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A week later he was at Sandown to debut the Birrana 272, so didn’t run the Kingswood in the ATCC event, then on June 11 the Kingswood ran at AIR’s ATCC round and filled another third place. The car was actually on the front row of the grid for this event, Beechey and Geoghegan not being on the pace in practice, and the pointscore after the event saw Malcolm fourth of the larger cars. This was one of those years in which the 2-litre cars could score equal points to the big cars with class positions.
Fourth on the grid and third in the race at Warwick Farm put him third in the pointscore, but still the car was lapped at the end of the 82km event.
It’s incongruous that the Surfers Paradise round of the series didn’t see Malcolm running. This was, however, the debut of the Bob Jane HQ Monaro in John Harvey’s hands, Jane entering his second car in an effort to keep Moffat out of the points. Moffat retired, but it shows that the series was hotly contested – and the Kingswood still held third in its class in the points.
Although Malcolm was concentrating his efforts on beating all comers in the Birrana by this time, he still entered the October meeting at AIR with the Kingswood to meet the challenge put forward by some New Zealand cars that had come across for a Calder meeting and this one. But problems in practice saw the car at the back of the grid, and as the grid curves around the banking at AIR it meant weaving in among cars in that curve as he attempted to make up the deficit as quickly as possible off the start.
He miscued, however, and crashed headlong into the wall, severely damaging the front of the car. “It pushed the engine and gearbox back, there was a lot of damage, including to my neck!” Ramsay says.
The car was repaired, but there was no rush. No further races were to be contested in 1972, the Birrana got all the attention for the time being, though the car went to Bay Park in New Zealand for an outing that failed to add anything to its CV.
The two races supporting the International event for F5000 at AIR late in February saw the car’s last appearance in this form. Remembering that the rules for Touring Cars had changed and that the car was now a Sports Sedan, there was no longer much relevance running it.
To be a front runner would require a lot of development, but development was also needed in the team’s ANF2 racing. Leo Geoghegan was now driving the 272 and the 273 was not far away.
In the two races that final day, Bob Jane was the winner with Malcolm and John Kay (Camaro) sharing the honours for the placings. The car was dismantled and the engine sold to John Mann for his Cortina.
All in all it had been an interesting exercise for the Birrana team. But they had bigger fish to pursue as their main goal of supplying the Australian racing scene with F2 and F3 cars of a quality not seen before became evident.
That he was a front-line runner in F2 at the time gives weight to Malcolm’s opinion of how the Kingswood behaved. “It handled nicely, I could always get it to do what I wanted it to do,” he told us. “That I attribute to Tony, his work meant we always had a nicely balanced car.”
Birrana has been through other phases since, racing being put aside in the mid-seventies as Malcolm expanded into more commercial areas. Tony Alcock pursued a design career in England, only to die in that fateful air crash that put an end to the Graham Hill Embassy F1 team.
In more recent times the bug to race again has bitten and Birrana became the team to beat in Formula Holden, also entering the Konica Lights field. But again the race team is dormant as one of the most advanced engineering organizations in Australia concentrates on servicing and supplying mining equipment.
But the value of racing to that organization is clear in the Managing Director’s mind. “We put our engineers on the race team,” he told us, “it taught them to think on their feet.”
Just like he ran a car that dared to be different in the Australian Touring Car Championship of 1972, Malcolm Ramsay runs a company that challenges new engineering frontiers.
The HQ Kingswood was one of its first projects.
Ray Bell
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Originally Posted by Steve Holmes
