Kevin Bartlett, Lola T300 leads the Angus & Coote Trophy from John McCormack, Elfin MR5 Repco-Holden, Oran Park 1972…
Allan Horsley, the promoter of Oran Park Raceway in Sydney’s outer west, was an energetic, creative guy. Even though this event wasn’t a Gold Star Championship round, he attracted a good field of F5000s to drag in the punters, the Angus & Coote Trophy was provided by a retail chain of jewellers.
The 500bhp V8 roller-skates were spectacular at the (then) short circuit, with Lynton Hemer there to capture the action, his wonderful photos are the inspiration for this article.
With the exception of Frank Matich and his Matich A50 Repco, Lynton has many fine, close-up shots of the Australian F5000 Class of 1972 – I wonder why FM wasn’t present, he was a Sydney boy after all? The answer is probably that he didn’t bother with this non-championship event on May 21, given the Belle Magazine Trophy Gold Star round was only a month hence, here in June.
By then he was on the way to comprehensively belting the Gold Star opposition – he won at Sandown, Oran Park, Surfers Paradise and Warwick Farm – with Kevin Bartlett winning at Adelaide International in his Lola T300, and John McCormack at Symmons Plains aboard his MR5. FM won the Gold Star with 36 points from Bartlett and McCormack on 24 and 20 points respectively.
This lengthy article on Matich and his cars focuses a lot on 1971-72 so is useful context to the Australasian F5000 scene of the time, so have a look rather than repeat myself here; https://primotipo.com/2015/09/11/frank-matich-matich-f5000-cars-etcetera/
John McCormack (above) led from the start of the 25-lap event from Kevin Bartlett and Gary Campbell in Lola T300 Chevs. KB’s was a new chassis (HU16) acquired after the Tasman Series, in which he raced his venerable ex-Niel Allen McLaren M10B.
Gary Campbell (above) stepped up from the Waggott 2-litre engined ANF2 Elfin 600B/E he raced in the Australian 1972 Tasman rounds into the T300 (HU1) Frank Gardner raced in the Tasman, Campbell took delivery from the final, Adelaide round.
Gardner had notionally retired from single-seater racing but did an event or two in the UK later in 1972 as he track tested the very first Lola T330 HU1, a car purchased by Max Stewart and oh-so-successful in his hands.
Bartlett passed McCormack for the lead on lap three, with Muir passing Campbell on the same lap.
Muir became a very fast exponent of F5000, perhaps his best work was in the ’73 L&M rather than at home. Bob’s Reg Papps & Sons prepared T300 – chassis HU4 ex-Niel Allen – after a practice crash ended Allen’s planned racing comeback, was easily one of the most beautifully presented and prepared racing cars in Australia, visually stunning, I waxed lyrical about it here; https://primotipo.com/2014/11/18/my-first-race-meeting-sandown-tasman-f5000-1972-bartlett-lola-and-raquel/
Muir passed Bartlett (above) and ran out the winner from Kevin, John Walker’s Elfin MR5 Repco and Gary Campbell with KB setting a new lap record of 40.2 seconds.
In many ways the story of Australian 1972 F5000 racing, the championship Gold Star Series and non-championship Calder based Repco Birthday Series (fiftieth birthday by the way) was FM’s absolute preparedness for the season.
His Matich A50, so named in honour of sponsor, Repco’s fiftieth, had won on debut at Warwick Farm’s November 1971 AGP, but then had a disappointing Tasman Series, which he lost to arch-rival Graham McRae’s Leda LT27/GM1 Chev, Graham took four wins to FM’s one.
However, Matich was well and truly ready-to-rock at the domestic season’s outset with a very well developed car. Bartlett and Muir were more than capable of giving their fellow Sydneysider a run for his money, but neither had their T300s early enough to have them honed to the fine pitch Matich had A50 ‘001’.
I suspect Matich did more test miles at Warwick Farm, paid for by Goodyear – he was both a contracted driver and their agent in Australia – than the rest of his fellow F5000 competitors added together. His 1972 results reflected just that.
I wonder why Max Stewart (above) raced ye-olde-faithful Mildren Waggott, his ’71 Gold Star winner rather than the Elfin MR5 Repco he had run since the ’72 Tasman?
Maybe the distinctive yellow MR5 wasn’t ready or ‘praps he wanted to give the Mildren Waggott a gallop to showcase its potential to would-be purchasers, Allan Grice bought it shortly thereafter. Maybe he was inspired to do so by Max’s performance at this meeting? In any event this amazing, popular machine was finally outpaced by the post-McLaren M10B series of smaller, lighter F5000’s despite the efforts of its oh-so-talented, lanky pilot.
There are so many shots of the utterly-luvverly Lola T300 in this article it seems smart to expand a bit upon this seminal F5000 machine…
The Lola T190 F5000 wasn’t Lola’s best design but Frank Gardner evolved it into the longer wheelbase, and modified in many other areas T192, and won plenty of races in it in Europe and Australasia.
The car was far from uncompetitive into 1971 too. FG won at Warwick Farm during the Tasman Series, and European F5000 championship races at Silverstone, Mondello Park and Castle Combe. The old racer ran with and beat youngsters such as Brian Redman, Mike Hailwood, McRae and Allan Rollinson.
But the laconic racer/engineer wanted something smaller and lighter to stay ahead of the chasing pack, including the new McLaren M18/22, Surtees TS8 and coming Leda GM1.
In a moment of wham-bam-thankyou-maam pragmatic inspiration, Gardner and Lola Engineer, Bob Marston, married the existing Lola T240 F2/Atlanic chassis with a 5-litre Chev and DG300 Hewland transaxle. The production variant of the prototype became the T300 we F5000 nut-bags know and love. After some testing, the prototype T242 made its race debut at Thruxton on August 1, 1971.
FG plonked it on pole and finished third behind McRae’s highly developed McLaren M10B, and Hailwood’s works Surtees TS8. It was a statement of intent, the cars performance and looks were the subject of all the paddock chatter that weekend. The queue at Huntingdon started the morning after.
T242 was renamed T300 from the following Silverstone round on August 14, Gardner was again behind Hailwood, this time in second position.
The photos above show the car in the Snetterton paddock on August 30, 1971.
The chassis was destroyed in an argument over real-estate that very weekend between Gardner, and Redman’s M18 McLaren on lap eight. The T242/300 was badly damaged, rooted in fact. Sad as that particular Lola was a very significant one for the company and F5000 as a class.
The key elements of the design, its overall size and packaging, hip-mounted radiators, wedge shape and aerodynamics are all clear despite the poor quality of the drawing.
Gardner raced his replacement car, the first production T300, chassis HU1, to its first win at Hockenheim on 12 September, in front of Emerson Fittipaldi’s F1 Lotus 56B Pratt & Whitney turbine and Teddy Pilette’s McLaren M10B Chev. He brought it to Australia late in the year where he boofed it in practice for the Warwick Farm AGP. Repaired, it then contested the ’72 Tasman before sale to Gary Campbell
I hope Eric Broadley paid those two fellas, Gardner and Marston a bonus in 1971 because they created, arguably, the first of the most successful and profitable family of production racing cars ever. Lola built ‘a million’ T300/330/332/332C/332CS/333 cars and spares, those machines won countless F5000 and single-seat Can-Am races in the hands of just as many champions, journeymen and amateur drivers for well over a decade.
The photo above is the business end of Bartlett’s T300 HU16 at Surfers Paradise in 1972, that’s Bartlett’s red driving suit and John Harvey’s purple crutch alongside!
Key elements of the machine are the injected 5-litre 500bhp Chevy V8, note the magneto and fuel metering unit. The rear of the aluminium monocoque chassis is to the right, the car was designed as an F2, it was a bit floppy.
Torsional rigidity was improved with the T330/332 which followed, but these were not machines in which to have a front-in shunt, as Bartlett experienced at Pukekohe aboard his T330 in early 1974. He was an early member of the Lola Limpers Club joining fellow Australasians Graeme Lawrence and Warwick Brown who came to grief in T300’s.
The gearbox is of course the ubiquitous Hewland DG300. Originally designed for ‘effete’ F1 engines, the prodigious torque of 5-litre motors made the ‘box marginal. Sticking to maintenance and lifing cycles of gears, dog rings, crown wheel and pinions was critical to avoid DNFs. The Hewland in yer little namby-pamby Formula Ford (Mk9/LD200) or Formula Pacific (FT200) was set-and-forget to an extent, not so in one of these big, heavy muvvers.
The uprights are magnesium, disc brakes inboard at the rear and suspension period typical – single upper links and inverted lower wishbones, two radius rods – you can see one on the right threading the exhaust system. The adjustable rear roll bar is clear as is the engine oil tank to the right of the left exhaust outlet.
A superb, fast, race winning bit of kit in every respect but nowhere near as forgiving – if that is ever a word to be used in the same sentence as F5000 – as an McLaren M10B KB notes…
Etcetera: The T300 and it’s father before the 1971 AGP @ Warwick Farm…
This is a pre-race publicity shot by Fairfax media. The only trouble was Frank Gardner boofed HU1 in practice so did not start the race. He would have given Frank Matich a run for his money that day given the speed of the T300 in Europe. But ‘ya gotta be in it to win it’, and FG was not that weekend, despite a stellar record of prior success at the ‘Farm.
The car was rebuilt in Oz around a new tub freighted in from Huntingdon, and raced to an NZGP win at Pukekohe, and three second places during the 1972 Tasman before being sold to Campbell after the Sandown round.
There’s More…
Speaking of chassis, Robert Davies has superbly captured this rare photo of a nude T300 Chev, it’s the Allen/Muir/Brown ‘HU4’ in the Sandown paddock during 1972.
I won’t repeat the technical summary from above, devoid of bodywork the small light aluminium monocoque and minimal front impact protection is abundantly clear. The only deformable part of a racing car of this period was the body of the driver…
Far-canal, that really is a mess, it’s the same chassis HU4 shown above. If you thought about the physics involved in a Formula Ford shunt you probably wouldn’t do it, but Jesus the big single-seaters of this period, F1 and F5000 really were lethal devices. Balls of steel to race them springs to mind.
I don’t usually publish shots of rooted racers but this one had a happy ending, and adds some colour and reality to the glib Lola Limper line used earlier on.
Young Australian thruster Warwick Brown graduated from the McLaren M10B Chev with which he cut his F5000 racing teeth in 1972, to the ex-Allen/Muir Lola T300 prior to the 1973 Tasman. Third at Levin and second at Wigram showed his mettle and immediate pace in a competitive car, but it all came undone at Surfers, the first of the Australian Tasman rounds.
His car got away from him on the fast, demanding circuit spreading bits of aluminium and fibreglass over the grassy undulations of the Nerang countryside and broke both Warwick’s legs. He got wide onto the marbles on the entry to the flat-in-fifth right-hander under Dunlop Bridge, and bounced across the grass into the dirt embankment surrounding the circuit.
The light aluminium tub folded back, in the process doing horrible things to Warwick’s feet and lower limbs. He had a very long recovery, made somewhat easier by the promise of a new car from his near-neighbour-patron, mining millionaire Pat Burke. In that T332 – HU27 – he won the 1975 Tasman Series, becoming the only Australian ever to do so.
It’s a story for another time, but WB had another two Lola big-ones in the US in a T332C and T333. If there was a President for Life of the Lola Limpers Club I suspect it was Mr Brown.
Balls of steel, and mind over matter…
Click here for a piece on WB; https://primotipo.com/2017/03/09/wb-for-73/
The photo above is of WB at Levin only a couple of weeks prior to its Surfers demise. Terry Marshall has captured the Sydneysider nipping a right-front during the 13 January Levin International. Warwick was third behind McRae’s GM1 and Matich’s A50, two of the toughest F5000 nuts.
Calder in 1972. Bob Jane had no Gold Star round that year but did promote the ‘Repco Birthday Series’ for F5000 and ANF2.
By the look of the clothes of the hardy Victorians it’s winter’ish, Calder in the winter is not a particularly pleasant place usually, I’m figuring the October 15 round with the assistance of oldracingcars.com though.
It looks as though Gary Campbell #4, has made a corker of a start and is seeking a way past KB #5 but then again maybe KB got off like a rocket and and Gary is giving him room as KB jinks right for a way past John McCormack’s Ansett Elfin MR5 Repco. Over by the aptly placed Repco sign is the Repco-Holden F5000 engined Matich A50 #25 of John Walker, perhaps some of you American readers saw JW race this car in several L&M rounds in 1973 so well?
Bartlett won this 30 lapper in a smidge under 21 minutes from Walker and McCormack, then came Stewart, Elfin MR5 Repco and Campbell. Bartlett also won this five round series from Matich and Muir.
Who would have thought the T300 as a rally car? KB negotiates the Warwick Farm paddock during the famously wet 1973 Warwick Farm 100 Tasman round, Steve Thompson Chevron B24 Chev won that day.
The angle on the dangle.
And they are all angles, just the wildest looking thing at the time, even the Lotus 72 looked conservative alongside one of these babies. Bartlett on the Calder grid alongside McCormack during the 15 Ocober meeting referred to above.
Photo Credits…
Lynton Hemer, John Ballantyne, oldracephotos.com.au, Graham Ruckert, Terry Marshall, Pinterest, John Ellacott, Fairfax Media
References…
oldracingcars.com, The Nostalgia Forum
Tailpiece: Double T300 Trouble – Muir from Bartlett, Oran Park 1972…
Finito…
primotipo... 