Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car
Clinton Walker
Wakefield Press 2009
Reviewer: Bob Estreich
Now I am old and senile (according to my kids) I look back on my earlier
motoring days and wonder what happened to the distinctive fun cars of my youth.
Cars now are just a bland egg-shaped cocoon designed to protect the driver
against everything including measles, but they are no fun and they have no
style. Clinton Walker’s book celebrates the last great truly individual cars,
christened the muscle cars. It’s not just a nostalgia trip for the old farts.
Without these cars we may have taken much longer to see the benefits of disc
brakes, fuel injection and decent handling work their way into mainstream cars.
Many motor vehicle advances that we take for granted today came from the
designers’ attempts to get every last bit of performance from a muscle car.
They did not start out like this. The early ones were, to use Clinton
Walker’s words, “noisy, overpowered, under braked, unsafe, gas-guzzling……”.
They had the traditional American design ideals of a big crude V8, extravagant
tail fins and loads of chrome. In Australia the cars evolved. Our roads had
many tight corners so handling became more important. Petrol was never as cheap
as in the United States so we tended to go for smaller engines. The U.S. idea
of planned obsolescence did not appeal to Australians so cars were built for a
longer life. That meant less chrome, and so fewer places for rust to
start.
The technology wasn’t however, as important as the culture. These were
not cars for middle aged family men – they appealed to the new wealth of the
younger generation and became sex symbols. Films like Mad Max, Bullitt and Sunday Too Far Away helped promote
the image. The muscle car dominated the drive ins on and off screen and even
became a major subject for songwriters.
Walker follows the development of the first U.S. muscle cars from the
early models made from bolt-on extras to the special designs like Ford’s
immensely successful (and sexy) Mustang. In Australia these cars needed a
theatre to display their style and in the 1960s they found one – Bathurst’s
Mount Panorama racetrack, where the Bathurst 500 all-day production car race
was held each year.
A long track with great downhill straights, a long hill climb where
power was important, and tight corners around the top of Mount Panorama,
Bathurst had long been the domain of the little British sports cars like the
Mini Cooper S and the Ford Cortina GT. The imported street muscle cars just
couldn’t handle the stresses imposed on them by a real race track, so the Big 3
manufacturers in Australia (Ford, General Motors-Holden and Chrysler) started
developing their own. Since the major Bathurst race was for production cars
each company had to sell at least 500 units to the public. They soon realized
the tremendous advertising value in this televised race, and a win meant good
sales for the rest of the year from the reflected glory.
The companies also quickly recognized that standard U.S.-based car
designs just didn’t stand up too well under the pressures of real racing.
Slowing over a ton of car at the bottom of Conrod Straight was more than drum
brakes could handle and in the mid-60s Holden introduced front wheel disc
brakes. I remember a race in the 1970s when a well-meaning driver imported two
Chevy Camaros with huge V8 engines just to compete in races. They had tons of
“go” up the hill but at the bottom of Conrod the Camaros had absolutely no
“stop”. It was hilarious watching these huge cars trying to get round a 90
degree bend at ludicrous speeds – the cars still had drum brakes.
In 1967 the first home-grown muscle car, the Ford Falcon GT, won at
Bathurst and the race between the Big 3 was on. Most young Falcon owners at
least looked at their car and wondered
how it would look dressed up as a pseudo-GT. In 1968 Holden released its
competitor, the Monaro. This was Holden’s first V8 muscle car and it had just
one job – to take sales from the Ford Falcon by winning at Bathurst. From here
on, Bathurst became more of a two-brand race with other models fighting it out
for the minor placings if they were lucky.
Chrysler tried valiantly to keep up but without a V8 they were doomed to
be always in the background. Even their hotted up Valiant Pacer was a
straight-six family car with a flash paint job and bolt-on bits. It just failed
to impress anyone.
Holden didn’t help them by having a second go, this time with a smaller
car. The Holden Torana (a dressed-up Vauxhall Viva) was lengthened and in place
of its toy British 4-cylinder motor a 161 cubic inch straight six was
shoehorned into the engine bay. With sexy paintwork and a cheeky rear boot lid
spoiler it was sold as the Torana GTR and successfully filled the gap as a poor
man’s muscle car. When Holden upgraded the engine to 186 cubic inches with a
wild camshaft and triple carburetors into the XU1 version they had a serious
Bathurst contender. The Torana GTR-XU1 was compact and nimble and became a
winner in 1970. It also began the end of the Monaro as a race car. It was
simply outclassed by its little brother. I sometimes drove a friend’s XU1 and I
was always surprised by how easy it was to handle around town and yet how its personality
changed on the highway. It was practical, inexpensive, and the street racers
loved it. It went a long way to redefining the muscle car for Australia’s
youth. They accepted it cheerfully and this helped sell powered-up Japanese
cars in later post-muscle car years.
For the traditionalists there was Ford’s Falcon GTHO, a true beast of a
muscle car. It was huge and intractable and designed in the old U.S. muscle car
style. I drove one (once only) and around town it was, simply, terrifying. Even
in the automatic transmission version there was no true sense of control – it
either went like the clappers or stopped and rumbled at you. Just backing it
out of the driveway had me worried. It
was a bit like trying to negotiate the aisles of a supermarket in a bus.
The 1971 Phase III GTHO marked the end of an era. Reputedly the fastest
four-door car in the world until the Jaguar XJ12 equalled it, it was killed by
the wowser anti-speed brigade who got wind of Ford’s plan to release an even
faster Phase IV. It also came out that Holden was planning an XU2 Torana with a
whopping 5 litre V8. In 1970 there were 3798 deaths on Australian roads and the
Phase III was right in the middle of the controversy. Never mind that it was
probably safer than most of the cars in the fatal crashes. Never mind that many
crashes were fuelled by alcohol or pathetic roads or fatigue or sheer
stupidity. The cry “Speed Kills” was heard throughout the land even though it
defied the reality. Scared of the bad
publicity the Big 3 announced their retirement from car racing and muscle cars
and went back to making family cars. The one most relieved was Chrysler, whose
Charger R/T muscle car had cost buckets of money and failed to do anything for
the ailing company.
The unhappy one was British Leyland who had just released their P76, an
Australian-designed muscle car designed to take them into the league of the big
boys. With a few more years of development it could have done it, but it was
simply the wrong car at the wrong time.
Rising world oil prices and anti-pollution regulations put the final
nails in the muscle car’s coffin, even in the U.S. The technology lived on but
cars were now becoming more sophisticated thanks to the Japanese “rice
rockets”. You could buy a Nissan Skyline GT that was nearly as fast as a muscle
car but didn’t frighten the wowsers as much.
Gradually the high performance Japanese cars took over the market, and
so did bland design and safety-consciousness. Where once a car was rated on how
economic it was or how well it handled and braked, now it is rated on how many
airbags it has. Mediocrity is the goal.
The old advertising idea of draping a pretty girl over the car seems to
have disappeared. It’s hard to make an egg look sexy.
Clinton Walker has given us a comprehensive examination of the
short-lived muscle car phenomenon and its effect on our culture. Reading this
book has brought back many memories for me, and even a certain sadness that the
muscle car days are over. Or are they? The V8 has been gradually creeping back
into the cars by stealth, although in a more fuel efficient, environmentally
safer way. The release of a new Holden Monaro was a risky move for the company
but it is now being rebadged and sold back to the U.S. Even Top Gear’s drivers
seem to enjoy it. Without the loud paintwork and hoon image, perhaps the muscle
car can once again appear on our roads and fight off the great grey blandness
that is modern motoring. Golden Miles may help. Way to go, Clinton!
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