Monty Suffern penned this account for the 2016 Golden Anniversary Southern Cross Rally.
As any of us move through life, luck, either good or bad, is likely to have some influence on how things turn out. In motor sport in particular, luck often affects the outcome. In 2013 Fernando Alonso, through no fault of his own, nearly had his head taken off in a spectacular first corner accident. Certainly, no level of driving skill could have changed the outcome from his perspective, although had he been lucky enough to be a couple of metres further down the track when the carnage came rushing up from behind, he might not have been involved in an accident at all, and who knows, he might have driven the rest of the race to some respectable podium place. But he wasn’t and he didn’t.
Sometimes in motor sport, missing out on the bad luck is nearly as good as having good luck, but for some, the saying “if he didn’t have bad luck, he wouldn’t have any luck at all” seems to fit well. For others, good luck seems to follow them around. In our rally career with the Nissan Motor Company, not many thought that George and I had any abundance of good luck. Rather than being followed around by good luck, sometimes all the luck you are going to get comes in one dynamite package. This story describes such as occasion.
Some competitors manage to run off the road, flip onto their roof (which could be an event ending occurrence), then have the luck to see a couple of gorillas swing down out of the trees (whoops – profound apologies to those most important rally participants – the spectators), who push the car back onto its wheels, tell the navigator which was the other cars went (because he/she is still disoriented from the crash), and away they go – sometimes to victory. For us, however, on the rare occasion we ever crashed, it was likely to be a four barrel roll down the road with no spectators in sight, and in any case, all four wheels had fallen off, so there was no point tipping us back off our roof (the last night of the 1977 Southern Cross). However, the 1978 Southern Cross set all that right.
The 1978 rally season saw the introduction of the mighty Stanza onto the Australian rally scene. We campaigned one for the ARC season with some success. It was a very good car operated by a very good and well managed team. Now thanks go to the mechanics and others who were so important in the successes of the year. For the Southern Cross that year, the parent company in Japan sent the usual top-notch team from Japan with two additional Stanzas for the international drivers who were coming for the event. All the final preparations of these vehicles was happening at the rally workshop in Braeside, a Melbourne suburb near Moorabbin airport. It was a regular beehive of activity, with not only the Japanese team members and our regular full-time mechanics, but a number of other Australian mechanics hired by team manager, Howard Marsden, specifically for the Cross. From Braeside the cars were to be loaded onto a transporter for the trip to Sydney, ready for scrutineering and the start of the four-day event. The transporter was scheduled to leave at 5 PM for the overnight trip.
At about 3 PM on the departure day, George sidled up to me and said to get in the Stanza as he was going to go for one last shakedown run in the car. This was suburban Melbourne, but there was a gravel road, albeit at a very straight gravel road, a couple of kilometres away. I was busy folding maps or something similar, so I suggested he take my brother, Bob, who was one of the contract additional mechanics described above. Off they went, and about 25 minutes later there was a phone call for me (before mobile phones mind you), with George explaining I had better get one of the boys to come down with a trailer to Government Rd. This did not sound promising to say the least, but it was much, much worse than that. Seems that George had detected a small vibration in 5th gear, and decided to see if it would “drive through it” at higher RPM. So here they were doing about 160 kilometres per hour on a gravel road when the tail shaft broke, and all hell broke loose. At least we found out the small vibration was not just a figment of George’s imagination. So part 1 of the “good luck” story was that the car was not pole vaulted end over end on the tail shaft hanging out of the diff. The car came back to the rally workshop on the trailer and the damage was assessed. To say this thing beat the shit out of the vehicle would not be an understatement. The shaft broke about 150 mm behind the gearbox, and this short shaft flailing around tore the back off the transmission, but worse still, tore through the floor and cut a 50 mm swath through the floor and the transmission tunnel. Shards of metal were lodged in the roof of the car, all of which narrowly missed George’s wrist as his hand was resting on the top of the gear stick in his attempt to “feel” where the vibration might be coming from.
The Japanese team looked over the car and said something to the effect of “stiff shit – looks like your car is out of the rally” (it was said in Japanese so I did not get the exact wording). The Australian guys looked over the car and declared that we had a spare gearbox and differential in the service van ready to go to Sydney and they could fix it, but it would take a while. The only concession made by the team management was that they would delay the departure of the transporter until 8 PM, and if our car was on it. good for us. That meant something like about 3 hours, a piece of cake to a well-oiled rally team. Out came the seats; in went the oxy torches; and hammers beat things back into place. Strengthening pieces were welded in and painted over, shards were removed from the roof, mechanical components were put back in, and the car was on the truck to Sydney by the required time. What a piece of teamwork with no apparent panic and with guys working all over the car without getting in each other’s way. And imagine what would have happened if the first time the car reached whatever critical tail shaft RPM caused the break had occurred at close to 100 mph on a twisty gravel road just south of Newcastle on the first competitive stage. Frankly I would rather not imagine such things. Thank you George for going on one last shakedown run. So lucky break to have now been described.
But wait – there’s more, as the famous TV commercial proclaims. Good luck number three.
The second night of the Cross was wet and muddy with rather treacherous conditions, and we were bombing along some twisty godforsaken mountain road (rally talk for a ripper road) when George says “no brakes”. He probably said more than that, but there has been enough swearing in this story already. Turns out we had no brakes – no pedal at all. Well brakes only serve to slow you down, unlike “no steering”, so we pressed on to the end of the stage As luck would have it, there was a service point up along the bitumen road, but it was quite a few kilometres up the highway. Probably the Oxley highway, though my memory is not good on details, and my record keeping is even worse, so my chances of finding the route instructions after 35 years are non-existent. So we drive up there in the pissing rain with no brakes and one of the field vans is waiting for us with the two Bobs – Bob Woolley and Bob Suffern. Howard Marsden, the team manager, used to organise the service crews with the philosophy of putting the Japanese crews at the major service points where they could do what they do best, which is work very fast with well set up and well lit service points, and the Australians out in the field where they could fix things with a piece of string and at three inch nail. Well, we needed more than a piece of string and a three inch nail, but fortunately, our service van had the parts required to fix our problem, which was to put new brake callipers on the rear of the vehicle.
The sequence of events happened like this: The pads were held in with two pins. For faster service, the pins were tied together with a fine braided wire so they could both be pulled out together (which would save at least three seconds). Earlier in the year during the ARC events we had found that if mud packed under the braided wire, it would work the pins loose and the brake pads would fall out, so we removed the wire – problem solved. The Japanese mechanics notice the wire was missing, so they put it back. In the muddy conditions on the second night, the mud packed under the braided wire, and the pins came out followed by the brake pads, followed by the pistons (though I am not sure if they came completely out) hence the “no brakes” comment from George.
What I can say, however, is that everything was bloody hot – brakes tend to be even when they are not working too well (I guess the pistons were in the callipers still). Bob and Bob burned the crap out of their wrists and hands changing these things, despite wearing gloves, but with nary a complaint to us. Including a quick field bleed – enough to get us going – it was probably less than 10 minutes or so for the whole repair. We did not even get out of the car (remember the pissing rain) and we lost no time on the transport section. Well done guys, and I hope we remembered to say thank you.
Of course, at the next major service point, while they were giving the brakes a proper bleed, the Japanese mechanics noticed the wire was missing and they were in the process of replacing it, but someone pulled rank (thank you Howard) and the wires disappeared forever – well at least in Australian events.
The rest, as they say, is history. Our names are in the record books as the winners of the 1978 Southern Cross Rally, a gruelling event of some 2700 kms, of which over 1500 were competitive, including one stage over 200 kilometres on the last night which included an “in stage” service for a couple of tyres and a splash of fuel (less than a 45 seconds stop). There were plenty of other long stages on other nights too, but the long one on the last night was always a mental and physical challenge (remember the four barrel roll over when all the wheels fell off in 1977? Well that was on this long stage on the last night).
If you ever hear of me complaining that if it wasn’t for the bad luck, we wouldn’t have had any luck at all, just remind me of the tail shaft incident on Government Road, Mordialloc and the brake calliper change up on the Oxley highway. I’ll try to be contrite. On the other hand, perhaps I will recall the start of the last night of the 1980 Southern Cross, which we were leading comfortably, when the engine blew up big time just as we finished the first competitive stage of the evening. On disassembly of the engine using a tension wrench, it was found that two crankshaft main bearing bolts were not much more than finger tight. So I guess that can hardly be called bad luck. It is likely that some little engine builder back at the Nissan factory in Japan fell on his sword over that one. I suppose I should be recalling the good luck we had in even getting to the last night given the circumstances. Or better still that the engine quit just as we passed the timing marker at around 7 PM, so we did not have to walk a long way out of the stage in the wee hours of the morning in the freezing cold, as had happened more than once before, and we could get back to the Sandcastle Motel before the bar shut.
