Anyone who knew George Shepheard would have described him as a lovely bloke. He was also possibly Australian motorsport’s most versatile bloke, perhaps the ultimate all-rounder – because Shepheard could do just about everything: driving, navigating, car preparing and team management. His record of success across all these fields in a career spanning some six decades is probably unparalleled.
His father, Reg, owned the RedeX company that’s best known today for the Redex Round Australia Trials of the 1950s. So rallying was in George’s blood, and he began competing as early as 1959 in NSW in rallies and hillclimb events.
Shepheard competed alongside schoolmate Colin Bond, and in rallying the pair soon formed a partnership. With Bond driving and Shepheard navigating, they won their class in the 1964 Round Australia Trial in a VW Beetle. It was the first big win in what was to be a long and fruitful association for the pair in rallies.
They won three Australian Rally Championships (1971, 1972 and 1974) in Holden Dealer Team Torana XU-1s. The were in business together with Bond Roll Bars in Sydney around this time, with Shepheard taking over the company as Bond’s professional driving career took priority. Shepheard continued to run the HDT’s rally effort through the Torana L34 period and later Gemini, before masterminding Holden’s remarkable 1-2-3 win in the 1979 Repco Round Australia Trial.
A circuit racing sojourn followed. Shepheard built a Group C Gemini touring car for Bob Morris, a partnership that later saw Morris commission Shepheard to build him a Falcon XD touring car for the 1981 Bathurst 1000. That car was destroyed in the infamous track blocking crash at McPhillamy Park while Morris was in second place and looking a definite chance of winning. The replacement XE Falcon Shepheard built for the following year’s race didn’t take the start after co-driver John Fitzpatrick crashed it on the Saturday.
Dick Johnson had noted how well the Shepheard Falcons handled, and so he hired him to oversee his own XE Falcon. That culminated in the famous overnight car exchange/rebuild at Bathurst in 1983 after Johnson wrote his car off in a crash at Forrest's Elbow in Hardies Heroes.
Into the Group A era, Shepheard headed up the Mitsubishi Starion effort, an association that led to a partnership with Sutherland Mitsubishi dealer principal Ross Williams. With Williams, Shepheard ran Commodore production cars for Ian Palmer in 1989 and then Tony Scott with a VN model. Later in the ’90s the pair ran Volvo’s Australian Super Touring programme, first with the 850 Estate with Tony Scott and then the 850 and S40 sedans. Peter Brock drove the 850 sedan in 1997; the following year the Williams/Shepheard operation teamed up with TWR to win the Bathurst 1000 with Rickard Rydell and Jim Richards in a TWR Volvo S40.
By then Shepheard had moved to Queensland to set up a new business, Roadsafe Suspension, where he prepared the works Holden-backed Commodore V6 which Ed Ordynski and Ross Runnalls won the 1995 Round Australia Trial – 16 years after Shepheard orchestrated Holden’s Repco Trial win.
In later years George enjoyed himself by returning to rallying not as a navigator but as a driver. It was just a bit of serious fun, and it was made all the more rewarding by the fact that he was working with and competing alongside his son, Steven. The third generation Shepheard himself enjoyed a decent career as a rally driver, winning the Rally Australia round of the 2011 Australian Rally Championship.
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