Muddy Waters
Outside of winning a local South Coast rally in the mid 1960s in a Mini, Gillard had little experience of rally driving. His only other off-road event would be at Catalina Park in rallycross in 1973, at the wheel of a Mini he was preparing which Peter Tett shared with Ken and Jan Nelson.
“Peter Tett, Peter the Pom, he wanted to go rallycrossing because he’d seen it in England. So we built this rallycross car. I was building Mini engines for speedway running on alcohol, and when they did the rules for rallycross they just put ‘fuel free.’ So I basically built a speedway engine running on a blend of 93% pure methanol with a bit of acetone. Peter was an industrial chemist so he was able to mix it up in a big drum. I learned a few things about keeping water out of the thing, which was always the problem with Minis. It used to be a drama starting it up on cold mornings up there because the alcohol would freeze the manifold, and it would ice all the way up to the carby and freeze the throttle butter y. I worked out that the thing to do was run it until the carby freezed up and then engine stopped, and then wait while the heat of the engine travelled back up the manifold and unfroze the carby. Then it would start properly.
“Back in the early Group A days when they were running jungle juice – toluene, diesel and all sorts of things mixed together – a
Walkinshaw Commodore, before we understood them, was the worst dog to start at Bathurst on a cold morning.You’d have to start the starting procedure at about three o’clock in the morning!
“Anyway, I wound up driving the rallycross Mini one meeting when Peter was sick, I
nished up in the repechage; I had to win the repechage to get into the nal. Evan Green interviewed me on the grid for the TV, but I was a bit camera-shy and tried to make a joke and made a bloody idiot of myself instead.
“I’m on the grid alongside one of the VWs, and the guy has the ag raised, but before he dropped it to start the race, the Mini’s taken off by itself – with the clutch still on the oor! The thrust race had shattered. So I won the start, but then the VW got past me while I was trying to gure out what had happened to the clutch. Then I learned my rst lesson about rallycross: don’t try to pass someone in the watersplash. The trick, that nobody told me, was to follow their wheel tracks. I’ve pulled out from behind to make a move on the VW, and suddenly everything went brown! Couldn’t see anything. The car jumped up in the air and spun around and then landed, and then I could see again so I took off. In the photo here of me in the Mini (above), you can see it’s on two wheels with mud and slush everywhere from the watersplash, but if you look closely you can see it’s going backwards! All the dirt and mud are in front of the front of the car, not behind it! At that stage I think I was still wondering which way home was…
But it was an interesting exercise, rallycross, really enjoyable to drive in.”