Only twice have the highest crowns of Australian open-wheel, sports and touring cars been up for grabs in the same meeting. The first occasion was the Albert Park double-header that coincided with the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, which we've already been over. The other was here in 1958, over the Labour Day long weekend at Mount Panorama. Here were held the Australian Grand Prix (for open-wheelers), the Australian Tourist Trophy (for sports cars), and if there was no Australian Touring Car Championship on offer as well, that's only because no such thing yet existed. That didn't prevent the weekend's supporting touring car races becoming the most important of the entire decade, as the future arrived with all the subtlety of a glove slap to the face.
Humpy Heaven
The Repco Hi-Power head was a bit like one of those Warhammer "start collecting" boxes – on its own it looked like affordable fun, but it was a gateway drug to a wider world of much greater expense. If you were handy with a spanner (and had rivals to beat...), the sky really was the limit when it came to modifying your family car for racing, especially in the absence of any Australia-wide rules. And at the peak of the outlaw era, the late 1950s, the two biggest names in the business were John French and Leo Geoghegan.
A Queenslander by birth, French started out as a bicycle mechanic but switched tracks and became a travelling salesman for an agricultural company instead, selling milking machines to dairy farmers. In 1957 the company gave him an FJ Holden to use as a work vehicle, and French got into the habit of finishing his sales trip on Thursdays, then doing a quick engine swap to install a tuned Grey for racing on weekends. His two-tone green FJ, which was soon known up and down the east coast, featured a high-flow twelve-port Repco head with triple Weber carburettors (rumoured to be running on high-octane methanol-based fuel) and a Jaguar 4-speed gearbox complete with floor shifter. At one point French even sliced off the top of the bonnet, cutting clean from the base of the windscreen to the top of the grille and welding in a flat steel sheet instead. This created a sloping wedge shape which was either intended to aid air penetration, or would just allow him to see where he was going!
No one ever really thought about aerodynamics in the '50s and '60s – they hadn't even invented wings back then. The FJ, of course, had a real humpy bonnet. Either Frenchie was too short and couldn't see over it, or he was trying to make the car go faster, but he cut the top right off the bonnet – from the windscreen to the radiator – to make it dead flat. Did he really know what he was doing? I don't know. But I'm sure that it would have given him so much front downforce – it would have been an oversteering pig! – Dick Johnson, AMC: Muscle Racers Vol.2
Pig or not, French would take this car to Queensland, Victorian and NSW state titles before the decade was out.
His only real rival was Leo Geoghegan, son of Tom Geoghegan and his dearly beloved Edna (née Low). Tom started as a taxi driver but upgraded to proprietor of Geoghegan's Sporty Cars, Sydney's premier dealer in British sports machinery. While still a teenager, in 1954, his son Leo had been invited to take over his Holden at Gnoo Blas, and without any previous experience the lad had immediately managed a pair of 2nd places (beaten only by Ken Jones' Riley). Realising the boy had talent, Tom began re-orienting his operation around Leo, fronting him regularly in a highly-modified Holden 48-215 painted in Geoghegan team black. Leo's tweaked Holden also featured a 4-speed gearbox (this one from an MG), and a unique Repco head cast from lightweight aluminium, allowing the highly-tuned six to produce a claimed 125 kW. Most visibly, this car also featured bulging aerodynamic aids on either side of the grille, and dome-like headlight covers to improve air penetration. Going into the Labour Day weekend that October Leo had every reason to be confident – he'd already won the Veedol Cup for touring cars at April's Easter meeting, and that was after winning the NSW Sedan Car Championship at the Mountain in 1956. He recalled in a Vintage Racecar interview with Patrick Quinn:
I drove at Bathurst for the first time in 1956 in the Holden. Bathurst was marvellous, all that I expected and more. I loved it! Loved the challenge. To cut a long story short, it was a handicap race and we started at the back but managed to win the event with Bob Holden not far behind in a Peugeot.
The meeting also counted Jack Myers in his yellow Waggott-engined FJ, Bob Holden in a black FE, Lou Kingsley in his Repco-headed yellow FE, Bill Slattery in another FJ, and Des West in a 48-215. Non-Holden runners included crowd-pleaser Barry Gurdon in an Austin A95, Frank Dent in a grey & white Austin A30 (capable of 101mph, if you could believe it), and way down the back you might even find a Morris Minor convertible piloted by a kid named Kevin Bartlett. The meeting was also notable for featuring the first Western Australian to race at the Mountain, Syd Negus, father of Wayne and later to be elected a WA Senator. His presence was remarkable given the sheer distance over an Eyre Highway that was just a graded dirt track at the time.
But when they took the start early on the afternoon of Sunday, 5 October, none of them realised they were about to be shown up.
Jaaag
In the 1950s, Jaguar was on a roll. The company had hit the decade running with their Le Mans-winning XK120 coupé; they'd taken over a brilliant new factory in Browns Lane, Coventry; and the excellent XK six-cylinder engine had proved a revelation, its advanced double overhead-cam layout properly high-tech at a time when most cars still relied on valve-in-head engines. The previous generation of Jags with their Standard-designed 1.5 and 2.5-litre engines weren't missed, but their demise did leave the company focused on the top end of the market, competing with stately Humbers, the bulbous Standard Vanguard and the heavy Rover P4 – a market that would be the first to suffer in the event of a recession. It was felt they needed a smaller, more bread-and-butter car to broaden their customer base and give them some financial security. To achieve it, they began work on Project Utah.
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| Early development prototype (Source: AR Online) |
A sign that this was a genuine attempt at a more humble machine came, paradoxically, when the crew designed their first modern steel monocoque chassis. Hitherto all Jaguars had featured separate bodies mounted on ladder-frame chassis, the sort of thing Holden had been doing way back in the 1930s. It might raise eyebrows to realise Holden had been ahead of them on this one, but it must be remembered Holden was a mass-market brand, whereas Jags were low-volume and exclusive. A unitary body would make Utah lighter and stronger than anything Browns Lane had built before (at least until rust started eating the box sections...), but it would take a lot of sales to amortise the expensive tooling required. In the event they farmed this job out to their partners at the Pressed Steel Company of Great Britain Ltd, based at Cowley, who were already stamping panels for them. Pressed Steel worked out the details with Jaguar's chief body engineer Bill Thornton, and his assistant Cyril Crouch, but warned they would need 10,000 sales a year for a unitary body to make sense. Even so, the unitary body did its job well: despite being almost as long as the Mk.VII limousine, Utah arrived with a kerb weight of only 1,270kg, compared to 1,750 for its big brother.
As per tradition, styling was done by company head William Lyons, working of an evening in his garden at Wappenbury Hall. A lovely Queen Anne Revival-style mansion half an hour south of Coventry, this setting explained much about why classic Jags looked the way they did – and the work was usually done under the wide eyes of local boys, who climbed the walls to get a glimpse of the latest prototypes while Lyons worked. The shape Lyons arrived on looked, not coincidentally, like a sedan interpretation of the XK120, with full, rounded curves that, however beautiful, were more than cosmetic – they were a clever way of adding strength to the panels without adding any extra weight. The narrow front grille was in line with the marque's previous offerings, even if it would prove inadequate in warmer climates, while the many headlights clustering on the front were a necessary work-around when they were all made by Lucas. And of course, the close proximity to Browns Lane also allowed the prototype to be brought to the estate for the final approvals process – no model was finished until it had been looked over and given the nod by Greta, Mrs William Lyons.
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| Wappenbury Hall in more modern times, hosting the E-Type Reunion (Source: Secret-Cassics) |
The choice of engine created headaches for the design team. It was clear power would have to come from some version of the proven XK straight-six, with its twin overhead cam layout and aluminium head. Early on, technical director William Heynes had started working on a 2.0-litre, four-cylinder version of the XK, but as the final design took shape it was realised such an engine would take the car too far downmarket. Jaguar was first and foremost a sports car company, and a 2.0-litre powerplant simply wouldn't give the performance their buyers expected. Instead, Heynes went back to the six and de-stroked it, producing an experimental 2.5-litre six instead. After the usual development faff, the final production version used a shorter block to produce a lively 2,483cc inline-six, fed by Solex carburettors in place of the usual SUs. This gave Utah a claimed 84 kW at 5,750rpm, and 190 Nm of torque at 2,000rpm. This was mated to a Moss 4-speed manual gearbox, with Laycock de Normanville overdrive available as an optional extra.
One of the cons of an all-steel body was road shock and internal echoes, like a van, which were completely unacceptable for the sort of customer Jaguar had in mind. Heynes dealt with it by mounting the double-wishbone front suspension on its own a separate subframe, with lots of rubber between it and the passengers to cushion the blows. The rear used a simplified version of the D-Type's live axle, with inverted leaves and a Panhard rod likewise packed with plenty of rubber. One of its oddest features was that the rear track was 114mm narrower than the front, a fact which was the focus of many a myth in later years (that it caused understeer, that it was better for high-speed stability, etc), when it was probably just because axle supplier Salisbury didn't have anything of the appropriate width!
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| This is a '59, but it matches the brochure pretty closely. (Source: Waimak Classics) |
The interior was the blend of leather and polished walnut the buyers expected (although the combination of real wood, real leather and rusting box sections would make them big money to restore in later days), with most of the switches and gauges cleverly mounted in the centre, making it easier to build in left-hand drive. The first two prototypes were turning test laps by September 1954, with the first "dress rehearsal" production model completed on 7 January 1955.
The finished product was unveiled to the public at the Earl's Court Motor Show on 19 October 1955. Its official name was the Jaguar 2.4 Litre, but after the release of its successor in 1959, it retroactively became the Jaguar Mk.1. It was available in two variants, the cheaper Standard or the more expensive Special Equipment, which came fitted with a heater, tacho, windscreen washers, twin fog lights, a cigarette lighter, a folding centre armrest for the rear passengers, and extra switches to operate the rear interior lighting. Given it only cost £29 more, most buyers had no problem handing over the full £1,298 for the Special Equipment.
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| The big day at Earls Court (Source: AR Online) |
Only 32 cars were manufactured in 1955, however, and most of those were retained by the factory for development and PR duties, so it wasn't until mid-1956 that the press were granted a 2.4 to review. The Motor was given a Special Equipment model with overdrive (registration SWK-803), and found it certainly hit the performance targets Lyons had set, with a top speed of 101.5mph (163 km/h), a 0-60 time of 14.4 seconds, and fuel economy of 24.4mpg (9.6 litres per 100km). They noted approvingly, "Whatever the aesthetic appeal of the body shape, it also is extremely effective in reducing noise, so that passengers can and do converse normally at 100mph even with the window open."
Autocar tested a similar model (rego SWK-986), and came to a similar conclusion:
Mechanical smoothness is matched by the silence of the engine. When accelerating on test runs at full throttle from a standing start, whipping into each higher gear in turn as the rev counter needle touches the red band, high speeds are reached without the slightest mechanical fuss and, although the engine note can be heard, it has a sweet and subdued note… The immunity of the occupants from noise initiated by road surfaces is quite astonishingly good.
Going For Broke
However, there was a problem. 1956, the first full year of production, saw only 8,029 units leave the assembly line, which was less than the 10,000 they needed. Complaints from American dealers made clear that the problem was a lack of power – the wide boulevards and endless interstate highways of the U.S. made a mockery of tiny British engines. In a bid to boost power, the company got to work on a trio of optional tuning kits, which would've lifted the brake to 89, 98 and 112 kW respectively – but it was quickly clear they wouldn't be enough. If they wanted to move metal Stateside, they'd just have to bite the bullet and fit the full-sized engine from the Mk.VIII instead.
Fitting a 3.4 into the space intended for a 2.4 was not the work of a moment, however. On the most basic level, it didn't fit – since it retained the older, taller block, the 3.4 sat too high to properly close the bonnet. Getting it to fit required cooking up a new inlet manifold, a different air filter and a lower sump so it could be packaged beneath the existing Mk.1 bonnet. The larger engine also required a larger radiator, and getting sufficient airflow over it required a correspondingly larger grille opening, which forced a minor redesign of the front end (these modifications eventually became standard to streamline production). The 3.4 was also heavier than the 2.4, which required the front suspension be strengthened with stiffer springs, while the rear axle also had to be strengthened to stand up to the increased torque. An extra bid to please the Americans was an optional automatic gearbox: Jaguar's choice fell on the Borg Warner DG, an American design being made in the U.K. at their factory in Letchworth, Herfordshire. At first it was only available on export models, though given its poor quality nobody complained much.
The 3.4-litre Jaguar Mk.1 launched in the U.S. – initially it wasn't available domestically – on 26 February 1957, its twin SU HD6 carburettors giving it 157 kW at 5,500rpm, and 293 Nm of torque at 3,000rpm. Because it was designed to lug around a much larger car, the engine was managed to be lively while offering torque across the rev range, enhancing the driving experience no end. Motor were the first to get their hands on one in April 1957, an export model in left-hand drive with an automatic gearbox. Even with the slushbox, 0-60 was covered in only 11.2 seconds and the top speed had risen to 119.8mph (193 km/h), although fuel consumption had crept up to 19.2mpg (12.2 litres per 100km). The test car cost £1,864, or about $73,000 in 2024, including tax of £622 ($24,000). Their rivals at Autocar didn't get one until June 1958, but by this time it was a manual with overdrive. At last the Mk.1's full potential was unleashed: top speed 120mph, 0-60 in a mere 9.1 seconds, and 0-100 done and dusted in 26 seconds; on the downside, fuel consumption was now up to 16mpg (14.7 litres per 100km). Jaguar's executive sedan was barely more than a second behind the contemporary XK150 sports coupé with the same engine!
That said, Motor was quite critical of the Mk.1's brakes, finding drums all-round were no longer adequate for a car with so much power. Their words provoked heated discussion at the factory, but it was for the good in the end, as it convinced Jaguar to draw on their Le Mans experience and fast-track the introduction of Dunlop disc brakes, added to the options list about the same time as the 3.4 became available in Britain. Discs wouldn't become standard until January 1959, but few indeed were the buyers who left that box unticked.
Jaguar had found their calling almost without realising it, stumbling onto the sports executive sedan market that had until now been dominated by Daimler and Riley. Orders from the U.S. poured in, which must have pleased Her Majesty's government mightily, as Britain was still trying to export its way out of colossal war debts and needed all the U.S. dollars it could scrounge to buy the oil it needed to keep the economy afloat. In all, Jaguar produced 8,520 Mk.1's in 1957, with another 11,605 following in 1958. For his services to the nation, William Lyons was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1956 New Year's Honours list, and Jaguar diversified away from the luxury car market in the nick of time – the feared economic downturn had arrived with the Suez Crisis that October.
Cheetah Jags
Given its pedigree, it surprised no-one when the Jaguar Mk.1 turned out to be rather hand on a track. The engine required no introduction, it was already a Le Mans winner five times over, but the rest of the design wasn't too shabby either. Because Jaguar had been nervous about the technology, the unitary body had been overbuilt and the car turned out much stiffer than it really needed to be. That made for surprisingly lithe handling, especially when combined with the Dunlop disc brakes which, like the engine, had already won Le Mans. It all added up to a very capable, off-the-shelf racecar.
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| Sopwith steering the Jag around Snetterton (Source: Touring-ModelCars) |
One of the first to exploit it was British gentleman racer Tommy Sopwith, son of the man behind the Sopwith Camel fighter plane (and, later, the Hawker Hurricane as well). It was aboard a Jaguar that Sopwith wrote his name into the history books by winning the first officially-sanctioned British Saloon Car race, held on Boxing Day 1957.
The first race I did in that car – I was spending Christmas with my parents, near Winchester. And I drove it to Brands Hatch, put the numbers on it, won the race and drove back for dinner. And you sure as hell couldn't do that today. – Tommy Sopwith, Touring Car Legends, Ep.1: Gentlemen and Players
The first British Saloon Car Championship – the forerunner to the BTCC – was held the following year, and again Sopwith was in the thick of it. Because they competed in different classes, at the end of the season both he and rival Jack Sears (driving a rally-tuned Austin Westminster) had won their class and were on equal points. The officials wanted to decide the championship with a coin toss, but both drivers revolted at the idea. Instead, they staged a special tie-breaker event at Brands Hatch, where both men raced each other in identical Riley 1.5s. The winner was decided on aggregate time over a pair of 5-lap heats, with Sears taking the title by 1.6 seconds on a soaking wet track. Sopwith later admitted he was foolish to agree to settle it in BMC-branded cars when his rival was BMC's star works driver, but at the time he gave it no consideration.
Others who stepped into Mk.1s that year included Roy Salvadori, who raced for Guildford-based dealer John Coombs (sporting iconic "BUY 1" number plates), and Mike Hawthorn, who drove for his own team. Hawthorn might seem a touch ironic at first, given he was a contracted Ferrari driver on Grand Prix weekends, but remember that he also ran a Jaguar dealership on weekdays. The Tourist Trophy Garage in Farnham, Surrey, had been founded by his father, and was also the first importer of Ferraris into Britain, but even so Mike couldn't resist the crisp handling and smooth power delivery of the Jag. Of course, Hawthorn's tuned Mk.1, nicknamed, "the Merc-eater," because, "no Kraut car could overtake or out-accelerate" it, was also the car in which he would die, only weeks after clinching the 1958 World Championship in Morocco.
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| Golden Boy Mike outside the TT Garage with the his prize Jag (Source: Facebook) |
Still, all these famous names generated a lot of buzz, and soon that buzz was audible even in places as remote as far-off Australia...
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