McLeod’s sons

Elsewhere in this issue of AMC is a detailed introduction to the new Steven Johnson Falcon XD – a car which pays homage to the 1980 Group C XD racer of Steven’s famous father, Dick Johnson, who ttingly gave the big blue Ford its rst shakedown laps at the Lakeside circuit ahead of its Adelaide TCM debut.

But at Adelaide the Johnson Falcon wasn’t the only new 1980-model TCM racer with a father/son connection stretching back to the ‘80s. Gerard McLeod debuted his newly built Commodore VC, decked out in a livery reminiscent of the colours his father, Peter, ran on his Group A Commodore VK at Bathurst in 1986. (This was the car McLeod was to have raced at Bathurst in ‘87, but he ended up switching to the HDT to share the second Brock team car with Jon Crooke. When Peter Brock’s own 05 machine failed early in the race, the team boss switched to the McLeod/ Crooke Commodore, and so McLeod went on to become a surprise Bathurst winner.)

Gerard McLeod’s TCM Commodore VC was built from a one-owner donor chassis purchased from country Victoria last year.

“The design brief was to make a very simple, very reliable but well-thought-out car,” he explains, following a year-long build programme.

“I got in touch with the category four years ago saying that if they ever introduced a Commodore that we would be the rst to commit to running one, and I’m proud that we’ve reached this point of getting the car on track.”

Interestingly, the car runs the new TCM generic engine, a 6.0-litre V8 based in the Chev LS block, producing 450kW. The $25,000 Chev-based TCM engine can be used in any V8-powered TCM machine, regardless of the manufacturer.

“Aside from being a potent little engine due to weight,” McLeod says, “it will be very torquey and will do two years without being unbolted from the car. We weren’t going to build the car with an $80,000 engine and it ticked last box for us to go ahead. It was at that point we committed to see it through to the end.”