1973 – not a Strong year
The rst 1000km Great Race Gillard describes as his most disappointing. This time he was paired with Ray Strong in a dealer-entered (Chas Teeney Holden) LJ XU-1.
“Most people running XU-1s that year made the same fatal mistake: they didn’t get on top of the oil surge. We hadn’t had problems before because we didn’t have as much grip, as we weren’t running the big wheels and lowered suspension you could in Group C.
“But that year was also the biggest rush job you’ve ever seen. We picked the car up from the Pagewood plant – straight off the assembly line – with a car trailer about three or four weeks
before the race. I had the motor out of it the night we picked it up. It was one of the special Bathurst XU-1s with different harmonic balancer, cut outs in the fan, extractors instead of headers, ne spline axles, all sorts of things – a Harry hot rod, basically.
“I built it up with three two-inch SUs which I got off Billy Bressington. They were the latest ones from England, which was a bit of a feather in my cap when we got to Bathurst. Harry Firth had the old ones on his car – he didn’t even know the new ones existed. He had the old SUs on the [Brock/Chivas] car that ran out of petrol. “He used to stand at the scrutineering bay and watch all the cars go through, and see what he could learn. He was a cunning old bastard. He said to me, ‘What have you got there, sonny? Where’d you get them?’ But he’d never give you any information; if you asked him how to x something, he’d say something like ‘Read the workshop manual.’ He’d never give you anything. “The car was very good, and Ray Strong was a quick driver. We had good tyres too, because Ray had a Dunlop deal. But in practice we blew number one conrod out of it on Mountain Straight. We went back to Gurdon Motors in town to see if we could get another motor, and there’s four or ve other XU-1s already there, all with dropped conrods like ours, from the oil surge. The only one that was competitive and didn’t have oil surge was Don Holland’s car, because, I was told, he did a deal with Harry to get a motor with the right sump on it. We were all trying to x our sumps ourselves in the middle of Saturday night. We overlooked it a bit – to this day, I’m still pissed off with myself that we didn’t concentrate on getting on top of that. We didn’t have much time anyway; we didn’t really have enough time to test that car.
“I was running a Sports Sedan XU-1 at the time, so I had some idea of how to stop oil surge in these. The Sports Sedan only ran short races mainly at Oran Park and Amaroo. But Bathurst, at the end of Mountain Straight, Griffin’s Bend, that is the oil surge capital of Australian race tracks.
“We quali ed poorly because it blew up early in the session. Ray started, and from 37th on the grid he was up to eighth when we blew the motor up again.”
The car had covered just 26 laps.
“It was a quick car. It did everything right. I’d built the engine for torque; I went for a milder camshaft than most of the others had, but with a heap of lift. This thing just went up the mountain like you wouldn’t believe! With the two-inch SUs,
Above, below left: Gillard still has regrets about the ‘73 race – their XU-1 was fast and easy to drive; a top result had been there for the taking, he felt.
it had so much torque. It felt a bit like a V8 because you didn’t even need to rev it out; every time you put your foot on the accelerator the thing would go!
“That was one of my biggest disappointments. If we’d nished we’d have been high up because that car was so good. I still regret it to this day.
“It was a tricky year, ’73, because everyone was interpreting the new rules differently. But a funny thing happened that year.You were allowed to roll the guard lips up, which you weren’t allowed to do before, and they gave us a maximum width for the mudguards. As it turned out, the allowable width for the XU-1 was about an inch wider than our car was – on each side! So I got in there with a port-a-power and got stuck into it to pump out the guards. When we
nished there were two little dents below the C-pillar. We’re looking at it, thinking, ‘bloody hell,’ but at that point we couldn’t do anything about it. Then at scrutineering old Harry’s standing there looking at all the cars go through like he did. And then I saw his cars. I went up to him and said, ‘Gee Harry, our car’s got two bloody dents in the side but I notice yours have got the same dents – I wonder how that’s happened?’ He just grumbled and walked off!”