Minis at Bathurst 1966

Most of the cars I collect are 1:43 scale, and all the Photoshopped dioramas I have made so far have used 1:43 scale cars, but this time I'm using a tiddler to set up this posting. It's a 1:87 model of the second-placed Mini Cooper S at the 1966 Bathurst race (called the Gallaher 500 that year, after a forgotten and forgettable brand of cigarettes).

Number 17 was the second-placed car driven by Australians Fred Gibson and Bill Stanley.
The winning car (number 13) was driven by Rauno Altonen and Bob Holden. For my
diorama of them racing across the mountain I have used the "17" from the front car
to create a mythical number 7 Mini, but there was no number 7 Mini in the race, if the truth
be told. This 1:87 model is made by a German company, Bubmobil. I have several
other 1:87 cars made by them, including the three Ford GT40s which came 1-2-3 in
the 1966 Le Mans 24-Hour race, so one of these days I guess I'll do another
1:87 scale Photoshop diorama of a race scene.

1966 was an amazing result for the Mini Cooper S, winning the first NINE places in the race. For my diorama I wanted to capture that memory of seeing Minis in line, just racing each other all day. Here's an old shot from the race itself which tells the same story, even better.

This shot pinched from Google Images is only captioned with the name of Rauno Altonen, the
race winner and the guy in front. Several Mini Cooper S driving rally aces from Europe came
out for the Bathurst race, inlcuding Rauno Altonen, Timo Makinen and Paddy Hopkirk.

Speaking of Paddy Hopkirk and Timo Makinen, here's a quick little video of them doing some very fancy Mini driving on a skidpan somewhere in New Zealand. Great little cars, super skilful drivers.



FInally, if you have a serious amount of spare time on your hands, here's a link to a 56-minute documentary on the first seven years of the famous Bathurst race, including footage from Phillip Island in 60-63, where the great race originated, and about which I blogged quite recently in this posting on the Peugeot 403. The second half of the video has footage of the 1964-66 Bathurst races, and the roughness, narrowness and dangerousness of the track is just amazing to behold. Here's the linky to that doco.  

As the doco says at one stage, the track was so rough and dodgy in places that the bigger, heavier cars tended to break. At Bathurst that was my memory of it, watching it on TV as a young schoolboy. It was often the case that the bigger American Studebakers would lead the race for the first hour, then the retirements would start (but this didn't stop me loving those Studebaker Larks, some of which were used as police pursuit cars here in the 60s). 

But by lunchtime it was all about the Minis circulating at speed, way out in front, almost connected to each other like a quick little freight train.

Action at Phillip Island

The famous annual 1000km race at the Mount Panorama circuit at Bathurst, New South Wales, actually started life as a 500 mile race at Phillip Island, Victoria, in 1960. Pictured below is the car that won the C Class in the famous race's first two years, and came so close to being the outright winner in the very first year that some people still maintain that it did win the race (although the officials didn't agree). It is, of course, a Peugeot 403, and the C-class winning team in both years, 60-61, was Geoff Russell and Dave Anderson.

This model is a 1:43 scale model originally by Altaya, but modified by an Australian enthusiast. It's number 3 in a limited edition production of 10 of these models. It's one of my favourites for many reasons, one of which is the great story of the race win that almost was.

I'm quite excited about this photo, as it is the first of what I hope will be a series of action shots
using my little diecast models. I was looking at a photo of a real action shot with just one car
in it, and it occurred to me that in Photoshop I could substitute my model for the real car, and the
blurred background of the action shot would do all the heavy lifting in giving that sense of
speed. Add a driver (in this case a deep-etched Jack Brabham driving a Cooper Climax in 1959)
and the only unrealistic thing is that the car is left-hand-drive, while the real car would be
right-hand-drive. It just looks more dynamic to have the driver on the viewer's side of the car.

The race win that almost was? Yep. It's like this. Each of the classes in the race started separately, at 30 second intervals. At the end of the race's 167 laps, the first car home across the finish line was the Class D Vauxhall Cresta driven by John Roxburgh and Frank Coad, seemingly the outright winner to all and sundry. However, the C-class winning Peugeot 403 finished soon after, also on 167 laps (the only other car to complete 167 laps), and it seems in the confusion of the finish of this inaugural race, the 30-second gap between the classes was somewhat forgotten. The Peugeot team claimed they finished less than 30 seconds behind the Cresta, and should have been the outright winner, but they never got anywhere with that claim, and so the inaugural winner of the famous race is down in the history books as the Cresta.

The model pictured here is captioned by its maker as the 1961 C-class winning car, as Russell and Anderson won that class in both years. It's notable for its distinctive red stripes, which made it easy for pit crews to pick out the car from the pack as it went around the course. 

The Armstrong 500 was held at Phillip Island for one more year, in 1962, and after that it moved to Bathurst, still called the Armstrong 500 for the 1963, '64 and '65 races. in 1966 it changed its name to the Gallagher 500, named after a brand of cigarettes if I remember correctly. In that first Gallagher, Mini Cooper Ss came home first-to-ninth, a race I remember very well. Perhaps that might be my next action diorama, as I do have a '66 Bathurst-livery Mini Cooper S in the cabinet...