Brock’s 1975 Torana
Whatever happened to Peter Brock’s 1975 Bathurst-winning Torana L34? AMC has tracked down the very man behind the wheel when this famous car was destroyed. He tells his story for the first time.
Whatever happened to Peter Brock’s 1975 Bathurst-winning Torana L34? AMC has tracked down the very man behind the wheel when this famous car was destroyed. He tells his story for the first time.
These days Michael Rowell is director of a transport company on the Gold Coast in Queensland, his home of the last 30plus years. In his younger days, before the move north, he was a car-mad Tasmanian with a passion for Toranas and going fast on the Apple Isle. He was convinced to take his love of speed onto the speedways of the island state and did so after owning a Bathurst-winning Torana road car that very nearly killed him. Yep, that’s right – a Bathurst-winning Torana. It was the very same L34 model that Peter Brock and Brian Sampson had used to win the
1975 Hardie-Ferodo 1000 at Mount Panorama for the privateer Gown-Hindhaugh team.
The same car that, legend had it, was converted for road use and later written off in a road accident in Tasmania.
AMC can now provide the definitive report on the fate of that famous #5 yellow and deep blue Torana as we’ve tracked down the very man who was at the helm when it met its demise. He’s never spoken publicly before about the car or the crash, but opens up to AMC about the fate of the Torana and how it all came to be.
Born and bred in Tasmania, Rowell ended up purchasing the Bathurst-winning Torana from the man who in turn had sourced it direct from Norm Gown and Bruce Hindhaugh at the end of 1976, local Tassie racer Roger Stanley.
“He bought it from Gown-Hindhaugh and raced it before he bought a new hatchback,” recalls Rowell today. “He then decided he wanted to sell the L34. He sold it to me with no motor in it. His mechanic built me a motor for it – he had that much motor stuff it wasn’t funny!
“It was sitting in their shed as a roller and I got absolutely everything with it. I straight-swapped it for an SL/R 5000 Torana, a really nice one. I had built it up from the ground. I straight-swapped it because I was getting a genuine L34 (in the deal)
and as a hobby I’d make it into a beautiful car.
“A genuine L34 motor went back into it. I took the cage out of the car and stripped it down to absolutely nothing and rebuilt it from the ground up to race it in street car racing, which was a very big category back then in Tasmania.
“At that time, at my age in my early 20s, I wasn’t thinking about Brock or how much of a legend he was and whether the car was going to be a collectors’ item. So I stripped it down. It was painted yellow and green when I got it. The body was yellow with an iridescent green bonnet and green flares. That’s how Stanley then had his hatchback painted, too.”
Rowell’s strip-down project of his new machine revealed some tell-tale signs that pointed to
the fact that this car was very much built for the racetrack and not the road.
“It was interesting rebuilding it and seeing all the things Gown-Hindhaugh did to make it more rigid,” he says. “Every part of the body was seamwelded. They’d pumped foam inside every air cavity where it was seam-welded too. The door pillars were all foam-filled.
“It had had a few clouts. I sandblasted the body back to nothing. When it was originally built it had no brackets underneath for exhausts, all that excess stuff was removed from the car and didn’t have any sound deadener under it.
“I made it a really good show car. We put the L34 motor back into it; it had the standard L34 gearbox, a Detroit locker, L34 rear end with drum brakes and HQ-style front brakes. The bolt-in roll-cage went back into it, the same one as it had raced at Bathurst. The crossover bars at the back went down through the back seat and they were still in the car.
“Everything was there as it was raced. It had two sets of the Hotwire wheels but by the time I got it from Roger Stanley it was pretty rough. The rear quarter-panels were original
but they’d had a fair bit of bog in them!”
Rowell bought the L34 in late 1977 and a local racing star’s choice of car colour convinced him what to do with his machine.
“Gene Cook had a green one at the same time,” Rowell recalls.
“He stripped his back and painted it black. I liked how his looked so I painted mine black too.
“I put the cage back into it and raced it in street cars at Symmons Plains and Baskerville for probably six months – it was still road registered.
“Chas Kelly (father of former V8 Supercar driver Owen) and Cees Hendriks both set about to get me off the road before I killed myself. My brother David had a hatchback, I had a flatplaned crank motor in my L34 for a little while, it was getting a bit ridiculous and they were getting pretty dangerous as road cars. I blew up the Holden gearbox in the L34 about four times; it kept stripping front teeth off the cluster, which they all used to do. So I ripped it out and put a Top Loader in it and fixed that problem!
“Cees and Chas set about getting me into speedway. Chas had sold an SL/R 5000 speedway car to Cees, who had bought himself a hatchback off Tony Noske. So Cees was racing the hatchback and decided to sell the four-door, which they put me into for virtually nothing to get me off the road – and that’s how my speedway career started.”
After winning his first feature race, Rowell was hooked on dirt track racing. As a result, he decided it was time to part with his black, exBathurst-winning L34 Torana.
“Ted Eustace had a car yard in Devonport and he offered to sell it for me,” says Rowell. It was a bloody nice car by that stage. We put it into his car yard for $8000 in 1978 or thereabouts.
“I had it for sale for a long time at $8000. I advertised it as a Bathurst-winning car that Peter Brock had driven. But I couldn’t sell it so I took it back out of the car yard on New Year’s Eve.”
And that’s where things went horribly wrong… Just a few short years on from its victory at Bathurst, the active life of the Gown-Hindhaugh Torana L34 that had conquered the Mountain was ended – and very nearly the actual lives of the occupants as well!
“I went to pick up a mate and was going back to a New Years party. Whilst on the highway and going through a turn, I met a car coming the other way on the wrong side of the road. I had to move off the bitumen to avoid a head-on collison, at which point I lost control and hit a telegraph pole.
“It was goodnight. I broke my neck, every rib on my left-hand side, burst my spleen and had a hole in a lung. “I was pretty messed up there for a bit. “I moved to Queensland in 1980 and I wrote the L34 off probably 12 months before I moved, so it must have been New Year’s Eve 1978.
“When I got out of hospital I bought Cees’ hatchback and started racing again. Then I decided I should rebuild the L34 as it was only damaged from the back door backwards.
“I bought another body-shell, stripped it all out, seam-welded it and foam-filled it identically to the original car.
“It was a concourse job! I had it all rebuilt, took it over to the upholsterer to do the carpet in the middle of winter. He put a heater on the back parcel shelf and up it went in smoke!”
The long-held view of muscle car fans around the country is that the Brock 1975 Bathurst winner was painted black, destroyed in a road accident and the remnants dumped. Another line of thought was that the wreck became a speedway car.
Rowell confirms that both lines of thought are indeed correct.
“I stripped it completely and cut it in half,” he says. “The front half went to Godfrey Gale. He got from the B-pillars forward and he ‘glued’ that onto his damaged speedway car.
“I kept the seam-welded cross member out of it and all the mechanicals, which went into a hatchback I built up. The rear end of the shell went into the Harford tip near Devonport.”
Rowell did keep the genuine L34 chassis plates from the car. Sadly, however, they were stolen in a break-in at his business about five years ago.
Like so many people before him, though, he was never to know at the time that his pride and passion road car would have been worth quite the pretty penny some years later.
“Who was Peter Brock back then?” laughs Rowell. “He’d won two Bathursts, not nine. He wasn’t the nationwide superstar he became.
“It’s crossed my mind lots of times since then as to what it would be worth right now sitting genuine as I had had it. It’d be a six-figure car now for sure.
“It was the first V8 Torana to ever win Bathurst, a privateer car and there was a whole heap of elements surrounding Brock driving that car. It’s a shame, a real shame, that this is what ended up happening to it.”