Morris's mistaken identity

Our regular columnist Bob Morris read our recent feature on Kingsley Hibbard and his Falcon XY GT-HO Phase III (AMC #101) with keen interest.

By coincidence, it turns out that Bob went to Melbourne on that same 1971 Sandown 250 weekend which landed Hibbard in hot water with the local Highway Patrol. Bob headed south down the Hume with a mate of his to collect his new Phase III in preparation for Bathurst. After picking up the car, they then stayed on in Melbourne to watch the Sandown race before driving the car back to Sydney.

But they only got as far as Albury before Morris was pulled over by the police. As Bob’s new Phase III was the same colour as Hibbard’s car, the cops had reason to suspect that Kingsley was at it again!

“I wasn’t speeding or doing anything silly,” Bob recalls. “We didn’t get booked or anything; they just wanted to look at the car once they realised I wasn’t Kingsley Hibbard.

“The thing with that trip was that the heater in that car wasn’t working – it either wasn’t hooked up or it wasn’t there, and the vents were jammed open – and it was a really cold night. I had every bit of clothing on, including my driving suit, which I must have taken down there in case I ended up getting a drive at Sandown with someone, just to try to keep warm.

“The car had already been race-prepared at Lot 6, so it had a full roll-cage in it. My mate was in the passenger’s seat, and the roll bars they did for those cars ran down into the passenger’s footwell, so he’s there with his feet either side of the roll bar, and freezing like I was.

“There was one thing in the Kingsley Hibbard story, where it was said there was a certain number of yellow GTs made – that’s not quite correct. There were the muddy yellow coloured ones, and there were the Yellow Glow ones which was what mine and Kingsley’s were. It wasn’t a Falcon colour; you couldn’t order a Falcon in that colour. It was an Escort colour, so it was in the Ford paint range, and so I got them to build my car in that colour. I just thought that colour would look different, and it would look good on a GT Falcon. They said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do a minimum of six cars in that colour’. So there were six Phase IIIs in that Yellow Glow, and I think three of them were at Bathurst…

“It then became a popular colour.”