Job for the boys

Ahigh level of staff retention is usually the sign of a good working environment. By that yardstick, Garry Rogers Motorsport must be a pretty good place to work.

The fact that GRM has a lot of long-serving employeeste of staff retention made this project a lot easier than it could have been. They did not have to rely solely on old records and drawings of the cars, because many of the guys who worked on the original cars some 18 years ago are still at GRM today.

Jeff ‘Gypsy’ Marshall has been GRM’s engine builder since 1999. He built the original 427 Monaro engines and he built the 2020 version. Howard ‘Johnno’ Johnstone is a fabricator who joined GRM around the same time as Gypsy – and is also still there today. The original Monaros are among many cars Johnno’s built for GRM. Les Creely, the company’s purchasing officer, came on board in 2003 – he missed the yellow car’s victory in the inaugural Bathurst 24 Hour but was there to see the red one do the job the following year. Nan ‘Spoon’ Kloth, is by comparison something of a blow-in, having been at GRM ‘only’ eight years… But in that time the skilled fabricator has built in excess of 25 GRM race shells, including the latest Monaro.

Creely remembers digging through what he jokingly calls the ‘Container of Misery’ last year when Barry Rogers got the idea to do the Monaro replica. In there they found that they’d kept spare body panels, including the specially

ared rear quarter panels, the moulds for the Monaros’ composite panels, side skirts, front bars, air boxes etc.

“As we went through the containers, all of sudden we started nding lots of little things off the cars,” Creely says. “That started the ball rolling.”

They did have a lot of parts, but there was still a lot of stuff they didn’t have. And some of those missing components would prove very difficult to nd.

Ironically, it was the seemingly simple things that proved the hardest to track down. Like wheels. Back in the day the Monaros raced on 18x11-inch Italian-made OZ magnesium wheels. Those size wheels in an offset to t the Monaro aren’t available any more. They tried to organise some new ones but OZ would only come to the party for an order of about 40 wheels.

“I ended up nding the guy we’d sold the wheels to about 10 years ago,” Creely says. “He gave us the number of the guy who he’d sold them to, and I was able to chase him down.

In the meantime Gypsy found one wheel from somewhere else, but when we got it, it had been machined on the back, so we couldn’t use it. Getting a set of wheels for the car ended up being a long and involved process but eventually Barry and Garry Rogers with the finished product. On the Monaro’s left flank are (left-to-right) Barry Megaw, Howard ‘Johnno’ Johnstone and Jeff ‘Gyspy’ Marshall - all three are ‘veterans’ of the original 427C effort. That’s Johnno (below right) with the original shell in 2002 (with Peter van Waart and Peter Hoare); Gypsy (right) built the engines then and now. Nan ‘Spoon’ Kloth (centre right) built the new shell.

The fact that GRM has a high rate of staff retention made this project a lot easier than it could have been. They did not have to rely solely on old records and drawings of the cars, because many of the guys who worked on the original cars some 18 years ago are still at GRM today.