Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 140 i Australian Muscle Car

In this issue we’re celebrating the 60th anniversary of the EH Holden. Not a muscle car, you might say, but it is a pivotal model in the history of home-grown Aussie high performance. It might also just be the most significant car in General Motors-Holden’s 73-year history. The EH was a milestone model in so many ways. For one, it was the first Holden with real performance credentials, courtesy of its all-new 179cid ‘Red’ six-cylinder engine. The Red six made the old ‘Grey’ engine that had powered all previous model Holdens look like something out of the Stone Age. And the EH was also the basis for the first Holden Bathurst homologation special. Holden’s first Bathurst win might have come in 1968 with the HK Monaro GTS 327, but Holden’s…

The nature of our magazine guarantees that research is one of the skillsets needed to churn out the type of articles that you, the reader, wants to see. The internet and dare I say Wikipedia (shhh, don’t tell anyone…) has made that easier, but to achieve the sort of detail that we strive for, we have to go to the source. That could be the person(s) who were there – though sadly the passage of time is making this harder – or more usually, specialist magazines and newspapers of the day. Here at AMC, we have a pretty good Australian automotive and motorsport archive, but when it comes to overseas it can be hit and miss. Take the recent Graeme Lawrence Muscle Man profile. The Australian and to a lesser…

Mick Mason has owned this XW Fairmont GS 302 since 1972. When he bought the car (a bit over 51 years ago!), he chose it not so much because it was a nice example of a Windsor 302 V8-powered ‘69 model Fairmont, but simply because he needed something big enough and with enough grunt to tow a V8 ski boat. “I had a couple of mates with GT Falcons,” Mick says. “So we went out one night looking at cars in caryards, and this one was parked right down the back of the lot. I thought it was an orange one.” He went back to the caryard – John Newell Motors, on the Great Western Highway at Westmead in Sydney’s west – the next morning to have a second look.…

Holden HX Monaro in Cotillion white (Limited edition of 1000) I really like the simplicity of this paint. Gloss white with matt black just looks classic and understated. Classic Carlectables’ new HX Monaro model, in 1:18 scale features a highly-detailed front end with colour-keyed bumpers with rubbing strips and over-riders. The car’s interior has great detail on the seats, belts and the fully-optioned dashboard. Open the bonnet for a detailed engine and surrounding bay that looks just as good as the original, featuring the ‘5.0 litre’ graphics on the air cleaner. In the boot there’s a spare wheel with retaining wing nut, jack and tyre lever. Under the car is just as good, with the chassis having full detail and working suspension. A press button on the chassis is also…

Muscle Maniac Ever noticed in old photos from the Great Race that some cars are carrying a swag of small sponsor logo stickers that maybe hadn’t been displayed at race meetings earlier in that year? It’s not necessarily because the entrant had been able to attract new sponsors via the lure of Bathurst – although of course for many once-a-year Bathurst warriors back in the day, the ability to get backing for Bathurst (and Bathurst alone) was crucial to their entire racing season. Most of those additional sponsor stickers at Bathurst weren’t actual sponsorships, however, and instead had been put there in the hope of taking advantage of the ‘conditional’ prizes on offer. And it was worth chasing, because that conditional cash represented a fair proportion of the overall prize…

There were just two V8s in the first Great Race at Bathurst (a pair of Studebaker Larks), 60 years ago. There was talk pre-race of Ford running a team of works-entered V8 Falcons, and while it sounds far-fetched (for a start, there was no V8 in the Falcon range in 1963), in reality the idea wasn’t really any less plausible than Harry Firth’s Cortina GT, which was a limited-edition Bathurst hotrod model, just 100 built. But there was a third V8 in the entry list for the 1963 Armstrong 500. According to Australian Autosportsman magazine, the sole Chrysler Royal entry attracted heaps of pre-event publicity and was even ‘being proclaimed a winner before the flagged dropped’. Alas, the Chrysler did not even get to face the starter’s flag – apparently…

Muscle Mail amceditorial@chevron.com.au | Locked Bag 5555, St Leonards NSW 1590 Mustang-Chev? I really can’t see the point in having different cars in TA2 Trans-Am.racing. Apparently all cars run the same motor, whether they are Mustang, Dodge or Camaro. It’s a bit misleading, if people didn’t know they all have the same power plant. It’s not really a Ford Mustang nor a Dodge, they are powered by Chevrolet motors. Congrats on a great magazine; been collected since it came out. Lots of great stories, interviews, facts both here and overseas. Loved the story on Fred Gibson and his ute. Wonder what ever happened to John Goss’ XR panel van he used to own and use to tow his race with. Peter MorganEmail ED: We assume the Falcon van is this…

Norm Beechey: GMH does not like competition but it is stuck with it anyway as so many Holdens are sold that they have become the cars mechanics and engineers know most about and for which, because of the number of potential buyers, it is cheaper to manufacture hot-up bits and pieces. That’s what Beechey had to say in his column in Australian Motor Sports magazine in September, 1963. In just a few succinct words, Stormin’ Norman had managed to sum up the entire history of hot Holdens on the road and in competition. But now a whole new chapter was about to start, with a new bigger, better and far more powerful Holden engine. Holden’s furtive flirtation with racing and rallying the EH turned out to be a false dawn…

For a ‘child’ of the technological age, Todd Hazelwood believes in going back to basics when it comes to having fun. He loves nothing better than tinkering with cars when he has time away from the track. But it’s what is in the garage that will surprise: one he describes as ‘a bit of a cruiser’ while the other is a project he started when he was 12. The ‘cruiser’ was bought during the Covid lockdown. He wanted a vehicle that was easy to get on the road and have a bit of fun with – hence a 1977 Ford Falcon 500 XC wagon. “It’s all original. The original 4.1-litre, six-cylinder engine and what they call the ‘poverty pack’,” he laughs. “There are absolutely no optional extras: no power windows,…

It’s been a bruising debut season for Gen3. It started with reigning champ Shane van Gisbergen tipping a bucket on Supercars at the opening round at Newcastle when he was asked how much he liked the new cars (van Gisbergen was promptly muzzled by the Supercars heirarchy, which clearly doesn’t believe in the old adage that any publicity is good publicity). Then came the performance parity disputes, and threats from Ford that it would quit the series if its parity concerns weren’t addressed to its satisfaction. There were also problems with the new cars – such as Mustangs catching fire, steering racks failing and, at the Sandown 500, wheels falling off. But the racing had been good – the new cars with their reduced downforce race much better than the…

One of the most enduring images from the first Bathurst 1000 half a century ago was something that wasn’t even in the race. It was the spectacle of a Fleetways car carrier loaded up with six LJ Torana road cars decked out in signwriting identical to the Ron Hodgson Motors race version driven in the race by Bob Morris and John Leffler. It was an idea way ahead of its time – race team promo replica cars back then were almost unheard of. But it was just the kind of publicity stunt for which Ron Hodgson became famous (Sydney residents in the ‘70s will remember his quirky ‘Update’ TV ads) – and it worked a treat. On the Friday the week before the ’73 race, Hodgson hosted a pre-Bathurst ‘sponsors…

The 1960s was a pivotal decade for the Australian car manufacturing industry. For one, it saw the birth of the Australian ‘muscle car’, with Ford’s release of the XR Falcon GT in 1967. But it was a time of huge change generally. Holden entered the decade with a market dominance of almost 50 percent – and that was with its dowdy, ‘50s-era styled FB model with its antiquated 2.2-litre ‘Grey’ six. And there was just the one model in the entire Holden range, available as a sedan, wagon, ute or panel van. By the end of the decade, Holden’s lineup had expanded enormously: two six-cylinder engines, a local-made V8 and an imported Chev, a long wheelbase luxury version of the sedan, a pillarless coupe in the Monaro, and the new…

Into the Red ‘As different from the FJ as eight cylinders are from six’. That’s what Wheels magazine had to say when the Red six engine was unveiled in the new EH model in 1963. It wasn’t an overstatement. Here at last – as the Holden marque celebrated its 15th birthday – was a Holden with genuine performance. It wasn’t just that the ‘Red’ straight-six 179 engine was of a larger cubic capacity (by 30 percent!) than the old Grey six. The new Red six was bigger, certainly, but it also offered the choice of 149 cid (2.4-litre) and 179 (2.9-litre) configurations and, with a seven-main-bearing block, it had a much stronger bottom end. With a seven-mains block, the red six had none of the limitations (such the risk of…

For some, the hunt through boxes of old postage stamps, carefully handling the little rectangles of perforated paper, deciphering water marks and looking for rare cancellations with a magnifying glass in hand, is the stuff of dreams as the years tick by and retirement becomes a yawning future that needs to be filled. For others, however, retirement fun is to be found at speed, ignoring a slowly failing body and coaxing a race car to its maximum in open competition with a bunch of younger would-have-beens and showing them how it’s done. That’s how 87 year-old George Wegener fills his days in the year 2023. Wegener is a long-term drag racer, who had a background in go-karting starting as far back as 1957, when he was 21, with trophies –…

It seems we are still recovering from the effects of Covid with the late release of slot cars for the calendar year. Last year’s products have lagged behind their planned release dates and, as a result, it has taken most of the year for new models to be agreed upon and signed off within the Hornby family of Scalextric and its distributors. Now we can finally examine the announcement of the Scalextric release of Australian cars for 2023. The big news is that we now have a trio of VL Commodores in the works, with two more set to accompany the previously announced Rothmans Moffat/Harvey VL from Monza 1987. There will be the HRT Perkins/Hulme VL from Bathurst 1988 as well as the Group A homologation silver road car. The…