Poncing around Laguna Beach

Our Top 10 racing Camaros feature in AMC #106 prompted Phil Harrison to rummage through his files to find these old photos. They were taken in June, 1980, and they show a Chev Camaro road car at Laguna Beach, California, about to be shipped to Ron Dickson Racing in Sydney.

For those unaware of Phil, in a long career in motorsport he’s fulfilled various important behind-the-scenes roles over the years. He was part of the team that introduced stadium supercross to Australia in the 1980s, and more recently was co-ordinator of the Muscle Car Masters event. These days he helps run the Toyota 86 Racing Series.

But in 1980 he was working for Mike Goodwin, the man who created Supercross, at Laguna Beach, California. The job he’d left in Australia had been with the ARDC. Phil was the club’s media officer; he ran the press room at Amaroo Park and Bathurst.

“Because I’d worked at the ARDC I knew some of the drivers, and I knew Ron Dickson,” Phil explains. “He was after a second Camaro, and he knew I was in the States.”

So Dickson got in touch and asked Harrison to find him a near-new Z28 Camaro.

“This was obviously back in the days before the internet, and really the only way you could get something like that was to have someone there or go over there yourself.”

Since it had already been arranged that Dick Barbour would be sharing the second Dickson car at Bathurst, Harrison thought that one of Barbour’s west coast car dealerships would be a good place to start his search.

“I got onto one of his sales guys, a bloke named Bud Thurston, at Dick Barbour’s Arizona dealership, the Honda Car Company. I told him what I was after: a ’79 model manual Z28.”

Phil still has a copy of the letter he wrote to Thurston confirming the intention to purchase a ’79 model Z28 ‘stickshift’, with 12,000 miles on the clock. The price was $6800.

In the letter Phil made sure to mention that Thurston’s boss, Dick Barbour, would be racing in Australia for the team buying the Camaro, just so the salesman didn’t get any ideas of gouging the Australians on price.

“Ron did the money transfers and organised the shipping. I was just the person who found the car, and then received when it was trucked to Laguna Beach from Arizona.”

After taking delivery, Phil had the Camaro for a few days before it was due on the wharf.

“It was registered, so I drove it a bit while I had it. So it went from me poncing around Laguna Beach in it pretending I’m in the Beach Boys, and then a few months later it’s racing at Bathurst!”

Dickson’s team referred to this car as ‘Car Two’ and it ran three consecutive Bathurst 1000s for Dickson’s squad, before it was sold to Mike Burgmann and written-off in May 1983 at Oran Park and then dumped. The two cars’ stories were told in issue #23’s MIA section.