Australian Muscle Car

Steve Normoyle

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The very rst Holden Dealer Team Monaro GTS 350 ever to race changed hands the other day for three quarters of a million dollars. That’s a lot of money for an old Holden race machine

– especially one with no

Bathurst history.

The Holden Dealer Team

Monaro on the cover of this issue likewise has no

Bathurst history. Of course, it has no race history at all, because it never existed in physical form. It appears here only as a digital render, created for AMC by former

Holden designer (and the man who played a key role in the design of the VE

Commodore) Peter Hughes.

We asked the ex-Holden design guru to show us what a HG model HDT Monaro GTS 350 might have looked like had Holden not chosen to change tack so dramatical­ly with the smaller, lighter, sixcylinde­r LC-model Torana GTR XU-1 and instead stuck with V8 grunt for its date with destiny on the Mountain in October, 1970.

It’s easy to look like a genius when you have the bene t of hindsight. And as our cover story this issue will show, with the corporate politics that were in play at GM at the time it’s way too simplistic an analysis to simply say that Holden made a mistake in benching the GTS 350 for Bathurst in favour of the GTR XU-1

And yet, if the old adage of ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ really did mean what it said, then it was certainly a mistake. Because as our in-depth story will also show, Holden would have had a better chance of winning Bathurst in 1970 with a slightly upgraded HG Monaro than with the new Torana.

The irony of all this is the fact that Ford went to Bathurst in 1970 in more vulnerable shape than it outwardly appeared. The lessons from the failure of 1969 had been learned, but while the Phase II

GT-HO was technicall­y a much better package than the original XW HO, on the track it wasn’t any faster. If the HT Monaro GTS 350 had been good enough to see off the Phase

I 12 months earlier, it follows that a HG model could have done the job against the Phase II.

We’ve had a bit of fun with this story, with Peter Hughes’ design mockups and the fake ‘Daily Mirror’ front page on page 23. And while it is just a bit of fun, a hypothetic­al look at what might have been half a century ago, it is indeed interestin­g to ponder what might have been, had Holden not only run the Monaro at Bathurst in 1970, but also did win with the Monaro.

As the ‘Daily Mirror’ reported, it would have been a hattrick of Bathurst wins for Holden and the Monaro. It would have raised the pro le of the Monaro model hugely, so that rather than the short but sweet footnote in our muscle car race history it occupies, today it would probably be viewed with the same kind of awe and mystique which surrounds the GT-HO series of Falcons.

That would be especially so had Holden continued with the big 350-Chev powered coupes on the track into the following years. Just imagine: a 1971 Bathurst battle between the mighty XY GT-HO Phase III and a HG GTS 350 suitably upgraded and tweaked by Harry Firth to take on the Phase III. That would have really been something…

It also would have meant that the HG GTS 350 itself would have received the acknowledg­ment as an Aussie muscle car classic that it always deserved. As we point out here and previously in

AMC, for a whole host of reasons the HG in its day was the Aussie muscle car classic which almost nobody noticed.

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