“When I take her to the track she really shines,
(giddy-up, giddy-up 409)
She always turns in the fastest times,
(giddy-up, giddy-up 409)
My four-speed, dual-quad, Positraction 409.”

You know a muscle car has serious street cred when a legendary band like The Beach Boys writes a song about it. When they released ‘409’ as the flip-side to ‘Surfin’ Safari’ in June 1962, it was recognition from the hip youth market that Chevrolet’s stomping 409 cid big block V8 unleashed the previous year was already being revered as one of the greatest street and strip performance engine packages of all time.

So it was no surprise that Australian touring car great Stormin’ Norm Beechey had earlier decided that a “four-speed, dual-quad, Positraction 409” was also the way to go if he was going to break the formidable claw-hold that British car maker Jaguar had on local tin-top competition since the late 1950s.

That dominance had started in 1958 with the instant success of David McKay’s semi-works Mk1 3.4 sedan which triggered a sudden expansion of Mk1s in the hands of Ron Hodgson, Bill Pitt and Ian ‘Pete’ Geoghegan.

Bob Jane sunk the Jaguar’s claws even deeper in 1961 with the purchase of a more powerful 3.8 litre Mk II model which with extensive local development under John Sawyer, including a super-hot 4.2 litre version of the famous DOHC inline six, became the new benchmark.

Beechey’s hot 48-215 Holden was no match for Jane’s flying Jaguar but Norm could see little sense in trying to beat Jane with another Jaguar. For Norm, the challenge was to come up with a faster car for 1962. A Jaguar beater.

He found his answer after doing some research in US and European car magazines to find out what was racing and winning overseas at the time. What really caught his attention was a dazzling performance by US racing great Dan Gurney in the 1961 British Empire Trophy meeting at the UK’s famous Silverstone GP circuit.

Gurney’s 1961 Chevrolet Impala SS two-door coupe was powered by the company’s brand new fire-breathing 409 cid (6.6 litre) big block V8, which was also terrorising Ford and Chrysler opposition on the US quarter mile strips in the hands of Super Stock pilots like Dave Strickler, Hayden Proffitt and ‘Dyno Don’ Nicholson.

In Gurney’s skilled hands, the drum-braked behemoth showed ferocious pace as a road racer, having comprehensively blown the locals stars into the weeds until a rear wheel collapsed under the strain not far from the finish.

Of great significance to Beechey were glowing press observations of how stable the big car looked through Silverstone’s high speed corners. And the fact that Gurney’s shocked opposition included Jaguar Mk II 3.8s driven by F1 guns Roy Salvadori and future world champion Graham Hill! Gurney’s Jaguar-kicking appearance so upset the British establishment that the US muscle car was banned from competition.

Norm rightly figured that the 409’s superiority over the Jaguars at Silverstone would translate to Australian tracks, allowing for the fact that Gurney’s 1961 model was pretty much stock standard and powered by the first version of the 409 with a single four-barrel carb and 360 horsepower.

Beechey sets his sights on the latest 1962 model Impala which had an improved version of the 409 available as a factory option that upped its power output to a genuine 409 horses @ 6000 rpm or the magic one-horsepower-per-cubic-inch.

The new 409/409 was not only lighter than its predecessor but also armed with a pair of 500cfm Carter AFB four-barrel carbs on a cast-aluminium inlet manifold, raised ports with bigger valves, 11:1 compression, improved valve train and freer-flowing exhaust manifolds.

Norm’s choice of a four-door pillarless hardtop body instead of the more sporty-looking two-door coupe surprised some, but his thinking was based on typically pragmatic reasoning.

One was that Australia’s Appendix J touring car rules at the time limited two-door touring cars to engine capacities of less than 1.5 litres. The other was that a freshly imported Impala 409 was a very expensive purchase in 1962. So Norm figured the most desirable pillarless hardtop with power windows would stand the best chance of finding the well-heeled buyer he’d need to get his money back when the time came to off-load it.

Using a GM catalogue, Beechey placed an order for his new car locally and when it arrived by ship from the US in Brisbane he drove it all the way back to Melbourne (it was left hand drive, remember) to run it in.

At the time Norm was driving for David McKay’s Scuderia Veloce team, which comprised several rising stars including Gavin and John Youl, Brian Foley and Greg Cusack driving a variety of sports cars and open-wheelers.

Norm was the touring car representative in the smartly presented, Castrol-backed squad and with the new 409 at his disposal it appeared the Jaguars were in for a big block shock. However, those shocks were initially reserved for Beechey, as the new Chevy proved to be a very expensive car to develop and chewed up huge amounts of cash.

Norm was in contact with Dan Gurney, Dave Strickler and Hayden Proffitt during his time with the car, gaining information and advice via telegrams and international phone calls on how to get the best out of it. He also learned a few tricks from the good ol’ boys running stock cars in NASCAR competition.

Even so, the immensely powerful big block V8 took Beechey about six months of heartache to get sorted out before he could race it. A recurring problem with crankshaft seizures was traced to the 409’s big-end journals, which generated enormous heat at high revs.

A cure was eventually found through a combination of larger bearing clearances, with a high capacity oil pump and a huge remote oil cooler mounted in a removable section of the front bumper bar to keep a lid on the oil temperatures. With 11:1 compression, Norm could rev the 435 bhp monster mill to a spine-tingling 7000rpm.

However, getting the engine sorted was only part of Norm’s pain. The standard gearbox and diff supplied with the car were clearly not designed to handle the huge torque of the 409 under the extremes of racing, which was factory-rated at 420 ft/lbs.

The single-plate clutch was relatively trouble-free but the Borg Warner T10 gearbox with its cast-aluminium casing and marginal gear strength would regularly fail. The tiny 10-bolt Positraction limited slip differential was also too small to withstand the enormous torque in racing conditions. The oil would boil and the pinion gear would almost melt under the strain.

Beechey copied an idea straight from the NASCAR guys by using a shock absorber attached to the rear axle that acted as an oil pump. Through suspension movement, the shock would continually pump the hot diff oil through a remote VW oil cooler then back via the crown wheel and pinion to try and cool them down.

Steering and suspension also got the Beechey treatment. Norm replaced the original Chevy power steering box with an unusual EK Holden item that was used only in the company’s LHD export models. This reduced the number of turns from lock to lock which was great on the race track, but also made the steering incredibly heavy at low speeds.

The early 1960s was also an eternity before the advanced technology found in today’s competition shock absorbers was available. Back then you simply looked for a shock with ‘heavy duty’ stamped on it and bolted it in, but given the Impala’s massive bulk Norm copied another NASCAR idea by making up special brackets to install two shocks per wheel.

The four wheel drum brakes were also typical of the era. If a driver used them hard for a couple of laps, they could end up spearing off the road with the middle pedal on the floor and brakes on fire. Drilling holes in the backing plates for cold air ducting and use of sintered metallic linings only partly helped. The heat generated inside the drums was so intense in a race that the steel backing plates for the brake shoes would distort and bend away from the drum face. Metal gussets were welded under the brake shoes to stop this happening, but the Impala’s stoppers remained a huge compromise.

Beechey adapted his driving style to cope by braking very early in a straight line, changing down a gear then throwing it sideways into a corner to wash off speed. Given that Norm’s backside was sliding around on the standard bench seat, with only a four-point harness to hold him in place, it makes you realise why he attracted such a huge following in this car!

Due to the crippling costs that came with racing the Impala, Beechey only competed in a handful of meetings between 1962 and 1963, but he certainly made each one of those a memorable occasion for the spectators who turned up in droves to see the big US muscle car upset the Jaguar juggernaut.

The Impala proved Beechey’s theories about Gurney’s car correct, as he won roughly two races from every three starts including the NSW Touring Car Championship and Victorian Touring Car Championship.

He also towed the 409 to its race meetings behind a 1961 Impala, which had as much to do with having a ready supply of spare parts on hand for the race car as it did about pure showmanship.

Beechey’s fierce battles with Jane’s Mk II during this period are legendary. In fact, Norm got so tired of Jane nudging the Impala’s back bumper that he fitted a big steel tow bar to stop him. Jane responded by simply fitting reinforced grille sections to the front of his car and kept on bumping!

The ultimate showdown between the two would have been the 1962 Australian Touring Car Championship at Tasmania’s Longford circuit, where the Chevy could have unleashed its big block firepower on the circuit’s famously long straights. However, the problem-plagued Impala was typically out of action at the time, which left an easy ATCC win to Jane.

Beechey eventually sold the Impala as a road car “only driven on Sundays” and switched to the new EH Holden S4 in 1964 with the formation of the famous Neptune Racing Team.

But this story has a happy ending. Many years after his retirement from racing, Beechey had the opportunity to buy the old Impala back.

After a full restoration, which included a right-hand drive conversion, Beechey now drives his famous “four-speed, dual-quad, Positraction 409” on the street and enters it in the occasional road rally and classic car events. Both living treasures, from a magical era of motor racing that was way too short.