NZ Performance Car

MAKING A LEGEND

AN INTERVIEW WITH AUSTRALIAN TOURING CAR ROYALTY FRED GIBSON

- INTERVIEW: JADEN MARTIN PHOTOS: AUTOPICS.COM.AU

NZ Performanc­e Car: Hi Fred, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Could you quickly tell readers who you are and what your involvemen­t with the Nissan GT-Rs was?

Fred Gibson: Morning, buddy, sure thing. I’m Fred Gibson, former motorsport­s driver, winner of the ’67 Bathurst 500 with Harry Firth, and the owner and manager of the Gibson Motorsport team that competed in the Australian Touring Car Championsh­ip (ATCC) from 1981 to 2000. Formed out of the Nissan Motorsport team, which I headed after Howard Marsden moved on, we were responsibl­e for the developmen­t and campaignin­g of all the Skylines in the ATCC and Bathurst, including the BNR32 GT-Rs, backed by the Nissan Motor Company.

Could you tell the readers how you got started in motorsport yourself?

My dad was involved in restoratio­n work with my uncle; they did old Rolls-Royces for a guy in a panel shop. All of a sudden I got the petrol bug and I bought an MG MGA for the road — that was my first car. I kept getting too many speeding fines and things like that so I decided to try out motorsport. I joined the Southern Sporting Car Club and turned my MGA into a race car; I suppose my career started then. That ended up being one of the quickest MGAs in the country. My first Bathurst was with an MGA twin-cam in a six-hour sports-car race many, many years ago. I started a long time ago — I’m pretty old [laughs]. That was ’65. It was one of the first longdistan­ce races at Bathurst. My second race at Bathurst was the year after in a Mini 850 in one of the first 500s — the following year I drove a Cooper S and came second outright.

So you saw a good amount of success in those earlier days?

I wouldn’t say success; I was just enjoying what I was doing. I worked on my car in the backyard. That car ended up having rear disc brakes, a close-ratio gearbox, and crossflow heads — that was a big deal for those times. I sold it as a trade-in for a Lotus Elan from the Geoghegan brothers because they were the Lotus agents back in those days. It was the first Lotus competitio­n car to come into the country and was very successful for me. I raced it for a number of years and won all the production sports car races at all circuits — Bathurst and everywhere. After that I got involved with Harry Firth. He rang me about doing Bathurst, because Frank Matich couldn’t get back to drive with him at Bathurst in ’67. We drove the Ford Falcon GT, and Harry and I won the Bathurst 500 that year. After that, I became a driver for Ford Motor Company.

“We were responsibl­e for the developmen­t and campaignin­g of all the Skylines in the ATCC”

How did Nissan get started in touring car racing in Australia, and what was your role in that?

Well, I drove for Ford until they pulled the plug and Howard Marsden moved to the Nissan Motor Company, he was the boss of Ford motorsport­s programme you see, and that’s where the Nissan Motorsport programme started. Howard became the product planning manager at Nissan and head of Nissan Motorsport, as they had decided to get involved with racing. So, you think of Nissan as a manufactur­er in Australia, because they were manufactur­ing Nissans here back then, and they wanted to promote the cars they were manufactur­ing. At the time, they were in the middle of manufactur­ing the Bluebirds, so Howard got some of the Japanese Bluebirds that were the highest spec and already FIA approved through the overseas rallying campaigns. The idea was to have their rally driver George Fury come and drive, so they pulled out of rally and went circuit racing.

For those that weren’t around then, how different was the touring car world compared to what we know today?

Back in those days it was just motorsport. The whole idea was to drive whatever had wheels on it. It didn’t really matter what it was, drivers drove lots of different types of cars. I drove the Gold Star Series, sports car racing, and touring car racing — everything. Now they tend to stick to one sort of thing, but I also think that when I was racing those were strong categories. It isn’t like today, we don’t have those types of series now, which is a shame. The openwheel racing was really good stuff too, especially when you had the internatio­nals coming. The whole scene has changed and we’ve become touring cars or GT cars now, except for the club racing or smaller classes.

What was it like moving to the Bluebirds compared with what you had previously driven?

It was chalk and cheese, mate. The Falcon was a big beast of a car, and big cars are hard on tyres and hard on brakes. Going to the Bluebird was … definitely more nimble, the Bluebird was an amazingly nimble car. We really raced them as a class car; we tried to win the two-litre class with that rather than win against the big boys. But then we got greedy and started developing the car more, and it became an outright contender, although unreliable. Plumes of smoke would come out of the exhaust, and you’d know you had blown another turbo.

Is that where the story of Gibson Motorsport started?

I suppose so, yes. When it was Nissan Motorsport and they were in charge of the racing programme, the boys got a bit out of control as a team. Howard wasn’t able to spend the time in the workshop as much as he probably should have, and those Bluebirds really got out of control. When I took over, we went to the DR30, but it took a lot longer to homologate. To do the homologati­on back in those days, you had to do your paperwork here in Australia, then it would go to Confederat­ion of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS), then the Japanese authority, then to FIA, so we were late starting. That was probably

good for me in some ways, because I started with a whole new team for the Skyline. That’s when it became more Gibson Motorsport than Nissan. We changed the name to ‘Gibson Motorsport’ and developed the DR30. Howard said: “I’ve got a sponsor for you, and Nissan will put in some money as well.” That was Peter Jackson cigarettes. They put in something like A$750K at the time and Nissan made up the rest of the budget. I forget what the exact budget was in those days; probably about A$1.5M, something like that. When we went to the GT-R, and had Winfield sponsoring the cars, that was about a A$5M budget total. The GT-R was an expensive programme. Nissan couldn’t really afford to do it without a sponsor; it was too much money out of the company budget. Nissan were putting something like A$1M into the GT-R budget, while Winfield were putting in A$4M.

How much time did your team have to develop the new GT-R chassis before letting it loose in the 1990 ATCC season?

Not very long, really. The HR31 beforehand wasn’t a problem; it was quite simple: a single-turbo rear-wheel-drive car. The GT-R, on the other hand, was so different for us. When Nissan told me they were going to send out the new twin-turbo six-cylinder before they had even released the GT-R, I thought it would be a V6 twin-turbo. But when it came out, it was a straight-six in typical Japanese fashion. One of the biggest mistakes they made was that it made the car front heavy — the engine hung over the front cross member. That was a very difficult car to get to handle right and develop it. To start with, we got two full-trim road cars delivered. It’s a shame really — they arrived at the workshop as brand-new cars, and we ripped everything apart, threw the upholstery away, and built race cars out of them. So, whatever they were cost-wise, we just ripped them apart. After the initial two, we just got bodyshells and built them that way, because we didn’t need a lot of the stuff that was in the road cars.

Did the Japanese versions have much influence on how you built your own?

Yes, but in the way that we learned that we had much tougher competitio­n here, and the Japanese-spec parts weren’t going to do. The first car we raced was at Mallala [Motor Sport Park, north of Adelaide], and a lot of that car was built with Japanese bits. We ran out of time getting the car ready, and Nissan wanted it there. We broke a front hub in the race, and, after that, we realized that the Japanesesp­ec car was not going to be quick enough. From there, we made our own wheels, front and rear uprights, developed our own gearbox, own bellhousin­g — we made our own components in Australia. And it was expensive to buy parts from Nismo — they would want A$12K for a water pump. A straight-cut gearbox from Nismo was something like A$65K at the time, and they would last maybe two races if we were lucky. We got a brand-new box, went to Mallala and then Perth the next weekend, and blew it apart. That’s when we

“Our turbos were running to 180,000rpm, and we knew that if they hit 200,000rpm they’d shit themselves”

“I’m a competitiv­e prick, and our GT-Rs ended up being the best in the world”

decided this isn’t going to work, and we developed the gearboxes with Holinger. We designed a lot of the parts in the workshop, and did our own engines in the workshop. We had more power than the Japanese cars for sure — they used to email us asking to see the latest dyno sheet and ask what we had done to achieve that power.

Speaking of doing the engines in-house, what was it that you were doing to them to crank so much power and be so lethal?

The first engines we did, we put them on the dyno and water would be running out where the engine mounts bolted to the block. They used to crack because of the torque of the engine and nearly pull the mounts out. We got on to Nismo about it and they kept asking, “Why do you have this trouble?” That’s when the N1 blocks started coming out — they really designed the strength into them because of the dramas we were having. As far as the motors go, we didn’t use a lot of Nismo components; we made our own camshafts, pistons, turbos, everything in-house. We did very little outside the workshop. The factory turbos weren’t good enough, so we made special bearings and balanced them ourselves. They were running 1.8bar [26psi] of boost, but it wasn’t the boost that worried us so much; it was the turbo speed. We were one of the first teams to have data logging and mapped out what the car was doing at different points on the circuit. You’d go to Bathurst and see the boost from the bottom of the circuit change once the car got to the top due to the altitude change and because the turbos were working harder to produce the boost. So, we would put the engine on the dyno at the workshop and tune it to Bathurst atmosphere, because we had that data. Our turbos were running to 180,000rpm, and we knew that if they hit 200,000rpm they’d shit themselves, so we were very vigilant of the turbo speed. Power levels would depend on the conditions and who our competitio­n was — we could have on full-boost around 680hp [507kW], but normally we’d have about 650hp [485kW]. Don’t forget how heavy they were, though — our cars were 1400kg; they were like trucks.

Did you expect the GT-Rs to be so successful off the bat, winning the ATCC three years running and Bathurst twice?

We expected them to be a very technical car to get going; they had all the ingredient­s to say they were a good car, but it wasn’t an easy task, wasn’t an easy task at all. Australian touring car racing was probably one of the most competitiv­e in the world. We knew how difficult it was going to be. I suppose, until the rules changed, the car had a lot of competitio­n with cars like the Sierras, that sort of thing, so it was always an unknown. Though we undoubtedl­y ended with the best GT-Rs in the world, the competitio­n forced us to do it better — and we did. We could have run a Japanese-spec GT-R and come sixth or seventh every race, but that wasn’t what we were about. I’m a competitiv­e prick, and our GT-Rs ended up being the best in the world. We got offered to go to Fuji [Speedway] one day. I got a phone call from the organizer of the Fuji 1000, and he asked if we would be able to bring one of our cars to race. I said I’d be interested, “Yep, no problem”, but then I got a phone call the next day from Kakimoto-san, the boss of motorsport at Nissan [Nismo], and he said “Fred-san, I believe you have had an invitation to come to Fuji for 1000?”, and I said, “Yes, I have”, and he replied, “Not a good idea. You look after Australia and New Zealand, and we’ll look after the Japanese series”.

Were the drivers, Jim Richards and Mark Skaife, happy with the change in pace from the HR31 to these new fourwheel-drive powerhouse­s?

Oh shit yeah, because they were quicker; any driver wants a quicker car, doesn’t he? It was a bit of a struggle getting used to the four-wheel drive, I suppose — and we developed the ability to direct drive to the front to the rears from within the cockpit, or in the wet have full four-wheel drive — but really it wasn’t much different to a normal car. They did say that they found it a lot heavier to drive — remember, the HR31s were down under 1000kg — the GT-R was a much heavier car. Skaify and Richo were a great team.

We understand that in 1992 some heavy restrictio­ns were imposed — how did your team work around this to claim

its third championsh­ip and the final Bathurst win?

Yeah, we had to put some weight in the car — it was a lot of weight too, I tell ya. They put that extra weight on us and restricted the boost with a pop-off valve that CAMS had sourced from the FIA — it was used in Formula 1 and restricted boost to 1.5bar [22psi]. We had to machine the turbo inlet manifold and put the valve on there. They had a set-up that tested the pop-off valve at each race to make sure it was working. But you work around that, don’t you? We said, “OK, we’re only allowed 1.5[bar] boost, so let’s go to a higher compressio­n engine.” You can either have a low compressio­n engine with a heap of boost — which is what the Sierras did back in those days, using 2bar [29psi] and more boost — or you run less boost with a higher compressio­n ratio. The pop-off valve forced us to lower the boost, so we raised the compressio­n, from something like 7:1 to 9:1 — something like that, it was a bit more. We finished up virtually having the same power we began with before the restrictio­n. The biggest killer was that weight. They made us put in another 150kg, roughly, but didn’t say where it had to go, so the weight was added to the rear cross member. That weight was still in the car, but it was as low down as we could get it and didn’t hurt us as bad. Once you get those sort of things, you just have to work around it — we went as quick with the restrictio­ns as we did before.

What was the public reaction like to these foreign imports?

They hated us, hated us. They did come around after a while, but, yeah, they did, they hated us. ‘Japanese shitboxes’ they used to call them, and that would give me more encouragem­ent, because then we had to beat them all. Larry Perkins, he’s a good mate of mine, but he was always giving me grief about those Japanese shitboxes, and when we switched to the Commodores and were competitiv­e, that made him change his tune. We beat him in a Nissan and [were] also competitiv­e with him in a Commodore. It was really good stuff [laughs]. The public were very used to Australian cars, and even Dick Johnson was getting trouble with the Sierra — they were a Ford, but people still were funny about it. For Nissan, it was an image thing. They

were a Japanese car and people didn’t like that. I don’t know why. Especially with the HR31 — people learned to expect the GT-Rs to beat the Commodores and Falcons, but no one expected the HR31 to give the Commodore a hard time and beat them, but we did.

What was the biggest highlight of your career as a driver and team owner?

I suppose winning Bathurst in ’67 was really something special. Also to have been a successful touring-car manager and owner and winning touring-car championsh­ips. Skaife, Richards, and all of the other drivers wouldn’t have been winning championsh­ips without the team, and I’m very proud that we put a team together that could win — not just once or twice, but many times in different categories and with different cars. Winning the championsh­ip in the Commodore after the GT-Rs was probably the best, because everyone said they were going to blow the socks off us because we couldn’t make a Commodore quick enough. Having the team regarded as one of the best teams in Australia, having the cars as good and better than anyone else could build — that was pretty satisfying. There were people with us then that are still around in teams now as stars, such as Matthew Nilsson, the current boss of Holden Racing Team; we put him through his engineerin­g course at work!

Do you still watch the series?

I do; I don’t go to all the meetings though. I do go to the historic meetings, it’s good to see some of the older cars blazing around. I don’t go to Supercars unless we’re invited — we’re hall of fame members and all that sort of stuff — but at my age, I’d rather sit and watch it on TV.

Many people still think of the GT-Rs’ departure as a banning, but, for the team, was it a surprise when the format changed?

We knew the rules were changing; it wasn’t a surprise. I was on a committee which was assisting CAMS in the touring car championsh­ip, and we knew that CAMS were looking at changing it to a Ford-and-Holden format. So we had plenty of time to readjust our focus, I borrowed a Commodore off Bob Forbes, and we did some tyre testing for Yokohama. They were our tyre sponsor; we did some testing for them well before we went to Holden, as they didn’t have a tyre to suit the Commodores. We started developing the Commodore long before the end of the GT-R — there was a bodyshell in the workshop, and we had already started building it. They didn’t like the GT-R to start with, and there were no other cars that were looking to come into the series, so they just decided to make it a Ford and Holden–only thing. Both were manufactur­ed here, and, by then, Nissan had pulled out as a manufactur­er in Australia. They wanted to make it for Australian manufactur­ers.

It’s a shame really; imagine what Gibson Motorsport could have done with newer generation­s of GT-R! Did you realize back then how iconic the cars would become in the years after?

No, not really; we were just racing. The cars were just the tool to win races, and, back then, nobody wanted cars like that once they were finished. I originally kept one of every car we had right up until Gibson Motorsport finished, but it became: where do I put them? You’ve got to have a big shed to put them all in, and a guy offered to buy the whole lot off me, which I sold and wish I hadn’t done now. What they’re fetching now compared with what I sold them for is chalk and cheese. I can’t believe the money people are paying at auction. A local enthusiast owns nearly all our race cars now. He doesn’t own the Bluebird, but the DR30 — he owns two of those — two HR31, and owns all the GT-Rs except one which the Fox [Classic Car] Museum has got — that’s the Winfield car. He races the GT-R occasional­ly in historic touring cars here, and we run it for him. It’s good to see them still around, I suppose — those DR30 we restored for him at the workshop, and they’re brand new. We also restored a GT-R for him.

And, we have to ask, would you like to see the GT-R return to the current Supercars series?

It would be good to see a GT-R in there, but it will never happen. Now that it’s gone to the Mustang and Camaro format, they are more two-door sedans. The GT-R is a sports car, isn’t it? It would be good to see; it would light up the series. Although, all they’re really doing is putting bodies on a control chassis. If GT-R came in as a race car, that’d be a pretty good car, especially if it is fourwheel drive, and this one particular­ly, being a V6 twin-turbo, gives it a good advantage. Makes it a much better balanced car. But I don’t think they’d be wanting to let that sort of car in; the memory is still very fresh.

That it is, and will undoubtedl­y be for a very long time, Fred. Thanks for taking the time to relive years gone by with us. We hope to catch up again soon.

“A guy offered to buy the whole lot off me, which I sold and wish I hadn’t done now”

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