In 1970 Niel Allen’s 5.0-litre Chev V8 McLaren M10B was threatening to lift off the ground and flip over backwards on Conrod Straight at 270km/h. Back then there was no Caltex Chase to slow the cars before Murray’s Corner, and the straight – and indeed much of the rest of the track – was lined not by concrete walls designed especially for motor racing circuits, but by wooden post-and-wire farm fencing of the type designed to keep sheep and cattle from escaping the paddock.
But aerodynamic lift at high speed on Conrod was only one of the problems Niel Allen faced at Bathurst that Easter weekend. The strain on the Formula 5000’s aluminium monocoque chassis on a quick lap around the Mountain was extreme: it was actually shaking loose the rivets that held the car together...
Allen’s fastest race lap was half a minute quicker than the lap time Allan Moffat would set a few months later in a works Falcon XW GTHO Phase II to take pole position for that year’s Bathurst 500. Needless to say, Allen’s 2m09.7s fastest lap was also a new outright lap record.
Of course, with the return to the Mountain of big V8 openwheelers in the form of the new S5000 – Formula 5000 reimagined for the 21st century – the likelihood of the outright lap record copping a battering was high. It didn’t quite happen like that, however.
Despite safety standards (for both the cars and the track) having advanced veritable
