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Story: Gavin Farmer Images: Ross Vasse
MOPAR Muscle
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Production may only have lasted four years, March 1969 to March 1973, but Chrysler Australia managed to squeeze no less than three models – VF, VG and VH – and countless options into its Pacer era. The street-legal factory road racer was the Aussie quick-six that could be bought for next to nix.
Valiant efforts
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o understand the Pacer’s appeal to young car enthusiasts upon its launch, it’s important to examine the Valiant models that preceded it and how they were perceived in the ever expanding and changing new car marketplace of the 1960s. Australian motorists had been fed a steady diet of Holdens and Fords for most of the postwar years with a serving of the likes of Austin, Morris and Hillman on the side. It was all rather plain fare, really – solid but conservative meatand-potatoes motoring. Chrysler really revolutionised the market in
January 1962 when it released the R series Valiant with its extrovert Virgil Exner-inspired styling and big 225-cubic inch RG slant-six engine. The R series was succeeded in March (10 weeks later!) by the S series that continued to be a sell-out. Today both models are highly sought after and very collectible. These two Chryslers undoubtedly changed the motoring landscape in Australia forever, a fact that has eluded most historians and critics. The next generation of Valiants were boring and plain by comparison from a styling point of view. Sure the mechanical components and the platform remained little changed, but the
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styling was so plain and simple that it was hard to believe it had come from the same studios. Coded AP5 it sold, from 1963, in healthy and ever-increasing numbers at a price premium over its Holden and Falcon rivals and garnered an ever-increasing share of the market for the company. Chrysler’s clever advertising by-line at the time was ‘Finest of the 3’. The AP5 gave way in 1965 to the AP6, which was followed by the VC (1966), all facelifts of the same body, which in turn gave way to the slightly larger VE in October 1967, and this was followed logically by the VF in March 1969. That’s an incredible seven models launched in as many years.
Even though Chrysler was setting new sales-and-profit records, by the time the VE was released the perception the company made nicebut-boring middle-class cars for non-enthusiast drivers was spreading. Chrysler’s managing director David Brown was a man with his finger on the pulse. He sanctioned the production of a sporting sedan – note, not a sports sedan – to try and ginger up interest in the whole Valiant product line.
As engineer John Ellis remembered, “We were given instructions to develop a sporty sedan. We did not have the resources to go head-to-head with Ford’s Falcon GT or Holden’s Monaro GTS, so we had to come up with something sporty but different.” Colleague Brian Ludlam said, “There were thoughts at one stage of perhaps using the 318ci V8 but that would have raised the costs beyond where we perceived the car to be placed in the
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market and so we modified the six. In hindsight, we should have pursued the V8 line of thinking.” Meantime, marketing director Bill Grieg believed there was a niche for a car that was bargain-priced but at the same time offered younger buyers considerable bang for their buck. Not only was there a spur from the nation’s media but Brown and his management team were acutely aware of the image boost touring car racing was giving their rivals.
MOPAR Muscle
VF Pacer 225: Statement maker
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n integral part of the VF line released in March 1969 was a new sporting sedan, the Pacer 225. It was greeted by a strongly positive reaction from the media who had wanted something like this from Chrysler for years. Mechanically the Pacer was not a lot different
from its plain-Jane siblings. Under the bonnet was the familiar RG 225-cubic inch (3.7-litre) overhead valve slant-six; it ran a compression ratio of 9.2:1 (up from 8.4:1) and utilised a two-barrel downdraught Carter carburettor and dual-outlet extractor exhaust system. Curiously, Chrysler never quoted any power and torque figures, although an educated guess put the power at around 175bhp (130kW). Power was transmitted to the rear wheels
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through an Australian-made Borg Warner threespeed manual gearbox with synchromesh on second and top gears. The ratios were 2.95:1 for 1st gear, 1.69:1 for 2nd and top was a direct 1.0:1. The standard differential ratio was 3.23:1 with either 3.5:1 or 2.92:1 available as options in conjunction with a Sure Grip limited-slip differential. The gearshift was on the floor and used an external linkage system that was similar to that on the original R series sedans. Stopping the Pacer were finned cast iron 9-inch diameter drums with Duo-Servo action, 154.5 square inches of lining area and a dual master cylinder feeding separate front and rear circuits. As an option buyers could select servoassisted 11-inch front disc brakes that added $55 to the car’s retail price. The wheels were 5.5 inches wide with double-sided safety rims – Chrysler made a big deal of this feature – with 6.95 x 14-inch four-ply red-line sports tyres. Naturally the suspension was by Chrysler’s famed alloy steel longitudinal torsion bars up front, with upper and lower wishbones and a sway bar, and live axle with four-leaf semi-elliptic springs out back. Ride height was lowered half an inch and the damper ratings were stiffer than the regular models. Exterior body decoration, to differentiate the Pacer from the rest of the pack, consisted simply of a blacked-out grille with three discreet red bars picked out across the centre, a contrasting
(usually white) body stripe running full-length just below waist level, ‘fake mag’ wheel covers and ‘Pacer 225’ decals on the boot lid and low down on either side of the front fender. Exclusive to the VF Pacer were three rather interesting colours – Wild Red, Wild Yellow and Wild Blue. Inside few changes were made. “We never had the budget to make the improvements we wanted,” John Ellis explained. The dash was unchanged from its lesser siblings with the instrument cluster of speedometer, fuel, amp and temperature gauges changed only insofar as the colours were reversed from white-on-black to black-on-white, and there was the addition of a tiny VDO strip tachometer on the dash top redlined at 5000rpm. The front seats were of the then popular ‘tombstone’ type buckets and of course there was the floor shifter. In an effort to keep the retail price down, the floor had rubber mats and Chrysler chose to make a heater a $43 option. There was quite a bit of razzmatazz where the Pacer 225 was concerned upon its release – it was unexpected, that’s for sure – but there was not the banner waving that would accompany such a model today. The release was typical of Chrysler’s efforts at the time – to the bone! The company had only one(!) Pacer available for the press release according to Ken Hartland, who was charged with the responsibility of keeping an eye on it and cleaning it before the next day’s adventures. Luckily the car never came to grief despite some hair-raising driving from some of the invited media. The media did Chrysler proud and gave the Pacer plenty of column inches. The May 1969 issue of Modern Motor highlighted Chrysler’s targeting of the youth market “with a
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The release was typical of Chrysler’s efforts at the time – to the bone! The company had only one Pacer available for the press release! Luckily the car never came to grief despite some hair-raising driving from some of the invited media.
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s r a C The
Story and images: Aaron Noonan
Muscle Survivor
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t s r u Bath that won
Triple treat The Falcon model’s final golden era at Bathurst came courtesy of Triple Eight Race Engineering’s winning triple of the late noughties. As the five winning Falcons from the GT era have gone MIA, we’re keeping a very close eye on the three victorious 2006, 2007 and 2008 chassis.
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o through the list of teams that have claimed victory in the Bathurst 500/1000 over history and you’ll see quite a lot of names pop up with regularity. The Holden Dealer Team claimed success across the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, while the Holden Racing Team continued on the winning tradition in the 1990s and 2000s with seven Bathurst wins to its name. In terms of Ford teams, the factory Ford Motor Company squad of the 1960s and early 1970s
did its fair share of winning and Dick Johnson Racing claimed three wins spaced across 13 years between 1981 and 1994. However only one team – Triple Eight Race Engineering under the Team Betta Electrical and TeamVodafone banners – can lay claim to taking Ford to victory three times in a row at Bathurst, in 2006, 2007 and 2008 with Craig Lowndes and Jamie Whincup behind the wheel. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was to be almost certainly the last ‘golden era’ for the
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Ford Falcon in Australia’s Great Race. Ford Performance Racing’s victory in the 2013 race was indeed a fantastic result after years of heartbreak and disaster. Mark Winterbottom and Steven Richards’ win was all the more notable given the backdrop of Ford announcing mid-year it would cease manufacturing in Australia in 2016. Yet it would appear unlikely – especially given the paltry one-year extension of their FPR deal and seemingly not much security beyond it – that the halcyon days will be ever be repeated before
Falcon model rides off into the sunset. Perhaps the irony of the Triple Eight ‘three-peat’ was that mid-2008, some months before Bathurst, Ford had announced it was cutting funding to the team as well as Dick Johnson’s operation – in other words, the team that had done all the winning for Ford for the last three-odd seasons and the fan-favourite was chopped. This decision will go down as one of the dumbest in Aussie motor racing history given Triple Eight swapped to Holden in 2010 (after running Falcons again in 2009 though without Ford badges) and, at time of writing, had claimed another two championships and two Bathurst wins,
2007
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while DJR claimed the 2010 title with James Courtney. In that time both FPR and Stone Brothers Racing (the other squad given Ford funding) claimed no titles between them and just one Bathurst win in 2013 with FPR. Under the leadership of Roland Dane, who had tired of the ‘buzz-box’ British Touring Car Championship and yearned for a new challenge in Australia, the Triple Eight team was born in 2003 out of what had been John Briggs’ Caterpillar- and Betta Electrical-backed team based in Brisbane. While developing into a contender for the V8 Supercars Championship was indeed the plan,
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Dane made no secret of his primary goal of claiming victory at Mount Panorama. It took a few goes to get everything right, but when it all came good in 2006 the team simply became unstoppable and went back-to-back-toback with three successive, though three very different, victories. As part of Australian Muscle Car’s commitment to preserving our tin-top racing heritage and making sure no cars go missing for years (or ever) as per previous eras, our V8 Sleuth has tracked and traced where each of these three cars has ended up and documented them for your reading pleasure and indeed the annals of history.
Andrew Hall
Clay Cross Greg Taylor
2006
s r e t s n Mo r u o h 4 2
Story: Luke West Images: Chevron Archive
24hr Muscle
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Ten years have passed since the 2003 Bathurst 24 Hour pulled down the curtain on the twice-round-the-clock Mountain marathon and the car which conquered it both times, the Monaro 427C. To mark the end of GRM’s time flying the Holden flag, AMC examines the team’s most successful cars. winning the 1969 Hardie Ferodo 500 with the GTS 350. And the twice-round-the-clock affair could hardly have gone better. The #427 Monaro – driven by Tander, Steven Richards, Cameron McConville and Nathan Pretty – completed 532 laps of the 6.2km circuit. The car, nicknamed ‘Nuclear Banana’, finished a whopping 23 laps ahead of the British-entered, American-built 5.7-litre Mosler MT900R despite a series of delays (see breakout).
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Ray Berghouse
“It was almost like the Bathurst campaigns of old,” Garth Tander reflects on the 2002 Bathurst 24 Hour, “where you build a car, take it up there largely untried and then engineer it on the run to some extent.” Tander spearheaded Holden’s assault on Australia’s short-lived 24-hour race in a Garry Rogers Motorsport-built and operated Monaro. It was the first time the General had taken a Monaro to the Mountain in 33 years, since
Clay Cross
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t’s difficult to pigeonhole the Monaro 427C racecar’s place in Aussie motor racing history. A decade has now passed since its biggest successes, yet putting the controversial machines – only three of which were built – into perspective is no easier. Perhaps the Monaro’s lead driver says it best in highlighting that the 427ci (7.0-litre) machine’s debut was not so much a clash of the titans, but a clash of eras.
AMC put both Monaros in a studio in the condition they finished the 2003 race. This is the stunning result, complete with bug-hit windscreens, oil-smeared bonnets and stone-chipped front splitters.
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BACK IN THE DAY Images: Ray Berghouse, Bill Forsyth, Autopics.com.au Paul Cross and Chevron Library
Left: Has there ever been a better-looking group of cars blast from a Bathurst grid? If so, we’d like to see it. Below left: Trust Rory and Rory Jnr to steal some of Colin Bond’s thunder. Below: Oh, how we miss the days when crews pushed their cars onto the Bathurst grid behind a Scot’s band, after bursting through a banner. Today’s build-ups are boringly clinical.
1978 Hardie-Ferodo 1000 Bathurst ’78 was a hard-fought battle of the two-doors, until Ford’s attack went up in smoke. Literally.
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he Hardie-Ferocious 1000 would have been a more appropriate name for the 1978 Bathurst classic. The opening six laps saw four different leaders – Colin Bond and Allan Moffat in the Moffat Ford Dealers XC Cobras, the Holden Dealer Team’s Peter Brock and fellow A9X Torana driver Bob Morris (Ron Hodgson Racing). Also in the mix were Allan Grice’s Craven Mild-backed Torana and Dick Johnson in a Falcon wearing the reverse livery to the Moffat machines. The Canadian-born Ford spearhead took up the front-running after the initial brawling settled down and set the pace until stopping. Brock asserted his authority thereafter and he and co-driver Jim Richards were largely untroubled to the end, finishing a lap ahead of the Grice/John Leffler combo. Third and first of the
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Falcons was the Murray Carter/Graeme Lawrence example. Johnson was fifth. Moffat’s challenge ended when he handed over to Belgian Jacky Ickx for the Cobra’s second stop on lap 66. Spilt fuel went up in flames when Ickx fired up the 5.8-litre engine, with crew member George Smith and an official suffering burns. The #1 XC Falcon got back under way, but there would be no repeat of the pair’s stunning victory the previous year, much less a 1-2, with sister car of Bond and Gibson also failing to finish. We begin our pictorial tribute to the 1978 Great Race with the colour of the pre-race build-up – a Bathurst tradition that has long since bitten the dust but will be recreated via the ‘Bathurst Grid Spectacular’ at the 2013 Muscle Car Masters on Father’s Day.
Clockwise from bottom-centre: Even the MHDT had a primitive paddock set-up; more than a nudge-nudge for the Janson/ Phil Brock A9X in the lead-up; Camel spared expense with its mascot; spot the streakers on the programme; Morris couldn’t replicate his ATCC wins; Sunday just isn’t Sunday without them; Chitty Chitty Bang Bang sported non FISAapproved umbrellas; turn the page to see what did get #44’s attention.
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Story and Images: James Cockington. Modern: James Cockington Historic photographs courtesy Roads and Maritime Services NSW, Chris Currie
Muscle Highway
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y a w h g Hi to hell The Deadly Hume is dead. The opening of the Holbrook bypass means Australia’s two largest cities are now linked entirely by dual carriageway. AMC reflects on the old Hume’s passing and goes in search of what’s left of its most notorious and noteworthy sections. 12 www.musclecarmag.com.au
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he deadliest part of the deadly Hume used to lie just south of the Tumblong Tavern, near Gundagai in southern NSW, leading down from what was known as Herpes Hill. This was the infamous Sylvia’s Gap, scene of numerous head-on collisions, many resulting in fatalities. It’s easy to see why. Now cut off from regular traffic, Sylvia’s is a narrow, steep descent (or climb, if heading north) between solid walls of rock. It’s a threatening location even in the middle of the day. At night, in fog or rain, it was lethal. Trucks would crawl up the hill in first gear while desperate car drivers would take the risk and try and pass on the double yellow. Cars travelling in the opposite direction would suddenly appear over the top of the hill, headlights blazing, gathering speed down the
slope. The overtaking driver would suddenly realise there was nowhere to go. They were trapped by a wall of rock. Going down wasn’t much easier. At the bottom there’s a sharp right hander with steep drops on either side. The state of the fence shows that not everyone made this turn. It’s hard to believe now that Sylvia’s Gap, despite its suicidal limitations as a main artery, was once part of the most-travelled highway in Australia. It was only replaced by a safer stretch of freeway in the mid-1980s and now exists as a farm access road partially blocked by falling rocks and fallen trees. These, so I’m told, were a regular hazard even in its prime. There’s a lasting reminder of the bad old days at the bottom of the gap. If you look down over the
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This page: Incredibly, the Yerrinbool underpass was still part of the main Hume Highway when the XU-1 was launched. twisted Armco which still lines the road, you’ll see a stack of wrecked cars that emergency workers have pushed into the gullies on either side. Like some archeological dig, the vehicles of the earlier civilisations lie at the bottom of the pile, in this case a rusted Ford that looks to be around 1950 vintage. On top of that is an Austin Westminster, circa 1960, on top of that a Holden FC. Another FC lies at the other side of the road, still wedged against the tree which it must have hit a few decades ago. This automotive graveyard is made all the more gruesome by the skeletons of cattle which have