Mount Panorama by John Smailes

Author:John Smailes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

They called it ‘The Beast’. Harry Firth built up an old six-cylinder Torana XU-1 used in rallies into a car powered by a Formula 5000 V8 engine. It was an unintentional homage to every hotted-up Holden that had competed at Mount Panorama two decades before. At the Easter motor-race meeting at Mount Panorama, 1973, Firth had Colin Bond drive it in all three events for which it complied. ‘It wasn’t much of a car,’ Bond recalled.

‘Sports sedans were just starting to become really popular and there was a lot of prize money on offer,’ Bond said. These sedans had purpose-built chassis with incredibly powerful motors. ‘But Harry said there was no money to enter the category. So he built this instead.’ Bond thinks it was a bit of an exercise. Holden was soon to launch a V8-powered Torana—the SLR 5000—‘and maybe they wanted to try out a few bits in this car’.

The open-trumpeted Repco V8 sat alongside the driver, a little forward of where the passenger seat would be, so loud that the driver was deafened (Bond, like so many former racers, now wears a hearing aid), and the four-speed gearbox was behind so Bond had to reach backwards to change gears. ‘Its suspension was pretty standard and so were the brakes,’ he said. But the power—The Beast easily topped 160 miles per hour (257 kilometres per hour), moving all over the road, and Bond was grateful he had no competition to make his job even harder. It was difficult enough just driving the car without having to employ race craft.

The Easter ’73 meeting was a watershed for Mount Panorama.

Motor racing was going through yet another metamorphosis. The rules for touring-car racing had changed in favour of production cars, and the Geoghegan–Moffat clash the previous year would be the last time a round of the Australian Touring Car Championship was contested at Mount Panorama.

Mount Panorama was losing out to the amphitheatre circuits outside Sydney, like Oran Park and even the ARDC’s own Amaroo Park. People could go there for just a day, not a weekend, see most of the action from one vantage spot and enjoy back-to-back racing—sometimes sixteen races on one card. It was difficult for Bathurst to compete in the instant-gratification stakes.

The Easter 1973 race meeting was particularly dissatisfying for the organising club. They’d not had a championship event on the card; that felt disrespectful to the great circuit and everything it stood for. It had been just like a big club meeting.

A committee, convened shortly afterwards, resolved to tell Bathurst City Council that the ARDC would concentrate on the promotion of its long-distance race, which was putting the city of Bathurst on the map in a way not even the Australian Grands Prix for open-wheeler racing cars had done. It recommended that the Easter date become the sole domain of the Auto Cycle Union.

Colin Bond, one of the most decorated drivers of his generation, took the chequered flag for the last closed-car race held at Mount Panorama in its first golden age.

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