What hapened to the car is it got used as a hill climb car at Rotorua!Originally Posted by Steve Holmes
We sold the car to Reg Cook who did the North Island races of the 1978 International series, and I guess some Gold Star rounds prior, then it sat unused in his shop for quite a while before Tom Donovan bought it. I see it is described as a 77B as used by Donovan and this is one of the issues for historians trying to trace March history as updates were easy to do with the car then often passed off as something newer. March themselves were as much to blame as anyone, our car chassis 742-U1 being the pre production mule was probably built up from one of March's damaged tub exchange trade ins, used to test and jig for the 1974 series cars then given a new identity and sold on.
And, no I didn't have any March connections, they were only interested in people with money! We bought the car through Dave Price racing in the UK where it had been used by stunt driver Val Musetti who had a pair of Marches which he ran variously in Atlantic, F2 and even F5000 guise with a 3litre Ford V6 and interchanged parts and possibly even chassis plates between them. So even being sure of its history was uncertain in 1976.
Despite its doubtful parentage it went quite well, the biggest issue we had was that our car and the Moduses of John Nicholson and Phil Sharp were late arriving in NZ because the ship broke down en-route then Graeme Lawrence the distributor of the Goodyear control tyre had also had delivery issues so we were only able to pre-race test on the old Goodyear G44s that had come with the car. It went really well on those but when we bolted on the NZ control tyre for round one at Bay Park it was a different car and it took until round 3 at Manfield to sort the setup.
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