Barry 'Bo' Seton’s father was ‘dead-against’ motor racing – which is ironic given that he was the start of a motor racing dynasty that continues to this day with his grandson, Aaron, more than 60 years after Bo won the Bathurst 500 – but Seton Snr soon changed his tune when he saw that his son was mixing it with (and sometimes even beating) big-name stars like the Geoghegan brothers, Bob Jane and Bruce McPhee.
Growing up in Moorebank in Sydney’s west, Seton lived close enough to the Warwick Farm circuit to hear the engines on race days. That prompted him to try racing himself; within a year of the circuit’s opening he was out there mixing with the other drivers in a hotted up 48-215 Holden.
He raced in the first Bathurst 500 in 1963 alongside his good mate Herb Taylor in an 850cc Mini, the pair returning the following year to finish second outright in a Cortina GT. Then Seton won it outright in 1965 with Midge Bosworth in a GT 500 Cortina.
A second win went begging in 1968 when the Falcon XR GT he was sharing with Fred Gibson holed its radiator near the end. That was the first of several years Seton was part of the factory Ford team at Bathurst. The last of those was also the final run for the original ‘FoMoCo’ outfit as Ford quit the sport at the end of 1973. Moffat and Geoghegan won in the sister car while the Gibson/Seton Falcon XA GT Hardtop retired with an engine failure. It was a classic case of foot-shooting: it was decided by team boss Howard Marsden to fit new cam followers to the engine in the Gibson/Seton car before the race as a preventative maintenance measure, but the new followers had a manufacturing fault and the engine was doomed even before the start.
Seton never went close to winning the Great Race again. Instead, he went on to dominate the under 3-litre class, taking the Capri V6 model which thus far had proven uncompetitive and developing it into the car to beat. He scored two Bathurst class wins in Capris, though there should have been a third, in 1975, That year he was comfortably in front and not far from the end when an axle failed.
In the midst of the Capri era he raced a Torana A9X, scoring top 10 finishes on the Mountain in both years with that car. His last Bathurst start came in 1984 alongside Don Smith in a Mustang, but the year before that he introduced young son Glenn Seton to the Mountain. The father and son Capri team dominated the class until bowing out with engine failure.
Later, Bo and Glenn formed their own Ford Sierra team with backing from Philip Morris. For most of the 1990s Glenn Seton Racing was the preeminent Ford team alongside Dick Johnson Racing. Though Bathurst glory proved agonisingly elusive, two Australian Touring Car Championship crowns and many big touring car victories added up to a body of work that makes Glenn Seton – along with the team he founded with his father – one of Ford’s all-time Australian motor racing greats.
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