Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 85 i Australian Muscle Car

By the time you receive this issue the first lucky buggers will have taken delivery of their Ford Australia-delivered 2016 Mustangs. What a Christmas treat. Good luck to them. This issue we present plenty of summer holiday reading on the topic of ’Stangs with an Aussie flavour. One feature revisits the 1965-66 ‘Homebush Mustangs’, the first generation cars converted to right-hookers at Ford Australia’s Sydney plant. A couple of days before this issue went to press, I found myself driving along Parramatta Road in AMC’s hometown and passing the very building where these cars were converted to RHD 50 years ago. The former Ford building’s impressive 90-year-old facade still stands today, tastefully preserved after the gutting and renovation of the rest of the facility in recent years. Appropriately, the site…

The replacement plan for the Holden Commodore is going to run to more than just a re-badged Opel Insignia out of Germany. Details have emerged from the USA that link the all-new Buick LaCrosse to the Commodore plan, thanks to the platform-sharing program across General Motors. The LaCrosse was unveiled at the Los Angeles motor show in November and, even though Holden’s design group at Fishermans Bend was not involved in the project, it shows the sort of masculine design work that should go down well in Holden showrooms here. GM executives have refused to confirm the Commodore connection but did admit that the Buick shares key components with the car that will take over from the homegrown Holden in 2018. The car’s basic architecture will also roll under an…

The most famous of all Homebush Mustangs was the car which appeared in the 1967 Crawford spy series Hunter. This was a 1966 Australian-delivered RHD car with the distinctive JOH-999 numberplates. Typical of the Mustang’s starring role was its appearance in one episode called ‘The Benedict File’, in which Hunter, played by the late Tony Ward, had to jump from his car (which someone else was driving at the time) into a Kombi van which was rolling downhill without a driver. Ward was filmed clinging to the exteriors of both vehicles while a professional stuntman made the leap across. The result was so unconvincing that he insisted on doing his own stunt work from then on, including driving the Mustang at speed. “We didn’t have any driving accidents and we…

Shot from a cannon: car #109 I ’s a long . In ’s a bloody long , but I want to share a few of the items on that list with you. I think it will give you a feel for the kind of work we do at Gibson Motorsport these days, and it will certainly open your eyes to the variety of automotive machinery that comes through the workshop. It will also raise a very interesting question, one I plan to return to in my next column. The question is: when is a car a genuine car? When is it a restoration? When is it a replica? Are there any other R-words we should add to that set of options? The authenticity of historic racing cars is paramount if…

Aussie Mustang enthusiasts have always needed to be patient souls. Witness the long wait – and waiting lists – for the sixth-generation Mustang which Ford Australia is only now delivering to local customers, a full two years after it was unveiled. Patience was also a virtue with the fourth-generation model. By the time it arrived in 2001, it had been 35 years since Aussies could walk into a Ford showroom and buy a brand new ’Stang. Diehards may disagree, but we hadn’t really missed much, having been treated to the original and best Blue Oval pony car in 1964 and ’65 and dodging the increasingly heavy and unsporting facelifted first-generation (1971-’73) and second-gen (1974-’78) Mustangs. By the time a replacement was born in the emissions-strangled late 1970s, a four-cylinder variant…

Motor racing categories come and go faster than reality television’s wannabe celebrities. No branch of the sport has experienced the shifting sands more so than sports car racing. Myriad rule changes, Formula 1 and touring car racing’s growth, and manufacturer whims have led to almost a century of boom and bust cycles. FIA GT3 is the exception. Introduced for 2006 as a ‘gentleman racer’ class at the bottom of sports car racing’s food chain, GT3 has enjoyed a steady rise over the last decade. So much so, it’s become a drawcard category in its own right and now headlines such internationally significant races as the Spa 24 Hours, Nurburgring 24 Hours and Australia’s own Bathurst 12 Hour. With over 1000 chassis produced to FIA GT3 spec globally over 10 seasons…

As everybody knows, I’m quite the history buff. Old cars, old races, funky memorabilia and great tales (some tall, some true!) - these are the things that keep this V8 Sleuth’s passion for motorsport pumping. Museums, car collections and memorabilia displays will always grab my attention, usually no matter the specific subject. The Australian motorsport and motoring industry is quite some way behind our counterparts in England, Europe and North America in capturing our racing and road-going history, however there are some great museums, collections and history that have been retained. That chapter is about to be added to by the opening of the new Warrnambool Motor Museum in Victoria. Businessman Dean Montgomery, originally from Geelong and now based in Hong Kong, has been building quite the car collection in…

Love them or loathe them, temporary motor racing circuits have revolutionised modern motorsport, bringing events to the people. While racing on public roads dates back to the sports’ earliest days, this article deals with the modern ‘concrete-canyon’ variant. This era began in 1985 with Wellington’s wonderful dockside, shipping container-dodging Group A enduro and Adelaide’s stellar F1 efforts. But we’re not concerned here with the tracks that actually came to life. Instead, over the following pages, we review the many projects that failed to get up. Over the last three decades, specialist motorsport magazines and even the nation’s metropolitan newspapers have outlined umpteen proposals for temporary street circuits. Some were pure wishful thinking, while others were investigated and rejected. One or two have seemingly been done deals, only to fall over…

AMC’s Star Cars-themed issue (#82) outlined the back story to the Dick Johnson Grand Prix Turbo XE Falcons. In doing so, we highlighted Dick’s dalliances with road-going turbo Falcons in the early 1980s as he considered his options ahead of the international Group A touring car rules being adopted locally. DJ was certainly on the front foot sussing out potential replacements for the soon-to-be outlawed Cleveland 351-powered Group C Falcons. At one stage he even fitted his own Saffron Yellow XE Falcon S with an EFI turbo engine in a short-lived project in conjunction with Ford’s Motorcraft division and the Australian HKS Turbo distributor. This was a car Modern Motor magazine tested for an article entitled “The Daisy Hill Express”, which raised hopes that enough such cars could be produced…

When the giant Tirranna tied up at Appleton Dock in Melbourne in the last days of November it was a momentous moment. The Tirranna is not a show-pony cruise ship like the five floating palaces that sailed into Sydney in the same week, but a working-class, 72,000-tonne, roll-on, roll-off car carrier that sails the high seas to service the world’s carmakers and their customers. This time she was not carrying Korean consumer cars or Thai-built price-fighter pickups, but the first shipment of born-again Ford Mustangs. As they were driven back onto dry land for the first time since leaving their home port of Baltimore in the USA, they opened a pipeline that will eventually satisfy the 4000 people waiting patiently – and some impatiently – in Australia for the first…

Do it. Just do it now. That’s the message if you’re remotely considering one of the very last Holden Commodore V8s. The updated and upgraded SS V is a ripper beastie that taps and satisfies all the demands of 50-something buyers, who like to hark back to the glory days of Bathurst, and want something special. The engine is enough, with 304 kiloWatts and 570 Newton-metres from the 6.2-litre LS3 snitched from the Chevrolet Corvette. It’s a thumping beastie at idle that howls all the way to the redline. But the best thing about the VFII package is the added equipment and refinement. The car crushes bumps, has a new-age heads-up display and is great for family motoring. Design work on the car was limited by the GM bankruptcy, which…

Uncle Vince’s HK GTS Here are some photos of my uncle’s beautiful HK GTS. This Monaro has never been unregistered and still drives today! I quizzed my Uncle Vince to get the facts and the photos are of my family and I in 1971-ish. Uncle Vince purchased this 1968 HK GTS Monaro brand new in 1968 from John A Gilbert in Camperdown, NSW for $3165! Options chosen were a radio and locking fuel cap. Apparently the total price was $3165.65 and my uncle is still dirty with Gilberts because the sales bloke in 1968 didn’t discount the 65c. The Monaro remained stock from 1968 until about 1976 when my uncle decided that it needed fat tyres, Aunger alloy wheels, flared guards and a dual exhaust, which was all the rage…

Mustangs had always held a special place in my heart. I’ve wanted one since I was a kid when a guy down the road had a Wimbledon White ’65 Mustang GT fastback. Even as a seven-year-old I was smitten with that car. It looked like it was doing 100mph when it was parked. Mustang was THE car of the time. They were everywhere you looked from the racing ’Stangs of Pete Geoghegan and Norm Beechey or the Moffat TransAm to TV cars like Efrem Zimbalist’s 1965 Coupe in the US show FBI, Tony Ward’s similar car in the Aussie spy drama Hunter or, of course, the late great Steve McQueen’s ’67 Fastback in the movie Bullitt. And the rally Mustang in the classic French film, A Man and a Woman,…

The Mundi Mundi Lookout was included in Australian Traveller magazine’s ‘100 Best Views in Australia’ issue in 2012. “From here you can see more than 150km over a whole lot of nothing. Even the curvature of the earth can be seen. It’s an iconic place as parts of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert were filmed here,” wrote photographer Hartmut Toepler of the Mundi Mundi plains for the 100 best views in Oz article. As captivating as the vista is, scenery is not the reason 30-odd competing cars and some 300 spectators, including many Broken Hill townfolk, have gathered at Mundi Mundi. A movie is part of the place’s magnetism, but it’s not a flick about a trio of drag queens’ outback adventures in an old silver coach. No, the drawcard…

Our story begins in Italy in the 1950s, in the small Sicilian village of Brolo. Young Basil Ricciardello has left school to start his motor mechanic apprenticeship. He is 11 years old… Going into the workforce at such a tender age was more a matter of necessity than choice for young Basil. Life in Europe after the Second World War was hard for a lot of families, but it was particularly hard for the Ricciardellos. Basil’s father, Antonio, had been seriously injured in a landslide while working on a road construction site, leaving Basil’s mother to feed and clothe eight children. The nearest school was 20km away. “My mother didn’t have the ability to send me to high school,” Basil explains to us, “so I decided to be a motor…

Launched officially in November 1970, the Ford XY GT has become the most sought after GT model. Of course, one of the most collectable of all Australian performance cars is the iconic GT-HO Phase III version released in 1971. The XY GT extended the tradition of the true Aussie muscle car by being the first and only model to feature an exposed centre bonnet air-scoop which was attached to the air cleaner of its thumping 300bhp 351 Cleveland V8, hence the ‘Shaker’ nickname. Following on from Allan Moffat’s Phase II 1970 Bathurst win, the Falcon GT-HO Phase III took pole position and crossed the line as outright winner of the 1971 Hardie-Ferodo 500, a full 24 minutes faster. The XY model was a more refined version of its XW GT…

2015 V8 Supertest HRT livery and BJR Hot on the heels (or should that be rear spoiler?) of Biante’s recent release of their HRT Bathurst VFs, comes this awesome collection of 1:18 scale diecast models to mark the Sydney Supertest and celebrate the end of the 2015 V8 Supercars Championship season. At the top of the page is the #2 Holden Racing Team VF of Garth Tander, in its distinctive black and orange Sydney Supertest livery. Also available is the #22 car of HRT team-mate James Courtney. These two HRT models are strictly limited to 1002 pieces each. Both Fabian Coulthard’s #14 Freightliner Racing entry and Jason Bright’s #8 BOC-sponsored car look fantastic and would make the perfect addition to any collection. These two BJR models are limited to just…

A hulking, $140,000 RAM truck points to the future of the Walkinshaw Automotive Group in Australia. The parent company of Holden Special Vehicles, which is now led by second-generation motor mogul Ryan Walkinshaw, is looking to diversify its engineering and sales base here in Australia to move away from the historical reliance on Holden. It has done the RAM deal in partnership with Neville Crichton’s Ateco group, using its engineering and production expertise to provide the full-sized right-hand drive trucks demanded by a small but wealthy number of local buyers. The RAM deal was originally conceived by former Fiat Chrysler Australia boss Clyde Campbell, although it had to be re-ignited by Crichton following his departure from the company. And it was Crichton who also tapped Walkinshaw for everything from the…

Graham Alexander’s collection Believe it or not, there are a lot of long-time racing drivers who have next-to-no interest in road cars. Some others wouldn’t know a differential from a damper. Victorian Graham Alexander is an exception... on both counts. One of the more versatile race drivers in the country, Alexander has won rounds of the Australian Rally Championship, taken a production car Bathurst 12 Hour win and beaten established tin-top stars in rallycross’s 1970s heyday in his time behind the wheel. “I beat both Brock and Moffat at Calder in the Torana,” he says. Still very skilled behind the wheel – and handy with a spanner – in more recent times Alexander has been known as a consistently quick entry in the Touring Car Masters series with his bellowing…

Moff’s flags half mast Reading on the 1977 Falcons in AMC #83 reminded me that the car in the Bathurst museum did not have any text under the Australian flags on the rear spoiler. I can remember looking at the cars in the paddock after that ’77 race. Under the three flags on the #1 Moffat/Ickx XC, it said: “Touring Car Champion 1973, Touring Car Champion 1976, Touring Car Champion 197-” was course a fact that Moffat hadn’t yet wrapped up that year’s title. But proving that racing drivers don’t always make the best historians, under the flag on the #2 Bond/Hamilton car it said: “Touring Car Champion 1974.” It should of course have said 1975. Sadly, I didn’t take a photograph of the flags and the text, but my…

Ford Mustangs have a very proud and successful heritage of racing success in Australia. This stretches from the earliest models steered so masterfully by the likes of Pete Geoghegan in 1960s, through Allan Moffat’s Coca-Cola Trans-Am in the early 1970s and onto Dick Johnson’s Greens-Tuf examples of the mid-1980s. Over the last 50 years a long list of well-pedigreed Stangs has been imported and pressed into action. Meantime, a number of Australian drivers have raced the legendary pony car on both sides of the Atlantic – Allan Moffat, Horst Kwech, Frank Gardner and Marcos Ambrose. Then there are the often quirky examples that graced our track and the countless Mustangs in historic and retro racing series, headlined by Mustang Sally in TCM. AMC salutes the top 25 most notable competition…

The famous vision of Mobil Holden Dealer Team mechanic Marty Watt kicking the rear window out of Peter Brock’s #05 VK Commodore at Bathurst in 1985 is one of those ‘it could only happen at the Mountain’ stories. With Brock’s front windscreen removed after it was smashed mid-race, officials ordered the Holden hero back into the pits to have the rear screen removed as per regulations, just as he was making an impression on the leaders. When he arrived in pitlane Watt swung into action, quite literally. Barreling in through the front passenger’s door, a well-placed boot sent the full screen popping out the rear in just seconds and he dismounted quickly before Brock could drop the clutch and take him on an unintended hot lap of Mount Panorama! The…

Anthony Boddy “We together a parts Sydney we were keen to see our hero Brock win another Bathurst,” writes Anthony of his Bathurst 1986 pilgrimage. “We were not sure about having Moffat co-driving for this one, though! Somehow, we all wangled Friday off work and headed up to Mount Panorama. We had a shiny new VK Executive and we were all dressed in our Mobil jackets and Mobil hats. By the time we arrived, Moff had already buried the #05 car in the wall at Skyline. This confirmed our suspicions about him... Friday night at McPhillamy Park in the borrowed tent was cold and we felt despondent. On Saturday morning we walked along the track to warm up in the sunshine. Someone had sprayed “RIP 05” next to the furrows…

If you’re reading Australian Muscle Car, there’s a pretty good chance you’re the guy who had – or has – a big ol’ box of Scalextric track stashed in the attic. The good news is that you can probably plug it in and play today; the world’s favourite 1:32-scale slot car system hasn’t fundamentally changed in these past 30 or 40 years. The even better news is that, beyond the actual track, everything else has. Since a Spanish-led revolution around 20 years ago, slot cars have leapt ahead in their display-model quality and finish, the technology that drives them and the breadth and accuracy of models represented. And it’s no coincidence that the automotive eras that are best represented tend to be the 1960s and ’70s – right in the…

Some muscle cars are bought by loving owners who pamper them like members of the family. Other muscle cars, though, aren’t so lucky. Some get stolen, smashed or thrashed. Some get parked and lost under a layer of dust in an old shed, others get left outside to brave the elements and slowly rust away. Sad, but true. We eyeball plenty of beautifully maintained and/ or fully restored muscle classics in AMC, but as serious car pervs we have to admit there’s few things more intriguing – or exciting – than spotting an old classic in a paddock, or a shed, or under a shady tree, that’s seen better days and in need of some TLC. Some are beyond saving, but they all have a story to tell. So, get…