1969 – debut winner
Not long after the Easter Bathurst meet Gillard got a phone call from fellow driver, Warren Gracie. What was he doing in October, Gracie wanted to know. Gracie was looking for someone to share a Cooper S in the Bathurst 500.
“I told him I couldn’t afford to do it, I didn’t have the money, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, you can blueprint the motor and I’ll supply the money.’
“Warren didn’t have much money himself. His mate had bought the car on hire purchase and signed it over to Warren. Like every Bathurst, it was done in a bit of a rush. I did the motor; John Bruderlin from Lynx gave me a hand. He has been a great help to me.
“When practice nished, I was quicker, and being the gentleman he was, Warren said: ‘You can start, you do two thirds of the race and I’ll do the middle bit, because we can win this.’”
It was a smorgasbord of cars that year in class C – the Minis, Mazda R100 (the rst rotaries at Bathurst), Valiant Pacer, Fiat 125, Capri 1600 and even a Renault 16TS.
“The Pacer should have won but they ran out of brakes. We didn’t change brakes or tyres. Just fuel.
“Gracie said to me, ‘Watch out on the rst lap – when you get to Conrod, there’ll be faster cars coming up behind you that missed the start, all that sort of stuff, and don’t get involved when everyone’s running into one another.’
“I can remember it like it was yesterday – it was the most exciting rst lap I ever drove!”
It was a memorable opening lap, of
course, being the year of the famous Bill Brown rollover at Skyline.
“We got to the end of Mountain Straight, and in front of me there were two Cooper Ss and an Alfa and they’re hitting each other. Warren’s advice was fresh in my ears so I backed out of it a bit. ‘You can’t win this on the rst lap,’ he’d said – which is exactly what I used to tell the Lansvale guys years later!
“We’re heading towards Skyline, and they’re waving yellow ags. I’m looking at the yellow ag, and now there’s two ags, and then I can see tyre smoke coming up over the crest, and I’m thinking ‘geez, there’s something bad happening here!’
“I got on the brakes, moved over to the left and put my hand out the window. I went to the left because the smoke seemed to be to the right. That saved me. The two Cooper Ss that were beside me with the Alfa both crashed. I got three-quarters of the way through it, and I stopped because the track was blocked. I was looking out the window at Bill Brown sitting upside down in the Falcon with fuel running out of it, and it’s lurching up and down because cars are concertinaing behind it and crashing into each other. Then Max Stewart in that red Corona thing waddles through the middle, with chrome strips and bits falling off it, and I can see he’s going to try to get through. I look in the mirror and there’s another batch of cars arriving at Skyline, all locked up. So, I’m out of there. I squeezed through and off I went. “Warren actually anticipated the crash.
He had said, ‘There’s going to be a big crash because there are a lot of people driving GTHOs and Monaros that haven’t driven these sorts of things before.’ How right he was!
“I get to Conrod Straight and I’m the only car on Conrod Straight! The rst batch of cars got through before the crash, and I was the next car through. So I’d gone from about 40th on the grid to about 10th outright – without passing anything that was moving!
“I came around onto Pit Straight and still I couldn’t see any other cars. Our crew was waving and cheering as I went past, but I’m looking for a red ag because I thought they would have stopped the race. There was no red ag, so I kept going. When I got back around to Skyline, I had to stop as they were still letting cars through! Forbesy [Bob Forbes’ Fiat, their class C opponent] was stopped trying to help someone – he thought the race had been stopped, but then he saw me go past so he jumped back in his car. So he was already a lap behind me.
“Next lap Forbesy and I had to burn off the Chev Impala ambulance that was on the way up the Mountain!
“The race went virtually like clockwork after that, apart from a clutch linkage failure, and we won the class. That was my rst and probably best Bathurst.” They were 14th overall.