Taking care of business
Gillard’s marital promise meant that from 1971 until his last race start almost 20 years later, he never spent a cent of his own money on motorsport. Conversely, he actually made money from the sport, earning most of his living preparing race machines for others out of his workshop in Annandale, Sydney, and later Ballina on the NSW North Coast. In the early ’70s Gillard prepared and raced the Torana XU-1 Sports Sedan of husband-and-wife combo Pat and Darcy Peck (which will feature in a future issue of AMC), along with various customers’ Minis, in addition to Great Race appearances in all bar three years through that decade.
Along the way Gillard picked up some work with Jaguar Rover Australia. This lead to the Barclays TR7 Pro-Car Series, a one-make series for Triumph TR7s driven by a selection of star drivers – the likes of Sir Jack Brabham, Ian Geoghegan Dick Johnson, Jim Richards, Bob Morris, Colin Bond, John Goss and John Harvey. JRA contracted Gillard to prepare and run the cars.
The TR7 series was the brainchild of JRA’s marketing chief John Crawford and his understudy, Mike Breen. Crawford came up with the idea of racing the cars (in near standard trim) as a promotional exercise that might boost sluggish sales of the British sports car. It worked a treat, and even attracted lucrative naming rights sponsorship from Barclays Bank, a new nancial
player in Australia looking for business in the car nance sector.
Gillard’s role was to determine a set speci cation and ensure that the cars were of equal performance. This wasn’t always so simple.
“What I did was run them all on Barry Jones’ dyno and then try to tune them back to the slowest car, so they were all the same.
“But there was one car, a white one, that was always slower than the others. I couldn’t
gure out why; I used to have to hot that one up to match the others. It was really weird
– the motors were all blueprinted the same, everything else was the same, but it was still always slower. I guess it just shows that all cars aren’t created equal!
“They were a good car, very reliable. We didn’t have any failures: John Harvey went from fourth to low gear at the top of Bitupave Hill once and all that did was stretch everything. We did lose a couple of cars to crashes; Dick Johnson and Pete Geoghegan each wrote one off.”
Being in such close proximity to a selection of the best racing drivers in Australia afforded Gillard some fascinating insights:
“I used to randomly pyro (heat measure) the tyres. Jim Richards would come in with the same temperatures front and rear; Bob Morris would have the rears a little bit hotter, and Dick Johnson would be cooking the back tyres. The cars were identical, the lap times were so close they might as well have been identical; it was just their different driving styles. Above: Gillard with some of the the TR7 Series ‘pros’: John Goss, Colin Bond, Ian Geoghegan and Bob Morris. Below left: In the Darcy Peck Torana XU-1 Sports Sedan, on the second row at Amaroo Park behind Geoghegan’s Super Falcon.
“Jim Richards had real nesse in balancing the car. That’s why he looks so tidy – but if you sit in the car with him you can see he works pretty hard! I went around Calder in one of the cars with Jim Richards in the rain – and I was pretty impressed with what he was doing!
“I went for a drive with just about everybody, including Jack Brabham, and it was a real treat to see how different guys did things differently.”