Cover story: Repco GT-HO
It’s 50 years since the first Falcon GTHO model hit roads and racetracks. To celebrate this golden anniversary we present the story of an early XW ‘Phase 1’ that played an important part in the development of the factory racing HOs. While its provenance i
The story of an early XW ‘Phase 1’ that played an important part in the development of the factory racing HOs.
Under the covers
Long-term Perth-based Ford enthusiast Grant Matusiak was enjoying a Christmas party in 2004 with family and friends when a friend of Grant’s brother volunteered, “My dad’s got a GT-HO at home.” To raised eyebrows he explained that it was a special car (Duh!), with a “special” Windsor engine. Later that night the ‘dad’ – Chris Stanley, an ex-Repco executive who had long since moved to Western Australia – rang and his son put Grant on the phone. There was no talk of buying or selling, but Stanley suggested that Grant might like to come and have a look.
What Grant had innocently stumbled upon was a single vehicle, pushed into a carportcum-garage, with a tatty cover over it. But any lack of presentation was more than made up for by a provenance that makes this Falcon true Australian muscle car royalty.
It was, as promised, a 1969-build GT-HO Falcon, what retrospectively is called a Phase I. But more than that, it was a graduate of the Ford Special Vehicles program, based at Lot 6 Mahoneys Road, and the very car that had been used to develop the Falcons’ dual-plate clutch. It had never been raced, and had just road use and 70,000 miles under its belt when found.
“When I rst saw it, it had a drop-sheet over it and stuff stacked on top,” relates Grant. “You couldn’t even see the car until you pulled it all off. I couldn’t believe that here was this GT-HO being used as a storage shelf.
“It wasn’t in bad condition but would need a fair bit of work to make it driveable. I asked him if he was interested in selling. He said he wasn’t but he might be at some time in the future. A few weeks later I gave him another call to give him another prod. This continued over the next few months and about six months later he rang me and said he was prepared to sell. We negotiated a price and it ended up in my driveway.
“Chris was kind of aware of what the car was. He’d had a talk to other people before I
This is how the GT-HO looked when Grant purchased the car in the noughties. purchased it, and he knew it was a valuable car. I didn’t get it cheaply for the time, and I had to stump up a reasonable amount, considering it wasn’t running, but I could see down the road, with its history, what the car could be worth.
“I’d looked around at a few GTs and HOs before but nothing really grabbed me, but when I heard the back story to this car I knew this was special. Chris had worked at Repco at the time and when we went through the story of this car I thought, ‘Wow, this is a special piece of Ford motoring history in Australia.’”
Over the ensuing 15 years Matusiak has discovered a great deal about what made it special, but a few questions about its early history remained. He rst contacted us in late 2017 to discuss the possibility of an AMC story. We instantly knew we had an appropriate cover car for our 50th anniversary GT-HO celebratory issue – this very edition – if he was prepared to wait 18 months. He was.
It’s actually a car that AMC brie y mentioned in issue #44 from 2009, when marking the GT-HO’s 40th anniversary via an in-depth technical examination of the rst XW HO and the Al Turner-led in-house factory Ford race team’s earliest activities. That story included a list of the ‘works’ cars from 1969. The list ran to ve Brambles Red vehicles, two listed as GT prototype/racecars, two dedicated racecars and a Repco development car. Few further details were provided about the latter.
The rst reference to this car, JG33JA27050, in our mag was way back in issue #15’s Muscle Mail section, when a letter writer known as ‘The Insider,’ believed to be Ford archivist Adrian Ryan, shared information “about a special batch of Ford muscle cars, which were built sequentially” and “ordered directly by the Ford Motor Company for special use.” The rst was
the famed 428ci Bill Bourke Special, the second was earmarked for racing, but our mystery man couldn’t shed much light on the third.
We are pleased we can now tell you more about that Repco machine! And help Grant ll in some more gaps about its history. Like all good tales, there remains an element of mystery about one or two aspects of its life – including the engine that has powered this beast since 1969 – as we will explain over the coming pages.
Repco enters the story
After construction, Grant Matusiak’s Falcon was taken to the Repco Clutch Company in August 1969. When it arrived it had two principal people waiting for it: 33 year-old chief engineer Alan Warby and 23 year-old clutch specialist Rodger Moore. Now both retired and living in the afterglow of lifetime careers with Repco, they still keenly recall that red Falcon GT-HO and have watched much of its subsequent career.
Repco Clutch was a signi cant player in the Australian automotive world, but with the decline of manufacturing in Australia and the drop in manual gearbox popularity, like so many of
Repco’s offshoot businesses, it was sold off to a smaller concern and it continued to shrink, and all documentation has long since been lost.
According to Warby and Moore, in late 1968 Ford Product Engineering at Geelong met with Repco Clutch Company in commercial con dence. “That was pretty critical,” explains Warby. In other words this was top secret. It was all verbal, sitting down around a table, “That’s how things went in those days,” says Warby. The brief from Ford was to develop a clutch that would optimise the power transmission in the planned new 351 Falcons, and to keep it all within the standard bellhousing. From an engineering point-of-view this was quite a task, but there were no two better people in Australia to carry it out. Both were, and remain, highly regarded by people involved in motor racing in Australia in the 1960s and ’70s.
Ford wanted a clutch system for the proposed GT-HO 351 V8 vehicle for the Bathurst race, but of course it had to be suitable for road use so that the vehicles could be sold to the public. Ford was to blueprint the engines and increase its peak capacity to over 9000rpm with a considerable increase in torque. “The real issue was that in spinning the clutch up to those revs we couldn’t go any larger in diameter because the friction material would blow apart,” says Warby. “There were different materials that might have withstood the power at the revs they wanted to achieve, but the problem then became one of it handling like a passenger vehicle.”
All of those details would be solved within the Repco Clutch engineering department, which had a team of about six people.
The responsibility for the project was given to Rodger. “He was a good operator and would get the job done quickly,” was Warby’s summary of
his choice of engineer. “At that stage I was chief engineer and I had my day to day responsibilities of running engineering within the company.
“At that time we were providing the clutch for the Falcon,” explains Warby. “It was a 9-1/2 inch diaphragm clutch and it was at its maximum capacity.”
Earlier Ford V8 vehicles, including the 289ci engines, used a larger imported clutch but this was deemed unsuitable for the new vehicles because, while it would have transmitted the torque, it wouldn’t have coped with the revs expected from the new engine. Repco Clutch accepted the challenge.
“At that stage, I’m pretty sure,” added Warby, “the product had to be made in Australia. Time was also of the essence, and though we can’t recall now what it was it was a panic.
“The challenge was to design a system unique to the passenger vehicle within the space con nes because we weren’t allowed to change the bellhousing and everything had to be done within that con ned space.
“In anticipation of achieving the objectives and coming up with a suitable design we had to also develop a heavy duty burst test machine to permit the lab to safely test the clutch at revs in excess of 10,000rpm. We wanted to make sure it didn’t pop off when Mr Moffat was honky-tonking up the straight at Bathurst and hit the rst turn, missed a change and the revs went somewhere above what they believed would happen.
“This was done by adding a gearbox to up the nal revs within the machine. This machine had to be developed at the same time as we were designing and developing the clutch.”
“Even the choice of materials was very critical,” interceded Moore. “A standard clutch system had ordinary grey cast iron, whereas this Right: Grant Matusiak’s GT-HO highlights that various suppliers and Ford departments other than FSV contributed to developing these mighty beasts.
clutch had spheroidal graphite cast iron which has an increased tensile strength.”
“We chose to go down that path because we felt this was the only way to achieve the revs that they were potentially talking about and to transmit the torque,” Warby continued. “The real weak point was the woven friction material, because it used to fly apart pretty quickly. We chose to go with the known material because we had these other parameters to meet, such as it must be a smooth engagement, it must not shudder and so on. People said we should have used a metallic friction material but we simply didn’t have time to adapt those things.
“It was quickly identified that a dual plate 9-1/2 inch system would in principle meet the specifications, and utilising as much as possible of the existing componentry would be an advantage considering the time constraints. This was an obvious solution for the 351 engine. It had to be ready for the next Bathurst race. I’m not sure now when they first came to us, but it meant a pretty flat chat effort to have it done.”
Open-wheeler racecars with limitations on clutch diameter and using higher rpm had used multi-disc clutch systems, but according to Warby and Moore as of 1968 no road-going passenger vehicle worldwide had ever used a multi-disc clutch system. It is not uncommon now for more exclusive higher priced vehicles to use a form of multi-disc clutch.
“Ford was very guarded with its ultimate aims,” added Moore. “They did give us the engine specifications but really it was only very limited data.”
“It was basically the revs and the transmission and they said don’t change anything in the bellhousing,” Warby continued. “The constraints of the environment were really critical, and the inability to change the bellhousing, and I keep emphasising that because we really had no space to work in.
“The cover assembly had to be mounted on pads, back off the flywheel, to accommodate the two clutch plates and intermediate pressure plate, and there’s never much room in bellhousings anyway. The intermediate pressure plate, which is a drive plate as well, had separator clips on it which were designed to ensure the release of the two clutch plates was even and centrally operating.
“A number of pads were designed and tested to mount the cover assembly and provide a positive drive for the intermediate plate. Finally the cylindrical posts, or driven blocks, with high tensile mounting bolts, were used. We had a few blow-ups on the burst test machine. Some of the pads, which were made of cast iron initially, had a bit of a failure then we quickly realised that the cylindrical drive block was the answer.”
The Repco team began work on the clutch long before the Phase I cars went into production. Having successfully put it through its burst tests,
they then trialled it on then standard issue Falcon V8s: “Previous models and smaller engines, of course,” said Moore.
The design was nalised and samples prepared for approval and when that came through the Ford senior engineers visited Repco Clutch to witness the burst tests in the machine. These happened at night as it was the best time to get it done quickly as time was pressing for the race date of October 5. They passed all the tests and approval was given for it to go into production.
“The tuning of the clutch plates and the cushioning between the friction materials, combined with the release characteristics of the whole system, were tested in the vehicle but they were at normal driving speeds and did not involve us,” said Warby.
At this distance there is no accurate way of assessing how long this all took, but it was probably around nine months. There was a lot of
“We were told it was effectively capable of winning Bathurst; that it was prepared like that.” – Former Repco engineer Rodger Moore
work to produce tooling and testing equipment.
“We went up to Bathurst petri ed that something was going to happen, even though the lab tests were all saying it was okay,” Warby continued. “The clutch did its job, and always has done and the clutch developed in Grant’s car still works.
“The car remained at Repco Clutch for over a year and was sold, under very strict restrictions. While it remained at Repco Clutch it was used essentially by people like Rodger and the general manager of the day, Hans van Vugt, who used it as a company car and as a general conveyance. The latter also had something of a reputation of taking people for a ride up the side road at excess speed. He had a holiday house up at Eildon and so it did trips up there. We were checking it to see that it was still okay but otherwise it Top: It’s likely the XW shown in the background top left of this Bathurst 1969 paddock shot is the Repco development XW GT-HO. Our feature car was delivered sans radio, and no aerial is apparent in this 50-year old image. Frustratingly, the EK Holden obscures the numberplate. Could it be VIC KJD-811?
Above: When Grant removed the transmission for the restoration he spotted that the bellhousing was modified by the Repco engineers to allow access to work on the clutch in situ. The angle bracket used to mount the dial gauge to take measurements is also still in place.
was just accumulating miles.
“This whole project was the product of the hard work of a lot of people at Repco. It was a team effort and everyone was pretty proud of the outcome.”
That twin-plate clutch, by the way, was later adapted for the Ford FG truck, for the Chrysler Valiant and the Leyland Terrier truck.
Post Repco Life
The Falcon wasn’t exactly an inert player after its work in the initial clutch development at Repco. It was driven to Bathurst for the 1969 Hardie-Ferodo 500 by Repco’s Hans van Vugt and other senior Repco execs, plus Warby and Moore, to see how their handiwork performed. Van Vugt was boasting to anyone who would listen that they had got there “very quickly” on just the one tank (36 gallons) of fuel.
It wasn’t equipped with a rollcage but was available, if needed, for spare parts for the three factory racecars (#59D Leo Geoghegan/Ian Geoghegan, #60 Fred Gibson/Barry Seton and #61 Allan Moffat/ Alan Hamilton) had they come-a-cropper during Saturday practice. Thankfully they didn’t and it remained intact. It was reportedly used on several occasions
to take Ford factory sponsor VIPs for laps of the track, a heart-in-mouth experience for the uninitiated in those days. This is something that the Repco engineers would not con rm or deny. The best we could get was a, “I can’t comment on that,” from Rodger Moore.
After the Repco GM had been promoted to a new position Ford agreed that the Falcon could be sold to an executive at the company, Chris Stanley, on several strict conditions. This included being repainted a colour other than Brambles Red, to help hide its identity as a development car. Thus Ford repainted it white. It was a thorough job that involved removing all pinch welding and door trims and masking the interior; it was painted in the hinges, in the door jambs, and the boot interior and engine bay were painted in satin black without removing the engine. The other proviso was that it could not be taken to any Ford dealer for at least two years for service or repair. The new owner had to sign an agreement to that effect. Ford was jealously guarding its secrets of
what had been done to its factory cars – and they did not want anyone, even their own dealerships, being able to sniff around one of their cars.
Stanley was the personnel manager for Repco at the time of the Falcon’s residence there.
“The GT-HO was the most powerful production car in its day, a lovely car,” recalls Stanley. “The general manager drove it for the best part of 12 months and it was going to go back to Ford, but I decided I would like it, so I spoke to them and they agreed to sell it to me.
“They were particularly concerned that other people didn’t get to look at their technology or the engine and so they requested that I keep it to their people as far as mechanical work and
Left: Past owner Chris Stanley with the car in 1971. He purchased it with Ford stipulating a colour change, hence why it was white for a brief period of its life. Right: Go west, life is peaceful there... When Chris Stanley shifted from Melbourne to Perth, so did the former Repco development car. It’s shown here in 1981, back in red, on the trip across the Nullabor.
servicing was concerned. I dealt with the Ford people at what I was told was their ‘experimental division,’ which from memory was at Camp Road. I never took the car there, and any time it had to go one our engineers would drive it over for me. Occasionally both they and Repco used to borrow the car from me for a few days while they’d be testing various components. They’d want me to drive X number of miles or X number of clutch changes within a certain period and they’d tear it apart to see how things were going.”
Who or what was at the “Camp
Road experimental division” remains unknown.
Signs of the ongoing work which was undertaken on the Falcon included a set of later PBR (Repco) brakes, as tted to Phase III Falcons, when Grant found it. He restored it back to the original specs in his restoration.
Stanley drove the car as an everyday means of transport until 1982, after his 1981 move to Perth. “Before we moved we sold the wife’s car and I kept the GT-HO and we drove it across towing a trailer of goodies and I was quite amazed that even at about 80mph we got 27 miles per gallon.”
Eventually he had been given a company car, so it had become a second vehicle and nally it got to the stage where it was just sitting in a garage with a dust cover over it.
“In 2003 I was having some renovations done on the house and we had some carpenters in and they’d been through the garage and obviously had lifted the cover and over the next month I began getting all these phone calls from every man and his dog who I didn’t know wanting to come and have a look at the car. I let Grant come over and take a look because we had a personal contact. There had been one of these cars over at McInerney Ford that was in the actual showroom and it was stolen, driven It’s amazing the things you find on a ex-development car when you restore it. Owner Grant Matusiak was intrigued to find it was fitted with Repco-owned PBR brand brakes, as fitted to Phase IIIs.
out through the glass, and never seen again. So I decided enough’s enough and I’d sell it.
“I didn’t like to see it go but you have to move on. It was a sad spot for all the family; the car had become known as ‘Henry Ho’ and we all had a soft spot for it. While I had ideas of restoring it I wasn’t getting any closer to it, and if you did and you took it out anywhere you ran the risk of having your hubcaps stolen. There were a number of times where I’d park it at the shops or whatever and you’d come back and the trims would be gone because they’re collector’s items. It just wasn’t practical to have it out as an everyday car.
“It was a great car to drive, once you got past the fact that every time you’re sitting at the lights you have some idiot next to you who wants to drag you off in his souped-up bit of crap. You realise that that costs you sets of tyres and you grow out of it pretty quickly. I remember the Dunlop Aquajet tyres on it were pretty terrible.”
Nearly matching numbers
When Grant Matusiak took ownership of the car, he soon realised that the “special piece of Ford motoring history” he had acquired was, for all of its time capsule qualities, also something of a mystery mobile. On close examination, several aspects left him scratching his head.
“One of the things which struck me as unusual was that the engine number is actually eight numbers different to the chassis number, but it was rst registered with those numbers on August 22, 1969 and I have the rego certi cate to con rm that,” Grant told us.
This then became a major source of enquiry while writing this article. The vehicle was the 33rd Phase I GT-HO off the production line, in early August 1969, though plated July 1969. According to respected Falcon GT historian Mark Barraclough, the rst two GT-HO racecars were upgraded GTs built in June, then “there was a
rst XW HO batch (12 cars) in late July and then the main August run (second batch) was kicked off as soon as those 12 were signed off on July 27... The rst and second batches were both QC’ed on August 20-22.”
According to Ford factory paperwork held by ex-Lot 6 engineer Ian Stockings, Grant’s car, 27050, was built to SIDO No. 869255 for Dealer Code 3992 but has no retail date against the record. Curiously, Dealer Code 3992 was, according to Barraclough, “technically the Ford Employee purchase program.” He continued, “I’m a little unclear how Repco was added as an employee but it sounds like an accounting convenience to me as 3999 (the usual Dealer Code for vehicles going to Lot 6) was strictly for vehicles capitalised as Ford-owned assets.”
Grant’s Falcon was rst registered on August 22, 1969, to Repco Transmission and Clutch Co, with Victorian KJD-811 registration, but remained the property of Ford Australia until it was sold to Repco’s Chris Stanley. Curiously, Repco Transmission and Clutch Co was a different entity to Repco Clutch which did the clutch development work. Confusing, we know.
So, who might be able to resolve the issue of why the non-matching shock tower and engine numbers? At rst we speculated that it was simply the result of an urgent need to get the car out of Lot 6 to Repco to complete their clutch development and so the rst available
nished engine went into the engine bay and it was moved on. However, this is disputed by Bill Santuccione, who still keeps his hand in with Duvall Motorsport Australia in suburban Braeside in Melbourne, an ex-Repco dyno wizard from the days of the Repco Brabham team and who was in charge of engine building at Lot 6 until 1973.
In fact, the bigger question is, is this a car that was prepped by Ford Special Vehicles at the Lot 6 Mahoneys Road workshop?
“I’ve been hearing rumours of this Falcon over in Perth for a long time but, to be honest, I don’t have any speci c memories of it after all these years,” Santuccione told AMC. Regarding the engine/chassis number disparity he added: “If I was rebuilding an engine from a car, especially in the early days, I was pretty meticulous about making sure the original engine went back into that car. There would have had to be a speci c reason why it didn’t.”
Adding a different view to the issue, Barraclough commented, “I can point to many examples where the original engines were not assigned to the same vehicle. It’s possible (engine number) GL1299C failed the start-up test on the line and was simply pulled and (engine number) GL1307C was put in which I’ve seen before and may be the more likely given the rego documentation and timeframe.”
Ex-Lot 6 engineer Ian Stockings told AMC: “I have a bit of a struggle with this. I can’t nd any of the guys who can remember us preparing a vehicle for anybody else. We wouldn’t have blueprinted the engine and all that other work for a car that we weren’t going to race... The blueprinting didn’t give any quantum horsepower increase so I can’t see that we would have done it for the purpose of clutch development because the power increases wouldn’t have been that signi cant.
“The cars Lot 6 is supposed to have produced and the engines we’re supposed to have built have us scratching our heads at times because nobody can recollect any of it. We’ve come to the conclusion that there must have been another shift that came in ve minutes after we locked up and who were gone ve minutes before we arrived the next morning because so many Despite being first registered to the Repco Transmission Co, the car remained the property of Ford Australia. things that were supposed to have gone on in the Lot 6 garage we have no knowledge of.
“The only thing that we did for other departments – and it was usually the marketing office or the public relations office – was that we occasionally serviced cars and tuned them, but that was it. I would think that if it came to Lot 6 and it was somebody else’s car it wouldn’t have had any more done to it than a service, and that would have been reluctant. It would have been because an instruction came from a director, ‘Don’t ask questions, do it.’ The only cars that I can think of that we would have given the full
“One of the things which struck me as unusual was that the engine number is actually eight numbers different to the chassis number, but it was first registered with those numbers on August 22, 1969” - Owner Grant Matusiak
blueprint and other work would be the ones that we raced and that is less than 10 cars over the years. We did the occasional spare engine and stuff like that.
“Al Turner was very strict. ‘You guys work for me and you work on cars for races that we’ve entered,’ and he would get very, very cross if we even thought about sidetracking our efforts and any diversion that didn’t have his full blessing and authority. He was very strict about that and that’s why he was very good at running a racing team. We did get a few distractions at times, but they were only ones that were approved by him.”
Lot 6 engine builder John Mepstead, who worked in the Mahoneys Road workshop from Easter 1969, told us he had no recollection of the vehicle.
That former Lot 6 personnel have no speci c recollections of Grant’s ‘Repco development Falcon’ surprised us, especially considering the car’s otherwise impeccable credentials. But then 50 years is a long time ago and perhaps the time
it spent, if any, in Ford Special Vehicles’ skunk works was eeting in comparison to the racecars they so lovingly prepared.
Meantime, Repco engineer Rodger Moore says that they were told only that the car was from “a special area, but that was not part of our brief. However, to the best of my knowledge we were told it was effectively capable of winning Bathurst; that it was prepared like that.”
Chris Stanley added, “I always knew it was a one-off vehicle. It was certainly a blueprint motor. There was a lot of discussion about that in Repco. That was the understanding amongst the Repco people at the time, whether you call it general knowledge or whatever. I understood that it had been on a dyno and was putting out considerably more power than the production GT-HOs. I recall hearing at the time that the camshaft was not standard.”
We went through the list of seemingly unique engine features on Grant’s car with Santuccione: The less than one gram tolerance on the rotating assembly in the engine; the shims on the intake valves; remnants of some sort of sealer on the front of the block which appears to have been used around water jackets of the head gaskets and squeezed out between the head and block; and the slight variation of camshaft open/close timing points compared to a new old stock genuine Ford HO cam.
“Certainly this engine does not sound like a regular production engine installed in that car. Our blueprinted engines would have been individually and collectively built to within a gram. The non-conventional or production-type sealant is out of production car character. None of the production cylinder heads ever, ever were shimmed; everything was done to a tolerance factor that could have been less than half a mill but the production line people didn’t have time to chase the last two or three pounds of spring pressure. The advancing and retarding of the standard camshafts was something that we evaluated – and that
ts it into the category of a blueprinted operation. Now if we’d done that on a test engine, for example, and we decided, yes, that was the optimum point and that engine was put aside, maybe Repco, for the purposes of clutch development, said ‘we need to do a sign-off in an operational racespec car.’ Is it out of the question that Al Turner made that test engine available? But I’m going to say that we wouldn’t have installed the engine.”
The only problem with that theoretical scenario is that the installed engine is just eight numbers different from the chassis number, so in other words both effectively came off the production lines very close together, and since the car was registered on August 22, just days after being completed, that engine in the car could not have gone through a parts development program somewhere and been sitting around in the time frame available.
“Someone in some very short space of time has produced the sort of engine that I would have built for the Phase Is,” Santuccione continued, “but I’m going to ask the question, which I’m sure you’ve asked, where the hell did that engine come from, how did it get into the car? I’m pretty con dent, with a 98 percent factor, of saying that it was not installed at Lot 6 because in the early days we didn’t have the staff. Maybe if I saw the engine or components I might say, ‘Ha, I recognise that,’ but now it’s back together and back in the car.
“My recollections are similar to John’s and Ian’s: I just don’t recall the car. From day one, yes, we did the rallycross programs and other things but predominantly everyone’s workload was huge. I don’t recall any eight-hour days, but I can recall plenty of 18- and 24-hour days. I cannot see Al Turner agreeing to such a car. It couldn’t have happened because we didn’t have the staff at that time. And if it came and went more than once, which your people say, one of us would remember it. If I had to say a de nitive yes or no I would have to say my judgement is no.”
Santuccione did, however, suggest an alternative to the Lot 6 connection, and that was Ford’s own Service Garage. “They used to look after the CEO/department head type vehicles and some of those did have allocated GT-HOs, GTs or special builds so that there was an area within the company’s Service Garage that may have handled something like this.
“One part of this story makes perfect sense to me but I have reservations about some of it.
“It’s unlikely that we would have had the authority, the exibility or the capacity to do it. If it happened only once, well, I suppose we could say it had just disappeared into the quagmire of the years and the workload but if it supposedly happened more than once then I think someone would remember it.
“The Ford Service Department was removed one or two kilometres up the road, away from the main manufacturing plant and also from the Head Office facility. It may be deemed to be a remote or removed facility from the main operation and I’m wondering if the interaction with a Ford workshop was with the Service Garage and not with the Lot 6 workshop. The gates at Lot 6 were kept locked 24 hours a day, and anyone coming in or out, for any reason, needed a green light from Al Turner. I think we would have recalled this car if it had been around.
“The engine does sound unique. But how did that happen? I can’t answer that one and maybe no-one ever will.”
Pedantic resto
Grant Matusiak is today a self-employed electrician and is no latecomer to the automotive world. In the early 1980s, when he was 16, before he had a driver’s licence, he bought his rst set of wheels, an Electric Blue XW Fairmont, which he still owns. It’s been through quite a transformation since those days, and after a period as a daily driver for the young electrical apprentice it became a some-time drag racer.
“It’s quite a rare car: Matching numbers 302, four-speed with light grey interior,” boasts Grant. “It had nitrous running through it back in the mid’80s. It was not treated with a huge amount of respect, I’d have to admit, and got a fair hiding in its early days with me.”
Grant says his family had mostly Fords but the brand wasn’t a welded-on aspect to life.
“In those days every second apprentice had a Torana or a Falcon or similar. I just sucked it all up and began my life-long passion for Aussie muscle.”
In the early 1990s Grant bought the ex-Wally Kleszcz XP Falcon two-door drag racecar, heavily modifying it and, with a 377 Ford for
Top: It was a long, long resto project.
Far right: Owner Grant Matusiak has been on a long quest to unlock the car’s full history. He’s hoping this story is read by someone who can explain why the engine and chassis numbers are eight apart. Above left: Engine bay as found, painted black. Centre left: The car’s original clutch.
Left: The bottom end of the engine removed for resto. Right: White and red paint evident around fuel filler. power from 1996 to 2001, ran it down into the 9.8s on the quarter mile as a regular at the old Ravenswood and the new Kwinana strips in WA.
In 2004 Grant purchased another XW as a project car and was still in the “gathering bits” stage at the time of that fateful Christmas gathering when he heard his rst reports of an XW Falcon at Chris’ house.
“The car was almost completely unmolested: it was all there and pretty much original. It wasn’t in great shape but wasn’t too bad considering it had been sitting for a long time. The core plugs were rusted out but everything was there. The tyres were completely at, it was down on the rims, there was a forest of spiderwebs underneath and it had been damp in the boot so the fuel tank had rust in it. The engine had all its correct parts, right down to the original plug wires. The interior was really good and it was a sound unmodi ed car mostly as it had left the factory. It had a radio though, as I later found out, it had not been manufactured with one so it had been
added later by someone, I suspect Repco’s Hans van Vugt as Chris Stanley told me it was there when he bought it. I just looked at it as a good long-term investment and something that I could have a bit of fun with.
“Mechanically the car looked great, but it had been sitting for a long time so everything would need to be stripped and checked. All the driveline was completely original though the rear brakes had seizeded up. There was only 70,000 miles on the clock – I’ve only put a couple of hundred on it since. The car was last registered, in Victoria, in 1982 and it’s still got that rego sticker on the side window. A rego search suggested the car had not been registered here in WA.
“There were little rust bubbles in the doors and a little around the fuel tank in the boot. The car was structurally really good, just worn down.
“It had originally been one of only 14 Phase Is in Brambles Red, but Ford insisted that it was repainted in white before they’d agree to sell it to Chris. Then a few years later he’d had it repainted in red again, in Vermilion Fire, which he’d thought it had been. To the eye it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.
“All the bodywork was done here at my place by a good mate, an old school panel beater, Peter ‘Pedro’ Calautti, and another good mate, Gary Stirling, did the painting. The body just needed a little ne-tuning and getting the three coats of paint off. I left a section on the A-pillar, under the stainless moulding, where it’s rubbed back through the three stages of the car’s life. You can see the Vermillion paint job that was on it when I bought it, see the white and the Brambles Red from when it was rst built. It
“I love this car. I’ve done a full nut and bolt restoration on it. Bar the panel and paint I’ve done almost everything myself. The car went back to bare metal, and all up I spent 10 years restoring it.”
keeps the history of the car as part of the car.”
After refurbishing the car, Grant largely kept quiet about the car’s existence until 2017, though stories that it was out there somewhere have been echoing within the Falcon brotherhood.
“At the time I bought the car a little bit leaked out among Ford enthusiasts in Perth, but I made it pretty clear that it was not for sale and I would be hanging on to it for a while. I’ve had a couple of offers in the last couple of years but while they were reasonable they were not enough to tempt me to part with my pride and joy.
“People knew the car was out there. I had it on display at the All-Ford day in 2018 and a guy approached me and asked if this was the car from ... and he named the suburb where Chris lived? When I asked him how he knew that he said that a mate of his had been doing some work there and had seen it.
“I love this car. I’ve done a full nut and bolt restoration on it. Bar the panel and paint, I’ve done almost everything myself. The car went back to bare metal, and all up I spent 10 years restoring it. I got it stripped quickly, but I’m fairly pedantic about things. For example you can buy riveted lower balljoints now but when I started the resto you couldn’t so I spent a fair bit of time making my own dies. I had whole boxes of old balljoints, because I didn’t want reproductions – I wanted to keep the car original – so I stripped them all down and got all the best bits and made up new balljoints. I made up my own rivets. I got a press and made my own guides and pressed my own rivets in to match the factory rivets, all for originality.
“That’s the sort of thing that slowed me down because I’d get hung up on little things along the way, just chasing concourse perfection. You see a lot of cars that are, in my opinion, over-restored. I spent a lot of time reproducing factory nishes with their imperfections.
“The engine was immaculate: standard bore, standard crank. Being what I was told is a Lot 6 car, everything was blueprinted. When I pulled the engine down it was all original parts, it had never been apart before. The rod-piston-pin assemblies were all within one gram, that’s a tolerance you just don’t get in production engines. It still has the original pistons, and we just gave it a hone, put in new rings and bearings, the original factory camshaft, the original high performance lifters in their original holes. I also put in new valves, springs, collets and retainers for peace of mind, but other than that it is the original, as delivered, blueprinted engine.
“It’s a really smooth engine that easily runs past the 5500rpm red line and the car drives beautifully. I have a new old stock Phase I camshaft with the right part number and when I put the engine back together I degreed both cams and they were very similar but the one that was in the HO, while very similar in duration and lift, had the actual opening and closing points a little different.
“Then the 2017 GT Nationals were coming up in Perth, so about six months before I bit the bullet and sent in my entry. That gave me a deadline and six months to nish the car and motivated me to power through it and get it done.
“The Nationals were on over Easter and the Above: It was restored in time for the 2017 Falcon GT Nationals in Perth. If only showgoers knew of its past. Right: Ace snapper Clair Negri photographed the car in the workshop where Grant did his apprenticeship. car had to be there for scrutineering on the Friday morning. I red the engine for the rst time on the Thursday, the night before. It was a last-minute thing. I burned the midnight oil and worked to 2am every night for the month before. We managed to get there and the car was really well received. Although not a hundred percent
nished, it made it to the top four XW GT-HO overall and we received the trophy for the top XW GT-HO Phase I restored.”
Grant’s wife Sabrina is not a huge car fan, but she appreciates that it’s a hobby that he really enjoys. “I’d like to thank Sabrina, my kids Joel and Tayla for their support, as well as Rob and Peter Lush at Applied Automotives, Tony and his staff at Superoo Falcon Spares, Paul at Positive Auto Electrical, Muzz, Glen, Grant S, Trav, Gary S, Pedro and Will for their support in getting this project nished.”
AMC was pleased this story could shed more light on Ford Special Vehicles’ methods and operations in 1969 and ll in some gaps for Grant.Yet, what we learned posed as many questions as answers and opened our eyes to other possibilities. In particular, it’s entirely feasible there were other departments at Ford with engineering staff able to blueprint a racespec engine “capable of winning Bathurst”, as Repco’s Rodger Moore outlined. Perhaps there’s someone reading this story with the answers. If so, they know where to nd us.