After losing local full-scale vehicle manufacturing and the tenuous relationship it gave motorsport fans to the Commodore and Falcon, with the return of the Mustang as a full-blown Bathurst front-runner after decades of obscurity, it seems Ford has found again, and backed, a winning formula.
But half a century ago a very different beast was roaring down Conrod Straight, built by blokes in an ordinary tin shed known only as “Lot 6” in Melbourne’s Thomastown industrial precinct, back when asbestos was everywhere, speed cameras didn’t exist and Bon Scott was still a kid.
This was Ford’s real sales strategy.
The Mustang today is consistently the best-selling sports car in Australia by far, with 3584 sales this year, despite being down over 30%.
It outsells closest category competitor the Mazda MX-5 nine times, and with Commodore only on 5100 sales (down over 35% in 2019) – for a motorsport connection to road cars, the Mustang is it.
On the morning of the Bathurst 1000 in October, AutoTalk had the opportunity to chat with some of the unsung heroes behind what was the original Ford legend, long before it had an official name.
The expression “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” was the driver of Australia’s formerly two biggest car brands, back when Monaros, Kingswoods and Toranas sold hand-over-fist for Holden and the Falcon was the must-have Blue Oval.
A crew of six men, brought together by the special vehicles’ manager Al Turner, was tasked with building the fastest tin-top racing car Australia had ever seen.
The legends.The GT-HO Phase I, II & III race cars.
Robin Searls started as “a gopher” cleaning tyres and fetching burgers before a stint in the US as an apprentice doing development for Ford’s racing division called Kar-Kraft.
He’d caught wind of Ford Australia wanting to go motor racing.
“I’d done a lot of work on the Cleveland engine in the US for development on the Boss 351 Mustang of ’71, but they brought that engine here in late 1969 to put into production first,” he tells AutoTalk.
“It wasn’t a large team with only five others on the floor working with their own job on each of the three race cars, one doing brakes, one doing gearboxes, a couple doing engines,” Searls explains.
Lot 6 for those who don’t know, was the equivalent of Dick Johnson Racing Team Penske building the most extraordinary V8 Supercar under complete secrecy from the rest of Ford’s organisation.
There was no public recognition, no giant glowing sponsor logos out front or gift shop racks of merchandise, you certainly couldn’t watch uniformed engineers building next month’s highly-strung machine like today.
This was motorsport warfare.
No leaks, no sharing with loved ones – the first rule of Fight Club type of thing.
“It was called Lot 6 and it was all hush-hush because you don’t want your competitors knowing anything, and if you weren’t one of the inner sanctum crew, you didn’t get in the gate,” he reveals.
“Even top knobs from Ford head office would come down and knock on the gate and got told to go away,” Searls says.
“When you got to the race track, everybody was looking over your shoulder, photographers, recordings – it was much easier back then with no mobile phones – but we kept to ourselves because you were always trying to get an edge over the competition to win,” he concedes.
Searls, known as the “fuel man”, says the idea to chill the 20-litre drums of fuel before filling up the larger Falcon fuel tank (versus the smaller Torana tanks) was their cunning idea to drastically shorten time spent in the pits at Bathurst.
Selling cars and the glory of victory depended on it, which is why Lot 6 existed and was commonly working under lights strictly until midnight.
“Every second we saved made life easier for Allan Moffat, Bo Seton, “Gibbo” (Fred Gibson) and other drivers out on the track,” he says.
“We never envisaged the work we were doing would create a legend still there 50 years later,” Searls says.
“We used to work in cubic inches back then and nowadays we joke that race teams work with cubic money; it is very different, but people still buy cars today because of what we did,” he surmises.
The Phase III GTHO was the fastest four-door production car in the world in its day and there’s an entire generation of car buyers today who will never forget – even if they never knew – what Robin, Al Turner, Ray Kennedy, John Gowland, Ian Stockings, David Thurlow, Peter Jeffery, John Mapstead, Colin Russell, Geoff Sharpe, John Wynne, Alistair McNaughton, Bill Santuccione, and Brian Mackellin achieved behind closed doors.
It was their efforts that took Leo and Ian “Pete” Geoghegan, Bo Seton, “Gibbo”, John French, Bruce McPhee and Allan Moffat to the greatest racetrack in the world –Mount Panorama.
It wasn’t just Scott McLaughlin and Dick Johnson who won on Sunday to sell Mustangs on the Monday morning.
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