Race on Sunday, sell on Monday

The old adage ‘Race on Sunday, Sell on Monday’ mightn’t have much relevance today, but it certainly applied in the early ’70s Series Production era. And for the car dealers that went racing, it was literally true. This was a time when racing was still a financially viable proposition for the dealers, and there were plenty of them doing it – although few with the same kind of style and commitment, and success, as McLeod Ford.

Story: Steve Normoyle

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Your Fair Dinkum Ford Dealer

McLeod Ford is probably one of the best-known Ford dealers in Australia. That’s no mean feat when you consider that McLeod Ford no longer exists under that name, and that its founder, Max McLeod, sold the business decades ago.

But McLeod Ford is known more for the cars it raced, and the races it won, than for the Fords it sold. Ask any motorsport or muscle car fan over the age of 30 and chances are they’ll know McLeod Ford as the sponsor of John Goss, and the dealer-backed race team that scored a fairytale win at Bathurst in 1974.

McLeod Ford in the 1970s was some kind of phenomenon. It wasn’t just that a Ford dealer in the southern Sydney suburb of Rockdale was able to take on the might of the factory race teams from Holden, Ford and Chrysler and beat them. Uniquely, this was a dealership for whom high performance muscle cars were its trademark. The racing effort provided the excitement factor, and on the showroom floor the innovative sales team delivered with a targeted niche marketing effort that would eventually make McLeod Ford the biggest seller of Falcon Hardtops in Australia.