The Real Mount Panorama
1958
Bathurst, New South Wales, October 6
"You buggers are really making sure you win this one." - Lex Davison,
talking to the Tornado crew on the eve of the race

Considering the leverage of Mount Panorama on Australia's motor racing emotions, it is hard to realise there have been only four Australian Grands Prix held on this unforgettable circuit. It was opened by the 1938 AGP; it staged the first post-war AGP (not without difficulties) in 1947; it staged the classic 1952 AGP; and finally, in 1958, it staged its last AGP - the last real AGP of them all, in many ways.

There were no subsequent AGPs at Bathurst because the introduction of the Tasman Series package races restricted AGPs to capital-city circuits; in NSW this meant Warwick Farm. After 1973, when the Farm was no longer available, Bathurst would probably have been judged too fast for Formula 5000 singleseaters -assuming it would have been available in the first place, or that the ARDC would have been interested in staging a race. In 1958, with Mt Druitt freshly closed and with the Katoomba project more than three years from completion, the ARDC was less than ideally placed; by the time Warwick Farm folded the ARDC owned the game for what they knew was the real Australian Grand Prix, the October Bathurst touring car endurance race.

What the touring cars, and the open wheelers before them, have shown again and again is that Mt Panorama's long straights and larger-than-life mountain section make it impossible to stage a bad race. They might riot always be close races, granted, because Bathurst has always magnified differences in the performance of cars and drivers. But Mount Panorama presents, in the clearest way, the traditional units of motor racing measurement: distance covered, obstacles overcome.

So the 1958 AGP, run over the long-weekend date which the touring cars have since made sacred, was automatically sure to be a satisfying event. What was not realised at the time was that this was to be one of the milestone AGPs, and a heroic one at that.

It was the last 'really, Australian' AGP riot because of its large and diverse entry; certainly it was diverse, ranging from Frank Walters' side

valve Ford V8 So Cal special, originally built ill Bathurst by George Reed in 1949, through to Merv Neil's neat green '58-model Cooper Climax. But Mallala in 1961, or Caversham ill 1962, had similar spreads. What made this the last Australian GP was that it was the last one where an Australian-built car had a chance of winning.

That car was Lou Abrahams' Tornado, driven as it almost always was byTed Gray, but now significantly different to the form in which it had contested the 1956 AGP. During 1957, working through contacts at GMH, Abrahams had imported a 260 cu.in. (4.6-litre) Chevrolet Corvette VS to replace the bored-and-stroked sidevalve Ford VS with Abrahams' own ohv colt. version which had been the power plant for the Tornado in all its previous appearances. The continuous flow fuel injection system of the Fordbased engine was carried over, as was the methanol fuel with its convenient tolerance for mixture variation.

Late in 1957, the Tornado had run the fastest times at a BP-financed Australian land speed record session at Coonabarrabran in NSW; hick and bravery counted as much as sheer speed on this occasion, but the Tornado's performances during 1958 were enough to indicate that the big blue car had the legs of anything else then racing in Australia. All the car needed was reliability gearboxes and driveshafts were continually being uprated to match the power of its Corvette engine.

There is no doubt the Corvette engine promised a new era for the Australian special, and that its potential was quickly recognised. By early 1958 Ern Seeliger had completed a substantial re-jig of the final, inclined-engine, Maybach to give it not only revised front suspension and de Dion rear suspension but also a dry-sumped dual-carburettor Corvette engine which %%a, both more powerful and lighter than the original. Then, by the time of the 1958 AGP, Curley Brydon had replaced the fragile V-12 engine of hi, GP Ferrari with a Corvette, and Ray Walmsley had replaced the GMC truck six in his Alfa Monoposto with yet another Corvette. Moreover, after the AGP Tom Hawkes decided a Corvette was the engine needed to propell his Holden-engined Cooper Bristol. There were only two cars which were timed at more than 150mph during that 1958 AGP, and both were Corvettepowered: Gray's Tornado at 155mph, Seeliger's Maybach at 152.

Traditionally, a flood of Corvette- engined specials might have been expected to appear in following years; what was only just beginning to show itself in Australian racing was the potential of the rear-engined Cooper Climaxes, which in the 18 months following the 1958 AGP demonstrated that even the most advanced front-engine racing cars had passed their peak

In fact, there had already been blurred suggestions of this turnabout at the 1958 Easter meeting at Bathurst, where Stillwell in a recently acquired ex-Brabham 1.7 Cooper had been unofficially timed at 2:46 see, and where New Zealander Merv Neil had more officially been timed at 2:50. On the day however, Stillwell crashed at the first corner and Neil's race performance was disappointing; Whiteford's classic 300S Maserati won the Bathurst 100 after Arnold Glass' 3.4-litre Ferrari Super Squalo burst its engine on the last lap.

But at Lowood in August, where Ted Gray had been comfortably leading the Gold Star round until his differential started to fail, his immediate challenger proved not to be Stan Jones and his 25OF but Alec Mildren, his Cooper newly fitted

with a locally-machined crank to bring its capacity to 1965cc. At Bathurst for the AGP, Mildren's little Cooper was marginally faster through the flying eighth than Jones' 250F; but the Maserati was a good eight seconds quicker per lap. The Coopers were virtually as fast as all but the Corvette-engined top-liners; what the mechanical mice still needed was torque.

As Alec Mildren was to recall, many years later, the effect of even a 150cc increase in capacity in a Climax engine was out of all apparent proportion. But at that time there were very few people who had had enough experience to know the potential of a big bore Climax, and of course competitors like Mildren kept their cards close to the chest.

So Bathurst in October 1958 was seen as a continuation of all the previous years of the post-war golden days, with their wonderful mixture of fast cars and slow, factory cars and Australian-built. The exclusion of sports cars from the Grand Prix - the first time in the history of the race that this distinction had been made -was seen simply as an indication of how many racing sports cars were starting to appear, and of how many pure racing cars we now had to choose from. In 1958 the variety was taken completely for granted; by the time of the 1963 AGP the entire field was factory-built.

The '58 AGP entry included some interesting small fry: there was Cooke's homely and simple Peugeot, and Schroder's immaculate green Nota, originally MG Magna powered but now fitted with a de-stroked Consul (although not with the blower credited to it in the program or with the Kieft-twin-carn head that was on hand.) Bill March's unfriendly-looking Holden special, which had a big lose in the. Con Rod braking area in practice and bent itself on the fence, did trot start.

There was a fine assembly of MG specials. At the simplicate- and- add-lightness end of the spectrum was the Ray Fowler-built Orlando MG, its tiny J2 chassis barely accomodating the TC engine, blower and giant SU. At the opposite end was Gordon Stewart's advanced - but still bothersome - rear-engine tube frame car. In between were two real veterans. One was the TB in which Alf Najar had run the 1948 and 1949 AGPs, and in which Peter Critchley had run the 1952 event, now completely, rebodied for driver Paul Samuels. The other was the much, much revised MG TA to be driven by Barry Collerson, in which Allan Tomlinson had won the 1939 AGP and in which (by then TC-powered, with its engine moved down and back and the body and steering revised) Curley Brydon had finished second in the 1954 AGP at Southport.

There were also two Holden-powered MGs, in best Australian specials tradition: Keith Moy's ex-Sherwood NE, now with pushrod Holden and three SUs and Alan Ferguson's TC 'Isk', with an almost maximum-overbore Repco-head Holden engine in a frighteningly standard chassis with minimal offset singleseat bodywork.

Repeo-headed Holden engines were also well represented amongst what might be grouped as the Cooper Bristol section of the entry. In fact, the sole truly Cooper Bristol of the group was Syd Negus' Michelin X-shod morone ex-Mildren car from West Australia. Ray Gibbs had the ex-Ken Wharton car, which he had bought without engine in the UK and which now had a neatly installed Repco Holden; Tom Hawkes had his ex-Brabham ex-Jones car, now further modified to rise Len Lukey's replica late-model Cooper eightspoke wheels and locally-designed coil spring front suspension; the car had run a formidable 2:51s at Easter, but. its new chassis mods had riot been tried on a circuit until AGP practice started.

Jack Myers produced what at first glance seemed to be his familiar Orange Rocket, the Waggott twin-cam engined Cooper Holden; but it was in fact a lower car with an all-new multitube chassis, all that remained of the original Cooper being the four road wheels and the fuel filter cap. Len Lukey produced his Cooper Bristol evolution too, the car which had run in etchprimer yellow six weeks earlier at Lowood; although entered as a Cooper Bristol, this was Lukey's own chassis, a very deep multi-tube affair with bulbous high-sided bodywork although with essentially Cooper Bristol suspension design.

Lukey and Myers' cars were very new, but there were plenty of older specials: Jack Robinson's consistently successful - and noisy - XK120 monoposto; Noel Hall's Vincent- engined Ralt with de Dion rear suspension and partly Austin A-30 front suspension - the only Australian-built Ralt to be entered for an AGP; Frank

Walters' So Cat Special, which was the George Reed-built successor to the car which had won the 1951 AGP and which was now, in 1958, giving the side-valve Ford V8 engine its final run in an AGP.

It was the last AGP entry for a Prad - this on the sports-bodied built-from scratch car powered by the Alta engine from the Cooper Jack Brabham first raced in the UK; but the Prad did not get finished in time.

It was the first AGP entry for a Lotus, the car being, appropriately enough, the first singleseat Lotus ever to run under its own power, the MG X gearbox 1957 Mk 12 which had been import(.(] by Ern Tadgell and which was to have a brief but eventful career under the nom de guerre of the Sabakat.

And there were plenty of older ex-factory cars as well. Brydon's immaculately-presented Ferrari Corvette and Walmsley's indomitable Alfa Corvette have already been mentioned, but as well the entry included Jack Neal's veteran 4C \laserati, and former TC punter Alf Harvey's almost mythical 4.5-1itre OSCA, fresh from a major engine rebuild at Repco which had finally cured the oil scavenge problem which had dogRed the car from the time Bira had tried to run it at Orange in 1955. (With Stan Jones running his 250F, the 1958 AGP must have been a very rare occasion where Maserati brothers' cars, both Maserati-named and OSCA, ran in the same cvent as Orsi-Maseratis.)

Stan Jones' 25OF Maserati was widely judged its the likely race-winner. Although more than two years old and, like Davison's even older Ferrari, about to run its third consecutive AGP, the Maserati was still the Bathurst lap record holder (2:44 sec) and the most consistently fast car up to that point of the 1958 season. A late - and unprogrammed - entry was Bib Stillwell in the former Reg Hunt 250F, but the car did not appear.

Davison's Ferrari arrived, however, although since Davison had earlier announced his retirement, and since the car had been blown up in New Zealand at the start of the year, the entry had a measure of uncertainty about it. When it appeared at Bathurst it had a more current version of its original 1955-type Monza 3-litre engine which - logically enough - would have had more power and probably a higher rev limit than the earlier version; in the general surprise and pleasure of seeing Davison and his Ferrari again no-one seemed to mention this possibility.

There were two further Ferraris in the lists, Tom Clark's 14-litre Super Squalo which was the car Peter Whitehead had run in the 1956 AGP at Albert Park, and Arnold Glass' sister car, which Reg Parnell had run in 1956. After its engine failure at Easter, Glass' car had been returned to the factory for a refit and did not get back to Australia in time; Clark ran his, but was again involved in an accident, as had happened to him in 1957. This was to be his last Australian GP (he had run his supercharged black HWM Alta at Albert Park in 1956), but his Crown Lynn ceramics company later became a major supporter of the talented New Zealand driver Graham McRae, who went on to win no fewer than three Australian Grands Prix during the 1970s.

Practice on the Saturday, in warm weather, resulted in a rather sobering 2:43.5sec lap by Gray and the Tornado; the 'Tornado Racing Team', as their overalls proclaimed, were quite confident of victory. It is interesting that the well

informed David McKay, in his Modern Motor report, was unmoved - he considered Bill Paterson, in the ex-Stillwell, drum-braked, SU-carburated 1700cc Cooper, had the best car for the job.

Grid positions for the AGP, on the Monday, were to be decided by the times in two heat events on Sunday (where the main event was the 1958 Australian Tourist Trophy, won very professionally by David McKay in his ex-works DB3S Aston Martin, when Doug Whiteford made a rare error in his 300S Maserati and crashed at the foot of the main straight).

It was not obligatory to finish the heat to start in the AGP, and this explains a number of strange AGP grid positions for Monday's race. In the faster of the two heats, the Tornado was dominant and won from Jones and Davison, with Neil and Lukey very evenly matched further back, then Seeliger, then Hawkes, Patterson and Clarke. The upset in this heat was Mildren's collision with Clark during the first lap, which crumpled the Ferrari's nose and left the Cooper well bent.

The heat for slower cars was shaping to be a forceful win for Ferguson in the demented Isk, only for Harvey's OSCA to gather its talents and come through from mid-field to take the lead on the last lap. Hall in the clattering little Ralt gave Robinson's Jaguar a very hard time across the mountain, and finished third in front of the Jaguar pointer to the fuel-starvation problem which was to spoil the Jaguar's race the following day. The OSCA had impressed, and was to do so again in the AGP, until - to frustrate all those years of perseverance - it spat a spark-plug clean through the bonnet on its way through Reid park

There was the usual pre-race work that night, as could be seen by a tour of the garages and service stations which was an essential part of any E~ race weekend. Gordon Stewart and his coo converted the Stewart MG back to SUs after it had damaged its blower; AMS recorded -Alan Ashton was up until 2.30am on race morning checking the Ferrari; one of Ted Gray's crew. engaged on intensive checking without disturbing anything, remembers being visited by himself. "He said, 'You buggers are really making sure you win this one,' and he was right, we thought we could win."

It should be noted that they believed they had a winning driver as well. Ted Gray had been a awe. on the dirt before the war, and in fact had m~ against Peter Whitehead at Aspendale in Melbourne during Whitehead's 1938 tour. Gray told his team he could win races if he, too, had an italian factory-built car; but that was not what the Tornado team was really about.
Although there was more rain during the night it did not rain on race-day but it was only very late in the afternoon that the sun finally broke out, just in time to blaze into the driver's eye on Pit Straight and on the climb from Quarry to The Cutting. Scheduled to start at 2.45pm, the race was held up by the need to clear oil from the track; when the course was clear, there was no further warm-up: waiting engines were restarted on the grid and the field waited for the flag.

Jones won the start, leading into Hell Corner from Davison and a carefully-starting Gray, with Neil, Clark, Seeliger, Hawkes and Lukey in the next bunch and the 26 car field finally in full up Mountain Straight. Hall did not start with the little Ralt, and Patterson was again a last-Minute non-starter, discovering a blown head Gasket.

The order at the end of the opening lap was Jones, Gray, Davison covered by 1.1 seconds, then already a good seven seconds back to Clark and Lukey in an even tighter bunch, then 2.5 sees to Seeliger, already being tagged by Hawkes. Then came the heroic Ferguson in the Repco TC two seconds clear of Harvey's factory built 4.5- litre V 12 OSCA and a bunch comprising Mildren-repaired, and up to 11th after starting the back of the grid - and Walmsley in the Alfa Corvette, then Gibbs and Brydon. A long last was Robinson, the Jaguar having fuel-supply problems.

Jones still led at the end of the second lap, with Davison now in front of Gray, having passed him on the haul up Mountain Straight. But next lap it was Gray who led, having motored past both factory cars down the 18-foot wide main straight, and from that point he applied himself to pulling away by around two seconds a lap, a formidable performance. All the reports of the race confirm 'how hard Gray was working, and his lap times support it: from lap four - 2:50.5 sees - his times read 2:49.0, 2:47.5, 2:48.5,.then 2:48.0 for lap eight. By that stage, the Tornado was leading by nearly nine seconds.

Jones and Davison continued to lap close together, Jones sometimes barely in front, and this duel quickly drew away from the rest of the race. The surprise here was the emergence of Tom Clark in a strong and very confident-looking fourth: he had been fifth at the end of the first lap, claimed fourth from Neil during the second lap, and proceeded to build a useful lead of as much as eight seconds over fifth-placed Seeliger by lap six. Seeliger had claimed fifth during lap two, when he had passed both Neil and Lukey, and had been starting to close on Clark when he made an error somewhere and was, for a lap, passed by Hawkes; Seeliger corrected this situation the following lap, but thereafter could never shake off the red Cooper. And then, for both Seeliger and Hawkes, came a useful break: Clark started to ease off, possibly the first signs that the big Ferrari was starting to run hot; the gap narrowed, and during lap 11 both Seeliger and Hawkes were through. From lap 15, Clarke's times went right off and on lap 18 he lost more than a lap in the pits before rejoining the race, now well off the pace.

The big disappointment from the early stages of the race had been Lukey. From fourth at the end of lap one, he fell to eighth by lap four with some kind of misfire. He pitted, eventually, on lap 11 - and, having lost nearly a full lap, rejoined with great spirit, lapping faster than the Seeliger/Hawkes duel although of course quite out of touch; but it was to become one of the classic Lukey drives.

The drive at that stage, of course, was Ted Gray's. The lap times show how all the faster cars' times swung back and forth, obviously as they encountered traffic around the circuit; but then, from lap nine, they also show that Gray's charge was faltering. While Jones and Davison, nearly nine seconds astern at the start of the lap, put in lap nine in 2:49.5, Gray fell back to a 2:51, and next lap (Jones 49.7, Davison 50.0) was only a 2:50. Lap 11 was a 48.5 for Gray - while Jones recorded 2:47.4, Davison a 2:47.5 - and the Tornado ran the next two laps in 51.5s, the nine second lead from five laps earlier now whittled back to three seconds - enough for Gray to know precisely how close the Italian cars were.

His next lap was a prodigous 2:45.5, enough in just the one lap to rebuild his margin, and he then seems to have made a huge effort: the next two laps were each 47.5s, the next a 47.0, then a 48.0 - and then, again, with the lead now out to more than 10 seconds, lap 19 was another bad lap, a 53.0, and the lead again started to crumble: down to seven seconds at the end of that lap, five-and-a-half the lap after that, and something clearly had started to go wrong. Perhaps delayed by traffic (the suggestion is made only because Jones and Davison were also a lot slower that lap) Gray came into view at the end of Conrod with the red cars reeling him in, and he headed for the pits. The Jones/Davison train swept through to lead the race.

It was an unexpected stop, and the Tornado crew, who had allowed for the possibility their car might run low on fuel, nonetheless were not counting on a pit stop without warning, or as soon as two-thirds distance. So it was a chaotic stop, with fuel spilled, much shouting over the noise of the engine, and the race was as good as lost when Gray rejoined.

But the race had been lost in any case: what the Tornado crew did not realise at the time, and what none of the press realised, was that Gray had come in to complain about the car's handling. As Gray's crew later realised, the rear suspension mountings had already started to crack. Gray's stop was nothing at all to do with a 1 strategic' race with partially-filled fuel tank, and in fact the car had started with full tanks and the intention to run straight though: the 35-gallon rear tank had more than enough capacity at 4mpg for the full duration of the race.

The only reference to a suspension problem came many years later, in Bill Tuckey's The Book of Australian Motor Racing, "Two cars of fuel went in and the Tornado roared away, but with Gray signalling at his rear suspension".

In the course of what must have been a precarious lap, Gray kissed a fence across the top of the mountain, and by the end of lap 22, he trailed Jones and Davison by more than 54 seconds. The car ran two further laps, had another pit stop, and was retired during the leaders' 25th lap.

What had now become the duel for the lead had in fact been an absorbing personal duel from the fall of the flag. Jones' assertion of his right to lead Davison was balanced by Davison's ability to draw level, and even to go past, whenever circumstances allowed. Old friends and old rivals, each must have been wondering what the other had in reserve.

The first hint of a problem may have been on lap 17, where Jones fell several seconds off his normal high-2:40s and lapped in 2:51.1; he was back in the high 40s thereafter (apart from lap 21, where all three leading cars were unaccountably slower than usual). But in fact from about the time of his 2:51.1 lap, Jones had been driving the Maserati without a clutch. It is obvious neither from Jones' lap times, nor from Davison's; the gap had been down to 0.3 at the end of tap 18, but it then varied like this: 1.5, 1.0, 1.0, 0.8, 1.0, 1.1, then 1.8 on the lap Gray finally climbed out of the Tornado. It was starting to look like Jones had taken command of the race and that, finally, he would have his long-awaited -XGP victory. For the crowds down the bottom end of the course, it was virtually confirmed before the end of the lap: the course PA announced that Davison had coasted into view on Conrod trailing smoke.

Except, of course, that Davison had already taken the lead. The smoking car in second place ,.%-as the Maserati, which had dropped a valve on the run out from Forrest's Elbow. Davison drove smoothly through the remaining four laps - the Ferrari-never looking or sounding better - and ..%.on his third AGP.

There was still plenty more racing going on - in fact the closing stages of the AGP were very lively. The Seeliger/Hawkes duel saw the two cars side-by-side on inumerable occasions, Hawkes getting down to a best of 2 mins 31.3 sees (the less-modified car had run similar times at Easter) and Seeliger to 2:50.5. On lap 24 Hawkes fell back several seconds and from there to the finish Seeliger was able to draw away, driving now for an outright second placing. The Cooper finished the race reportedly with no oil left, due to a split-sump, and Hawkes did his victory lap riding on the tail of the Maybach- a nice touch, as Seeliger had been in charge of the Cooper's preparation, while also having to rebuild the Maybach after its Corvette engine had been damaged in pre-AGP testing.

The unreported drama in the final stages of the race was Lukey's re-appearance in seventh place, closing fast on Mildren. Lukey had been running consistently at around 2:52 during the middle third of the race but then started to fade; he was a minute astern of Mildren with 10 laps to go and pulled it all back with two laps remaining, to reach sixth. At the same time, Curley Brydon's Ferrari -first time out with its new Corvette engine, leading Lukey by more than a minute and threatening to finish an AGP at last - split its fuel tank and pitted with one lap remaining. Lukey charged on, turning a 2:54.6 on his last lap with the sun low and the course by now fairly slippery, and was just 2.8 seconds behind Brydon when the flag finally fell.

The fact that Merv Neil, with the only '58 model Cooper (and the only Cooper in the race on disc brakes) had had an untroubled run through to fourth place was undoubtedly not lost to either Lukey or Mildren. Mildren already had a '58 series chassis being built at the Cooper factory, and Lukey bought a '58 ex-F2 car from Brabham early in 1959. But, just as a reminder that the heart could still be as important as the chassis, look who was on the same lap at the finish: burly Ray Walmsley and the Corvette engined Alfa.

Published sources for this chapter were Australian Motor Sports, Modern Motor, and Wheels. Results sheets and lists of individual lap times preserved and made available by the ARDC's Ray Price were central to establishing a sequence of events which in part differs from the generallypublished version of the race, and timekeeper Stewart Marlowe assisted by confirming that consecutive lap times could be recorded in halfseconds without losing the essential thread of the race. In turn, Lou Abrahams and Bill Mayberry were very generous in providing an accurate version of what really happened to the Tornado. John McDonald acted as devil's advocate in the investigating process. Also involved in the chapter were Alf Harvey, Reg Hunt, Col Masterson, Geoff McGrath, John Medley, Alec Mildren, John Schroder and Otto Stone.