Bondy's Monaro memories

1970 Surfers 12 Hour

“Look at the road in this shot – you can see the track was breaking up badly. One guy was running Firestones and I reckon he went through about 50 sets in that race! I blew a tyre going under the bridge just on the two hour-mark. That was a fast sweeping right hand corner – not the place where you want to have a tyre fail. We were planning to do two-hour stints, so that worked out OK, but after that I was keeping an eye on my watch, and when I was getting close to the two-hour mark I’d be taking it really easy under the bridge! In the night, you could see the sparks coming off the steel belts on the tyres!”

Ampol Trial

“The trouble with us was that we were one of the first cars on the road, and in the first competitive section somewhere up near Broken Hill, we got stuck in a creek. You weren’t allowed to receive outside assistance, so we winched ourselves out – and that took a fair amount of time. Then everyone else is getting stuck in the same creek, and a local farmer turns up in a 4WD and he’s charging $50 if you’re a factory car and $30 if you’re a privateer, to tow you out. We’d lost so much time doing it ourselves that we were nearly last! Harry (Firth) didn’t want to know us when we got to the control. In the end, if that hadn’t happened, we probably would have won.”

Bush bashing

“In the Mitsubishi Colt Fastback, if you miscued you’d hit trees. In the Monaro, you’d knock the trees over! They were very strong, and they didn’t feel like a big car to me. And with the torque, they were actually really good on the dirt – you were never having to go up and down the gears all day as you would with a smaller-engined car. The XU-1 was the better rally car eventually, but the Monaros weren’t bad. After the Tasman meetings in 1970, Harry kept me busy rallying and rallycrossing the Monaro for several months and I didn’t actually race again until September.