From nag to thoroughbred
With Mustang’s premier return to racing Australia’s put category in the spotlight 2019, we compete on the last in the ponycar to top division.
The Ford Mustang’s return to Supercars racing conjures up memories of the great ponycars of Australian touring car history. Norm Beechey’s blue beast was followed in quick succession by Ian Geoghegan’s white Castrol car, Allan Moffat’s history-changing Coke example, then, much later, Dick Johnson’s Group A green machines.
In contrast, the most recent racer of a Mustang in the Australian Touring Car Championship has few fond memories of his steed.
History records Lawrie Nelson as the last driver to start an ATCC/Supercars championship race aboard the American muscle car.
His brief appearance at Phillip Island’s 1990 round is the latest for the iconic nameplate, up until Supercars-spec Mustangs take to the grid at the 2019 Superloop Adelaide 500.
It was not a glorious history, however, as Nelson’s Group A Mustang caused him nothing but heartache.
“There’s not much about the Mustang I really want to remember,” he told AMC. “It was really the only Ford product that was possible for Group A (early on) but, in hindsight, we would probably have never done it if we’d known more about it. As you’re probably aware, the Europeans, they don’t quite tell you everything that might not be by the rules…”
Nelson was synonymous with racing Ford’s Capri throughout the Group C era, the Melbourne-based privateer even getting a little assistance from Broadmeadows along the way.
When Group A loomed on the horizon for 1985, Nelson wanted to remain loyal to the Blue Oval, which left him with only one real option.
“I knew of the Group A Mustang that was built by the guys who used to build Capris in the UK,” Nelson said. “I’d already seen some of the drawings and stuff that they’d done for a car that had run in Belgium with Vince Woodman, who I knew because he was one of the top Capri blokes over there.”
Once Nelson committed to running a Mustang, Ford organised to import a car for him from Detroit through a dealer in Melbourne.
“It was a brand-new Silver Fox body Mustang,” he said. “We just ordered the basic car for what
we needed because we knew a lot of stuff was going to come out. I think the radio had to stay with it, but it was just an ordinary AM radio.
“When it got here, it was over at Ford’s for a couple of days for them to assess. After that, they actually brought two, three or maybe four cars into the country to assess them as to whether they would sell them in Australia.”
The silver machine actually spent a couple of weeks on Melbourne’s streets wearing trade plates so Nelson could reacclimatise himself with the left-hand driving position before starting the conversion to Group A racing trim. It was then that he began to realise just how liberal the European Mustang-runners had been in their interpretation of the rulebook.
“It was one of the rare cars where we didn’t do our own roll-cage. We sent it to a local guy,” he explained. “He rang me up and said: ‘you’d better come out here, something’s not right.’
“When he put the roll-cage in the car, there was this big gap in the rear hatch area between the oor and the wheel arch. In Europe, they’d cut and sectioned the rear guards!
“I spoke to Ford Australia about it and they said, ‘they’re going to inspect the Zakspeed cars (bought by Dick Johnson) when they come out here and then they’re going to inspect yours, and we want them to be the same.’
“So that’s what happened: we had to cut a whole section of our wheel arches so that they were wider inside the car. It probably wasn’t two inches, but there was a fair whack we had to put in.”
The car nally hit the track for the rst time at the 1984 Castrol 500 at Sandown, but a mechanical issue in practice meant he and Peter Jones raced his venerable Group C Capri one last time before taking the Mustang to Mount Panorama, where they lasted just the one lap.
“The power steering failed on it,” Nelson said. “(The Europeans) threw the power steering rack out and ran the manual steering rack. That wasn’t in the paperwork either, but we ended up doing that.”
Nelson claimed the best nish of the car’s racing life in period in Group A’s rst official race down under. The white, metallic blue and burgundy Mustang came home in sixth place in the opening race of the 1985 ATCC at Winton, the only Mustang nisher after Johnson’s overheated and Don Smith’s car failed to nish.
Nelson managed a couple more top 10 nishes at Symmons Plains and Adelaide International Raceway, but the Mustang was primarily a mid- elder as the quality and size of the Group A grid swelled during the year.
The car’s second and nal trip to the Bathurst 1000 came that October. Despite bene tting from upgrades homologated on August 1, he and Bill O’Brien made it only 18 laps into the race.
“We were supplied the wrong material distributor gear,” Nelson said. “You had to have these super-duper ones and at the time we could only get them made in Queensland, but they would shear out. They were a bronze gear
but it would chew out and damage the teeth on the camshaft.
“We bought them from the States in the end and we didn’t have any more problems.”
Unreliability was a continuing theme of the car, Nelson continuing to break the standard 302ci Windsor engine block and road car differential required by the homologation paperwork – until he came up with a creative solution of his own.
“We weren’t competitive and the Sierra was on the board by then, but Ford wasn’t giving me any money to run a Sierra,” Nelson explained.
“In those days you could talk to people at CAMS. So they said: ‘you’re never going to win anything with that, we don’t like how the car’s running at the moment and we know it’s uncompetitive, what do you want to do?’
“I told them I wanted to run a better block and better heads, and we needed to run a 9-inch diff.
“They said to me, ‘well, you go put all that stuff in your car. We are aware of it, but you be aware that if someone protests it will go through.’ And I just said, ‘okay, we’ll do that.’”
Nelson went straight to the Ford Motorsport parts catalogue and ordered himself the best bits available – or as future owner Neville Butler described to AMC, “a V8 Supercar engine with a carby on it!”
Nelson continued to campaign his Mustang at the Australian Grand Prix – including a spectacular crash with Peter Doulman in 1989 that saw the latter’s M3 drive over the Mustang’s bonnet! – and at the Sandown 500 and Victorian ATCC rounds until Phillip Island in 1990 where the car, wearing a new livery, made its last championship race start. It didn’t get very far. “As we did the warm-up laps it was alright,” Nelson said. “But as we rolled down slowly to our position on the grid she developed a nasty overhead rattle, so we just pulled off.”
Although the Mustang didn’t appear at any more ATCC rounds, it took part in two more Australian Grand Prix support events. The last of those was in 1992, Nelson’s Mustang bookending the era by taking part in the nal Group A race held on Australian soil. This was a full eight years after its debut!
The end couldn’t come soon enough for its owner.
“We’d just had enough of the car. It wasn’t getting us anywhere, we were just throwing good money after bad,” he said.
Nelson had hoped to put together funds to run a Falcon in the new winged V8 touring car formula for 1993 and had gone so far as to start sourcing parts, but when the plans fell through he tted the fuel injection and MoTec engine management system he’d acquired to the Mustang and raced it in Sports Sedans. However, a crash at Phillip Island in the mid1990s nally prompted him to park the Mustang for good.
“We got involved in a fairly big accident with Robin Doherty,” he said.
“He started off the back of the grid and decided to pass me into the kink between Southern Loop and Honda. He got all out of shape; I had nowhere to go and ran into him.
“There used to be an earth bank that ran all the way down to Honda. We ran all the way down that on our side. It didn’t do a huge amount of damage, but we sold the car in that state. I felt I’d had enough. “It had no life left in it anyway.” Maybe not as a frontline touring car or Sports
Sedan, but the Mustang went on to have quite the second life with the emergence of Group A as a historic category.
After Nelson’s Mustang sat dormant for a decade, it nally found a new suitor. Neville Butler purchased the car from Nelson in 2004 – despite being warned off it car initially.
“I’d seen that it had been advertised,” Butler told AMC. “I can’t remember who told me, but they’d seen the car and said it was really bad, that it’d had a really big hit, the windscreen was smashed and the doors didn’t open. I got out there and found it actually wasn’t that bad. The more I looked at it, the more I spoke to Lawrie, the more I thought it could be a really cool car.”
Butler didn’t waste any time readying the car for the racetrack, and with good reason. He’d been invited to a demonstration at the 2005 Clipsal 500 Adelaide, simultaneously marking 20 years of both the event and the arrival of Group A.
“That was its very rst outing. I can tell you, I drove it up the street and back down the street, and then it went in the transporter and they shipped it over to Adelaide,” he said.
“My rst time driving the car out of rst gear was turning onto the main straight at Clipsal. I’d never driven a left-hand drive car before either, so it was a baptism of re there!
“It was just fantastic. I loved the car, the sound of it, the look of it, the history … it was just a really cool, fun car to drive.”
He passed the Mustang to a new custodian in Greg Keam in 2014, who spent 18 months performing a bare shell restoration on the car.
“Thankfully I own a panel shop!” he told AMC. “It spent about two months on the rotisserie. The body was pretty good but the oor was a mess. The passenger oor and sill panel, for example, where the muffler box sits, it looks like when they rst built it they’d just jacked the car up and absolutely ogged whatever they needed with a sledgehammer to make the muffler t!”
A new steel roll-cage was installed while care was also taken on the mechanical components, with the Mustang now putting out much more power than it did back in the day.
“It (showed) about 480 horsepower on the dyno, probably about 100 horsepower up on any of the other Mustangs with the later specs it was allowed,” Keam said. “We also mucked around a fair bit with the spring rates. It actually squats and dives now! Before, you’d get a photo of the car mid-corner where I’d be just about fully on the gas, but the car would be sitting absolutely dead- at like it was parked in the garage.”
As much as Keam appreciates the unique history of his Mustang, he also loves what it’s like to drive.
“It’s an absolute ball!” the ex-rally driver said. “I’d only raced Ford Escorts on the circuits, and then jumped into a big car. I was amazed how easy it was.
“It’s just a beautiful handling car. You can throw it around, you can do whatever you like – it’s really like a big Escort!”
What’s more, it’s often a frontrunner in the Heritage Touring Car class for historic Group C and A machines, something no-one would have predicted rst time around.