Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 151 i Australian Muscle Car

Here’s a neat bit of merchandising from the organisers of the recent Hardtop Anniversary event in Tasmania (see our feature on page 44): commemorative ‘challenge coins’ in celebration of the 100th year of Ford Australia. The coin was designed to pay homage to Ford’s own logo design (below) from its 50th year celebrations in 1975 (which was right in the middle of the Hardtop’s model life) while also incorporating the 100th anniversary of Ford Australia. There was a separate, special coin for Landau owners, in honour of the luxury coupe’s flagship status in the Hardtop lineage. Event organisers issued a tongue-in-cheek note accompanying the coins to explain the exclusivity of the Landau coin: Being a Landau owner, you obviously expect a bit more… Hence the addition of these Landau specific…

The All Ford Day Queensland is on this year at Willowbank Raceway, near Ipswich on July 20 – that’s the week before the NSW All Ford Day. The event will feature a Show and Shine, trade stands, swap meet, ‘race ya mate’, free kids rides and food stalls. To enter, check the Willowbank Raceway website for when booking goes live – there’s a non-refundable online booking fee, but entering on the day will be more expensive. For more details check the All Ford Day Southeast Qld website.…

Holden is – or was – universally known as ‘Australia’s Own Car’. In truth, it’s a spurious claim. For one thing, General Motors-Holden was no more an Australian company, nor any less an American subsidiary, than Ford Australia. It’s true that the 48-215 Holden was the first car to be wholly manufactured in this country. However, in late 1948 when the Holden was unveiled, Ford had been assembling vehicles here for some 23 years. What’s more, had the political machinations of the mid-1940s played out differently, when prime minister Ben Chifley proudly launched the new ‘Australian car’ in November, 1948, it could have been a Ford he was celebrating, and not the new GM Holden. In 1945, when the federal government was laying the plans for Australia’s post-war manufacturing sector,…

In the long history of Holden high performance, the Commodore and Torana nameplates share a unique bond. From the start of the 1970s until the very end of GM-H itself, some 50 years on, these were the model names the General took into battle in racing. In the beginning it was the Toranas that held centre stage as Holden’s hero models (leaving aside the occasional Monaro cameo appearance); then in the 1980s came the Commodores. The quest for Bathurst success delivered a succession of classic home-grown Holden muscle – from the six-cylinder Torana XU-1 through to the A9X, and then the 1980s Brock/ HDT Commodores until the final Group A homologated VN SS in 1990. A glorious half-century of high performance Torana/Commodore muscle indeed (and, of course, that wasn’t the…

Noel Delforce was born into the motor industry. Cars were the family business. The Delforce family ran a service station/car dealership business in Wyong on the NSW Central Coast. They sold American brands Dodge Fargo, Plymouth and de Soto, as well as Morris (which was later absorbed into the British Motor Corporation, or BMC). Delforce would go to learn his trade as an apprentice at BMC/Leyland – and was still there when the company was shut down at the end of 1974. His father died when Noel was six months old. His mother kept the two businesses running while raising Noel and his elder brother, Russell, as a single parent. “One of my jobs when I was about eight or nine was to drive brand new Morris Minor 1000s from…

Henry Ford is said to have uttered the words, ‘History is bunk’ more than a century ago. Of course, back then the Ford Motor Company had little in the way of history. Fast forward to today, and history is a primary marketing tool for all long-standing manufacturers (except Jaguar, based on the evidence of a recent bizarre rebranding exercise). Australian MUSCLE CAR magazine does Australian muscle car and touring car racing history very well – it has been doing so for 23 years, and now 150 issues. As a motoring writer, Australian motoring history is something that I am passionate about, and in order to do my job I need access to an extensive motoring library. As for large scale motoring libraries that are accessible to the public, there are…

Cortina GT It’s maybe not what you’d call a muscle car but the 1963 Cortina GT is a highly significant model in the history of Aussie Ford muscle. It was the first Bathurst homologation special, so in that sense it was the forerunner to the Falcon XR GT. The Cortina’s Bathurst win that year was just one component of a highly successful exercise, because not only was Ford able to get away with (via the cunning genius of Harry Firth) fielding what was really a Bathurst hotrod, the finger of suspicion ended up being pointed in the direction of the opposition, namely Holden, with its new EH S4 ‘sports car’ (resulting in considerable embarrassment and distress behind closed doors at Fishermans Bend). As the race showed, the Cortina GT was…

Grand Prix collecting A recent trip to the Australian Scalextric Racing & Collecting Club's Hornsby swap meet brought to my attention the collectability of Formula 1 cars. A chat with some of the club members highlighted that some of the most collectable slot cars are the older open-wheeler cars they remember from their childhood. In fact, Scalextric and other manufacturers have been tapping into the nostalgia boom and reinventing the slot car market once again. Recent product releases have been targeting those childhood memories, such as TV shows we watched as children and Scalextric cars we played with. It is a courageous move as some of these new models do not have the option of multiple historic liveries. Nevertheless, historic F1 cars are making a comeback, so I thought I…

Here we go again with the GT-40s. I got two Ford GT-40 kits a couple of years ago from my mate, Glen, who said he ‘was never going to get to them’. One was branded IMC and the other Testors, both brands now part of Revell. If you didn’t see issue #146, there’s more detail there. Suffice it to say that the kit, a very old one, gave me some grief – parts didn’t fit, the instructions were unclear at times and the parts weren’t numbered in all cases. Well, this is basically the same kit, but with slightly different body parts representing a later model. I built this one as a 1968 John Wyer/ Gulf car, the Paul Hawkins/David Hobbs car that retired after 107 laps with engine trouble.…

In our Leyland brother feature on page 82, Noel Delforce tells the story of an encounter he had with Allan Moffat in a Sports Sedan race in 1980. The Racing Car News report of that Oran Park meeting noted that it was ‘just like old times with Moffat, Seldon and Delforce all stranded on the infield – I wonder if they swapped tales about the past?’ The past to which RCN was referring were the previous clashes Moffat had had in the Boss Mustang with both NSW Sports Sedan drivers, including the infamous altercation with David Seldon’s Datsun at BP Bend in a Toby Lee Series Sports Sedan race in 1974. When interviewed by track commentators afterwards, Moffat launched an attack on Seldon and the other local drivers, describing them…

amceditorial@chevron.com.au | Locked Bag 5555, St Leonards NSW 1590 Beecheymania I enjoyed the features on Beechey in the last two magazines. Epic! I was at Sandown the day Beechey and Geoghegan pitted their Pacers on the first lap, which initially caused some dismay among those of us rooting for the underdog. Any number of things added to Beechey’s mystique, and this race was no exception. RCN reported that the Toranas and the Pacers were going twice as deep into the corner at the end of the main straight than the heavier Falcons – if the flaring brake lights told us anything. The thing was that Beechey’s car occasionally didn’t show any at all! A great follow-up to these articles would be another on Beechey’s Chevy Impala. Its performance against the…

This year’s Hardtop Anniversary was always going to be more than just a gathering – it was a celebration of more than 50 years of hardtop Falcons, and 100 years of Ford Australia. Previous gatherings averaged around 100 entrants, but this year’s event attracted a total of 186 hardtops from all corners of the country – there was even an entrant from Texas! On the Friday, early arrivals were treated to exclusive discounts at event sponsor Autobarn Devonport, along with a tour of a private car collection that boasted more than 200 vehicles – from Ferrari F40s to Edsel Fords and GT40s. When the Spirit of Tasmania finally arrived, mainland entrants cruised Tasmania’s famed Targa roads through the breathtaking highlands to the picturesque Great Lake Hotel for lunch, before proceeding…

#CarparkMuscle 2025 Van Nationals In 1976, a group of people from across Australia came together at Mildura to celebrate a passion and a lifestyle: vanning. Camping in the backs of often highly-customised Sandmans, Drifters, Sundowners and Bedfords, late nights were spent catching up with mates, and the days cruising the region and polishing paint and chrome to show of these unique vehicles to fellow vanners and the public. Fifty years later, over the Easter weekend, 2025, and over 250 people and nearly 200 vans made the journey back to Mildura where the first Australian Van Nationals was held. Entrants came from all States and Territories of Australia; the bloke who travelled the longest in a van was from Darwin – and he didn’t even take the direct route! He did…