Flight 67E from Bathurst

Bathurst’s biggest names are frequently asked at official dinners to recall their first impressions of Mount Panorama as rookies. Those from the prime muscle car era tell of being whisked up to Skyline as wide-eyed debutants and shuddering as they peer over the side.
Common themes of such stories are the first-timers’ surprise at the steep drop-off and the inadequate barriers ‘preventing’ cars from plunging to the bottom. Another shared trait of these driver recollections is the ‘glad I never found out’ tone.
Yet one former race winner did experience the sensation of sailing over the single row Armco and falling to the base of mountain during the October classic.
Tony Roberts won the 1969 Hardie-Ferodo 500 with Colin Bond in a Monaro GTS 350 for the Holden Dealer Team. This feat alone cemented his name in Bathurst’s history books.
The following year he entered Great Race folklore for an entirely different reason.

Tony Roberts and Colin Bond may have won the Great Race in 1969. But for Roberts, 1970 was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

The Victorian drove solo in a Falcon XW GT-HO Phase II entered by ‘The Tony Roberts Team’ and owned by Sinclair Ford at Penrith. Roberts was in third place, five laps from home, when the car spun going over Skyline. “The back locked up and spun backwards down the mountain at around 160km/h,” he explained after the race.
The Falcon hit the Armco which launched it over the side of the Mountain heading down into The Esses.
Roberts painted a vivid picture of his unique experience for the 1975 race’s event programme.

“It’s so quiet in mid air. No noise at all, except the wind rushing past. It all seemed to take 10 minutes before the banging started and the kaleidoscope of blue sky and green grass started flashing before my eyes."

“I’d never had a look over the side. But I’d heard somewhere it was a sheer cliff. When I hit the Armco and launched backwards into space, I really did think I wasn’t going to stop until I hit the pits – from above.
“It was a relief to find the drop was only about 30 metres.
“When it all stopped I got out and noticed if it had rolled once more I would have ended up with a tree through my driver’s door.
“I suddenly had an urge to sit down and it was around this time the first flag marshal arrived. He asked if I was okay and I said, ‘Yeah, give us a fag.’ So he shoved two in my mouth and lit both!”
We can’t think of another car that ended up in the same spot, although many threatened to, slamming the concrete walls installed from the mid-1970s.
Channel Seven caught the middle portion of Roberts’ ride. It shows the white Falcon tumbling down the hill, barrel rolling several times until it goes out of view.
While Seven’s footage is spectacular, it’s trumped by the colour photograph taken by spectator Hugh Primrose, who captured the very moment the GT-HO leapt the barrier, a good two metres off the ground.