The Goss on the Bathurst Kingswood

Forget six degrees of separation, when it comes to racing legend John Goss, AMC reckons there’s never more than two!

Take, for example the story we ran here on the AMC website on the sole Holden Kingswood to contest the Bathurst classic, the 186S-powered HK driven by Novocastrian Jim Sullivan and Sib Petralia in the 1968 Hardie-Ferodo 500.

That story first ran in AMC #79 back in 2014. After it was published, the ever-helpful touring car historian Scott Mackay dropped us a line to highlight that this Kingswood was also raced by the legendary JG.

This was in the 1969 Rothmans 12 Hour at Surfers Paradise International Raceway, when the Kingswood and a Hillman Hunter GT were entered in class C by ‘The High Performance School’.

The school’s ‘principal’ Bill Tuckey was paired with Sib Petralia in the Hillman, while Goss and John Cooke drove the Kingswood. Wheels magazine’s brief race report mentions that both cars finished the race but were excluded from the results for non-attendance at final scrutineering.

Again, we wonder what became of this well-used Kingswood, that wore NSW plates EXY-255 at SPIR? Whaddaknow?

For the record, Surfers’ rock around the clock was won by the McCluskey Ford-entered XT GT of Bill Gates (not the Microsoft squillionaire) and Jim Bertram, who covered 427 laps or 1374.5km.