1976-1977: Turning Japanese
Looking for something faster and more reliable, Leeds bought the ex-Gary Cooke Mazda RX3 – but always had trouble with it suddenly sticking in second gear. Inevitably, perhaps, one day at Amaroo it was written off when Paul Older’s BMW slammed into the back of it. “Next thing, Mazda House rang and asked if I’d like to drive their car at Bathurst with Jimmy McKeown and I said, ‘Jimmy McKeown? You betcha!’
“I thought the handling was OK, but Jimmy hated it because he was getting out of his Porsche. He said the guys had to do something about the handling. I spoke to them, but there was really nothing you could do apart from change the camber or something. So they bought a Porsche badge and stuck in the middle of the dash! ‘There you go, that should make it handle better don’t you reckon?’ I just cracked up. Typical mechanics’ humour.”
They nished fourth in class and 11th outright, but Mazda House quit racing and Geoff bought the car, which he raced competitively in the 1977 BF Goodrich Series. Allan Grice won that series in the Craven Mild RX3, and Gricey (who would race his Torana A9X at Bathurst) was sufficiently impressed to offer Leeds the Bathurst drive alongside Mazda works driver Yoshimi Katayama, who Geoff hadn’t heard of but was described as ‘the Allan Moffat of Japan.’ Well, that sounded encouraging.
To ensure Katayama plenty of practice, Geoff’s car was painted up in Craven Mild colours and taken as a T-car. But communication was a problem: “Katayama only had four words of English – understeer, oversteer, cigarette and beer! So we had to have an interpreter.”
Katayama was typically fearless, but in those days Mount Panorama was a daunting place – even for a former motorcycle racer and future Le Mans class winner – with no fences on the left across the top and earth banks on the right.
“After rst practice, (photographer) Lance Ruting came up and said, ‘Oh, Geoff, you’ve got to do something about your co-driver, he’s going to tip the thing over. He’s going down the middle of the road through the Esses and he’s got it up on two wheels!’ I said to Lance, ‘I can’t say anything to the Japanese touring car champion, how can I tell him he’s not driving properly?’ So Lance went over and talked to Gricey, who came over and told me to take the T-car out and let Yoshimi follow me around. He wasn’t that quick at that point in time, but he was certainly brave! He had a bit of trouble keeping up at rst but after a few laps he was right, and later on Gricey came over and told me that Yoshimi said I was ‘very fast driver.’
“Yoshimi felt that Allan’s car handled better than mine – so perhaps McKeown was right!
– so we elected to run it in the race, which was always the plan anyway. I started, but I was getting a palpitation through the pedal, so after I nished a stint I told Yoshimi through the interpreter to be careful. I washed up and was just telling Gricey that it was going well, then looked at the TV monitor as this gold and white car was rolling through the sand at Murrays Corner. ‘Is that your car or our car?!!’
“When it nally came to rest, I could see it was our car, so I ran down and crossed the track to check on Yoshimi. In those days the medical
centre was a caravan next to the old control tower, so I put my arm around him to walk him there. He just said, ‘Cigarette, cigarette!’ I managed to bum a cigarette from a spectator, so we’re standing outside the medical centre and they’re trying to get him inside and he’s dragging away on a cigarette! Anyway, he nished his cigarette and they checked him out and he was OK.
“A big piece of the brake disc had come off and pulled the strut out at the end of Conrod, so he was bouncing the car off the fence trying to slow it down, but it hit a drain and that turned it over. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It could easily have been me.”
So that was the end of Geoff’s rst big-budget drive. He wouldn’t get another, but Katayama did return as co-driver to the real Allan Moffat in the Peter Stuyvesant RX7, and nished second outright in 1983.
Leeds sold his RX3 to Victorian Noel Edwards and delivered it to Phillip Island. After a few laps to prove the car was as promised, Geoff accepted a bank cheque and, as he waited to cross the circuit to leave, Edwards ew past and had a huge crash. Geoff quickly checked the bank cheque and left…