Monaro styling
The 1960s was a golden age for General Motors-Holden and 1968 was undoubtedly its biggest year of that decade. Not only did the company release the latest generation of ‘all new’ volume-selling HK Holden sedan and wagon models, it launched what would become the company’s most iconic model: Monaro.
Under the astute managing directorship of American Max Wilson, GM-H faced signi cant challenges with the bigger, lower and heavier HK.
The new model created unprecedented complexity in the company’s widespread manufacturing plants, outgunning its crosstown competitor with multiple options, plus the addition of a prestige V8 sedan and two-door pillarless coupe, both of which were introduced six months after the high volume sedan and wagon.
1968 was also a career de ning year for me. In February I completed my two years of compulsory Vietnam War-instigated National Service, then four days later started work as a cadet designer in the high security GM-H Technical Centre at Fishermans Bend.
As a naive 23-year-old – with the coveted photo security pass around my neck – walking into the vast, brightly-lit design studios for the rst time was awe inspiring.
It’s difficult to put into words the excitement of being surrounded by renderings of futuristic sports cars, viewing the next generation of Holden and Torana clay models mounted on steel surface plates, and watching talented designers, modellers and metal and wood workers do their thing. The memories are all still vivid.
Isolated from the majority of GM-H employees, it was a different world, and a lifechanging experience for me.
Downstairs, in the engineering workshops, new models, many hand-built prototypes, including a stylish two-door coupe, were being prepared for covered transportation to our remote Lang Lang Proving Ground, while elsewhere in the building engineers and technicians were busy with platform and driveline design and fabrication of a midengined sports car, later to be revealed as the ‘Holden Hurricane’.
Understanding how these complex set of design and engineering tasks worked in harmony took some time, but seeing the end result of the collective efforts of hundreds of technical staff was always exciting. And I joined GM-H when one of those ‘end results’ was about to be unveiled. So I have a special interest in telling how my colleagues had got to that point.
The HK Monaro development story started four years earlier, with the mainstream HK sedan, largely designed in GM’s Michigan International Studio, led by veteran Ned Nickles, working under the direction of GM’s amboyant global design director Bill Mitchell.
Detailed body design drawings were shipped from Detroit to Fishermans Bend, then using those, sedan clay models were created. American designers Ted Schroeder, Ed Taylor and technical designer Larry Fink were despatched to Melbourne to ensure Mitchell’s image for the Australian car was carried through by GM-H’s then Design Director Joe Schemansky.
The back story to this process of design development was that Mitchell lacked con dence in the Australian design team, following local attempts to create a contemporary replacement for the EJ-EH Holden.
When a locally-designed breglass display model of the forthcoming EF Holden was presented in Detroit, Mitchell was unimpressed. He rejected Australia’s proposal, setting his American designers to work, developing what became the controversial HD.
Local designers, including Alf Payze, Val Stacey, Gill Mathwin and Jack Burgan, who had all worked at GM-H in Adelaide much earlier, before transferring to Melbourne to nalise design work on the original 48-215 Holden, were relegated to a support role.
It was not until the building of GM-H’s new state-of-the-art Technical Centre and the Australian-designed HR, under the guidance of Schemansky, that much-needed con dence was restored in the local capability, albeit remaining under the direct supervision of Americans.
Then, signi cantly, during the design of the HK, and two years before its launch, Ford Australia introduced the ‘Mustang bred’ XR Falcon. Its design character originated from the new era of American muscle cars, including GM’s Camaro and Firebird twins, the Plymouth Barracuda, AMC Javelin, and of course the iconic Ford ‘pony’ car, based on the Falcon platform.
Concerned about the new Falcon’s contemporary long hood design theme, GM-H
Top left: Not a computer to be seen in Holden’s design studio in the 1960s. Above, right: Early HK styling exercises had a heavy American influence, distinctly Pontiac in flavour. Below right: A HR ‘Monaro’ might have looked like this David Veltman design of 1963. promptly added approximately three inches to the HK sedan model, between the front axle and dash, creating an extended engine hood and front fender proportion.
In addition to the sedan design, Mitchell had his designers develop a two-door coupe, which was then shipped to Melbourne to be re ned alongside the sedan and locally-developed station wagon and commercial models.
Although the initial model came from the USA, the concept of a Lion-badged coupe was not a new idea in the GM-H design studios. The earliest renderings of a two-door Holden are by designer David Veltman in 1963.
Despite Veltman’s designs re ecting a more formal two-door hardtop than the more youthful owing design architecture ultimately achieved with the HK coupe, his renderings did highlight the desire by many in GM-H to produce a stylish performance Holden for the youth market.
Locally-manufactured two-door bodies were not new in the Australian market. Ford had tested local market interest with its Falcon XM and XP two-door hardtops. They would not be the last. Chrysler introduced its two-door Valiant hardtop in 1969, then its stunning Valiant Charger coupe in 1971, and Leyland was preparing to launch its locally-designed and engineered Force 7 coupe, just as the Sydney-based company went belly-up in 1974.
Along with the LX Torana in 1976, the P76 Force 7 was the only post-war mid-size or large car designed and manufactured in Australia as a coupe-hatchback.
Meanwhile, GM-H designers, including Phil Zmood, who had been hired in 1965
and went on to be Holden’s first Australian design director, Don Brown, Peter Nankervis and Eugene Mori – working for Americans Don Schroeder and Ed Taylor – were developing the HK coupe. Identified during development as the ’37 styles’, early concepts featured stacked headlamps, initially inspired by Pontiac’s twodoor Tempest, shown in the accompanying photo in Holden’s display auditorium.
Although for cost reasons the coupe was destined to share the now extended HK sedan front-end sheet metal and trunklid, it would feature a longer side door, and critically, a unique side-profile, featuring an Oldsmobile Toronado-inspired monoform rear-quarter and fastback roofline.
Disappointingly, less obvious were changes to the coupe’s interior. Upgrades were limited to trim, faux wood-rim steering wheel and a centreconsole-mounted tachometer.
While the vastly experienced body engineer Reg Hall and his team were toiling to ensure a pillarless coupe structure would be stiff enough to meet GM-H’s rigorous durability standards, in the design studio, on the floor above engineering, colourful designer sketches and three dimensional clay models reflected a high level of emotion, and optimism.
Although an infrequent visitor ‘down under’, Bill Mitchell, on a visit in 1966 was given the opportunity to examine first-hand work of the American/Australian design team, as well as a taste of outback conditions, joining an engineering durability drive program.
As a gesture of thanks from GM-H management, and likely paying homage to the company’s roots, Holden & Frost’s saddlery works in Adelaide, the equine-loving design director was presented with a saddle, embossed with Australian images, designed by the versatile Phil Zmood!
Given that GM-H designers and engineers were breaking new ground with the Holden coupe body design and driveline, with two V8 engines being added to the ambitious program, the support and approval of senior management was vital, and achieved.
While GM-H were increasingly adding names to their model grades, discarding the mundane Standard and Special designations following the introduction of the luxuriously-appointed (by 1962 standards) EJ Premier, new HK grade names were being prepared. Belmont, Kingswood, Premier were designated for the mainstream range, with Brougham tagged for Holden’s new ‘uber-luxury’ sedan.
Now, only the sports coupe needed a modeldefining badge.
To fast track the selection process, design staff were encouraged to suggest a name for the company’s new coupe, and a wall-board quickly filled with over 60 suggestions.
Enter Noel Bedford. GM-H’s long serving design studio engineer, who had commenced his career at Commonwealth Aircraft. Bedford then moved to GM-H in 1957 as a technical artist, developing exploded-view drawings of part assemblies, before transferring to the Styling Department (later named Design Staff and now, in 2018, branded GM Design Australia).
In October 1967, less than a year before the coupe’s launch, Bedford, on holidays with his wife Ann in southern New South Wales, drove into Cooma and parked outside the Monaro County Council office building. According to Bedford, “It struck me that the word ‘Monaro’ was like
‘Camaro’ and ‘Marlboro’ – both success stories in their own right.”
Attracted to the name, on arrival back at work he left a slip of paper on Assistant Director John Schinella’s studio desk. Shortly after, the loud-and-lanky Schinella walked into the Interior Studio, looming over Noel’s shoulder. “How’d you pronounce this goddam name?” he questioned. Thinking ‘American’ Noel quickly replied, ‘Mon(ar) o’, not ‘Mon(air)o’, as it was locally pronounced.
A few days later, in the same studio, at a design review meeting attended by senior management, including Max Wilson, John Bagshaw and Joe Schemansky, the name Monaro, loosely translated as ‘high plain’, was proposed, then, within two minutes, approved.
With only checks for copyright and dialect meaning, and without any focus groups or extensive consumer market research clinics to determine the name’s suitability – nor any bonus for Bedford – Monaro had been selected. Unknowingly, a slice of Australian motoring history had been created!
With GM-H’s energetic and amboyant marketing guru John Bagshaw now heading sales, the new HK Monaro, featuring the sporty GTS grade with six- and eight-cylinder engine options, was launched in GM-H’s Technical Centre, an extravaganza, focussing as much on cat-suit-attired models as the swoopy Warwick Yellow coupe itself.
On its high pro le introduction in July 1968 the public’s reaction to Monaro was immediate, and positive. Demand for the stylish coupe exceeding supply. Holden had its mojo back, the two-door coupe establishing a new, more youthful image that rubbed off on the entire HK range.
The public’s response to the stylish new Holden Monaro
sports coupe was in stark contrast to that of the luxury Brougham, designed with a low budget, relying on the high speci cation levels to attract buyers, mostly those most loyal to the GM-H brand!
The Holden HK Monaro attracted the judges of the prestigious Wheels magazine, who voted the new sporty Holden Car of the Year in 1968.
Monaro became GM-H’s motorsport weapon for the next two years, before the launch of the giant-killing LC Torana XU-1.
Due to GM’s global ban on motorsport, GM-H covertly entered the 1968 Hardie-Ferodo 500 mile enduro, under the management of David McKay’s Sydney based Scuderia Veloce. However, the ‘factory’ cars were overshadowed by the privately-entered Wyong Motors Monaro of Bruce McPhee and Barry Mulholland, which edged out one of the Holden Dealer Racing Team entries.
Scuderia Veloce was in the spotlight again a month later. In November 1968 a team of three Monaro coupes departed England on the gruelling 7000 mile London-Sydney Marathon. Scuderia Veloce was the entrant. However, all the heavily-modi ed coupes were prepared for the international event in GM-H’s experimental garage, deep in the bowels of the company’s technical centre in Salmon Street Port Melbourne.
Design of the livery fell to myself, and although we were deeply involved with the car’s preparation, frustratingly, no use of any corporate GM-H or Holden design logos was allowed. The design was almost entirely based on the noncorporate design used for the Bathurst racecars.
Despite their extensive, and expensive, preparation the rst Scuderia Veloce/Sydney Telegraph-sponsored Monaro home, the car of Barry Ferguson and Doug Chivas, nished in 12th place, convincingly beaten by Ford Australia’s factory Falcon team which took the event’s Team Award, nishing third, sixth and eighth, intensifying the rivalry between the cross town red and blue teams.
From a design perspective, GM-H was striving to prove to its distant parent that the local creative team could stand on its own two feet. Launching the HK Monaro was a signi cant step, although arguably, it would not be until 1971, when the innovative and arguably most attractive Holden ever, the HQ, was launched, followed by the LH Torana in 1974, that the local company could stand proud as a design resource in GM’s global business, ultimately exporting design capability back to the US, and the world.
By 1971 and the introduction of Holden’s most ambitious new car program, the HQ Monaro coupe had become more formal in design, lacking the spirit of movement and sportiness inherent in the original HK-HG series. A luxury Premier-based LS grade was added to the range, then later, to the dismay of purists, Holden resorted to adding Monaro badges to the fourdoor body.
None of this blatant market-driven badgeengineering took away from the initial excitement Holden had created with the HK Monaro, emotions that that would be on public display 30 years later, in 1998, when the Mike Simcoedesigned VT-based Monaro show car was unveiled at Sydney’s Australian International Motor Show.