Born again Series Production
In the early 1980s Series Production was reborn. There had not been racing for near-standard ‘showroom’ sedans since the original Series Production morphed into Group C at the end of 1972 – a move prompted by the infamous ‘Supercar Scare’ that year which resulted in the Falcon XA GTHO Phase IV and the 5.0-litre V8-powered Torana XU-1 becoming stillborn.
No one was expecting the new version of Group E Series Production to revisit that halcyon early 1970s era, but with V8 Falcons and Commodores up against a wide array of sixes, fours and rotary RX7 Mazdas, the racing was willing and wild and usually made for compelling viewing.
Gillard found himself involved in the new category via one of his customers, a young driver named Mark Gibbs.
“Gibbsy had bought Mike Griffin’s Corolla rotary Sports Sedan and I was doing stuff with that for him in club events. Then he decided to go production car racing, so we bought a 4.2-litre Commodore SS Group 1. There was a 5-litre one available but they wouldn’t let it run in Group E because they thought it would be too bloody fast. But they let the XE 4.9-litre Falcon in, and it had more grunt than the Commodore.
“Gibbsy kind of burst onto the scene in that car. Nobody really knew him. The rst race meeting we took him to at Amaroo, he’s quali ed up near the front and the next Commodore is about 20th. They’re all immediately crying ‘cheat!’ and then after the race they pulled
all the Commodores apart – and ours was the only one that was legal!
“I used to cop a bit of ack over how well Gibbsy was going but people didn’t realise how good a driver he was. I used to say: the car’s only half of it – the bloke behind the wheel is making me look good!”
Later on the rules were changed to allow the 5-litre V8 into production car racing. The weapon of choic ewas the VH police pack, with the V5H engine and FE2 suspension.
“We bought a brand new one – everyone else bought second-hand ex-police cars but I just thought that if you did that you’d be having to overhaul everything on the car. The V5H engine was the 304 cubic-inch one that they brought out when the big stink was going on in Group A about single-row and double-row timing chains. We ran it predominantly in the Stallions Stables Series at Amaroo. Gibbsy won nine races and Peter Fitzgerald’s Starion won the other.
“From testing the car, I worked out real quick how to keep Starions behind in a V8 Commodore at Amaroo and I told Gibbsy – just back off a bit in the middle of the Dunlop Loop and baulk them, so they’d go off boost a bit, and then just stand on it and piss off down the hill to the next corner, so you had some space to stop with the Commodore brakes before the Starions got you. It really used to frustrate them...
“The biggest problem we had with those V8 Commodores was the sump. Under the rules you could baffle the sump but you couldn’t change the shape of it. GM-H put an engine on the dyno for me, with glass sides in the sump, so they could see what was happening. At 5000 revs – and remember we only revved these to 5200 – there was only one litre of oil in the sump. It would have had even less than that on the track. We had to come up with a very elaborate windage tray just so we didn’t blow the engine every time. Those engines used to wear out a camshaft every meeting, atten the lobes off – it was basically through bad design with how Holden had done the valve springs and hydraulic lifters. Every race it would be a brand new cam, lifters, valve springs and a new cluster gear in the
gearbox because they used to strip third gear.
“We were sponsored by Waggott Cams, and you had to have a standard cam so everyone was always looking at us as though we were cheating.
“So that there were no arguments, before each race we’d give the scrutineer, Greig Black, some money, and he would then go to a Holden dealer, buy a new camshaft and lifters and give them to us, and then watch us t them before he sealed the engine.
“Our car came new from the factory with the double-row timing chain, which they’d brought in because of Brock’s problems at Bathurst in 1985. But they only allowed single row chains in Group E, so we had to change it. If anything, for us it was better as a single row because it weighed less!”
Gibbs and Gillard also ran the Ford Laser Series in ’84 – for which Gillard ended up becoming technical liaison officer in the second year, in an attempt by the series organisers to tidy up the rules and stamp out rampant cheating.
“One of things they didn’t want was the cars to be like the old Alfasud series where they looked like they were falling over through the corners, so I designed a suspension package for them. I also wrote the rules so that anything you couldn’t easily police, we made free.”
Gibbs wasn’t the only young talent on display in this series; others included David Brabham and one Mark Skaife.