Barry Sharp
This colourful knockabout Sydney race ace was Sharp by name as well as performance, even if the V8-powered Sports Sedans he raced tended to be more like blunt instruments
He was Sharp by name and sharp in his performances on the track – even though his most of cars would be best described as blunt instruments. He may not have been a champion racing driver but Barry Sharp was a colourful presence on the motorsport scene in the 1960s and early ‘70s with a bewildering array of weird and wild home-built V8-powered Sports Sedans.
At Barry Sharp’s funeral in 2008, one of his friends, drag racing identity Bob Honeybrook, summed up the man in this way: “There were three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way and Barry Sharp’s way.” Barry Sharp certainly did things his way. If Sharp didn’t invent Sports Sedan racing, he was a crucial early pioneer of that category with the series of low-cost, low-tech (but highhorsepower) race cars he built and raced in the mid-to-late-‘60s. Nothing too sophisticated, mind you, but usually with enough Ford or Chev V8 grunt to get the job done.
Sharp was born in 1942 and grew up in Earlwood in Sydney’s inner west. He trained as an auto electrician but when it came to cars he was a jack of all trades. When Sharp, aged 17, met his rst wife, Dianne (now Dianne Mawer) in 1960, he was an auto electrician by day and working on cars at his parents’ home by night and on weekends. Sharp’s afterhours activities later developed into a business of its own, eventually the Barry Sharp Performance Centre – but before that came a spell with Jack Brabham and the retired F1 World Champion’s Ford dealership’s performance road car and racing division.
Barry Sharp also has the distinction of co-driving what remains today the most unlikely, and almost certainly the biggest and heaviest, car ever to start the Great Race, a hulking ’63 model Dodge Phoenix with 318 V8 power and automatic transmission, which he shared with Lindsay Derriman in 1967 (and which two weeks later served as the bridal car at Sharp’s wedding – with Derriman doing the honours as chauffeur, of course…).
Outside of circuit racing Sharp had a separate (and at rst secretive) career in drag racing – driving a series of homemade quarter-mile monsters that were arguably even more outlandish than his road racing cars. Later on he took to water, going power boat racing. In typical Barry Sharp style, he dived in at the deep end, so to speak, in the large capacity class – with a series of Ford V8 and Jaguar V12 boats, including, at one stage, a vessel powered by not one but TWO fuelinjected Ford 351 Cleveland V8s…
Barry Sharp started circuit racing in late 1964 in a 1948 model Wolseley 6/80. It would be the only one of his many circuit racing cars that either wasn’t a V8 or hadn’t had a larger-engine (V8) heart transplant. The Wolseley soon gave way to another stately old English sedan, a 1955 model Austin A90 – into which Sharp shoehorned the Y-Block V8 Ford Customline engine from his Studebaker-based ‘Strip Teaser’ dragster.
With 10-inch wheels, fat tyres and ared guards to suit (and converted to left-hand drive – a trademark Barry Sharp modi cation), the 312 cid (5.1-litre) V8 Austin was a brutal-looking beast of a machine. It should be noted that an English sedan/American V8 muscle hybrid vehicle such as this was something different in Australian touring car racing in the mid-‘60s. Certainly it caused a stir amongst officialdom – at its debut at the Oran Park night meeting in March, 1967, the scrutineers wanted to ban it.
It is said that one of the scrutineers was an Austin enthusiast, and he was
so offended by what Sharp had done to the lovely old A90 that he refused to clear it for competition… The Austin remained impounded in the scrutineering bay for some four hours while the scrutineer raised point after point, only for the rule book to prove him wrong every time. The Oran Park promoter Allan Horsley was there watching this saga unfold, patiently asking the scrutineers whether or not Sharp would be allowed to race. Horsley was new in the job, but already had seen what some other promoters hadn’t yet noticed – the rapidly growing spectator appeal of these new highly modi ed ‘Sports Sedans.’ Within a year Horsley would be paying appearance money for a little-known young driver from Victoria who also raced an Austin-based Sports Sedan with a bigger-engine transplant much like Sharp’s A90. That driver was Peter Brock.
Like so many of Barry Sharp’s cars, the A90’s competition life would be short and sweet. It only raced a handful of times before it was burned to the ground in a workshop re.
Dianne Mawer was there on the night of the re and remembers it well:
“Barry was renting one of the sheds at [fellow Sports Sedan racer] Bruce Carey’s father’s place at Lakemba. It used to be a mushroom factory – Bruce Carey’s father used to grow mushrooms in the sheds. Anyway, they had the Austin in there doing a modi cation to it because the scrutineers had knocked it back. They’d just nished what they were doing, and then a spark must have come out of the radiator on the oor which was upward facing, and then got into some petrol or something ammable. The whole place went up in ames.
“I had been sitting there knitting at the time… I had to run around to get Bruce Carey’s mother to ring the re brigade, and she says, ‘what have the silly buggers done now?’ The eries arrived and I told them there was oxy acetylene in there, and they panicked, and anyway the whole thing burned down.
“The next morning we went back there, and inside the burnt Austin was Barry’s helmet, which had been sitting on the seat. I went to pick it up, but when I touched it my hand just went straight through it. It just fell apart like powder; it was just ash.”
Sharp was able to salvage some parts out of the Austin’s charred remains (there was no insurance) and these would go into his next car. So out of the ashes would rise not a Phoenix (although, as it happened, around this time Sharp actually did in fact race a Phoenix, a Dodge Phoenix, in the Bathurst 500 and lesser Series Production races) but a Zephyr.
The Mk2 Ford Zephyr was tted with the Austin’s front suspension, engine and its Riley four-speed gearbox. To save weight, Sharp
It is said that one of the scrutineers was an Austin enthusiast, and he was so offended by what Sharp had done to the lovely old A90 that he refused to clear it for competition…
formed the front guards and bonnet in fibreglass as a one-piece lift-off unit. Clearly a lot of midnight oil was burned putting the Zephyr together (without also burning the workshop down again!), as Sharp was racing it barely a month after the fire.
Soon it was further modified, with the Customline V8 fitted with a Top, above left: Holden FE with Chev V8 power, and left-hand drive... After Sharp and Bill Warner went their separate ways with the Holden, Sharp went off and built up an old Falcon V8 Sports Sedan.
Below: Sharp’s Falcon heads Lynn Brown’s Mini and a young Peter Brock at Oran Park in August, 1969. supercharger, and the radiator being relocated to the boot. The radiator was fed cool air by scoops fitted to the Zephyr’s rear quarter windows, like giant ears.
The Zephyr would soon be sold (to Ian Munt, who was still racing it at least six years later) to make way for a new machine Sharp put together in partnership with speed shop owner and driver of the legendary ‘Moon Eyes’ speedway Super Modified, Bill Warner. As detailed in AMC #37, Warner was an Aussie muscle car pioneer, developing and offering a V8 performance XM Falcon coupe package in 1965 – two years before Ford delivered the first XR model Falcon GT.
Through his speed shop business, Warner
supplied the parts and Sharp performed the labour in building an FE Holden Sports Sedan with
283 (4.7-litre) Chev V8 power. As was the common performance mod for pre-EH Holdens back in the day, the FE had a HD
Holden front crossmember so that disc brakes could be fitted.
It was also converted to lefthand drive.
It might be assumed that
Sharp’s seeming obsession with left-hand-drive was all about the handling balance for his home circuit, the anticlockwise Oran Park (Allan Moffat ran LHD Mazda RX7s at Bathurst for the same reason). Not that cornering was the old Holden’s strong suit – in reality, and as the pics show, it was an evil-handling pig of a thing.
In reality, converting his race cars to left-hand drive had nothing to do with performance, according to fellow Sports Sedan driver and close mate, Alan Broome. It was, says Broome, all about promoting Sharp’s business.
“People say ‘why were his race cars left-hand drive?’” Broome says. “It was because of his conversion business – Barry Sharp Conversions –converting imported left-hand drive cars. He did it to help advertise the business; that’s all it was.”
The deal between Sharp and Warner wasn’t long lasting, but before they went their separate ways (with Warner taking over the car) Sharp drove the Holden-Chev to victory in two special Holden-versus-Falcon challenge races at Oran Park, in December 1968 and then in April the following year.
After that Sharp wasn’t out of racing long, returning quickly with a Falcon XL with 289 Ford V8 power. Like the Zephyr, the body was stiffened by welding the rear doors shut (giving the car the appearance of a coupe), and the front bodywork was moulded into one fiberglass section.
Elsewhere the Falcon was fairly rudimentary and, as the pics show, it shared the FE Holden’s lack of handling poise.
“There was nothing particularly refined about the way Barry built his cars,” says Broome, who first met Sharp when he was running the Falcon. “Barry’s approach to building cars was: a big hammer, a big set of spanners and an oxy torch.”
It may not have been the most sophisticated car in the field but with good power from the 289 and a bullet proof Top Loader gearbox, it wasn’t easily beaten. And its creator knew how to get the best out of it. At Oran Park the
Falcon was well matched against the top Minis (which were the top Sports Sedans) but came up short against the Holden-powered Austin of the visiting young charger from Victoria, Peter Brock.
With other new and better Sports Sedans starting to appear, soon it was time for another Sharp upgrade. The 289 Mustang engine and Top Loader box were retained as the Falcon made way for a Mk2 Jaguar. As a measure of how popular the new Sports Sedan class was at the time, Sharp had been strongly encouraged to commit to the Jaguar by Oran Park’s Allan Horsley, and also Castrol rep Toby Bent. They saw it as a spectator drawcard.
The engine and gearbox were set back in the chassis a little, according to Alan Broome, who helped build the car. One big advantage with the Jag was that it came with four-wheel disc brakes – a then-rarity in Sports Sedan racing. The Jag’s rear brakes were retained but Mustang discs were tted up front. It wasn’t given the trademark left-hand drive conversion treatment, but it did have the Sharp-style berglass front bodywork.
It was cheekily entered at race meetings as a ‘Jaguar 4.8’ (the standard six-cylinder Jag was known as a 3.8), and in keeping with this rather more distinguished form of transportation from the usual Barry Sharp fare, the front doors were adorned in big letters indicating that the Jaguar was driven by ‘Mr Barry Sharp.’
“Barry always had a fascination with Jaguars,” Alan Broome says, adding that he believes (and is probably correct) that it was the rst Ford-engined Jaguar race car in the world (an interesting historical footnote given that decades later Ford would own Jaguar, and took it racing in Formula 1).
The Jag was a better package than any of Sharp’s previous cars, and it showed in the results. It was a match for any Sports Sedan either side of the NSW/Victorian border, and at Hume Weir late in 1970 Sharp drove it to victory in the Australian Sports Sedan Trophy. This was the unofficial national title for Sports Sedans at a time when CAMS was trying to avoid giving
avoid giving the category official recognition. The powers-thatbe might have thumbed their nose at this burgeoning form of wildly modi ed sedan racing, but the readers of Racing Car News magazine recognised and appreciated the category – and voted Sharp third most popular Sports Sedan driver of 1970, behind the young Peter Brock and Wayne Rogerson.
But soon the Jag would be offloaded (to Bruce Taylor) as Sharp joined forces with none other than Jack Brabham. As detailed in our Jack Brabham Ford feature in AMC #124, the retired F1 champ enlisted Sharp to help run the performance division of Brabham’s Ford dealership at Lakemba.
The only reason the Jag had to go was that it wasn’t a Ford. In its place came an XY Falcon GT Series Production car – but not a GT-HO Phase III, as Brabham gured that the HO was the big seller, and therefore that’s what they should race.
The GT did surprisingly well. According to Sharp, as a race package it actually lacked little compared to the Phase III. The GT’s taller diff ratio allowed Sharp to run lower pro le tyres, which he believed made for better handling (less sidewall ex), as he explained to Mark Oastler in AMC #124:
“It only had about 295bhp, but the ‘HOs only had about 350bhp anyway. Plus the GT had more torque because of the cam pro le and the smaller carby (600cfm vs 780cfm). It was an Autolite four-barrel and we had it set up so it worked a bit like fuel injection. It just kept pouring in the fuel and it had so much whack on full throttle out of the turns it wasn’t funny!
“We beat a lot of GT-HOs in that car, because it had so much bottom-end torque and even though the standard gearbox ratios were all over the place, it just happened to suit everything.”
There was one race Sharp felt they should have won – but which in his view was lost even before the start. It was a 100-lap second round of the Australian Manufacturers Championship at Warwick Farm. .Sharp wanted to run the (smaller) 17-gallon fuel tank, but as he explained to journalist Ray Bell in 2002, team chief Austen Tauranac (brother of Brabham’s F1 partner, Ron) insisted they t the bigger tank.
Sharp worried that the bigger fuel load would lead to massive surge once the tank was partly emptied, and that this would destroy the rear tyres in the never-ending right-left-right turnings of the Warwick Farm circuit.
“I wanted to stop an extra time and change the tyres and adjust the rear brakes,” Sharp told Bell, “so we would have had a better chance despite not being able to run the same as the HOs.”
The race was lost when he had to stop for tyres just before the nish (above). The rear tyres had been torn to shreds by pushing them so far with all that fuel. Even so, it was the second Falcon home, the GT splitting the Allan Moffat and Bruce McPhee GT-HOs.
Four weeks later the car would meet its end, written off in a heavy practice crash at Amaroo Park. Alan Broome remembers the herculean effort that was put in to build up a new car overnight to make the race the next day: