Holden FE Chev
Barry Sharp was one of the pioneers of Sports Sedan racing in NSW in the 1960s. Sharp raced a colourful array of self-built V8 powered machines, including an FE Holden with a 4.7-litre Chev V8 and converted to lefthand drive.
Gillard got the job of tidying up the Sharp FE for new owner, Bill Slattery.
“Bill bought it off Sharpy, minus a motor. It was a pretty rough old car. This was when I was working at Bill’s service station at Hurlstone Park, which I did for a couple of years. I built up a 5-litre Chev for it, with a high-rise manifold, one four-barrel carby, big valves and a lumpy cam – those bloody old Chevs, you can make
them do anything. It also had a really good set of extractors which came with the car. Sharpy had had them made, and they weaved in and out of the subframe. I think that was part of the reason he made the car left-hand drive.
“It was a torquey old thing; it’d rev to six grand. It had a Saginaw four-speed and Salisbury slippery diff. It was quite a decent car: and nothing ever went wrong, it was cheap to run and easy to drive. Bill won quite a few Division 2 races in it, but he was a pretty good driver, old Bill.
“We nearly burned the workshop down with that car one day. Bill had this mechanic, Barney Rubble, we used to call him, and he’s got the car up on wooden blocks while he’s underneath it welding something. But Barney accidently burned through a fuel line, and whoomph! Up it goes! There’s pandemonium as everyone’s running around with re extinguishers, and every time we got the re out it would start up again, because the wood was still smouldering, and the fuel was still running out of the cut fuel line! It did that about six or seven times before we nally put it out…
“I also went to Bathurst with Bill in 1968 as a mechanic, when he was co-driving in Nick Petrilli’s 327 GTS Monaro. I didn’t have much to do, because it ran out of brakes and Nick stuffed it into the wall pretty early. Bill was lthy with him because Bill knew how to look after brakes after racing Studebaker Larks and things like that at Bathurst, and was telling Nick not to use up the brakes. That was Petrilli’s rst run in that car, and he went on to do half alright with it after that.”