Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 149 i Australian Muscle Car

It’s late January as we prepare this issue of AMC to go to the printers, so that means it’s just about time for the annual round of Supercars teams pre-season livery reveals. Now it could just be that I’m getting a bit old and jaded. But it doesn’t feel right to me that a new paint job is newsworthy enough to make a big PR splash about. Or even newsworthy at all. The thing is, though, that new paintjobs as interesting pre-season talking points is where you end up once you head down the ‘cookie cutter’ racing path, where the cars are, for all intents and purposes, identical. Unless it’s a new model being raced for the first time, or there is the controversy of an unresolved performance parity dispute,…

March, 2025, is muscle car month, with three big events set to take place in three separate states during March – and all on the same weekend! In NSW the Mustang Owners Club will host the Mustang Nationals; down in Tassie it’s the Ford Coupe Club of Australia’s Hardtop Anniversary tour (kicking off in Geelong); while over in South Australia it’s the Chrysler Car Club of SA’s Adelaide Chrysler Festival. Mustang Nationals For Ponycar aficionados over the March 21-23 weekend, all roads lead to Mount Panorama, Bathurst, which is the venue for this year’s Mustang National. The Mustang Owners Club Australia is planning a big weekend, with check in and meet and greet at the National Motor Racing Museum on the Friday, Concours Judging at Clancy Ford on Saturday plus…

Back in AMC #118 our cover story ‘Six Pack Attack!’ depicted the racing life of the hot Hemi Pacer. Emblazoned on the cover was a VG Valiant Pacer in vibrant ‘Little Hood Riding Red’ and the back page column ‘Whaddayaknow’ pondered the survival rate of the factory race team VG Valiant Pacers. The response was, well, silence. However, it seems that Mopar fans may have missed the memo as the Norm Beechey E34 VG Valiant Pacer is alive and well. Whilst its racing history was mediocre at best, the story of its survival is anything but. The 1970 season was a great one for ‘Stormin’ Norm Beechey. He drove his iconic bright-yellow ‘Trans-Aus’ Holden Monaro GTS 350 to a memorable Australian Touring Car Championship victory – the first Holden to…

Motorsport in most of its forms is a contest of speed. In circuit racing, the measure of a car’s ultimate speed is the lap time. But lap time is a somewhat esoteric way of measuring speed, because there is more than one circuit, each circuit is different, and some suit some cars better than others. For example, comparing Bob Morris’ 1979 touring car lap record at Amaroo Park in his Ron Hodgson Torana A9X of 53.0s, which equates to an average speed of 132km/h, with the fastest Symmons Plains lap for Allan Moffat’s XC Falcon from around the same era, a 60.06s (144km/h average speed), tells you nothing about the relative pace of the two cars. But run them side by side down the drag strip, and you’ve got yourself…

#CarparkMuscle All American Day Scenes from the All American Day at the Macarthur Square shopping centre at Campbelltown in Sydney’s south west on January 19. The event was put on by the Mustang Owners Club of NSW but was not limited to Mustangs, or even simply Fords – as the pics show, any American car or light commercial vehicle was welcome. It was a charity event, with money raised going to the Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation. For more pics from the All American Day, check the AMC website: www.musclecarmag.com.au If you’ve got a car club or event that you’d like featured in AMC magazine, contact our Club Directory Manager Mat Clancy – mclancy@chevron.com.au…

Motor racing circuit owners (or leaseholders, in the case of the Australian Racing Drivers’ Club at Sydney Motorsport Park) increasingly are becoming little more than custodians of their venues. Instead of putting on events themselves, these days it seems it’s easier (and no doubt less risky financially), to simply open the gates and hand the place over to whichever third party (such as Supercars Australia, ARG, a motorcycle event promoter etc) is paying them the venue-hire fee for the day or weekend. But there was a time when circuit owners were also promoters. Back in the ‘70s the likes of Allan Horsley at Oran Park, and Ivan Stibbard at Amaroo Park, were more than just track administrators. They put the race meetings on, and they relied on drawing a crowd…

amceditorial@chevron.com.au | Locked Bag 5555, St Leonards NSW 1590 B&D Autos Torana L34 So I’m out to pick up the latest issue of MUSCLE CAR magazine and to my surprise I see the B&D Autos L34 Torana the front cover. To fill in the rest of the story of what happened to the car when Forbes sold it after the conclusion of the 1977 Bathurst race, the car was purchased by my late father, Mario. From my memories of him talking about, it I believe he bought it from a car yard on Parramatta Road in Sydney. He owned it from late ‘77 to mid ‘79. He always owned some pretty cool muscle cars, the first being a LJ GTR XU-1, then a couple of Ford coupes, firstly a John…

Allan Grice’s motor racing career had come full circle by the start of 1982. Over the course of a decade, Grice had gone from struggling for an opportunity to being one of Australian motorsport’s most recognised stars. And now he was back where he’d begun with no drive and, amid a legal fight against BMW, no money to fund a fresh start. While his big breaks in the 1970s had been courtesy of a car dealer (Cessnock Motors) and then a tobacco giant (W.D. & H.O. Wills), Grice’s career restart came via a somewhat unlikely source – a straight-shooting, English-born truckie by the name of Alan Browne. The short and stocky Browne’s success with his Re-Car business, which refurbished trucks and cars – including some racing machinery – from large…

Surfers Paradise in July, 1972, at the penultimate round of that year’s Australian Touring Car Championship, as John Harvey in the Bob Jane HQ Monaro GTS 350 leads Bob Jane himself, at the wheel of his famous ZL1 Camaro. Jane won the race and thereby clinched the title; Harvey was second (young local rising star Dick Johnson was a distant third in his Torana XU-1) in what was the HQ Monaro’s debut race. Within six months the Improved Production rules for which the car was built would be scrapped, leaving Jane with no option other than to adapt the brand-new Monaro for Sports Sedan racing.…

“Pure American performance.” That’s how Gary Patterson, President of Shelby American, describes the S650 Shelby Super Snake. It’s three words that succinctly sum up the new model, which is also billed as the most technically sophisticated Super Snake ever. The new Super Snake’s Whipple supercharger-fed 5.0-litre Coyote V8 delivers an astounding 830 horsepower (620kW), so there’s no question as to the performance. The rest of the upgrade package – the suspension and brakes changes, the 20-inch forged magnesium wheels, which deliver an unsprung weight reduction of some 80kg, and the myriad of other enhancements – is about facilitating all of that grunt, and in a way that makes the Super Snake feel equally at home on road or race track. Externally, it’s a stunning looking car and visually quite a…

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the arrival of the Ford Mustang in Australian motorsport. The first-generation 289 cubic-inch V8 Mustang was the car to have when Improved Production/Group C rules were introduced in 1965 – Norm Beechey won with his new Ponycar that year (after failing the previous year with the Holden S4); after that Pete Geoghegan won the next four on the trot (with a first-series model and later with the ’67 facelifted version). That made it a record five ATCC wins for Big Pete – a feat that wasn’t matched for another 20 years, by Dick Johnson (for all of Holden’s success in Australian touring car racing, the first two drivers to claim five titles won all of them in Fords). But Dick wasn’t able to…

Dick Johnson was at the peak of his powers in 1990, but all was not well with the now legendary Queenslander. He had recently scored a record-breaking fifth Australian Touring Car Championship, won his second Bathurst 1000, was making his mark on the world stage and was the face of Ford in Australia. Not to mention starring in TV commercials for Shell with Barry Sheene, making him one of the most recognised celebrities in the country. So what could possibly be wrong? His body was letting him down. A long-time problem with his sinuses had worsened, exacerbated by constantly flying across the world to race in the United States. Despite the first of nine operations – the last of which finally succeeded, the day after he retired! – the clogged…

I’ve never really covered speedway cars here. Which is odd, because I enjoy the skids, even though I hardly ever get there these days (ED: being as you’re Sydney-based, Bruce, I recommend a night out at the new speedway at Eastern Creek – the venue had a chequered beginning but it’s turning on some great racing now). Sprintcars, of course, are the big attraction at the speedway. Loud, fast, always looking like they’re on the edge of disaster… And that’s parked in the pits. Seriously, they put on a great show and to see someone like Donny Schatz when he’s dialled in is a real treat. So I was intrigued when I saw these new models from Authentic Collectables. Based on cars raced in the 2022/2023 Australian Sprintcar season, their…