Muscle Maniac
Announcing a new 1968 London-to-Sydney Marathon book and Peter Janson’s business card.
It’s 50 years since Ian Vaughan, at the time essentially a club rallyist, brought his XT Ford Falcon GT home third in ‘The Greatest Car Race’ of all time, the London-Sydney Marathon, beaten by a Hillman Hunter and an Austin 1800. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either the Falcon GT’s greatest international triumph or its most devastating local defeat. John Smailes covered the marathon and he’s now written a book on it: Race Across the World.
Because of the stage it was played out on, so much bigger than Bathurst, there’s a myth that the London-Sydney Marathon was the greatest of all showdowns between Australian V8 power brokers Ford (with the Falcon GT) and Holden (with the Monaro GTS). In truth it was a one-sided contest. Ford Australia committed to it with a full works effort. Holden had to be brought, hogtied, into the ring. Ford won the team’s prize, against all comers from throughout the world, with its team of three coming home third, sixth and eighth. In the circumstances Holden’s 12th and 14th with their third car a DNF, was an admirable effort which could have been so much better.
Just ask Bob Watson. The highly-talented GM-H engineer – along with Holden draftsman Tony Roberts – was not allowed near the cars and were chained to his desk while his counterparts from Ford crewed the Falcon GTs almost 17,000km across the world in a moving time of just over 10 days. “It was Holden’s greatest mistake,” Ian Vaughan, who rose to vice presidency of Ford Australia and should have been president, says all these years later.
In 1968 General Motors was engaged in a global ban on motorsport and it was only under extreme pressure from the Marathon’s co-sponsor, Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, that Melbourne executives reluctantly put their careers at risk by enabling a last-minute skunk works effort and the formation of a team to be led by the Telegraph’s motoring writer, Australian Touring Car Champion David McKay. GM’s talent pool was off limits.
The Falcons and Monaros had the world worried. Twelve car makers had responded to the call by London’s Daily Express newspaper to race halfway across the world, and another seven had provided support to non-works entries. Their hope was that the Aussie V8s would fail in Europe and Asia before they got to their home ground where they could well be invincible. Ford was the favourite with three initially unrelated entries: the fast but fragile Lotus Cortinas from the UK; the V6 Ford Taunus from Germany; and the Falcon GTs. They had support crews, aircraft, advance teams, service dumps; everything that today we take for granted. Then, it was exceptional, groundbreaking, an event beyond compare.
As a young reporter on the Telegraph I prevailed against a bid by others in the newsroom to cover the event. Trips were few and far between, and even now the prospect of racing across Europe, crossing the Bosphorous Strait through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, traversing the Khyber Pass, being arrested by the Turkish military and shot at in Kabul, would thrill any 20-year-old no matter how jaded by contemporary technology. Back then we installed recently invented cassette tape recorders in the cars to capture our stories – made difficult because, with jarring at competition speeds, the tape kept jumping off its spools.
A million people waved the marathon away in London and another million got in its way in India. In between, cars crashed, drivers went to hospital and one had vital organs removed to save his life, competing vehicles were stoned and crews injured, crowds were whipped by militia, our media plane was buzzed by MIG ghters, and a Channel Nine crew opened the Khyber Pass in the pre-dawn with armed guards perched on their front mudguards. No-one died, but one competitor withdrew when news arrived four days after the start that his wife had been killed in a road accident while driving home from farewelling him.
Seventy-two cars from a starting eld of 98 made it to Bombay and boarded the P&O liner SS Chusan for the leg two resumption in Fremantle. The Falcons made the halfway point in seventh, tenth and equal 11th. The Monaros were equal 11th, 20th and 30th. Police in Perth defected 27 cars for ‘misdemeanors’ like airhorns and driving lights. It was the start of a running battle with Australian police that resulted in second placed Paddy Hopkirk labelling them “SS stormtroopers”. It wasn’t a good look.
Preventative maintenance could have been better. The Holdens had their diffs replaced in Perth but no-one realised they’d taken out the heavy-duty Chevy units and put back OEM parts. David Johnson discovered the mistake when he looked out the window of Barry Ferguson’s Monaro (76) and saw their wheel and axle unit running alongside the car. George Reynolds rolled David McKay’s Monaro (36) a short time later, perhaps because of a similar failure. Harry Firth, obstinate to the end, refused to replace his diff while his teammates complied with the reasonable requests of team manager John Gowland. Even a last night plea from the only bloke Firth ever really respected, Ian Tate, was rebuffed. Firth was in contention for a podium when his diff failed on the last special stage, dropping him to eighth.
Modest Scottish farmer Andrew Cowan, an understatement if ever there was one, won the Marathon in a Hillman Hunter from Hopkirk in an Austin 1800 and Vaughan’s Falcon GT. After the last special stage the Citroen pair of Lucien Bianchi and Jean-Claude Ogier had been leading by an unassailable 11 minutes when they were eliminated on a transport section in a head-on with a spectator’s Cooper S. Bianchi had been on top of his game. He’d won the Le Mans 24 Hour race in a Ford GT40 two months before (its June date had been delayed in 1968 by student riots in France). Just three months after he broke his leg in the marathon he was again at Le Mans, practising for his defence, when his Alfa 33 turned left at 180mph on Mulsanne Straight. He died instantly. Bianchi was the grand-uncle of Jules, who died as a result of his F1 crash in the 2014 Japanese GP.
Harry Firth returned from the marathon to nd that despite the team’s prize, he had no job at Ford. He went across town to Holden. Some said he spent his time on the Bombay to Fremantle voyage quietly feeling out recruits for his new venture. If he did, that meant he had prior knowledge of the falling of the Ford axe, an interesting component of the Firth legend that remains enigmatic to this day.