Bathurst Bond

‘Bathurst Bond’ was the name they were calling Colin Bond after his and Tony Roberts’ victory in the 1969 Hardie-Ferodo 1000 in their HDT Monaro. Here Bond re ects on the whirlwind of success that he enjoyed upon becoming a factory driver for Holden that year.

‘Bathurst Bond’ was the name they were calling Colin Bond after his and Tony Roberts’ victory in the 1969 HardieFerodo 1000 in their Holden Dealer Team Monaro HT GTS 350. Here Bond reflects on the whirlwind of success that he enjoyed upon becoming a factory driver for Holden that year.

Colin Bond was not exactly an undiscovered talent when he got the call from Harry Firth to join the Holden Dealer Team in 1969. Bond was already well established and was generally considered a rising star of the sport. Even at this fairly early stage of his career, the trademark Colin Bond versatility was clearly evident – whether in rallying, hillclimbs, motorkhanas or circuit racing in NSW, more often than not Bond was the driver to beat.

By then he was a three-time NSW Hillclimb Champion (so dominant was Bond in this type of competition in NSW that he had become known as ‘Mr Hillclimb’), and he was a frontrunner in the forests, rallying a Mitsubishi Colt on a semiworks basis. Indeed, the tie-up with Mitsubishi might have taken Bond down a different career

path had the call from Harry Firth not come.

Surprisingly, Firth wasn’t all that familiar with Bond’s circuit racing and hillclimbing credentials. He knew full well of Bond’s prowess on dirt and gravel, though – Firth had competed against (and been beaten by) Bond’s Colt in rallies, when Firth was rallying his Ford Cortina while still at the helm of Ford’s motorsport effort.

It turned out that Bond was exactly what Firth was looking for: a driver who could be slotted straight into the squad of three Monaro GTS 350s for Bathurst, as well as a skilled rally ace to head up the planned HDT Monaro rally programme. It also gave the new HDT a kind of satellite base in NSW – in the same manner as Fred Gibson would for Ford.

Bond was to have made his HDT debut sharing one of the new HT model GTS 350 Monaros alongside Spencer Martin in the Sandown 3 Hour Bathurst curtain-raiser. A prior commitment to compete in a rally in New Guinea on the same weekend saw Bond sit Sandown out, however, leaving Kevin Bartlett to take his place (Bond would join the team at Bathurst; Bartlett was already committed to Alfa Romeo for the Great Race).

Harry Firth’s rst event as Holden’s racing manager was a spectacular failure. As the new Falcon XW GT-HOs raced on to victory at Sandown in a 1-2-3 headed by the winning Allan Moffat/John French factory car, Firth was left scuttling back to the drawing board after a disastrous race.

The sole HDT Monaro proved slower than the works Falcons, at least during the early stages before a total brake failure pitched Spencer Martin into a ery crash. It was a big hit. So it was that Bartlett didn’t even get to do a single race lap in his one and only appearance with the factory Holden team.

“One good thing to come out of the Sandown crash,” Bond says, “was that Harry got GM-H to drill some brake cooling holes in the front of the car and get slotted wheels approved. The brakes were still very marginal but this at least made some difference.

“The GT-HO had ventilated discs, which gave it a huge advantage. But both cars only had drum brakes at the back, which was ridiculous when you consider they were fairly heavy cars and capable of about 200km/h. Even though the back brakes don’t do a lot, they build up heat which boils the uid, which leads to the pedal going straight to the oor. That isn’t a nice feeling when you’re heading for a corner at the end of a long straight – as Spencer found out at Sandown!

“But I’ve always thought that Sandown was a really good pre Bathurst test because it was about the same on brakes, with the two big stops, and it was about the same number of laps. You could judge pretty well from Sandown what you’d be looking at with the brakes for Bathurst.”

Bond’s own pre-Bathurst testing was done at another circuit, Amaroo Park in Sydney, a week or two out from the race, at a kind of pre-Bathurst test day for drivers entered in the race. It was more or less a standard road car, not one of the raceprepared cars, but Bond made the most of it.

“I got a Monaro from Harry and ran it for a day at Amaroo Park. I was a bit surprised by the car; it was quick and not too bad to drive. But that was really good practice in the car not long before the race. You have to remember that back then you didn’t get onto the track at Bathurst until the Saturday, so there wasn’t a lot of time to settle into the car.”

Had it not been for the Sandown crash, Bond probably would have been paired with Spencer Martin at Bathurst. Instead, he was teamed with fellow rally ace and winner of the previous year’s Sandown 3 Hour, Tony Roberts, aboard what Bond says was the ‘number two’ car.

“For Bathurst, Henk Woelders and Peter Macrow were in the car Spencer would have driven, and that was the number one car. Tony and I were in the number two car, and Des West and Peter Brock were in the number three car.

“There’s a reason why I know the Woelders/ Macrow car was the number one car. For qualifying at Bathurst, we had Michelin tyres, but Harry had a set of Firestones, which were faster – they were basically racing tyres but our Michelins were road tyres. Digby Cooke had Firestones on his car, a privateer car, and he quali ed on the front row. I said, ‘come on Harry, can I have a set of those Firestones?’ ‘No, cock,’ he said, ‘they won’t t your car!’ All it was, was that on the other car the inner lips on the guards had been rolled but our car was standard. It was a bit of a grey area in the rules; not really allowed but it was almost a safety thing. Anyway, ours didn’t have the guards rolled so the Firestones wouldn’t t.

“But everything was so close to the limit on those cars that any little trick helped. For example, lowering the panel under the front bumper-bar by half an inch brought the water temperature down quite a bit. If the scrutineers happened to notice, you were always able to blame it on poor assembly at the factory. Another favourite was lowering the ride height by putting in springs that had ‘sagged’ a bit. Most people were doing those kinds of things.”

Firth had assembled an eclectic array of drivers for his rst Bathurst assault with the HDT. A pair of open-wheeler specialists in one car, two allrounders in the other, and a veteran and a rookie in the third car. It was at that race that year that Bond rst met Brock, the man who would be his HDT team-mate for the next ve years.

“Peter hadn’t been involved at all at that stage but Des was obviously a lot older and more experienced, and had done lots of Bathursts. I hadn’t met Peter before then, and I think also I hadn’t met Des before either.

“I remember there were some funny things that Dessy said: ‘Geez!’ he said to me after the race. Left: A prior rally commitment meant Colin Bond missed the Sandown 3 Hour and instead made his debut for the HDT at Bathurst.

“There’s a reason why I know the Woelders/Macrow car was the number one car. For qualifying at Bathurst, we had Michelin tyres, but Harry had a set of Firestones, which were faster. I said, ‘come on Harry, can I have a set of those Firestones?’ ‘No, cock,’ he said, ‘they won’t fit your car!’ - Bond on Bathurst 1969

‘This race is getting so professional!’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘I’m really having trouble having a cigarette going around there now!’ He’d light a cigarette and when he was going past the pits he’d just hold it down so Harry couldn’t see it!” Pre-race predictions that the Fords would be quicker than the Holdens were proven correct after qualifying – although the waters were muddied a little by the mix of race rubber and (slower) Michelin road tyres. Ford team boss Al Turner had opted for Goodyear racing rubber while Firth went the conservative Michelin route. The Firestone-shod Digby Cooke/David Bowden privateer GTS 350 split the two GT-HOs on the front row of the three-two-three grid (the last time this grid con guration was used), but Bond, the next fastest Monaro driver, was only seventh on the grid.

The race plan for Bond and Roberts was fairly simple: try to keep the pressure on the Falcons ahead without hurting the car. Bond would be in for the start and the nish, the race being divided into three stints. The big issue for the Monaro drivers were the brakes.

“We were always worried about whether the brakes would last. The pads were very small – we used the same brakes on the XU-1 but that was a fair bit lighter. You had HardieFerodo DS1103 racing pads; you drove the car as gently as you could.

“Coming down Conrod Straight, I had to start braking about 500 yards before Murray’s Corner. At that point I couldn’t even see the corner! I had to ease off the pedal for a second or so to let everything cool down a bit before I got back on it again. After that, I just hoped the car was going slowly enough to make it into Pit Straight!

“It was a long distance race in those days and you had to look at it in a totally different way. As long as you could stay with the leader and be doing it easy, that was the way to go.” Numerically the seven Monaros in the race were up against it, being outnumbered by their GT-HO opposition exactly two to one. But even before they’d completed the rst lap, one of the Falcons was out, in that year’s famous opening lap pile-up at Skyline. Bond had been one of the lucky ones to have been ahead of Bill Brown’s

Falcon when the crash was triggered.

“I don’t know how the track marshals managed to clean up the mess while the race was still going on around them. The ag marshals at Skyline were waving their yellow ags, but as usual everyone only slowed down a tiny bit. It was the biggest race of the year, and everyone was really psyched up. The Falcon drivers were trying like mad to build up a lead, and we were trying like mad to stop them getting too far in front.

“There was a green ag after the Esses, which meant it was OK to start racing again, so the general idea was to slow down as little as possible and for as short a time as possible. This was long before the advent of full-course yellows and Safety Cars. At the time I had thought they might stop the race, but they never stopped races back then.

“The Esses became clearer as the really badly crashed cars were pushed over to one side, and by about lap ve there was a reasonable amount of room, so the yellow ags were replaced by green ones and we were allowed to go through at full speed.”

After that initial excitement, the race settled down – and everything fell into place for Bond and Roberts.

“I had got a really good start and I think I was about third on the rst lap. I was chasing Pete Geoghegan and Moffat was behind me, and then Moffat disappeared. That was when he had the gear selection problem on the rst lap and ended up losing a lap.”

By the mid-race point, Ford’s tyre dramas were plain to see. The Monaro drivers were having to nurse their brakes, but they managing a reasonable pace, weren’t chewing through tyres and were spending much less time in the pits. Then Bo Seton rolled his works GT-HO after another tyre blew. Al Turner then ordered Moffat in for a precautionary tyre change – only to nd that Moffat’s tyres were in great shape…

While the tyre debacle represented a spectacular own goal and a huge embarrassment for Ford, Bond reckons that Turner had the right idea in running racing tyres.

“We all switched over to racing tyres after Bathurst. I think Moffat could keep the tyres under his car but Pete (Geoghegan) could never do it, because that’s just the way he drove. But probably their biggest problem would have been a lack of testing. It was said that the tyres had been specially commissioned, but back in those days they would have just rang up Goodyear and said, ‘The cars weigh this much, and they’ve got this Victory at Bathurst for Bond and Tony Roberts in 1969 came relatively easily – despite pre-race predictions that mostly pointed to a Ford win.

much horsepower’, and Goodyear would then just say, ‘OK, these are your tyres’.

“The Fords were quicker, but only because of the tyres. We were always with them. We knew we had the race pretty well won by the time I got back in the car for the last stint. We knew that McPhee had to do another stop. So there was no panic. He was pulling us in a bit at the end but we still won by about 40 seconds. Toward the nish, it was one of those situations where you think, ‘how good’s this?’ Just driving around taking it really easy.

“I actually found it a very easy race,” Bond remembers. “You braked as early and as gently as you could, you used high gears. Other cars had gearbox problems, but you just had to be gentle with these cars and not change gears too quickly. The main advantage of the Monaro was that it had good torque, which meant you could leave it in a gear for a long time. We were using third and top gear most of the time.

“I wasn’t even tired afterwards. Those Monaros were fairly easy cars to drive, and at that time I was used to doing about 500km a night in rallies! I was pretty t back then; I wasn’t going to gyms and things like the kids do today, but I was sailing, and playing soccer, those sorts of things. Moffat used to complain after races about getting blisters here and blisters there, and it’s true the standard seats back then weren’t great, but Moffat wasn’t really that t either.”

The ’69 Hardie-Ferodo 500 was only the seventh time the Great Race had been held at Mount Panorama. But even at that early stage it was already established as Australian motor racing’s equivalent of the Melbourne Cup. For Colin Bond, winning Bathurst was a life changing moment – all of a sudden he had become a national sporting celebrity.

“I always say that winning Bathurst is like a jockey winning the Melbourne Cup.You might win a lot of other races through the year, and no one outside of motorsport really notices, but you win Bathurst and all of a sudden you’re very well known. There was a lot of media afterwards – I was suddenly thrown into the spotlight by winning Bathurst. For me personally, I went from an amateur driver to a professional overnight. All of a sudden you were one of the Dealer Team drivers, and you weren’t doing anything else except driving – and working on your car, of course, because that’s how Harry did it in those days.

“Afterwards someone came up with the name ‘Bathurst Bond,’ and that stuck for a while. It showed how winning that one race counted more than all the other events and championships over the previous eight years.”

Working for the man

Driving for the factory Holden team half a century ago was a different proposition from what we see in today’s Supercars racing. Here Bond recalls what it was like to become a works driver for the Holden Dealer Team with Harry Firth at the helm:

“Even though it was a big team by Australian standards, factory supported with full-time mechanics and a national program, driving for the HDT was only semi-professional – at least in my case.

“Harry would have known that any one of a dozen up-and-coming young drivers would have jumped at the opportunity he was offering. It was a team manager’s market, as motorsport usually is, and if Harry was better at anything than being sly with the rulebook it was being shrewd with money!

“He was from the old school, and commanded respect from the people who worked for him. He had his own way of doing things, and Harry made all the important decisions. He wasn’t the sort to ask people their opinion rst. I might suggest a new idea, or another way to do something, and not get much of a response from him. Then, a couple of days or a week later, he’d do exactly the same thing!

“As any successful driver will tell you, it’s the mechanics who deserve most of the credit for winning in motorsport. That went for all the HDT boys. They did amazing things and worked incredible hours for pretty small money.

“There weren’t all that many of them, either – at least not in the early days. Ian Tate did the engines, and there was Matt Phillip and Peter Byrne. Frank Lowndes managed the road car workshop, but he helped at nights and on race weekends.

“Later on there were others, like Larry Perkins and Bruce Nowacki. The other side of the coin was the boys picked up a lot of Harry’s knowledge and experience, which was worth plenty. Some were quite successful in setting up their own workshops

when they eventually left the HDT. Tatey and Matt became one of the country’s top competition engine and car builders, as did Larry with Neil Burns, and Frank started his own tuning business.

“I worked on the cars too, from time to time. Knowing I was a quali ed mechanic, Harry sometimes got me to come down to Melbourne to help if there was a lot to do and time was running a bit tight. I didn’t get paid any extra, though – ‘cheap labour,’ I suppose you’d call it!”

“We lived on prizemoney – we didn’t get paid, as such, but all our expenses were paid. Having said that, for a number of years we had to drive our racecars to the track ourselves, whether that meant actually driving them or towing them on a trailer.

“I remember one Lakeside meeting where Peter and I both had to trailer our cars up there, and then drive in the races. Harry had this old Holden panel van that kept on breaking axles, and we’d always be having to x it on the side of the road!”