Command performer

A pair of Holden Dealer Team HT Monaro GTS 350s would have been competitive in the 1970 Bathurst 500. That premise is supported by solid facts – the lap times and race results not just from that year but also the first half of 1971. But had Holden gone to the Mountain with Monaros in 1970, it would have been with the new HG model, not the HT. So, what of the 1970 version of the Monaro GTS 350?

It may have been the ‘Command Performer’, according to Holden’s advertising campaign, but it’s the car that never got to perform. Not only was it never put to the test against the GT-HO Phase II at Bathurst, but the true nature of its performance potential wasn’t revealed publicly in the motoring press until after the 1970 Bathurst 500 – which was some four months after the model had been released, and only about a month before it was discontinued!

No one, it seemed, was in any great hurry to sing the praises of the latest model Monaro in mid 1970. All the attention was on the remarkable little XU-1 and, as detailed in the HT GTS 350 Buyer’s Guide in AMC #46, it’s not as though the press would have been expecting much from the new HG anyway, as Holden was in the habit of nobbling its Monaro GTS test eet so as to obscure the full extent of the V8 coupe performance – partly due to the concerns over the perceptions of the car at head office (as outlined elsewhere in this feature by Holden’s motorsport chief Joe Felice) and partly over fears of a public backlash against high performance cars. The infamous ‘Supercar Scare’ was just two years away…

The HG GTS 350 went on sale late in July, 1970. A total of 450 rolled off the Holden assembly lines in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide before production ceased in December.

In around September there was an engine change for the model. Previously the 350 Chev V8s tted to Monaros had come from the Tonawanda plant in New York (as had been the case with the HT), but now they were being sourced from McKinnon Industries in Canada. The McKinnon Industries engine had a different block and better breathing cylinder heads. Both the Tonawanda and McKinnon engines were used in Camaros, and both