If silverware dictated the value of a race car, this would be the most valuable touring car in Australia. It has a race history that is unmatched. It raced in front-line competition for five years, scoring an impressive 89 wins from 144 race starts. Although not quite achieving the start/win record of Allan Moffat’s incredible 1969 Kar-Kraft built Mustang fastback, which notched up 101 wins from 151 starts, it’s the significance of the races the Geoghegan machine that makes the difference.
This car carried Ian ‘Pete’ Geoghegan to three of his five Australian Touring Car Championship titles. Until Dick Johnson clocked up his fifth ATCC title in 1989, Geoghegan was the only person ever to have achieved this. This Mustang is the only car to have won three ATCC titles. The first of these was on its race debut, in 1967. It’s also the only car to have won ATCC titles in both the original one-race format, and multi-race championship. At a time when rules were being constantly tweaked, this car continued to evolve, to stay ahead of the pack. It also took on, and beat, not only locally built Australian, American, German, and British race cars, but also American factory racers.
Geoghegan had this car built by John Sheppard in 1967 to replace his 1965 Mustang, itself also a hugely successful racer which had snared him his second ATCC title in 1966. In an interesting role reversal to that of the previous year, Geoghegan entered the 1967 ATCC race with his new Mustang totally untested, as a newly completed car, just as his arch-rival Norm Beechey had done so the year before. In 1966, Beechey entered the ATCC race, held at the punishing Mount Panorama circuit in Bathurst, with his brand new Chevy Nova (Nova II). The big Nova, which was forced by the Confederation for Australian Motor Sports (CAMS) to be fitted with four-wheel drum brakes, made its debut in this race, and on this most daunting of circuits, as Beechey felt the larger 327ci engine displacement would give him an advantage over the Mustang’s smaller 289. And if the race was only 13 laps long, he would probably be the 1966 Australian Touring Car Champion. But it wasn’t, it was 20 laps. He was right about the extra grunt, he pulled out a healthy second buffer on Geoghegan, until he ran out of brakes, and the Mustang swooped through to take victory.
That 1966 ATCC victory was typical Geoghegan; well prepared, and fully in control. He sat back and let Beechey go, waited for the big Chevy to run out of stoppers, then applied the pressure, nailing in fast laps, and moving through to take the win.
The rest of this article can be viewed here > >
-
Sponsors
