Steve Normoyle
Earlier this year an Electric Blue Falcon GTHO Phase III (much like our cover car), sold at auction for a record $1.15 million. That record (the highest sum paid not just for a Phase III but for any Australian production car) didn’t even last the year out, because in September a Yellow Glo example went for a whopping $1.3m.
You could say that that’s a lot of money for any car. It’s certainly a lot of money for a car which, when new, wasn’t even twice the price of a new base-model XY Falcon with three-on-the-tree manual transmission and 3.3-litre (200cid) sixcylinder power.
If you do the sums, you’ll nd that averaged out across the lifespan of that Yellow Glo Phase III, the car has appreciated by something like ve hundred percent every year…
No one in 1971 could have seen that coming. Even Wheels magazine didn’t fully grasp the enormity of what Ford had achieved with its latest GTHO – as Paul Newby explains elsewhere in this magazine, Wheels not only didn’t think the new Phase III was enough of a big deal for it to be on the cover of the October ’71 issue (which carried the mag’s rst Phase III road test), but they didn’t even make mention of it on the cover (the cover shot was the mag’s Big 3’ six-cylinder family car comparison test – Kingswood-vs-Falcon-vs-Valiant).
Still, it’s not as though Wheels or anyone else at the time didn’t realise that they were in the presence of high-performance production car greatness – on a world scale. After all, the numbers don’t lie. With a top speed of a tad over 140mph (225km/h), it was fastest four-door mass produced car in the world in 1971.
Ford’s John Gowland was probably being a tad disingenuous when he told journalists when the car was launched that ‘there are no big changes [from the Phase II] – we’ve just ironed out a lot of little things, smoothed the car out.’
Yet at the same time, what he was saying wasn’t wrong. The Phase III was a faster car in a straight line than the Phase II, but equally it was also a better handler. Not only that, but all round it was just a much more re ned and liveable package. Wheels described it as ‘now approaching the realm of an acceptable town car.’ One which was also eleven seconds a lap faster around Mount Panorama than its predecessor (a car which could never have been described as ‘an acceptable town car’)...
One thing no one knew at the time was that the Phase III would be the last of its kind. There would be no Phase IV; there would be no more street-legal Bathurst race machines – unless you count the 1972 version of the Phase III (and the LJ Torana). But the ’72 cars weren’t ‘pure’ homologation specials, but rather the existing models enhanced where possible with parts that had been meant for the stillborn Phase IV and XU-1 V8. As great as these cars were, in reality they were makeshift Bathurst upgrades, not pre-planned performance evolutions. They were cobbled together at the last minute.
The Phase III in 1971 by comparison represented a perfectly formed, concise body of work from Ford and Al Turner’s men at Lot 6 – and one which delivered exactly as intended. The Phase III was made for Bathurst, and it was Bathurst which made the Phase III.
After the Phase III it was never the same again for Bathurst, just as it was never the same for the Australian high performance road car scene. The era of the showroom racers was over.
It would take a decade or so before the respective performance road car offerings from Holden and Ford packed the sort of punch that XY GTHO did in 1971.
Of course, the more recent muscle from FPV (and HSV) well eclipses what the Phase III was capable of 50 years ago. But so they should.
But even the hottest, most powerful and fastest of those modern muscle cars doesn’t have what the Phase III has. Those cars don’t have the Phase III’s purity of purpose – one manufacturer’s unbridled attempted at creating a racing car for the road.
There are lots of things that made the Phase III great. But in the end it all comes down to the simple reason for the car’s existence in the rst place – the Bathurst 500.