Ron Harrop Q&A
Ron Harrop needs little introduction to most Aussie racing fans. He came to prominence by shattering numerous records in drag racing in his famous ‘Harrop’s Howler’ FJ Holden. Following this he campaigned an EH Holden in circuit racing to great effect in the early to mid 1970s, then drove for the Holden Dealer Team at Bathurst and later played a key role in setting the Holden Racing Team on its path to success in the 1990s. He also designed and manufactured a huge number of highperformance components for road and racecars through his thriving Harrop Engineering business.
But back in mid 1971, the family business was a far more humble operation. A corner of that general engineering workshop in Melbourne would soon house a bright yellow Falcon. For Ron, who had a growing reputation for assisting prominent race teams to get power to the ground, a chance meeting with Sydneysider Hibbard would, if not change his life, certainly frame the way he moved forward. AMC: Ron, when and how did this car and Kingsley Hibbard come into your life? Ron Harrop: I rst met him at a place called Headmod up in Doncaster in Melbourne. I think he was having the exhaust system altered for a race meeting at Sandown. It was a Series Production race that he was running in that weekend and John Ferris of HM Headers was doing the work on the car and I just happened to be introduced to Hibbard. AMC: That would have been the Sandown 250 of 1971, held two days after he picked up the car. RH: On the way down here he was involved in a police chase and it was in all the papers and made the news that night. Anyway, I don’t remember exactly how things progressed from meeting Hibbard at Headmod, but somehow myself and Barry Nelson, who was Allan Moffat’s mechanic to that point, got roped into the project. Hibbard wanted to turn the car into an Improved Production touring car. I do remember driving the car back from Sydney to modify it, which took place over many months. It was a huge amount of work. AMC: Kingsley’s plan was to beat the Super Falcon at its own game. So, in general terms, what did turning a Series Production Phase III into an Improved Production car entail? RH: Barry Nelson and I went to the States and got various engine bits and other mechanical components. We went to Ryan Falconer, which was called Falconer and Dunn in those days, for some engine parts. Then to Bud Moore in South Carolina, who had run Mustangs in the TransAm category to that point, for things like Lincoln callipers and discs and other things they used in circuit racing over there. Then we brought them back and modi ed the car, tted those parts and generally prepared it to race in that category. I don’t remember many of the speci cs, but I do remember it being a big job and a lot of work. AMC: Any recollections of its debut, at Calder in March, 1972, when it turned a smoky few laps in the race? RH: I don’t remember why it might have been smoky, but I do recall that Hibbard had terrible trouble over-revving the thing all the time. He seemed to be a bit numb in the right foot or something. We ended tting a rev limiter to try to curb the problem. At Bathurst it also blew-up, if memory serves. AMC: Yes, Kingsley didn’t last beyond the rst practice session as the engine blew to smithereens down Conrod Straight. RH: I only have vague memories of that, I’m sorry. I do remember tting, at some stage, a centrifugal rev limiter that threw out weights and stopped the spark going. He’d say to me, ‘I can’t help it’.” AMC: The car, tted with a new engine, performed much better at Sandown, nishing fourth behind Moffat, Jane and Beechey, then raced one more time at Calder in mid May 1972. Why did it not race on beyond this? RH: He wasn’t paying the bills. We kept up our end of the deal by taking the car to race meetings. So at that Calder meeting we told him, ‘No more until you pay us’, basically. He asked us what he owed us for work between Sandown and Calder, which was a sum of $1200 or $1500 or something like that. Then he said, “I’ll give you that and you can sue me for the rest!” I told him, no, we needed to be paid for the whole lot.
So we kept the car and it ended up in court cases. A few years down the track he had agreed to pay, as in it had got to court, and he agreed to pay a sum in three months, another sum in six months and the balance in nine months. We all agreed to that.
Three months rolls around and he doesn’t pay, so we end up back in court a year or two later and he says how he’d made a bad decision in agreeing to it. There he was in court saying he shouldn’t have agreed to pay. So, we end up back in court again and his barrister convinced the judge that I should not have kept the car. He successfully argued that the upshot of us keeping the car was that Hibbard had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sponsorship money because he wasn’t able to run the car. In simple terms, the judge agreed that he could not earn money because we had withheld the car. We were shown to be in the wrong for withholding the car and he got the damages for us doing so.
It cost us a bloody fortune and he ended up getting the car back in about 1978 or 1979.
I never knew what happened to it after that. I didn’t care. I guess I tried to erase it from my mind and move on. AMC: How much money did you sink into this car in the eight or nine months that you had it? RH: I don’t have any records, but somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 was spent on building and maintaining the car. That doesn’t take into account the time we put into it. AMC: What lessons did you learn from this experience?
RH: It sent me grey – or white – I reckon! It (premature greying) is in the genes, but I’m sure it accelerated the process. With all the legal fees it probably cost me $100 grand back then. The only way I could justify it back then, was ‘better $100 grand now rather than a million bucks 10 years later’. He got the damages for us withholding the car, which ate up what we should have been paid to prepare the car. The episode taught me to be careful who I did business with and that you just have to move on in life and put this sort of thing behind you. AMC: Did the car have potential? RH: It certainly had potential. Based on the opposition that was around at the time, I felt that it was technically pretty advanced. But not ‘out there’ in a ridiculous way. I just built it to take care of the issues I’d encountered in previous work I’d done on cars that I’d worked on. And then for us to improve upon those things. The engine probably could have been a lot better, but it was just a matter of time to get it right. I don’t think we had
got round to making a set of proper exhausts for it. Howard Marsden lent us a set until we could get ours organised, but we never got that far down the track. They were 2¼” primary pipes and in hindsight they were probably ½” too big. AMC: You mentioned you wanted the car to address issues encountered on circuit racing cars you’d had an involvement with previously. What were they? RH: I doing work for Norm Beechey predominantly. A lot of work for Allan Moffat, too. I think I tted a dry-sump system to his Mustang at the time and other work, too. I spent a fair bit of time down there [at Moffat’s 711 Malvern Road workshop]. AMC: What were you speci cally trying to achieve with the Hibbard XY’s rear-end set-up and what cars did it ‘borrow from’? RH: It borrowed from a lot of the work I’d done for Norm Beechey on the Monaro. And his Camaro that he ran brie y. With the Falcon, it was more about trying to get rid of any binding in the rearend for better traction, basically. With leaf springs they tend to twist and bind-up, so I incorporated, for want of a better description, a shackle between the diff-housing and the spring. So a spring would purely hold a car up – it didn’t have any other function such as axle torque or anything like that. AMC: Who else worked on the car? RH: Chris Farrell did the guards, a speciality of his, and I can’t remember exactly what else. Barry Nelson was predominantly the engine builder and he worked out of where we were set up in our family engineering workshop. It was a very modest shed at that stage. AMC: With the rst engine, what was done to the Cleveland 351 to improve its performance? RH: For reliability and durability it had Carillo conrods and the right sort of bearings. It was also dry-sumped. I think the cylinder heads had titanium valves in them. They were the very large port cylinder heads, the Phase III ones. The roller rockers? Whatever you were allowed to use there, we would have done. I think it was still a at-tappet camshaft. We had an injection manifold for it, but that never got on it – we just used the single four-barrelled one on it with a view to moving to the injection manifold, but we never got that far. Driveability was another consideration. [ED: See Barry Nelson’s recollections of building the original Improved Production engine in the sidebar] AMC: Any clues as to the engine in the car today? RH: No, sorry, I would have kept the bits from the blown engine for years, because I didn’t throw anything away, but the engine that’s in it now, I can’t recall what it was. AMC: Did Hibbard have the talent behind the wheel to beat the Moffats, Geoghegans, Janes and Beecheys in a competitive car? RH: Probably not. I think his temperament worked against him a bit. He was reasonably fearless, but didn’t seem to have a feel for it – especially the accelerator.