Muscle Man – Ron Gillard

We’ve featured some good storytellers in the Muscle Man section over the years and Ron Gillard rates among the very best of them. Gillard is known today as one of the Great Race’s finest privateer preparers and team managers, but this issue, in the first

Not a household name but Ron Gillard has played some important roles in a long career in Australian motorsport. Part one of this Muscle Man feature focuses on Gillard the driver.

As a kid growing up in country NSW, all Ron Gillard wanted to do when he left school was to work on cars and race them. He got his wish. While nancial constraints limited what he might have achieved on-track, it would be off-track, back in the workshop, where he would make his mark on the sport. He did his apprenticeship with a South Coast Holden dealer but his racing apprenticeship came later, at Malcolm

Motors, a Sydney-based mechanical repair shop that also ran its own race team.

When Gillard left Malcolm Motors he set up his own similar business – an automotive repair shop whose specialty was motorsport. In the Group C owner/driver privateer era at Bathurst, Gillard was one of those rare and much sought-after commodities: an accomplished driver who was also a gifted mechanic that knew how to prepare a decent racecar.

This meant that he was able to make 13 Great Race appearances without breaking a promise he made in 1970 to his wife to cease spending any more money on motor racing.

As is the way with the Mountain classic, many of those campaigns ended in heartbreak and frustration – on two occasions before the race even started. But there were good times: Gillard was a class winner in his rst Great Race start, before going on to score four top 10 results. There were also moments of mirth – as described here in trademark, straight-talking (and usually hilarious) Ron Gillard style.

The list of drivers, teams and

even manufacturers with whom Gillard has worked is long and diverse. He prepared and managed almost all of the Lansvale Smash Repair Team’s Group A and V8 Supercar Holden Commodore Bathurst assaults (all from Gillard’s automotive repair business at the NSW North Coast holiday hamlet of Ballina), and it was Gillard who was responsible for the cars in the early-1980s Amaroo Park Triumph TR7 Series. Later in the ’80s he was Holden’s ‘go-to’ man when it (secretly) sought to develop the Commodore VL Turbo into a competitive Group E production racer, while Toyota engaged him in various roles including a clandestine production car racing programme and even land speed record attempts. We’ll cover that territory in part two next issue: for the moment, here is the tale of Ron Gillard, the driver, told in Ron’s own colourful words – because no one tells an anecdote quite like Ron Gillard.