Craven Wild
It was one of the very rst Group C Commodores to race, and now after a long time in the wilderness it’s back, beautifully restored and back on track, 40 years after its race debut
It’s the last Holden Allan Grice ever raced under the Craven Mild Racing banner, and one of the first two Commodores ever to be raced. It’s also the only touring car ever to have been shared in an enduro by privateer superstars Bob Morris and Grice. Now, after a long spell in the wilderness, it is back and ready to race, 40 years after it first hit the track.
Gary Chick is a Holden man. Over the years he and wife Karen have owned a succession of Holdens (including a unique VR dual-cab ute – custom-built years before Holden brought out the Crewman in 2003), and now they are the custodians of the Craven Mild Commodore VC which Allan Grice and John Smith drove to seventh place in the 1980 Hardie-Ferodo 1000.
Gary bought the car in 2012 and now, eight years later after an extensive restoration effort to return it to its 1980 Bathurst trim, it is ready to race once more. In a unique symmetry of scheduling, it hit the track at this year’s annual Phillip Island Classic historic race meeting almost exactly 40 years to the day since Bob Morris gave the car its race debut at Symmons Plains, in the rst round of the 1980 Australian Touring Car Championship.
As the photos in this feature show, bringing this old Group C racer back to life was a huge undertaking. Gary can feel justi ably proud of the magni cent job he has done in restoring what is a very signi cant Holden racing machine.
For all of that, though, owning a historic racing Commodore like the Craven Mild VC wasn’t something that was ever really on Gary’s radar. He is a Holden man, but Toranas, not Commodores, are more his thing. He was not looking to buy a Group C Commodore when the Grice car became available – but, as a peculiar set of circumstances unfolded, over time he did become interested in it. In the end, it was only because the Commodore was not a Ford Sierra that Gary found himself in a position to buy himself a unique piece of Australian touring car racing history.
It was Gary’s neighbour from up the road, Ben Tebbutt, who rst happened across what seemed to be the 1980 Grice car. Tebbutt already owned one of the OXO-backed Ford Sierras that debuted in the 1987 Bathurst 1000, and was seriously looking at snapping up the Group C Commodore. So he began the process of trying to trace the ownership chain to see if it stacked up with the seller’s claims for the car.
“Then Benny found another Sierra to buy and lost interest,” Gary says. “I told him that I was interested in the Commodore if he wasn’t going to buy it. So I kept hunting down its ownership myself, to see if it was the car.”
What wasn’t in doubt was the fact that this was a genuine Group C Commodore. The only question was: which one? The waters had been muddied over the years through a series of ownership and livery changes, culminating in it being presented as a genuine Peter Brock race car, turned out in Brock HDT colours.
“Daryl Day, the third previous owner, was saying it was an ex-Brock car. The guy who next owned it took it to Melbourne and had one of the old HDT mechanics look at the car. The HDT guy said, ‘yeah, it could be one of ours,’ and from that the owner decided it must be a Brock car. But the guy we bought it off reckoned it was the Grice car…”
Gary wanted to make sure it was the Grice car before he bought it. After four months’ solid investigation he felt con dent that it indeed was legit. But before he made an offer, there was one last check he wanted to make to ensure the vehicle’s bona des…
“I went down there with a car trailer and a screwdriver and some sandpaper. Unless I found gold paint on it, I wasn’t going to bring it home. I did end up nding the gold paint, and then he told me it isn’t for sale!”
After a renegotiation on the price, Gary drove home with trailer loaded up with what looked to be an old Marlboro Holden Dealer Team Commodore VH.
The car had had a hard life.
The rear quarters hadn’t ever been properly repaired after Bernie Stack’s Murray’s Corner shunt at Bathurst in ’82, but that was nothing compared to what happened to the car in its post-Group C, Sports Sedan life.
While luckily it hadn’t been completely gutted out like so many Sports Sedans, there were wholesale sheetmetal sections on the car that were either too far gone or too stripped out to be repaired. It was bad enough for Chick to resort to sourcing a road-going VB as a donor vehicle.
“The donor car I bought was a genuine one-owner car! The guy had bought it new from Nobles Holden in Umina, and it only had 130,000km on it. It was mint, no rust on it. He was retiring and his kids wanted to take the car back to Sydney to sell it. He told them ‘no, you’re not taking it down there, you’ll damage it before I gets sold!’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was going to do with his prized Commodore!”
The one-owner, rust-free VB road car would provide the new rear quarter panels and beaver, along with doors (the inner skins of the race cars’ doors had been gutted in accordance with Sports Sedan regs) and various other bits including items such as the VB grille treatment.
“Most of the boot oor had been cut out. The front plenum chamber, there was a bit missing from there so I cut a piece off an old Commodore wagon I had. The inner guards had some big holes, the lower front apron had been cut off, so a good mate [retired panel beater] Billy Johnson and I put them back on. I probably could have left that off, but I wanted it to be and look like it was when it sat on the grid at Bathurst in 1980.”
Fortunately the Sports Sedan modi cations did not extend to cutting away the rewall and moving the engine back in the car. The original integrity of the Commodore from the C-pillars forward remained more or less intact.
“There were a couple of bits of steel bolted
from the rewall to the top of the strut towers to provide extra chassis bracing. But that was about all they’d done to the front. All we had to do was unbolt those braces and the basic original structure was all still there.
“Even the dash pad, a lot times with Sports Sedans they cut that right out and put in a piece of aluminium for the gauges. It was all still in place.”
Not surprisingly for a car that had had a lengthy and chequered competition history, it bore its share of battle scars. According to Gary Chick, during Daryl Day’s time with the car it did a lot of hillclimb competition – and suffered accordingly.
“It’s had a lot of excursions off the road. Not big crashes. The sills were all crunched in badly. We had to replace the passenger’s side – the original sills had been bashed and crashed so many times that the metal was just tearing as we tried to put it back into shape.”
Remarkably, the car still had its original roll cage. In fact, the cage had never been out of the car! When unbolted, Gary could see the original white paint underneath at the mounting points.
The paint on this car tells its own story. When Gary got to work with his screwdriver and sandpaper, he uncovered no less than 19 layers of primer and colours!
“I removed 4kg of paint off the roof alone! Over the years they’d just given it a light rub down and then painted over it.”
The issue of the 19 layers of paint and the welding in of replacement sheetmetal meant the chassis had to be stripped right back to bare metal. By 2015 the repaired shell had been painted and was ready for reassembly.
There may have been a lot of effort involved in repairing the shell, but the really difficult work lay ahead. A lot of time was spent sourcing the correct parts.
The fuel tank proved particularly difficult. The original 120-litre endurance tank was long gone. It had been made back in the day by former touring car driver Rod Stevens, and Gary wanted to get in contact with Rod in the hope that he might make a new one – or at the very least provide some information as to the tank’s dimensions. But Stevens couldn’t be found.
“Eventually I just got out all the pictures I had of the back of the car to try to work it out. I scaled the size of the tail lights, scaled how much the tank hung down, and made a plywood tank that matched the pictures. I went to the beach and got a bucket of sand and poured 120 litres of sand into it, so I was able to say, that’s about where it would have been full, so that’s where the lid will be. So, I had the plywood tank as a template to use when I got the new tank made.”
In the meantime some of Paul Gulson’s old mechanics had dropped round to have a look at the other car (the other car being the Gulson/Ian Geoghegan Commodore VB, also from the 1980 Bathurst 1000 – see breakout).
“I was telling one of the guys that their old
car had the wrong tank, and that it should have a drop tank like that plywood model over there, but I’m leaving it till last as I’m trying to nd Rod Stevens to see if I can get him to do it. And then he just said, ‘oh, I’ll give you his number now.’ So I called Rod. He had retired, but he still had all his gear, and he said, ‘I think I’ve got some pictures of what they were,’ and I said, ‘well, I’ve actually made a full size plywood model of the
tank’ – you can copy that.
“I posted the plywood model down to him, and he had the rst tank made for us to pick up at Phillip Island last year. He did one rst so we could make sure it tted the Craven Mild car before he did the second one for the Bullion car.”
Remarkably, this car will race on its original 1980 wheels. How Gary came to own those wheels is a story in itself, because they didn’t come with the car. The wheels had stayed with Geoff Searl after he sold the car to Stephen Lunn in 1993 – for whatever reason, they weren’t part of the deal. Searl lived in Singleton, not far from Gary’s house. So when Gary went to purchase the one-owner VB donor car, he detoured via Singleton to pay Searl a visit.
“I only went to see him to nd out more history of the car. He told me that he still had some bits and pieces from it. As it turned out, he was moving house at the time and had to get rid of a lot of stuff. He said, ‘I’ve got nine Simmons wheels over in the corner,’ but we couldn’t get to them because there was a lot of stuff in the way. “Later on I rang him and told him I’d take the wheels and other stuff, and how much did he want for it? We did a deal, and I went back up there to get the bits. He brings out the nine Simmons wheels, and then he goes back inside and came out with these other wheels. ‘These aren’t actually Simmons,’ he said, ‘but I think they’re a good wheel – they’re pretty light.’”
Gary could hardly believe what he was seeing – here were the original magnesium Rebel wheels that ran on the rear of the car at Bathurst in 1980 through to ‘83.
“To come across them was just gold. One was a bit damaged and they’d oxidised badly. I took them to Dave Mawer (of Mawer Wheels fame); he x-rayed and crack tested them and repaired them.”
Finding the Simmons wheels also helped solve a separate puzzle over paint colours. While painting the bare Commodore shell white was as straightforward as it sounds, the getting the right shade of gold for the diagonal side stripes was a problem.
Interestingly, the gold used on the Craven Mild Commodore in 1980 was different from the gold from the earlier Craven Mild Torana A9Xs and L34. Gary did at least have the remnants of the original colour from his ‘archaeological’ work with
the screwdriver and sandpaper.
“But then Robbie, the guy who helped me mix the paint, said he thought it was the same gold as on the Simmons wheels. It looked really close to the colour of the rubbed down paint – so we think that when they did it originally they either matched it up to the wheels or painted the wheels to match the gold on the car. Either way, it looks like it’s the same gold, so we used that as a guide as well. We think we ended up with something pretty close.”
Getting the brakes right was a long and involved process. While new retro-style calipers are allowed in Heritage Touring Cars, Gary wanted to try to run the original Harrop brakes.
“They probably only made 80 pairs of these things back in the day. I managed to get some bits, and Ron Harrop has made me some new rear calipers for it.”
Terry Bosnjak made new pistons for the Harrop callipers, and Harrop was able to provide Gary with the original part number for the seals he used.
The car retains its original Bathurst Rebel rear wheels and Simmons front wheels, and original roll cage. Replacement fuel tank was fabricated by Rod Stevens, who built the original tanks back in the day.
Below right: This is the passenger seat from Allan Grice’s ‘100mph’ Commodore VH from Bathurst in ‘82. Once restored it will serve as the passenger’s seat for the ‘80 Craven Mild machine. Just-painted Commodore (below) left with Gary Chick’s ‘Craven Wild’ Subaru Marulan circuit Cheap Car Challenge racer.
The brake master cylinder is not Commodore, but from an old Acco truck. After a lot of research Gary was able to gure out it was off an Acco 510 model, a small truck commonly used by the re brigade.
“I got onto a guy in South Australia that had two of them in a paddock. He sold me a master cylinder off one of them, and I got it reconditioned.”
Terry Bosnjak did a lot of machining work on the car, while Terry’s brother. Dave, did the diff. The diff was in bad shape; the centre had been welded up to make a homemade locker. But the diff in the Gold Bullion car was ne, apart from a bent housing. So Dave Bosnjak straightened the housing and built up three new diffs to suit. It means that by the time both cars are on track, there will be two spare diffs, with two different ratios.
Gary managed to source a Super T10 gearbox from a ‘bloke who’s got a heap of Toranas,’ and took it and the ‘box from the Gold Bullion car to Tony Sawford, who owns and races a Craven Mild Torana A9X in Heritage Touring Cars, to be rebuilt. The engine was done by Dave McLean, who in a neat coincidence was crew chief on Grice’s Cessnock Motors LJ Torana XU-1 at Bathurst in 1973. Most of the wiring has been especially made by Aaron from All Auto Recreations who remakes old-school wiring looms.
“He made it up with the right factory plugs and so forth. I learned a bit from him. It had the VC wiring loom to the dash, but the VC and VB are different in that they went to electronic ignition with the VC. On a VB the ignition wire between the switch and the coil is actually a resistance wire, whereas with the VC with electronic ignition it’s a normal wire, so if I’d hooked it up the way I’d planned it would have burnt the points out all the time. So we had to put a resister in it.” The nishing touch will be the passenger’s seat. It’s the seat out of a genuine Grice Bathurst Commodore, only it’s not the 1980 Craven Mild version – rather, it’s from Grice’s ’82 Re-Car Commodore – the car in which Grice set the rst 100mph average-speed lap of Mount Panorama in a touring car. Gary purchased the seat from Garry Willmington, who owned the Re-car VH before selling it to Willy van Wersch. Once the fabric and Recaro badging have been restored and redyed, it will go into the car.