Cover story: HT GTS Monaros
The odds were stacked against Holden and its new Monaro GTS 350 at Bathurst in 1969. The Falcon XW GT-HO opposition was superior in some key areas, and they outnumbered the Monaros two to one. But when the rubber hit the road, Ford was found wanting as th
Monaros served for little more than two years as Holden’s front line motorsport contender but the big V8 coupes enjoyed enormous success in that short space of time. And the General got it just
right with the second series Monaro, the HT model.
Monaros served for little more than two years as Holden’s front line motorsport contender but the big V8 coupes enjoyed enormous success in that short space of time. And the General got it just right with the second series Monaro, the HT model.
The HT Monaro was there at the birth of Harry Firth’s Holden Dealer Team, and the GTS 350 was good enough to see off Ford’s XW Falcon GTHO at Bathurst in 1969. It is, therefore, a rather special Holden model. But the HT Monaro of 1969 shouldn’t be remembered only for those two things. In a competition career as a frontline contender that only spanned 12 months before the new LC Torana XU-1 took over, the GTS 350 enjoyed enormous success on the race track. And off track, too, because despite its hefty size and weight, it proved to be remarkably
eet of foot in the forests. Colin Bond went close to winning the 1970 Australian Rally Championship, and with a bit of luck might have won that year’s Ampol Round Australia Trial.
And while the Holden decided in 1970 to park the big V8 coupe in favour of a smaller, lighter Series Production challenger, elsewhere the HT Monaro was playing a starring role in the ATCC. Indeed, Norm Beechey won the ATCC in 1970, which was the rst time a Holden had ever won the coveted touring title.
Then there’s the smaller capacity GTS 253, which, as a road car, was the rst all-Aussie V8 Monaro.
Let’s face it, Ford’s new racing car is better than GM’s new racing car. It stops a bit better, it goes a bit better, and it seems to handle a bit better – and that, in motor racing is enough.’
This was the assessment of Racing Car
Adrian Ryan in his race report of the 1969 Sandown 3 Hour. Given what transpired on the day – a glorious one-two-three for Ford and its new XW model Falcon GT-HO, a car which had shown itself to be both faster and better in the braking department than its Holden Monaro GTS 350 opposition – Ryan’s summation seemed reasonably fair.
Never mind that the new Holden didn’t have the pace to match the Fords, it didn’t have the braking capacity even to simply complete the three-hour journey. On the evidence of what took
place at Sandown, Ford was going to Bathurst three weeks later as the rm, if not hot, favourite.
But in the same RCN magazine, Peter Wherrett was a little more circumspect in his pre-Bathurst analysis. The journalist/racing driver had benchmarked a GTS 350 against an XW GT (but not the HO version, which wasn’t available) at Oran Park, concluding that the Holden was the better handler, the Ford had better brakes, and that there was not much between the two in the straight line department.
Wherrett made a point of highlighting the discrepancy in brake performance, though, noting that the Monaro’s discs were ‘glowing red-hot and the pads were burning themselves to cinder’ after just three quick laps of the Sydney circuit.
So if there wasn’t a lot to distinguish the two contenders in terms of handling and power, the point of difference was brakes. And the difference was real: the Falcon had Ford’s 11.25-inch (285mm) ventilated front discs, the standard stopping power for all of Ford’s V8s in that era, whereas the Monaro’s discs were 15mm thinner at 10.625-inch, and were unventilated. What’s more, the Holden was slightly heavier than the Ford. On paper – and on the evidence of what had happened at Sandown, where Spencer Martin backed his HDT Monaro heavily in the wall after the brakes failed – it was hard to see any of the seven GTS 350s getting the better of no less than 14 GT-HOs in the Bathurst 500.
But those thin, unventilated front discs was not what Holden had originally intended for its braking package for the Monaro GTS 350s on the Mountain.
Rally ace and occasional racing driver Bob Watson had won the previous year’s
Sandown 3 Hour, with Tony Roberts, in a GTS 327 HK Monaro. But Watson’s day job was as an engineer at Holden. He had been involved in some important aspects of the development of the original GTS 327 before being seconded to Holden’s design department to work on what Holden hoped would be the new HT GTS 350’s secret weapon at Bathurst in 1969 – oil cooled front disc brakes.
The idea (seemingly revolutionary at the time, but which was already in use in trucks in the US) was to cool the front discs by pumping (cooling) oil through the hub, supplied by an automatic transmission-style clutch pack splined to the hub. The goal was to signi cantly cool the Monaro’s front brakes, thereby enhancing braking performance (or to quote Holden’s own literature, achieve ‘complete freedom from fade’) and eliminating the need to change brake pads during the race.
Initial tests at Holden’s Lang Lang proving ground seemed promising. But on the 10th lap of a test programme on specially laid out course, the pedal went straight to the oor. Watson, who was driving, managed to negotiate a reasonably safe (if terrifying) passage through a thicket of small trees in a Monaro that had suddenly achieved complete freedom from braking...
The problem was the oil broke was breaking down under high (ie: racing) temperature,
causing the friction plates to fail. Work commenced on designing an oil radiator to keep the oil at the desired operating temperature, but time was running out and the oil cooled brakes concept was shelved – although it did make its public debut that year on the 253 V8-powered Hurricane concept car.
Instead, Holden increased the thickness of the existing front discs by 1/8 of an inch – or 4mm. It wasn’t much, but it was at least a small step up on the HK GTS 327’s brakes – which 12 months earlier had been good enough to see Bruce McPhee take victory at Bathurst.
But that’s to put an optimistic spin on it – in ’69, the cars would lapping as much as eight seconds faster than they had the previous year, and most of the gain in speed would be achieved in the straights courtesy of the engine capacity and power increases (the 350cid Chev engine in the HT GTS was more than 50bhp up on the HK’s 327) of both new model Holden and Ford. It’s not hard to see why there were 14 Falcon XW GT-HOs and only six Monaro HT GTS 350s that faced the starter the ’69 Hardie-Ferodo 1000.
What should have been
Ford really should have won Bathurst in 1968. It went to the Mountain with the bene t of everything that had been learned from the previous year with a 302 V8-powered Falcon XT GT that wasn’t radically different from the 289 XR GT that had won in ’67. Ford’s opponent, by comparison, was new to the game; any number of unforeseen dramas could have brought down the new HK model Monaro
GTS 327 simply through a lack of experience.
But it didn’t turn out that way. Ford was unlucky that the Fred Gibson/Bo Seton Falcon XT GT retired from a potential winning position late in the race, but brakes and other mechanical dramas took out the rest of the Ford challenge as Holden privateer Bruce McPhee sailed on to a brilliantly orchestrated victory – one man (and his one-lap co-driver, Barry Mullholland) who beat the works teams from both Ford and Holden.
Sadly for Ford, the story in 1969 was all too similar. Holden’s new GTS 350 might have been the better handler, but overall there wasn’t much to distinguish the two in overall lap speed. Crucially, though, the new GT-HO had the upper hand in the area of brakes. All other things being more or less equal, this should have been Ford’s winning card.
But Ford also held a better hand in the driving department. Its works team lineup of six drivers was impeccable: the Geoghegan brothers, former Bathurst winners Bo Seton and Fred Gibson, and Allan Moffat and Alan Hamilton. This was Moffat’s
rst Bathurst but his credentials were already well proven aboard the Trans-Am Boss Mustang; Hamilton was an experienced frontrunner in touring car racing in a 2.0-litre Porsche.
It was as stellar a lineup as anyone could wish for – and it was in stark contrast to the unusual array of drivers Harry Firth assembled for his rst Bathurst assault with new employer Holden. Of course, one of the problems Firth had was that he was unable to access his driving crew from the previous year, because they were now his opposition (having said that, it’s highly unlikely the Geoghegans would ever have followed Firth to Holden given the frosty relations that existed between those two camps). Firth did bring Spencer Martin across, although Martin would not be part of the Bathurst crew as he injured his back in a road car accident a week after the crash in the Sandown 3 Hour.
So Firth had to start afresh. The experienced Des West, a veteran touring car racer and Holden dealer in Wingham, NSW, was a logical inclusion, but less so his young co-driver, Peter Brock. While history shows that this was an inspired choice on the part of Firth, at the time it was a bold and surprising selection that could easily have back red: Brock had barely been in the sport two years, had never raced a Series Production car and had never driven at Bathurst. Colin Bond’s variety of credentials more than quali ed him for the role, and Tony Roberts was primarily a rally driver with almost no race experience (to be fair, though, the handful of race starts Roberts had made included victory in the previous year’s Sandown 3 Hour and third place at Bathurst). Peter Macrow and Henk Woelders were open-wheeler specialists, although Macrow had made one Bathurst start in a factory Corolla. Woelders’ appointment as a factory Holden driver in 1969 would be his one and only Great Race appearance. [ED: see 50 Reasons to Love story for Woelders’ recollections.]
By any logical assessment, Ford’s driver combos looked rock solid, but all three of Holden’s pairing contained potential weaknesses.
Ford went to Bathurst con dent it would have the pace, the brakes and the reliability to see off the Holden challenge. And when it came to pace, team boss Al Turner had put his faith in Goodyear
race rubber rather than road tyres. Moffat had given the Goodyears the thumb up after some fairly exhaustive testing, and yet even very early on in the race it was clear that the factory Fords were in trouble with tyres. Gibson made an early unscheduled stop for tyres, and then a tyre blew on Ian Geoghegan’s Falcon on the last lap of his opening stint. Later, when Seton suffered a blowout and rolled his car, panic set in within the Ford camp.
Turner then agonised over what to do with the remaining Moffat car. Out on the track Moffat seemed to be circulating without drama. While on the one hand Turner felt that Moffat had things well in hand and was looking after his tyres – he was already aware of Moffat’s trademark driving style, that delicate touch and keen sense of mechanical sympathy – in the back of his mind he worried about the consequences of another failure, and one which could be prevented. Ultimately the Ford camp erred on the side of caution and ordered Moffat into the pits. They changed Moffat’s tyres, only to discover the ones they’d just removed were in perfect condition…
Interestingly, while Turner copped the blame for a catastrophic error of judgement on tyres, the opposition Holden driver who beat the Fords, Colin Bond, today says Turner had the right idea to run Goodyear slicks.
With the bene t of hindsight, where Ford lost the race might not have been the choice of tyres, but half way around the opening lap. First time through the Cutting Moffat found himself with a gearbox full of neutrals. He came to a complete stop, and by the time he’d sorted things out he had lost the best part of a lap. The car did not miss another beat for the rest of the race. Moffat and Hamilton nished fourth, a lap down, but Moffat had always maintained he should have won the race.
One unscheduled pitstop for tyres does not account for a full lap’s de cit, but without that stop they’d surely have been somewhere on the lead lap – and possibly in a position to put Bond under pressure.
In the end Bruce McPhee (and ‘one-lap’ Barry Mullholland) was Ford’s only hope of victory. As the wily maverick had opted for Michelins rather than race tyres, McPhee was immune to the works Ford team’s tyre dramas. But the chances of the shrewd privateer defeating the factory teams in a Ford just as he had done the previous year in a Holden took a literal blow early on when McPhee hit the wall in The Cutting after a tangle with lapped traffic. The stop for repairs, then another stop next time around after Mulholland completed his customary single lap, cost McPhee six minutes.
Even with that delay, they still managed to nish second, and just over 30 seconds adrift of the winning HDT Monaro.
What really killed McPhee’s chances was the fact that The Cutting crash had inconveniently occurred a few laps short of his fuel range target. It meant that he’d be needing to make an extra fuel stop late in the race.
Harry Firth had made a mental note of this, and made sure that Bond maintained as modest a pace as possible in the run to the ag. In his
rst Bathurst with the Holden Dealer Team, Firth had orchestrated a victory in the style of Sir Jack Brabham’s famous method of ‘winning at the slowest possible speed.’
Ironically, beforehand it seemed that the only way a Monaro was going to win this race was at the fastest possible speed.