Pete Wherrett ‘Torques’ GTHO

Only once did he race a muscle car at Mount Panorama. That was in 1970 when he co-drove a Series Production XW Falcon GT-HO with Trevor Meehan, a Sydney driver who had a sponsorship deal with Sydney dealership Rowell-Thiele Ford.
This was several years before Peter began his TV career. At the time, he was running an advanced driving school at Warwick Farm and hadn’t driven a big V8-powered sedan in competition before this.
He wrote of this experience in his autobiography, The Quest For The Perfect Car (published in 1999 by Hodder Headline). Today, it’s a rare insight into what it was like to drive a 1970 muscle car on the limit.
“It was interesting to drive this big brute,” he wrote. “For a start it didn’t take too kindly to being thrown around. It required accuracy and finesse. Race driving (and road driving for that matter) always demands total concentration and this was especially so in the Falcon.

The Meehan/Wherrett Falcon negotiates the run down the Mountain in 1970

Brake applications needed to be both gentle to conserve pads and linings, and powerful enough to bring down the speed. The turn-in to corners demanded smooth steering while power, heaps of it, had to come on again steadily and progressively.”
Wherrett noted that there was an added challenge to driving this particular car, which caught out none other than Allan Moffat as a Bathurst rookie in 1969. “The gearbox was prone from time to time to select two gears at once and jam. So gearshifts, especially the shift from third to second, had to be very, very precise.”
It was Trevor Meehan who had the bright idea to forgo the racing tyres that some Falcon teams were using and stick with the proven Michelin road radials. His ‘secret’ was to buff the tyres down to about 20 percent of new tread depth before the race (a technique made famous by ’68 Bathurst winner Bruce McPhee) which gave optimum handling and less tyre wear. In this way he hoped to save at least one pit stop.
According to Wherrett, the plan nearly worked. Meehan settled comfortably into a top 10 position at the start and when the big guns pitted for tyres and fuel at around lap 40 he kept on going. At one-third distance, he was briefly outright leader.
When Wherrett took over he was circulating in the top five until he noticed a misfire in the engine and was called in for an unscheduled stop. The pit crew discovered a faulty set of ignition points in the distributor. This problem took an agonising eight laps to fix, after which the car ran faultlessly to the end.

“It is interesting to contemplate where we might have finished if this problem hadn’t occurred,” Wherrett wrote. “Allan Moffat won, also in an XW Falcon GT. The race distance was 130 laps; we finished ninth on 122 laps, exactly the eight laps behind we had lost in the pit stop.”
Interestingly, Wherrett’s account of that 1970 result differ from the official results, which show the Meehan/Wherrett Falcon finishing 18th on 118 laps. Either way, he was there and got to do what most of us will only ever dream about - race a Falcon GT-HO at Bathurst.
In his book, Wherrett estimated that he had driven 1,600 cars in his lifetime, covering a total of four million kilometres! Yet he could still clearly remember the buzz of racing that big, green brute of a Falcon.
“I loved the car and still do. It’s hugely powerful, big and cumbersome, and an enormous challenge to drive to its full potential.”