Bathurst 1973-79
As a mechanic/driver, Stevens never had much trouble securing Bathurst drives in the 1970s and ‘80s. He made 11 Bathurst starts and scored some top 10 results, but overall he found racing someone else’s car a frustrating exercise.
He made his debut in ’73 with Ron Dickson in the latter’s Monaro GTS 308 four-door. Stevens doesn’t recall much about the car or the race, apart from the disappointment of seeing the engine drop a valve 30 laps from home while looking on for a top ve nish.
After that he felt no pressing urge to return to the Mountain the following year, and only ended up in the race by chance, and at the last minute.
New Zealand Formula 5000 ace Graeme Lawrence was meant to have been co-driving Graeme ‘Lugsy’ Adams’ Torana XU-1, but Lawrence was a late withdrawal after injuring himself in a crash in his Lola at Surfers Paradise. A replacement driver needed to be found quickly.
“Graeme Lawrence was Shell sponsored and so was Lugsy – and so was I. That was the connection. Archie White from Shell just looked at the Shell-contracted drivers that were around
and came up with me. It was
1974
Inset left: ‘Lugsy’ Adams and Stevens with American Express marketing chief Len Mannell as they ink the sponsorship deal for the ‘75 Great Race.
Below left: Stevens (standing next to the XU-1’s right front guard) at Bathurst in ‘75 prior to the start.
the week before the race; I got a call from Lugsy and he said, ‘why don’t you come down and have a look?’ So I went and met his guys, the car was ready, he’d prepared it all, and we rolled up there and drove and didn’t have a thing go wrong, nished fth.
“That weekend went like a dream. After that race we were just ecstatic – I don’t think either of us worked for a week afterwards; we just sat around having drinks and talking about how great it was! We couldn’t wait to get back up there!
“I didn’t know Lugsy at the time at all, but he’d been a Formula 5000 mechanic for a while and he obviously knew what he was doing.
But it was really a backyard operation compared to people like Moffat and the Holden Dealer Team. So fth place for us was like a win.
“And the thing is, we would have been fourth if it had been dry, or stopped raining – because they would have taken Colin Bond’s car off the track. It was leaking oil and blowing smoke like you wouldn’t believe, but the smoke was obscured by the spray in the rain, so they got away with it. Had it been dry they’d have been given the oil ag.”
Adams and Stevens went again in ’75 with the XU-1, but it was not to be a happy experience. Stevens remembers that Adams ran off the road early on and damaged the car.
“We xed the car and Lugsy said, ‘you jump in, I just haven’t got my head around it,’ so I ended up doing a double stint, and then we had started to have problems.”
A long stop to replace broken pushrods saw them fall so far behind they didn’t complete enough laps to be classi ed as nishers.
For ’76 Stevens teamed up with Ray Kaleda in the latter’s Torana L34.
“Ray told me he had arthritis in his hands and didn’t want to do too many miles in the car, and would I be interested in co-driving? By that stage
1975
I was only interested in co-driving if I could be part of the preparation of the car. So I did the engine, did a whole of work on it.
“We’re up there and I go out in the car, and the vibration in this thing is just terrible – I’m looking in the mirror and it’s like you’re seeing 25 of everything! I came in and said to him, ‘did you balance the wheels?’ ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘why would you want to do that?’ Well, it was shaking the bloody car to bits!
“I quali ed the car. So we’re in, we’ve got most of the bugs out of it, we’re alright, looking forward to the race the next day. Then Ray says, ‘I’ll just jump in and do a few laps.’ So he goes out, comes up the pit straight and there’s two other cars, one in front and one he’s just about to pass, and I don’t know what he was thinking but when they all got to the rst corner he’s completely missed it, didn’t turn and then understeered into the earth bank. Heavy damage to the right front.
“They didn’t have the TAFE team there in those days, but I had a mate helping us who was a panel beater. We got the car on a tow truck and into town to Bathurst Motors, the local Holden dealer, then stripped it down so we could get to the sub rails. We had every Holden part we needed out of the parts department, and we’ve got a crowd of about 100 people watching this magic going on. But all my panel beater mate had was a port-a-power, and it didn’t matter what he did – if it ipped up one way it would push out the other way. It really needed to go on a rack and be pulled out properly, but there was none available. We got to about 9 o’clock that night and pulled the pin.
“Before that I had a race in that car at Amaroo. I started on the second row and it was going
alright, but as I was going through the kink at the top of the hill the right rear axle came right out of the car, wheel and all. The wheel and axle bounced up in the air, and as the car ground along the track on three wheels I saw a
ag marshal running for his life – he nearly got impaled by the axle! The axles had a shrink ring to hold them in, and Ray had used the standard thin one rather than the wider one you were supposed to use.
“I think he felt sorry for me after what happened at Bathurst. He said, ‘look, why don’t you drive it at the next Oran Park?’ So I did, but in the race into the rst corner the brake pedal has gone to the oor. I was off the circuit to the inside, no brakes, then slid back across the track and over the other side and somehow no one hit me. After that I said to Ray: ‘that’s it for me, I’m not driving your car again; you’re trying to kill me!’
“From there on I decided I wouldn’t go to Bathurst again with these guys who’ve put their cars together themselves – bugger that! Unless I was involved with the preparation, so I knew the car was OK. Not that I felt I was a genius, but I did feel that I had an understanding of how to put a car together capable of going the distance, which so many of these guys didn’t seem to be able to do.
“The problem for me was that most of the people I was involved with at Bathurst, none of them ran their cars all year. They’d pretty much only run Bathurst. They’d get a deal together six weeks out from the race, and it’d be, ‘here, let’s build this car,’ but there’d be not enough time or
people to do it
For 1977 Stevens relented and agreed to quicker than Murray and right from my rst lap in it I felt really good in the car. It was a brand new car, and I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got a bit of faith in this – this is going to be a good day.’ Murray starts the race, and about 45 minutes in he’s going across the top of the mountain and BOOM! Conrod out the side of the engine. We get the thing back down on the quick lift, everyone’s standing around and I said, ‘well instead of standing around kicking sand why don’t we put the Saturday engine in?’ So we did, and Murray says, ‘you haven’t had a drive yet, you poor bugger, I’ll just go out and make sure it’s right,’ and, believe it or not, he did exactly the same amount of laps as he’d done when he blew the rst engine, and BOOM! Another engine gone. So Murray blew two engines in the race that year and I didn’t even do a lap!”
Stevens happily sat out the ’78 Great Race, but would be back for another go the following year. And this time he built the car himself – although that hadn’t been the original plan.
The car Stevens was supposed to be sharing with Garry Rogers was the ex-Jane/ Geoghegan A9X. But Rogers had written it off in a crash at Amaroo.
The salvageable parts were transferred into a new shell (along with a new Ian Tate engine) at Rogers’ Melbourne workshop. Stevens took the partly built A9X back to Sydney and nished it off there. There was still much to do, and a fair amount of late nights were spent in Stevens’ workshop before they got to Bathurst – where the new car would turn its rst wheel.
“Garry quali ed the car. He was a quick driver, but I found him a hard customer to deal with. He starts the race, then I get in the car and notice that the brake pedal’s a bit low. Hmmm, we’ve got a long way to go yet and we’ve already got a low pedal. The problem was that Garry was driving it like there’s no tomorrow; he’s not driving it for 1000 kays, he’s driving it for 200. When I got out after my stint, he said, ‘what’s wrong?’ because my times had dropped off, because I was being a bit more conservative on the brakes. I was about a second and a half slower than what he was doing.
“I said to him, ‘you’re going to have to look after the brakes or you’re not going to get there.’ And he said, ‘well that’s how it is – you drive it
at out and if you get there, you get there, if you don’t, you don’t.’
“Sure enough, out he goes, and about 10 laps later he goes straight off down the road to Bathurst. Pedal went straight to the oor, popped a piston out of the caliper. I’ll give him this, though – he drove the rest of the race with that. Didn’t x it, still nished fth.
“He just thought I was a bit wussy; he had a different opinion on how to do things, whereas I thought it was a good idea to try to drive within what the car was actually capable of. I didn’t have much to do with him after that.” it like
1977
1979