THE WAR IS OVER
THE TWO MEN WHO HEADED UP AUSTRALIA’S HIGH-PERFORMANCE CAR DIVISIONS REVEAL WHAT REALLY WENT ON IN THE HEYDAY BATTLES BETWEEN HSV AND TICKFORD
Once adversaries, these men headed up the golden age of HSV vs FPV. Now John Crennan and David Flint sit down to reflect on battles won and lost
John Crennan was – and still is – a marketing man. David Flint, on the other hand, was – and still is – a nuts ’n’ bolts man
NOW THAT THE war is over, let’s catch up for lunch… said no two adversaries ever! Just imagine if that were true though; if Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee regularly played poker and swilled bourbon long after the battle of Appotomax brought a close to the American Civil War. Or if Churchill invited that little Austrian fella with the funny moustache over to 10 Downing Street for tea every Sunday. Or, more recently, if George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein smoked cigars and reminisced about the good ol’ days every September in the White House.
It would be intriguing to be part of a world if any of those situations were true, or even possible. But they weren’t, primarily because those combatants didn’t get along in the first place and, secondly, some of them were dead at the end of it all anyway.
Yet, today, overlooking the Yarra River on a baking early summer day with the birds singing from the eucalypts and glasses clinking with pre-Christmas cheer from the cafe, here I am sitting between the two opposing generals who masterminded one of the fiercest, bloodiest battles in Australian history. Or did they?
More accurately, what I want to find out is; was there even a war in the first place?
Even if you’ve been a casual observer of the Australian automotive industry over the past 30-odd years, and now that the Holden is history and Ford’s fortunes come from a dual-cab ute, it’s safe to presume most punters considered Holden Special Vehicles and Tickford (which later morphed into Ford Performance Vehicles) as mortal motoring enemies. We at Wheels certainly did. Whether it was on the road, the racetrack, the showroom or the dyno, the Red v Blue rivalry was real.
John Crennan and David Flint – the two generals in charge of HSV and FPV, respectively, through the
’90s and noughties – marched their respective brands through a purple patch of Australian performance cars.
But they looked out of their corner offices with a different view, and certainly not one with a cross-hair scope pointed at each other.
“We were never enemies,” says Crennan as he wipes the droplets building on the outside of his brown bottle before taking a refreshing first swig to counter a few-hour photoshoot in high 30-degree temperatures.
“We had phone calls every now and then...
“And we swapped cars regularly,” interjects Flint. “I drove one of his and he drove one of mine when there was something new. I always had a huge amount of respect for what John was doing.” “So, it was you who ignited the war, not us... we were getting on beautifully,” Crennan adds forcefully, pointing at my iPhone recording our conversation, charmingly removing any personal attack from his remark.
Whatever we the media – Wheels magazine included – might have made up, any rivalry needs two protagonists. And ‘Crenno’ and ‘Flinty’, as they are known within close circles, marched into our firing line – and, more often than not, shot back with as much force – from two completely opposing directions.
Crennan was inducted into the Australian automotive industry when he joined Holden aged just 17. After 24 years clambering through the marketing department obstacle course, he leapt out of the trenches at Fishermans Bend to mop up the mess created by the controversial explosion between Holden and Peter Brock and the crater left by the demise of HDT (Holden Dealer Team) and its burgeoning performance-car division. To do that, he joined forces with Scottish motor racing tycoon Tom Walkinshaw and created Holden Special Vehicles.
Crenno was – and still is – a marketing man.
Flint, on the other hand, was – and still is – a nuts and bolts man. He grew up in the UK and, upon graduating from university, was recruited directly to Aston Martin as a production engineer. He later led a management buyout of the Tickford engineering division when then-owners CHI went belly-up and he subsequently became the backbone in building the joint-venture operation with Ford Australia that was tasked to reload the Blue Oval’s performance-car arsenal and take on Holden and HSV.
Both are extremely smart leaders who don’t suffer fools in any way; Crennan a towering self-confessed “control freak” who casts an intimidating shadow; Flint a detailsdriven delegator who delivers orders and criticism with the bluntness of a sledgehammer.
Because of those inherent characters, HSV and Tickford were two very different organisations when they began to hit their strides in the early 1990s. Even though both were technically joint-venture operations with direct links to their respective parent companies, HSV had more autonomy. Its Clayton basecamp was on the other
side of town from Holden’s headquarters and Crennan and Walkinshaw demanded they assemble a crack squad to control the whole she-bang, including the design, engineering, retail and marketing of its vehicles. On the outside, HSV appeared to be its own entity.
“For me, it was a giant polish-up of Peter’s HDT operation that was primarily dominated by racing; and they also had a car business over there,” Crennan says.
“All their time and energy was about racing and the car business was – and I’m not in any way being disrespectful – more of a hobby. It wasn’t the mainstream. We were the other way around ... It was the whole deal.
“And the General Motors relationship was to make sure we were complementing each other. If we hadn’t had been able to do the marketing, it would have got lost in the GM marketing system. Totally lost. We were very fortunate to be masters of our own destiny.”
But that didn’t come without its own challenges, including some dissention from within its own ranks that placed roadblocks in HSV’s path.
“I always said that during my tenure – and afterwards – there were two types of attitude [within General Motors] towards HSV: the believers and the non-believers. And the believers were exceedingly helpful, and we needed their help all the time,” recalls Crennan.
“And for some reason or another there were people within Holden that were non-believers – it might have been motivated by envy – that created some antagonism and were saying that this star was shining too bright and taking away from the mainstream brand.
“There were still dissenters even at its peak. Not in a nasty fashion, but some were very unhelpful.”
Tickford, on the other hand, became a brand by accident. Its initial orders were simply to assist Ford with behindthe-scenes development and off-site production of niche, low-volume performance vehicles, as well as the fitment of accessories and systems that would have been too complex for the main Falcon factory line.
Strategically, its Campbellfield base was within shouting distance of Jacques Nasser’s corner office at Ford’s Broadmeadows headquarters, and the Blue Oval retained control of product planning, design and marketing.
Tickford didn’t have the same autonomy as HSV. It wasn’t meant to... or allowed to.
“The strategy was all wrong,” Flint says with his trademark brutal honesty.
“And I wasn’t smart enough to recognise that because I just built the cars, and I was quite good at that. But I had never been involved in marketing and so and so. It took a long time to change that...
“The name we chose, we chose it collectively – Tickford Vehicle Engineering – and I’m not sure why. Hardly anyone
“It did take a long time for us to step up to a level even close to what Crenno and his crew were doing”
FORMER FPV BOSS DAVID FLINT
in the UK knew what Tickford was unless they were older than me, and certainly no-one here knew about it.
“The model we were initially looking for wasn’t the same as what John had, and to be honest we couldn’t do it anyway because of how the joint venture was established. We had good engineers and we had good products. We just weren’t able to tell people about it.
“It did take a long time for us to step up to a level even close to what Crenno and his crew were doing.”
Crennan, however, admits he saw the arrival of Flint’s Tickford army as an immediate threat, proven by the original fax (remember this is the early 1990s) sent to Holden heavyweights which he pulls from a vast collection of documents – faxes, newspaper clippings and internal memos – he has brought to lunch. It’s dated August 14, 1991, and includes a copy of Ford Australia’s official press release confirming the establishment of Tickford Vehicle Engineering.
“At our next executive meeting I believe we should acknowledge the establishment of our first serious competitor,” Crennan reads from the faded cover letter. “There it is ... Tickford and Ford to form joint venture.” Crennan recalls meeting Flint for the first time in person at the 1991 Sydney Motor Show, where Ford officially revealed the Tickford-developed EB Falcon XR8, and admits his adversary immediately passed the “no-bullshit Aussie pub test”. By sheer coincidence, they crossed paths again a few months later while dining at the same restaurant in Melbourne’s swish South Yarra district on New Year’s Eve with family and friends.
“I remember the first time we sat down properly,” Crennan chimes in, pulling another file note from his collection and proceeding to read aloud; “On 25th of September 1992, David Flint, the Managing Director of Tickford requested that we meet for dinner. The dinner took place on December 24 and notably there was some points of discussion that were of interest.”
That’s Christmas Eve. Soldiers might have laid down their guns on Christmas Day, but their generals didn’t have a steak dinner together the night before.
“Flint stated his main reason for the meeting was to discuss the public war that Ford and General Motors were waging against one another which he felt was extremely unnecessary and desperate, and more importantly fuelled in the media, which seemed hell-bent on pinning HSV and Tickford into the same combat,” Crennan continues.
“Flint sought the writers’ cooperation that the magazines respectively stay away from comparisons that they wish to make, and that we should maintain a quality approach to our marketing.”
Crennan reveals that Flint disclosed internal machinations of Tickford’s relationship with Ford, including its financial structure, staffing and logistics. They even talked about top-secret engineering developments and future product strategies. Both laid their battle plans out over a three-course meal and a couple of bottles of red.
“What a fine, upstanding member of the industry. It doesn’t sound like we were enemies, right?” he asks rhetorically while offering his brown bottle as a ‘cheers’ to Flint across the table.
“I certainly didn’t want to give David any free kicks anywhere, but I also didn’t in any way take on the same sense of hatred there was between Broadmeadows and Fishermans Bend. And I think David was reading from the same page. We were just doing our thing.”
It wasn’t all red wine and roses when they retreated back
Crennan reveals that Flint disclosed internal machinations of Tickford’s relationship with Ford
to their bunkers, however, as Crennan admits there was a genuine battle within our made-up war: power!
“How critical was the power war?” he says repeating my question. “Critically critical! We could not concede, or we would have been dead in the water. The thirst and the appetite among our enthusiast base was that they demanded more and more power and we had to deliver.
“It was one of my greatest fears, to be honest, that David and his team were going to knock us off that perch. We held our breath a lot.”
Tickford – and later with FPV – never had an answer to HSV’s offensive front. Flint, at the time, always publicly retreated from being drawn into a power war, often stating his ‘Total Performance’ philosophy was a more holistic approach to produce vehicles that were better balanced and, ultimately, more socially responsible.
“Was that the truth or were you just being a diplomat and masking the disadvantages you had?” I ask.
“We were held back only because there was nothing in the Ford bucket that could give us what we wanted,” he responds honestly.
“Some of the stuff we developed was created surreptitiously. One day very early on [chief engineer] Winnie [Winfried Beilharz] came into my office and said, ‘I think we’ve cracked the V8’. I asked, ‘what are we going to do about it?’, so I went across the road to [Ford President] Geoff [Polites] and I told him that we could stroke that old nail of V8 and get back in front. He said ‘Well, bloody do it!’
“That put us back in the fight and we were able to build our own engines from then. Admittedly, Crenno’s mob had a better mousetrap most of the time, but we gave them a run in the end... and, more importantly, we gave our customers what they wanted.”
A better mousetrap? Isn’t that Flint’s area of expertise, and what Tickford was tasked to create?
“The DNA of the Falcon was a taxi and made to the lowest possible price,” he says.
“And truthfully, I’d get up in the morning and wonder ‘how the hell I am going to change that?’. It was really, really hard work sometimes.
“I always envied the difference in the DNA between the Commodore and the Falcon. I can’t remember which model Commodore it was, but I went to a dinner one night at the Hyatt and there was a red one parked outside and I said to [my wife] Sandy, ‘We’ve lost’.”
Not long after that metaphorical surrender, Flint retired from his role as Managing Director of Ford Performance Vehicles in 2005, not because he’d lost the cross-town clash with HSV, but as a result of a fractious insurgence by new owners, Prodrive. Two years later Crennan retired as Chairman of HSV, closing out an enthralling 20-year chapter in Australia’s automotive history.
Win, lose or draw, what Flint and Crennan created – individually via Tickford/Ford Performance Vehicles and Holden Special Vehicles – was undeniably the strongest battalion of V8 and six-cylinder powered soldiers, each of them deserving the automotive equivalent of a purple heart for the purple patch of performance cars that stood behind them.
If the fight between HSV and FPV wasn’t really a civil war, then two hours with Crenno and Flinty reminiscing and praising each other over the battle proves it was at least the most civil of wars.
“I always envied the difference in the DNA between the Commodore and the Falcon”
DAVID FLINT