Tarmac attack
Datsun was changing its name to Nissan in 1981, and motorsport was a big part of its marketing in Australia. Marsden’s rally team provided great publicity – the 1978 Southern Cross win came just three days after the company launched the locally-built Stanza – but rallying was about to decline. What to do?
Marsden had a circuit racing background and had run Ford’s Bathurst program only eight years earlier, so it didn’t take much prompting from Fury to go touring car racing with the forthcoming Bluebird. Marsden didn’t want a big name driver to begin with, and Fury had conveniently proven his tarmac ability in winning the Castrol International Rally, so he took a punt on his rally star and covered his bets by recruiting veteran racer Fred Gibson to help tutor Fury and develop the Bluebird Turbo for racing.
Fury initially took to the track driving one of the rally Stanzas in Sports Sedan races, where he demonstrated his car control, bravery and ability to race with other cars around him. Gibson helped him with cornering technique and lines, but by the time Bathurst came around the 38-year-old pupil was more than a match for the teacher. “I had to learn all that, and lucky that I was able,” Fury says.
The Bluebird story was comprehensively covered last issue, but it’s worth repeating how vital Marsden was in taking Nissan racing.
“When rallying lost its impetuous in 1979-80 and the whole thing went sour, Howard was the guy who sold Datsun, when they turned from Datsun to Nissan, on the idea that going circuit racing would be the way to sell the branding change. He loved to drive to events and back rather than y, even Brisbane to Melbourne. He would put the team on the plane and drive back to Melbourne himself, so we’d talk for hours in the car together. We talked it over a lot. It was a sales job and Howard was the ultimate salesman. He sold it to Nissan, and it would have cost an arm and leg to do what we did.
“The Bluebird would have been a magic machine if we could have put another turbo on it, but it had to be the standard turbo that the car was sold with, in internal dimension anyway. The little (Garrett) TO3 just wasn’t capable … it was designed for say 200 horsepower as a standard car and you were asking it to make 400 horsepower. It’s just not on. So we might have quali ed well with that turbo – we were on pole position at Bathurst – but you couldn’t race with that boost. So you’d go to Bathurst knowing you weren’t going to win with this car…”
Fury not only scored that famous Bathurst pole in the Bluebird in 1984 – the fastest touring car time ever around the old circuit – he also almost snatched the 1983 Australian Touring Car Championship and then won the rst two rounds of that year’s Australian Endurance Championship – his rst race wins. He had proven himself a genuine circuit star.