1970-71 – Torana time
Gillard was married in late 1970. He made a pact with his wife, Janette, that he would no longer spend money on motor racing.
“At the time, we had nothing. From that day on I never spent any money on motor racing, until some very recent hillclimb (retirement) stuff. Most of my racing was Bathurst, helping prepare and set the car up, and co-drive it.”
The Cooper S was sold and Gillard had effectively stopped racing. But then Warren Gracie called to see if he was free in October again. Gracie wanted to run one of the new Torana GTR XU-1s.
“He bought a new one, but it was the same deal as before – he was pretty broke and I had no money. This shows you where motor racing is different today and how it went from an amateur sport to a professional one: Warren bought a brand new yellow LC XU-1, and he bought three more wheels. So we had eight wheels, including the spare, and eight Michelin radial tyres. There’s our tyres for the weekend. I blueprinted the engine and did the wheel alignment with
Heasmans, who I was quite friendly with.
“We went to Bathurst, I did two-thirds of the race like the year before, and we
nished 10th outright. First Torana on radials. That taught you how to drive a car around Bathurst – skinny 70 series Michelin XAS radials. After the race I had blisters all over my hands from the skinny steering wheel. The amount of chasing you do with the steering wheel across the top of the Mountain on radials was just mind boggling!”
Gracie sold the XU-1 to a mate the day after the race for $3000.
Gillard reckons that Gracie might have been the rst person to ever race a Torana GTR – at Easter in 1970.
“He was probably also the rst person to crash one,” Gillard adds. “After he bought it from Suttons he only got two blocks up the road before it got hit up the arse by an unregistered Falcon!”
For 1971 Gracie decided to run a GTR (not the crashed one) rather than an XU-1, to try to win class C. Gillard was on board again as codriver/preparer. But things didn’t go to plan.
“I made a bad blue with it. There were 2850cc (173ci) GTRs but I wanted to race the 2600 (161ci), because they had adjustable tappets. The trick used to be – and this was my undoing in a way – that you could make the hydraulic tappets not work by backing the tappets off until there was no clearance, so the lifter can’t pump up the piston any more. The GTRs used to pump the lifters up.
“The other thing was that there were two optional diffs: 3.08 and 3.36. I was thinking along the same lines of what I’d done with the Improved Production Mini. The shorter 3.36 would make it quicker up the mountain and across the top, and don’t worry about the straight so much. As I worked out later, the Holden six had a bad harmonic valve oat problem at about 5400rpm, which was up near peak revs. They used to make a funny tingling sound and I couldn’t gure out what it was. I found out after the race.
“Warren blew the engine at the end of Conrod in practice. It was at peak revs there, and it was the best dropped valve I’ve ever seen in a motor – broke a piston, blew some of the piston back into the intake manifold which then went down into the next cylinders and bent more valves. We couldn’t nd another GTR motor and we didn’t have any money anyway, and even if we did get another engine I was worried that it would do the same thing. So we withdrew.
“I knew the problem was in the valve train, so afterwards I went back to the workshop and built up another motor. I got a strobe light and chopped the top of a tappet cover and glued some Perspex on so I could look inside and see what was happening while running it on the dyno. I ran it up to 5400rpm, and all of a sudden the valve spring and valve cap had separated from one another because of the harmonic vibration.
“The crazy thing about it, was that if you put in standard Holden valve springs rather than the special GTR ones, it never had the problem. But what I should have done was put the high diff in it; then we wouldn’t have been in that critical rev range down the straight.”