The Bathurst 1000 is the most popular race of the year in Australia. To the top of Mt. Panorama and down again a distance of around 6.2 km. By 1966 Bathurst had attracted an international flavor with the three works Morris Cooper S giant killers coming in 1-2-3.
The race these days is now only for the Australian V8 Supercar class, with initially just Holden and Ford, but now with Nissan, Mercedes and Volvo on board, the race attracts thousands of people to Bathurst.
Bathurst 1000.
But way back in the early 60’s was my first sojourn to the Bathurst mountain. There were only two major problems, firstly I was a starving medical student at that time and had no money, and secondly the only car I had was a very tired 1949 MGTC, which certainly would not make the 1000 km trip to Bathurst, let alone get home again. But I wanted to go.
I knew of a 1953 Ford Customline for sale for 50 Aussie pounds. A bit run down, in need of some tyres, but it was cheap enough that I could buy it, without having to sell my grandmother to a Turkish trader. We bought it, but still needed tyres.
Les, a friend, worked for a tyre company, and said he would supply the tyres if he could have a free ride with us. Agreed. Mind you, it was a trifle worrying that he insisted we bring the Customline around after hours with the lights extinguished.
But by Thursday night I had a car which (hopefully) would make Bathurst, sitting on four secondhand tyres which had cost me nothing. About the same price that Les had paid for them, but beggars can’t be choosers. A wink is as good as a nod to a blind man!
Now the old side-valve V8 Customlines were not known as being thrifty, and I could see that fuel was going to be our next problem. But Customlines were huge and would easily take six people, so Les and I found another four financially secure souls, who would bear the cost of the fuel there and back.
The weather did not smile on us and as we came to the first mountain range we discovered a slight design fault in 1953 Ford Customlines. They had a vacuum operated system for the wipers. When on a trailing throttle the vacuum was at its maximum and the wipers would go ten to the dozen, but when you depressed the accelerator the vacuum would decrease and wipers would just sit there, stuck to the screen, and no use at all as a device to clear water off the windscreen.
And so we made it to Bathurst by the Saturday night, and made it home on the Sunday night.
