Wally’s Words

My copy of AMC #114 dropped in my letter box in February – the same day as General Motors dropped the ‘Death of Holden’ bomb! Surprised? Probably not! Disappointed? Yes. Sad? Absolutely! And probably a little angry, in that GM-H and GM have been ‘painting over the cracks,’ ‘rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’ (use whichever cliché you like) for a decade or more.

I had planned for this issue to talk about what happened the time I shared the road trip from Melbourne to Bathurst with a certain young driver about to make his Bathurst debut with the Holden Racing Team – but in light of the Holden news, that can wait till next time. Because I reckon that right now a lot of us will find ourselves reminiscing about the Holdens we’ve owned and some of the adventures we had in them – I know I am!

I’m one of those ‘Baby Boomers’ that people take great delight in denigrating these days but, I can’t change the date of when my late mum and dad engaged in a bit of post war ‘rumpy-pumpy’ resulting in me arriving in the back end of 1950. Yes, I was a part of that post WW2 time in this country when there were jobs a-plenty and the arrival of ‘The Holden’ gave us all a chance to spread our wings.

I grew up in Albury, and Dad got a job as a commercial traveler for a Melbourne kitchen ware and kitchen knick-knacks company, taking samples around hardware stores and the like in north-eastern Victoria and southern NSW – company car supplied.

The first car that graced our driveway in Currawong Street, North Albury? A chocolate brown 48-215! What a technical delight – NOT! As soon as it was dusk, Dad had to stop the car so one of us kids could jump out to turn on the tail-light. Not me, though; I was too small and wedged in the front seat between Mum and Dad which restricted me from sliding sideways on the vinyl bench seats. However, it didn’t stop me from the odd bruise on my head because if the old man braked suddenly, I would disappear off the seat and under the dash!

Those early Holdens only had 6-volt electrical systems and had vacuum windshield wipers – remember those? Press the accelerator and the wipers would stop (great in a downpour), while the only way to clear the fog off the inside of the ‘screen was to open the vent windows in the

front doors; great in an Albury minus-something winter! But we loved it, because as a family, we were mobile – and that was the great thing about ‘Australia’s Own Car’ back in the ‘50s: good, solid and affordable transport designed specifically for Australian conditions.

The company car was replaced every three years or so, with a dark blue over light blue FJ following (the tail-light was now wired to the headlight switch – a great leap forward) and then a two-tone green FC, a white-over-coral EK (Vic reg: HKF-679), and then the duck’s guts car – the white-over-Amberley Blue EH with the 179cid engine! Me and a mate encouraged father to ‘stretch it out’ on the way back from watching a footy match in Rutherglen one day, and I reckon he chickened out at around the 80mph mark! That’s around the 130km/h in modern speak for you young people out there.

In a later job, he also had an EK ute and I did most of my learner driving in that car. I also took my first girlfriend out in it to the ‘Skyline’ Drive-In in Wodonga. A romantic evening it wasn’t in that old ute – and funnily enough, she didn’t go out with me again.

My first job came after the North Albury High School and I decided to part company, and was in the spare parts department at the local Holden dealer, Preston Motors. As the new kid at Prestons I was typically ‘hazed’ with the usual newcomers tricks of being sent round to the other dealers’ parts department or auto accessory shops with an order for ‘a box of short circuits’ or a ‘left-hand screwdriver.’ All that and you eventually got to drive the shop ute (an FC) which proved to be the most bullet-proof car ever, as we couldn’t break it, no matter how hard we tried.

The job led me to my first car – a 1955 FE model (NSW reg: BDD-745) – bought for about $50-$100 and then many nights were spent ‘working’ on mine and any number of fellow workers’ cars. Thanks Jeff Mott! It was great to have ‘access’ to the spares from Preston Motors – very good for the budget! Twin carbs, extractors with a 2 ½-inch exhaust pipe and a worked head. Of course, with standard wheels, re-caps and standard suspension, it didn’t stop or turn, but it was bloody quick!

After leaving Albury and moving to Sydney and then the various country towns while doing my ‘apprenticeship’ in radio, I moved away from ‘Australia’s Own’ car (after it died in Mudgee) and had a couple of Volkswagens, a Mazda RX4 (a bit like the FE Holden in that it went like shit off a shovel, but didn’t stop or turn) and then a Mazda 626.

Then it was back to the General with the HDT Brock Commodore and the subsequent Calais to Director status (see AMC #114) before joining the Holden Racing Team and being fortunate enough to have a company car as part of the package. I wasn’t THAT high in the pecking order, though, but was more than grateful for a succession of Commodores that were mainly the V6 ‘S’ packs.

So from all that – as well as 10-plus years with HRT – you can see there’s a lot of ‘red’ flowing through the old veins, which to me makes General Motors pulling the pin on OZ quite distasteful.

Do I still drive a Holden? If you call a 2004 Rodeo ute with 320,000-plus km on the clock a Holden then, yes. My wife’s car is a 2012 Kia Rio (1.6-litre) 6-speed manual that came with a 7-year warranty and hasn’t given us a moment’s trouble. What would I replace it with? A Kia Cerato GT sedan would be nice!

Do/did Holden have anything like that? No! The closest would have been the (Europeanbuilt) Astra RS-V with perhaps a 3-year warranty, but that model has gone to God too.

And therein lays the problem. Holden was so Commodore-centric that its ‘other’ models were floor-stock fillers, with a raft of fairly average small/medium/SUV offerings coming out – in later years – from South Korea, which were no match for the rising force of Hyundai/Kia. The Colorado held its own reasonably well but with the GM departure from a right-hand-drive platform worldwide, it’s not available anymore either. 1990s Astra’s, Vectra’s and Zafira’s came with good ‘cred’ from Europe – but weren’t designed for Australia - and I’d hate to think how many people were burnt by the brand, when many of the models clattered to a stop as their valves bounced up and down on the pistons when the timing belt failed (my wife’s car among them) leaving a $3-4,000 bill and little indication from GM-H that they’d make good for any of it.

Add in the Global Financial Crisis which Holden was so Commodore-centric that its ‘other’ models were floor-stock fillers, with a raft of fairly average small/medium/SUV offerings coming out

resulted in GM America cutting models and brands (and the export opportunities for the Commodore), and then not having a worthwhile SUV range, and Holden was left with an ‘orphan’ that fewer and fewer people wanted to buy and the Australian taxpayer having to stump up on average about 3k per car in subsidies!

So common sense said the Commodore was dead but we thought the Holden name would continue with re-badged USA or Europe-sourced cars. But no! GM has shut down RHD production worldwide and now it’s not just Commodore that became an orphan, but Australia generally, in the GM world.

At the time of writing, the Adelaide 500 has just been completed and it remains a great spectacle – even though the Ford Mustang doesn’t really look like a Mustang and the Commodore has a Holden badge but is driven by a V8 with drive to the rear wheels! Try buying one of those at your local red lion dealer as the ‘Great Holden Run-Out Sale’ ramps up!

I’m no longer involved in Supercars, but as a sidelines observer I’d say it and the teams will probably cobble something together that will result in a General Motors ‘presence’ with the Camaro to keep the red/blue rivalry going and the argy-bargy on the race track will be as good as ever but there’ll be one thing missing… emotion! That’s what has driven touring car racing in Australia and it’s what’s held me captivated since watching the exploits of Graham ‘Tubby’ Ritter in his chocolate-brown-with blue-stripe Humpy Holden at the long-gone Hume Weir circuit in the mid-1960s.

Emotion is what has kept the great-coat wearing boys (and their long-suffering girls) and all the other wonderful lunatics that descend on Bathurst each and every October and their roar on lap 161 – able to be heard over the thundering V8 racecars – is what makes the place and the race so special.

That’s the challenge now for Supercars Australia and its teams: keep the emotion but more importantly, develop the next generation of fans so when us ‘Boomers’ get carted out in an environmentally-friendly hybrid hearse made by a company from ‘somewhere else’, there’ll still be a huge crowd at Mount Panorama each October reveling in a race weekend and an event that will hopefully still be known as ‘the Great Race.

Emotion is what has kept the great-coat wearing boys (and their long-suffering girls)

and all the other wonderful lunatics that descend on Bathurst each and every October and their roar on lap 161 – able to be heard over the thundering V8 racecars – is what makes the place and the race so special.