1981-84 – Mazda RX7

For 1981 Gillard teamed up with Phil Alexander in an RX7. “The car was very late and wasn’t sorted. The only testing we did before Bathurst was running it up and down Castlereagh drag strip.

“We had bad brake troubles and a tailshaft vibration so bad that ogged out the rear bearing in the gearbox. Moffat didn’t have that problem because he’d had a two-piece tailshaft homologated for it and didn’t tell anyone.”

The official reason for retirement after 46 laps was ‘tailshaft.’ What really happened, Gillard says, was something a little more serious. Alexander had used a 20-cent piece rather than a welch plug to block off the thermostat bypass. The coin ended up falling out and jamming the cooling system.

“He did the rst stint, and came in a bit early, and I got in and he said, ‘Oh, by the way, it’s a bit hot, you might have to take it easy for a couple of laps.’ I look down and the needle on the temperature gauge looks like it’s on its second lap around… I go back out, and up the Mountain it’s got no power and it’s seizing up. I brought it back at the end of the lap and parked it.”

Gillard reunited with Alexander the following year with a much better prepared effort. Larger 14inch wheels help transform the handling, and after qualifying 30th the duo brought it home in 10th.

The Alexander RX7 returned to Bathurst in ’83, this time armed with a trick Watts Linkage rear end made by future HRT crew chief Wall Storey.

“Moffat never knew about that [Watts Linkage]. Only Terry Shiel, Peter McLeod and us had that. It was a good car that year but we had brake problems. One pad wore out, right front outer. Turns out that one pad was a different compound from the rest.

“I drove the last 15 laps with three-wheel brakes. It would want to turn left when you put the brakes on!”

They made it home ninth, a result which Gillard would repeat in the same car the following year, but with a different driver. Mark

Gibbs had leased the car and had Gillard along as co-driver/preparer. Then Gillard secured backing from Goodyear.

“We had the money to do it properly. I bought 15 inch Simmons wheels; John Edwards from Phil Alexander’s built two engines. Our race engine, for the rst time ever we used the factory peripheral port housings that Moffat was using. We had our act together for Bathurst.”

They quali ed 19th, third fastest RX7. Four rows outside the top 10, Gillard would have to negotiate a path around the stalled Tom Walkinshaw Jaguar – almost exactly as he he’d had to eight years earlier when Jack Brabham stalled on the very same 10th grid slot.

“After they dropped the ag I could see there was some congestion ahead on the right. I was always worried about getting hit up the arse at the rst corner at Bathurst because of the concertina effect, so I backed off a bit and got over to the left. I didn’t even see the Jag until I went past it! Then the Masterton/Moffat thing happened right in front me!

“Then they put out the black ag, which was the stupidest idea ever. A black ag is too hard to see when you’re looking at it against a background of green [trees]. I didn’t see it, and plenty of others didn’t. The front guys that had radios would have been told about it, but they didn’t see it either. I get to Conrod Straight and everyone is slowing down and they’ve got their arms out the window, so something’s up, even though I had no idea what it was about.

“Next thing, Murray Carter, he hasn’t seen the ags, and he’s making a killing passing everybody, and I see him doing a million miles an hour in the mirror as we’re dawdling over Gillard teamed with Phil Alexander in the latter’s RX7 at Bathurst to score a couple of top 10 finishes. Gillard and Mark Gibbs shared the car in ‘84 – Gillard showed the way to Peter Brock (inset left) in the CRC 300 at Amaroo Park in the wet, but bad luck awaited them at Bathurst.

the rst crest. Then he sees all the cars and jumps on the brakes, loses it, goes across to the right, spins across in front of Finnigan and off the other side, and then back on the track. He hit my left rear that hard that it belted my head on the roll bar. I spun off and went up on two wheels and into a peach farm. At the time I didn’t know what had happened. Then I saw Murray up in the bushes, so I realised it must have been him that hit me.

“The motor was still running so I reversed out. The car seemed OK but as I got going I could see the front spoiler still sitting in the peach farm… I struggled back to the pits with half a peach tree jammed in the front.

“We didn’t have another airdam, so we did the restart without one. We got up to fth or sixth but then a bolt broke in the Watts Linkage. It had been bent in the crash. We xed that, and then got back up to about seventh when a rear axle broke. I did the last six laps with one-wheel drive. Mike Burgmann passed me on the last lap – I couldn’t hold it at on the straight because it wanted to turn left all the time and you had to ght it all the way down the straight.”

Gillard’s last Bathurst start was in some ways his best prepared, but just as the opening lap chaos on debut 15 years earlier worked to his advantage, in ’84 he became the victim of someone else’s error. But it was far from his last Bathurst assault, and far from his last involvement in the sport.