In the same way, "Bathurst" isn't a town or even a circuit, but an event. And that makes it awkward when the early "Bathursts" didn't actually take place at Bathurst at all...
1960, and a new race was in the pipeline, a race destined to become far more important than the championship it would support. Jim Thompson, managing director of the shock absorber company Armstrong York Engineering, was doing what all good managing directors do and looking for ways to increase his business, especially with the local carmakers Holden and Ford. PR man Ron Thonemann told him the best way to do that would be to sponsor a motor race for production cars (what Americans would call “strictly stock”) and showcase Armstrong’s products there.
Thompson ran with the idea and, looking around for tracks to hold it on, came
upon Phillip Island,
Down Under’s answer to the Isle of Man, just to the south of Melbourne. The open roads of the island had
been used for racing since 1928, when it had hosted the “100 Miles Road Race”, forerunner to the
Australian Grand Prix. This race wouldn’t use the full 10-mile rectangular
circuit however, settling on a much
smaller 3-mile triangle that made up the westernmost end of the motorcycle
circuit, used in the years just before the war. It started with a quick blast
northeast along Ventnor Road
and through a sweeping right before the 90-degree right-hander named Heaven
Corner. From there it was a brisk descent straight and true down Berry’s Beach Road to a
much tighter right-hander at the opposite end of the cosmos, Hell Corner (not
to be confused with the other, much more famous Hell Corner that would enter the
story in a few years). Assuming the driver made it through with his soul intact,
it was one more flat-out straight along Ventnor Beach Road to the final right
hander, School Corner, just before returning to the start/finish line. The race
was set for 167 laps, 500 miles, hence the Armstrong 500.
Every man and his dog showed up to enter, 55 cars in five classes, each due
to be handled (since this was an enduro) by at least two drivers. Classes A
through C were for Eurotrash with tiny engines: Fiats, Renaults, Peugeots and V-dubs,
plus a sizable contingent of Morris Majors, Triumph Heralds and Austin Lancers from
Mother England. Class E was for cars with engines above 3.5 litres, and
therefore home to the only big V8 in the race, a 4.5-litre Ford Customline. It
didn’t do especially well, but as the only entrant in Class E, it was at least
guaranteed a class win.
That meant the real race would be in Class D, for engines between 2.0 and
3.5 litres. Among the challengers were a single Humber Super Snipe, a Mercedes-Benz
220SE, a Standard Vanguard and a Vauxhall Cresta. But more importantly, it was
also the first race deployment of a popular four-door sedan with a 67kW,
2.3-litre straight-six engine… yes, this was the race debut of the XK Falcon. It surprised nobody when one of the two Falcons failed to finish
– but the one shared by Lou Molina and future tyre magnate Bob Jane did finish
and finished well, completing a prophetic 161 of 167 laps.
But by then the race had already fallen to the Vauxhall Cresta of John
Roxburgh and Frank Coad, after 8 hours and 21 minutes of hard driving. But it’s
here that things get tricky. Armstrong had only ever planned to declare class
winners rather than an overall winner, so line honours for the first Great
Race have been recognised only in retrospect. Although Roxburgh and Coad are
generally listed as the “winners” of the first Armstrong 500 and have appeared
as such in CAMS’ own paperwork, there are plenty of racing geeks who’ll tell
you the winners of Class C – Geoff Russell, David Anderson and Tony Loxton in a
Peugeot 403 – actually finished the race in a faster time. The discrepancy came
about because the classes were released at thirty-second intervals, meaning the
winning Vauxhall started the race thirty seconds sooner than the winning
Peugeot. Sadly, surviving records aren’t accurate enough to say whether the
Peugeot was closer than thirty seconds behind at the finish, which is a shame,
because the howls of bogan protest if we found the “first Bathurst” really was won by a French car
would be more than worth the effort.
And while we’re on the subject, if you’re wondering where the Holdens
finished, you’re wasting your time, because there weren’t any! The only Holden
within cooee of the event was a driver, Bob Holden, in another Peugeot. Just like
Scuderia Ferrari, who hadn’t bothered showing up to the first World
Championship race at Silverstone, The General’s finest elected to sleep in
rather than attend the inauguration of their most important race. But like just
Ferrari, Holden would come to define their racing series, and with it the
culture of an entire nation.
