Johnny (Goss) on the spot

The story of John Goss is a tale of a truly unique figure in Australian motorsport, both in terms of personality and achievement.
This Victorian-born, Tasmanian-raised and long-time Sydney resident is the only person to have won both the Bathurst touring car classic and the Australian Grand Prix.
The latter was in a Matich Formula 5000 in 1976, a decade before the event became a round of the Formula One World Championship.
Yet to Blue Oval purists and Aussie motorsport enthusiasts generally he is the bloke who, along with co-driver Kevin Bartlett, scored an against-the-odds victory at Bathurst in 1974. This was the defining moment in Goss’ career when Goss’ XA Falcon GT outlasted the factory-backed Holden Dealer Team Torana L34s and Allan Moffat’s big buck, much-hyped Falcon XB challenge on a gloomy and wet day.

The first Sunday in October ‘74 fell on October 6, the same date on which the 1985 Great Race was held. His second and final Bathurst win was an altogether different experience. Goss was enlisted by the visiting factory Jaguar team run by Tom Walkinshaw Racing, a payback for flying the marque’s flag locally for several years.
In this feature Goss reflects on his biggest career wins and reveals that he was actually born into a GM family.

Early days back in Tassie, at the fearful Longford road course – in a Holden! Image: Paul Cross Collection

Early days

“I was born in ’42,” John Goss explains of his upbringing. “My Dad was an engineer with General Motors. Before the war he had been a development engineer for the Buick, Pontiac and Oldsmobile cars – the American GM cars that were imported. When he came home from the war, he went back to General Motors and was attached to the design team for the prototype Holden when Laurence Hartnett was managing director. He worked there for two or three more years, but the Holden thing became quite difficult because Hartnett didn’t agree with some of the principals of the first Holden project and left.
“My mother was Tasmanian and Dad loved Tasmania. Our family is a maritime family; we’re really a family of seafarers. My brothers followed that path, but I followed my father’s track as a mechanic.
“I grew up in Tasmania and went to St Virgil’s College in Hobart. It was a bloody great place to grow up.
“In ‘63 I started motor racing. And I had five years racing at Longford, through to the last meeting there in ‘68, and Symmons and Baskerville.”
Appropriately, given his father’s work history, his earliest racing was in a Humpy Holden, an FJ model. This gave way to an Appendix J Ford Customline and a home-built sportscar known as the Tornado. This was inspired by the brutish Chaparrals of the Can-Am era, though instead of a thundering big block Chevy V8, it was powered by a tweaked Falcon 170ci six.
Goss’s love of Blue Oval products grew, partly through an admiration “for what Henry Ford introduced to the industrial world.” He completed a four-year automotive engineering course and started to scout for opportunities to ply his trade off the track and compete on it.
“Towards the end of this time (racing in Tasmania) I ventured to Victoria with my Tornado, before relocating to Sydney and that’s where it starts with McLeod Ford.