Monaro's first victory

Just two weeks before Bruce McPhee’s Monaro GTS 327 finished first at the 1968 Hardie-Ferodo 500 race, another yellow Monaro had won at Sandown in the Datsun Three Hour endurance race for Series Production cars.

This victory, on September 15, 1968, is regarded as the first ever by a Monaro. The winning car was privately entered by Tony Roberts, then better known as a rally driver. In fact, he was only known as a rally driver, because this was his circuit racing debut!

It was the same for Roberts' rally champion co-driver Bob Watson, but if road racing was unfamiliar territory for Watson he was at least well versed with the Monaro. His day job was a suspension engineer at GM-H; Watson helped develop the prototype Monaro at the Lang Lang proving ground. So he had more testing miles in Monaros under his belt than any other driver in the race. And two weeks before the race the pair had teamed up to drive the car non-stop for 24 hours at Sandown, setting 16 new endurance records.

It was during that record run that they noticed that fuel consumption and brake pad wear were both far greater than expected. This proved to be an omen. Watson and Roberts finished the three hours with absolutely no brakes. They had to be stopped by their pit crew after their victory lap..

All Monaro drivers had brake problems at Sandown, none more so than Henk Woelders, who took the lead on lap one in Dave Bennett’s Perfectune car. Before 20 laps were completed he lost the rear brakes completely when the wheel cylinders popped out at the end of the high-speed BP Straight. He was still doing 80mph when he hit the Armco and crashed over the fence – and the two photographers hiding behind it – to land nose first on an access road. Henk deserves credit for being the first man to write-off a Monaro in a race. 

With only one Ford Falcon in the race Roberts and Watson took the chequered flag ahead of another Monaro, shared by Clive Millis and future world champion Alan Jones.

“Didn’t the General’s new toy confound the experts at Sandown on September 15? They ran out of brakes, they used up fuel like a 727 and coated the track with rubber but – they won!’ wrote a clearly surprised Adrian Ryan in his Racing Car News report. 

A fortnight later Monaros finished first, second and third at Bathurst. This was the start of a golden era for Holden’s new muscle car.

Two more milestones occurred at that September Sandown meeting. A young man called Peter Brock won the Sports Sedan race in his 179 Holden powered A30 Austin. And Norm Beechey made his debut in his Improved Production Monaro GTS 327.

JOHNNY’S MONARO. In 1968 Johnny Farnham, the soprano singer of daggy hits like ‘Sadie, the Cleaning Lady’ was trying to upgrade his image for an adult audience. One approach was to have him photographed next to a macho Monaro GTS on the cover of his latest record. That didn’t fool anyone. The car wasn’t really his, it was borrowed from Holden for the photo shoot.