Days of Datsuns
It would be another three years before Stewart returned to the mountain. When he did, he soon established himself as a class specialist, predominately in small-fry Datsuns, challenging the factory team before belatedly being brought into the fold.
The Datsun 1600 was a gamechanger on both the road and the track and it completely dominated Class B in the 1968 Hardie-Ferodo 500. Stewart was teamed with good friend, the swift Novocastrian George Garth in a local dealerentered 1600. Against their enduring nemesis John Roxburgh/Doug Whiteford in the factory Datsun, the duo had no answer, finishing a stellar second in class but two laps adrift. They were 19th outright.
Stewart would get his revenge the following year in what would be the beginning of a successful relationship with Liverpool-based Datsun dealer W.H Motors.
“A guy called Frank Palmer owned W.H Motors and he got involved via fellow racer Herbie Taylor,” recalls Stewart. “Don Smith and I both had cars and George (Garth) drove with me again.”
Stewart survived the infamous first lap carnage at Skyline via a novel approach to accident avoidance.
“I came around the corner and the track was blocked. I could either run into them or turn right and go up the mountain! I ran up like Evel Knievel looking down on the wrecked cars and came down the other side. I got to Forrest’s Elbow and let my hands off the steering wheel and thought, ‘The wheels are still straight, it feels alright, so I better get on with this!’”
Stewart crossed the start finishline to end lap one in 12th place and was almost half-a-minute ahead of the works Datsun, a gap they maintained for the entire race for a deserved class win and 18th overall.
He raced the same W.H Motors Datsun, with personal registration plates WH081 in three consecutive Bathurst 500s. When it wasn’t on the track, it could be found on the streets of Sydney suburbia.
“My wife Robyn used to use the 1600 to take the kids to school. It was our daily driver. Once we drove all the way to Surfers Paradise for the 250km race. Our son Darren was asleep in a bassinet in the back seat during scrutineering. I said, ‘You can do what you like, but if you wake him up, you’ve got him for the rest of the day – he’ll scream his head off!’ So they didn’t jack up the car and said ‘you’ll pass’ and I kept going!”
During 1970 the W.H Motors team built up a red 1600 for Stewart to race in the Improved Production category. Despite spending hours on Bo Seton’s dyno, the team were never able to get the necessary horsepower to compete against Ford Escort twin-cams at the local Sydney tracks.
In 1970 Stewart was paired with Dr Iain Corness at Bathurst but had an early shower after clipping another car while slipstreaming team mate and eventual class winner Don Smith. The fan punctured the radiator leading to a blown head gasket.
The 1971 race would see another ding-dong battle between the factory team and the W.H Motors Datsuns, but only after the rapid Mazda RX2 of Datsun defector George Garth had retired.
“The works Datsun (of Roxburgh/Jon Leighton) won the class but were disqualified. They got serious in scrutineering. We had to remove the head, take out the valves, strip the carburettor, remove the covers off the gearbox and diff to check the ratios, check the baffles on the muffler and inspect the camshaft. The factory car was running a SSS camshaft, which was worth 10 horsepower. We knew they had something, but that gave us the class win.”
With the advent of the Mazda RX2 and Escort twin-cam, the writing was on the wall for the Datsun 1600 in class B. So W.H Motors thought that running a Datsun 1200 in class A against the factory team would be a good idea. It wasn’t!
“Don Smith and I both had 1200s,” recalls Stewart. “Don did one lap to see what it was like. He said I can run up the hill quicker than they go! This is going to be a long day, and it was. They were so slow.”
Stewart and Smith had no answer to the works 1200s and finished a desultory fifth and seventh in class.