor vehicle dynamics, but that car probably spent as much time going sideways as it did in a straight line. The saving’s…

Holden EH Utility - Gundagai Grey The classic EH ute, this time in ‘Gundagai Grey’. I dunno, every time I go through Gundagai it’s mostly brown – but Holden were keen to have Australian names for as much as possible. The 1:18 scale model features a tonneau cover and hoop that are removable, revealing the detailed tray floor and side walls. The soft touch bench seats feature the ‘Standard’ interior engraving, the ‘Standard’ engraving also present on the door liner. Detailed 149ci engine and surrounding bay looks authentic. The smooth opening of the bonnet is aided by the metal hinges. The chassis bears an individually numbered etched metal plate which is the edition number of your model. All jokes aside, I reckon the EH Holden was one of the best…