Rallying calls
Living next door to a newsagent, George was soon devouring car racing magazines, dreaming of one day joining Bob Jane and Norm Beechey on the track but not knowing how he would ever afford it as a mechanical engineer with a little business converting American cars to right-hand drive.
“I always wanted to have a go, but there was no way known I was going to be able to go motor racing working for myself. There’s just not enough hours in the day. So I got a job as a chemical engineering technician at Swinburne Tech, which I knew was going to be an easy job, and it was.”
When the 1968 London to Sydney Marathon came to Australia, Fury drove his Mk1 Cortina – having already swapped the 1300cc engine for a 1600 with Webers – to the Hindmarsh Station section in southeast NSW to watch the action, and was inspired.
“I thought, ‘I could do this.’ I had $25,000 from selling the conversion business, so that was my nest-egg for going motor racing. I’d always wanted to do motorsport, but it was only then that I could do something. I gave myself three years and decided that rallying was the best value for money.”
Already in his late20s, George recruited a Swinburne lecturer he’d befriended, Monty Suffern, to be his navigator and together they tackled local rallying. Fury’s amboyant driving style soon attracted attention, especially after they replaced the Cortina’s 1600 engine and troublesome four-speed gearbox with a torquey standard MkII 2.0-litre unit and ve-speed gearbox. Just as George’s three-year trial (and money) expired, he was recruited by the Datsun Rally Team.
Each year the factory team would arrive from Japan for the prestigious Southern Cross Rally with a pair of new cars, only to go home after another beating by Andrew Cowan and the Mitsubishi team, leaving their cars behind for the locals to run the following year. Fury rallied a 180B SSS, then the similar (but not sold in Australia) 710 SSS, in which he won his rst Australian Rally Championship in 1977 (tied with teammate Ross Dunkerton).
By the time the Stanza arrived, Howard Marsden was running the local factory effort and had begun building cars locally. Driving a car built at Braeside, Fury led the 1978 Southern Cross Rally from start to nish to become the rst Australian driver to win the event in seven years, beating works cars and drivers from around the world. Then he won it again the following year.
But in 1980 everything changed for local rallying. Mitsubishi had withdrawn and Ford (running Escorts for Carr and Colin Bond) decided to follow suit. Fury won another Australian title for Datsun that year before the company walked away, not wanting to compete against privateers.
“We had a really ful lling career together,” Fury says of his partnership in rallying with Suffern. But George wasn’t giving up on motorsport just yet.