Bondy’s Monaro memories

AMC sat down with Colin Bond armed with a handful of shots from back in the day. Here are the Monaro maestro’s recollections.

1970 Surfers 12 Hour

“Look at the road in this shot – you can see the track was breaking up badly. One guy was running Firestones and I reckon he went through about 50 sets in that race! I blew a tyre going under the bridge just on the two hourmark. That was a fast sweeping right hand corner – not the place where you want to have a tyre fail. We were planning to do two-hour stints, so that worked out OK, but after that I was keeping an eye on my watch, and when I was getting close to the twohour mark I’d be taking it really easy under the bridge! In the night, you could see the sparks coming off the steel belts on the tyres!”

Bush bashing

“In the Mitsubishi Colt Fastback, if you miscued you’d hit trees. In the Monaro, you’d knock the trees over! They were very strong, and they didn’t feel like a big car to me. And with the torque, they were actually really good on the dirt – you were never having to go up and down the gears all day as you would with a smaller-engined car. The XU-1 was the better rally car eventually, but the Monaros weren’t bad. After the Tasman meetings in 1970, Harry kept me busy rallying and rallycrossing the Monaro for several months and I didn’t actually race again until September.

Ampol Trial

“The trouble with us was that we were one of the rst cars on the road, and in the rst competitive section somewhere up near Broken Hill, we got stuck in a creek. You weren’t allowed to receive outside assistance, so we winched ourselves out – and that took a fair amount of time. Then everyone else is getting stuck in the same creek, and a local farmer turns up in a 4WD and he’s charging $50 if you’re a factory car and $30 if you’re a privateer, to tow you out. We’d lost so much time doing it ourselves that we were nearly last! Harry (Firth) didn’t want to know us when we got to the control. In the end, if that hadn’t happened, we probably would have won.”

Married in a Monaro

What more appropriate wedding cars could there be for a man who had just delivered Holden victory at Bathurst in a Monaro GTS 350 than a eet of three Monaro GTS 350s?

Colin and Robyn Bond were married in Sydney on March 7, 1970. In addition to the trio of white Monaro GTS 350s, Holden also provided its own wedding car drivers – including one Peter Brock, Bond’s Bathurst co-winner Tony Roberts, and HDT’s then rally ace Barry Ferguson. Roberts was driver for the bride and groom; Brock and Ferguson chauffeured the bridesmaids in the other two Monaros.

Colin and Robyn’s rst date had actually been at the Hardie-Ferodo Presentation Ball held two weeks after the ’69 race. It was a whirlwind romance, as Colin explains:

“We’d grown up in the same suburb and went to the same school. We didn’t know each other at school, as I was a bit older, but our families knew each other. Then I suddenly realised I didn’t have a date for the presentation dinner. So I asked Robyn, and she accepted!

“I think it was on our second date when I proposed in December – and she accepted again!”

The happy couple spent their honeymoon on the ocean aboard the SS Southern Cross. The cruise was part of the prize for nishing third in the 1969 Southern Cross International Rally!

Interestingly, the Southern Cross had been held the week after the ’69 Bathurst 500, in what was Bond’s last engagement with Mitsubishi. He and co-driver Brian Hope shared a Colt 1500SS to third place in the rally – ahead of the Holden Dealer Team Monaro of Ferguson and Roger Bonhomme.

Lakeside 1500

“The Lakeside 1500 was the next race after Bathurst. They had this slogan to promote the event: ‘Come and see Col Bond the Bathurst winner and Billy Brown the Bathurst basher’! From memory it was three 20-lap heats – I don’t know what the ‘1500’ stood for – it certainly couldn’t have been miles or even kilometres. Maybe it was the prizemoney, although I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that! The HDT was the only front-running team there, so I didn’t have much trouble winning the three heats.”