The Holy Grail
Bruce McPhee’s 1968 Bathurst 500-winning GTS 327 represents the Holy Grail of Holden MIA searches. As the rst of 32 Holden-badged cars to win the Great Race, tell us another GM-H machine presently unaccounted for that’s more historical signi cant than #13D?
While there’s a strong chance it long ago went to God, the absence of de nitive stories of its demise provides some hope this priceless piece of Australian motoring history is still out there. Somewhere. In fact, one respected Monaro expert has suggested to AMC he’s heard reports it lives on. More on that in a moment, but rst let’s review what we know for sure.
This car was ordered by McPhee through Wyong Motors, the Holden dealership owned by his mate Phil Levenspiel. It was in the Central Coast dealership’s workshop where it was prepared for its three race outings: the 1968 Datsun 3 Hour Trophy at Sandown (where it nished sixth, pictured below) on September 15; its date with destiny in the 1968 Hardie-Ferodo 500 on October 6; and the 1969 Rothmans 12 Hour Classic at Surfers Paradise on January 5.
McPhee, partnered that day by Doug Chivas, quali ed on pole position for the Le Mans start and duly took the lead off the start. Racing Car News’ February edition outlined what happened next in the blistering, mid-summer Queensland conditions. “Bruce McPhee was in after one hour for a tyre-check, a forerunner of rotten tyre luck that was to persist all day.”
His next pitstop to change tyres led to the yellow Monaro returning to pitlane “to replace a faulty wheel after only one lap and his race was getting tough.”
Nonetheless, the #13 Lockhart Motors Gold Coast-sponsored Monaro remained in striking distance of the leaders as the fastest car on the track.
“McPhee was repeatedly clocked at 106 to 107mph and (the eventual winning Falcon of Jim Bertram and Bill) Gates at 105.
“McPhee moved into fourth outright well into the seventh hour, topping 110mph past the tower, an instant before a rear tyre blew with a deafening thunderclap.
“Fragments of rubber were scattered over a wide area as the tyre completely disintegrated, and McPhee maintained remarkable control to go under the bridge at some slightly reduced pace and complete the lap to the pits as though still on all four.
“However, the race was run for the ‘500’ winner before the eighth hour was up, the gallant veteran shattering a piston on entering the straight. Water was everywhere.”
The late Brier Thomas’s haunting photograph
of the EXO-100-numberplated GTS 327 sitting forlornly in the pitlane darkness, jacked-up and bonnet-up, is the last image we’ve seen of the famous car.
McPhee sold the car to his Bathurst co-driver Barry Mulholland not long after the race. Longtime Chevron Publishing contributor and racing historian David Greenhalgh spoke to Mulholland in the early 1990s for his ‘Before We Lose Track’ series in Motor Racing Australia magazine on the whereabouts of early Bathurst winners.
“Mulholland used it as a road car until about 1970, when he traded it in for $2000 on a Kingswood at Noble Motors, East Gosford, NSW. Mulholland believes the winning Monaro was in turn sold by Nobles at auction for $1500.”
Greenhalgh wrote that both McPhee and Mulholland had “made efforts to trace the history of the car since the auction, but have not been successful in doing so. Several people approached Mulholland over the years, claiming they own the car, but on inspection it has turned out not to be the case.”
Now back to our Monaro expert, who told us the best information he had received over the years, although he couldn’t con rm it, suggested the 1968 Bathurst winner was sitting on a rural property in Western Australia, out in the elements, slowly rotting away. The car’s owner, our man says, was oblivious to the part his car had played in Bathurst history.
Anyone keen to emulate the efforts of Saroo, the orphaned Indian boy who was adopted by a Tasmanian couple and who later used satellite photos on the internet to nd his rst home and therefore his biological mother in India? Saroo’s story was immortalised in the Academy Awardwinning movie Lion.
Maybe an AMC reader might nd immortal muscle via the magic of Google Earth? After all, regional Western Australia encompasses only 2.5 million square kilometres or so...
The late Brier Thomas’s haunting photo of the EXO-100-numberplated GTS 327 sitting forlornly in the pitlane darkness, jacked-up and bonnet-up, is the last image we’ve seen of the famous car.