Aussie muscle car saviour David Bowden dies

Australian muscle car enthusiasts and motorsport fans owe David Bowden a debt of gratitude.

Without his passion and hard work, many of our most significant Aussie muscle racing machines might not be with us today. They include legendary cars such as Ian Geoghegan’s ‘Super Falcon’, Norm Beechey’s 1970 Australian Touring Car Championship-winning HT Monaro GTS 350 and Allan Moffat’s Trans-Am Boss Mustang.

It’s not just that David Bowden and his team have over a long period recovered, purchased and then painstakingly restored some of our most famous touring cars.

He was doing it at a time long before these cars were attracting the kinds of astronomical price tags they do today. First and foremost, Bowden wasn’t in it for the money; it was his passion for the cars that drove him.

A love of cars runs in the Bowden family bloodline. Frank Bowden, his father, sold the very first Australian-assembled Fords back in 1925 before moving on to be part owner of the first Holden dealership in Nambour in Queensland.

David Bowden was 12 when he bought his first car, a 1934 Ford, which was followed in his late teens by a channelled '32 Ford Roadster with a supercharged Mercury V8 power.

His interest in motorsport began at Warwick Farm in the mid-1960s. Bowden was a young man in the crowd watching an equally young Ian Geoghegan dancing his '65 Mustang around the Sydney track. Bowden made a point of introducing himself to Geoghegan in the pits later that day. It was the start a lifelong friendship.

If Bowden had a preference, he probably would have been described as a Ford man – Falcon GTs were a particular passion (though he had a thing for Porsches, too). The legendary XA GTHO Phase IV ‘prototype’ was one of Bowden’s early significant cars, but it was his connection with Geoghegan and the Super Falcon that really kicked off what we know today as the remarkable lineup of machinery that makes up the Bowden Collection.

Bowden actually got to drive the Super Falcon around Surfers Paradise one day, to bed in the brakes. That experience at the wheel of the fuel-injected 600bhp Cleveland 351 V8 monster Falcon left its mark.

In the early 1980s, long after Geoghegan’s time with the Super Falcon was over, Bowden went searching for it. He found it in very poor condition; he bought the car and then spent the rest of the decade restoring it, returning it to as it had been at the memorable Easter 1972 ATCC round at Bathurst, where it beat Moffat’s Mustang.

There began Bowden’s crusade to save and restore so many of the great old machines from Australia’s touring car racing past. Working together with his sons, Dan and Chris, over the next few decades they tracked down and then restored some of the most significant touring cars in Australian motor racing history. In addition to the aforementioned Geoghegan and Moffat Fords and the Beechey Monaro, they include Ian Geoghegan’s 1965 Mustang, Peter Brock Bathurst-winning Toranas, Moffat's Falcon GT-HOs, Kevin Bartlett’s Chev Camaro, and various Dick Johnson cars.

Many of these mightn’t otherwise have stood the test of time (and cars with international significance such as the Moffat Trans-Am Mustang likely would have been lost to overseas purchasers) without Bowden’s care and intervention. But more than that, Bowden chose not to keep them safe and sound as a museum pieces. The cars were – and are – maintained in operating condition – so they can be demonstrated on the track, and therefore shared with other fans of Aussie muscle.

The Bowden Collection, which currently stands at some 50 cars, remains an ongoing testament not only to David Bowden’s passion for Aussie muscle and our touring car racing, but also a reminder the huge contribution he made to the heritage of home-grown high performance.