Howard Marsden cut a dejected figure at the end of the Chesterfield 250 at Adelaide International Raceway on August 27. The opening round of the Australian Manufacturers’ Championship had just been run, and won – but not by either of his works Ford team Falcons.
Their race had been ruined by excessive tyre wear as Allan Moffat and Fred Gibson fought a losing battle trying to match the sheer speed of the HDT Torana XU-1s of Colin Bond and Peter Brock. Bond led his team-mate to a convincing one-two; Gibson was fourth, but seven laps down after a litany of tyre stops. Moffat was a retirement, hitting the wall heavily after blowing a tyre.
Running on their new, wider Globe alloy wheels and ‘experimental’ Dunlop slicks, the fleet-footed HDT Toranas had made the Falcons look like lumbering tanks through the turns. If that wasn’t bad enough, where normally the GTHO’s 351 V8 could be relied upon to see off its smaller engined opponents on the straights, this time the little XU-1s were managing to stick with the big HOs all the way down AIR’s long main straight.
“Our cars were being driven close to their limits and it serves to show just how the performance gap between the Falcons and the Holdens has narrowed,” Marsden said after the race, going on to say that he felt now that his Falcons were the underdogs for Bathurst.
It was a disastrous start to the enduros for Ford just two weeks before the Sandown 250, and with Bathurst three weeks after that. Just to add to the sense of frustration and general gloom, Marsden must have been privately musing to himself on the sheer absurdity of the situation in which they’d suddenly found themselves mired.
After all, this wasn’t even the car they were supposed to have been racing – the XY Phase III was last year’s car…
Back at Ford’s Lot 6 competition headquarters were three brand new ready-to-race XA Falcon GTHO Phase IVs. Had it not been for the Supercar Scare, that’s what they would have been running at Adelaide – and with the Phase IV’s suspension improvements and bigger Globe alloy wheels, there
