1967 Bathurst 500: Flight of the Dodge Phoenix
A 1960s ‘Yank Tank’ with four wheel drum brakes, push-button auto transmission and bench seats would have to rank as one of Bathurst’s most unlikely Great Race contenders, which makes the one-off appearance of a 1963 Dodge Phoenix sedan in the 1967 Gallaher 500 such an intriguing occurrence.
It was the only time a Dodge competed in the annual 500 mile (800 km) race for standard production cars, which is a record in itself.
Not only that, it left an army of pre-race critics dumbfounded after wallowing around Mount Panorama for 118 trouble-free laps to finish 19th outright and only 12 laps behind the winning Falcon GT.
Of course, this was back in the days when just about anyone could enter the Bathurst 500. And it was that ‘run what ya brung’ philosophy that created one of the most unusual and memorable entries in the race’s history.
“It wasn’t our decision to run the Dodge,” admits Lindsay Derriman who shared the epic near seven-hour marathon drive with fellow racer Barry Sharp. “It was Johnny Barnard’s car. We were driving under his banner at the time and he just said one day that he wanted to run a car at Bathurst and that he wanted Barry and me to drive it, so that was how it all started.”
John Barnard ran a thriving wrecking yard and spare parts business called Barnard Auto Spares at Revesby in Sydney. Lindsay Derriman and Barry Sharp were two of four sedan racers that entered Sydney meetings under the Barnard Auto Spares banner, for which they would have their entry fees paid and have access to spare parts as required.
So when it came to decide on which car Barnard would enter for his first crack as an entrant in the Bathurst 500, it’s a no-brainer that a luxurious land yacht like a Dodge Phoenix was not top of his wish-list. In fact, it wasn’t even on the list.
“The first car John came up with was an XP Falcon Hardtop with the 200 Pursuit motor,” Derriman said. “He organised a test drive with Peter Warren Ford. We took the car for a blast around the local streets and frightened the hell out of the poor salesman, but they wouldn’t talk any sort of a deal with him so that idea was dropped.
“Then a local Chrysler dealer just down the road offered John the Dodge Phoenix at a very reasonable price, so he bought it. It was a second-hand car but it was in good condition overall, with the 318 V8 and push-buttons for the three-speed automatic on the dashboard.
“Initially John just drove it to work each day as his personal car but then as we got closer to Bathurst he entered it in a few race meetings at Oran Park and Amaroo, to let Barry and I get used to driving it at high speeds.”
The 1963 Dodge Phoenix TD2 was a big car by Australian standards, sitting on a luxurious 119-inch (3023mm) wheelbase with an overall length just under 5.3 metres. Compared to the then-latest XR Falcon GT, the Dodge was more than 200mm longer in wheelbase and more than half a metre longer overall. And with a kerb weight exceeding 1.6 tonnes, it was a whopping 200 kgs heavier.
Powered by Chrysler’s torquey A series 318 cid (5.2 litre) ‘Poly’ V8 (a term which described its semi-hemi or ‘polyspherical’ combustion chambers) the ’63 Phoenix offered a stomping 230bhp under the right foot, which eclipsed the 225 bhp from the new XR GT’s ‘Mustang bred’ 4.7 litre V8 being widely trumpeted at the time.
Even so, although the Dodge’s A727 Torqueflite three-speed auto was renowned as one of the finest self-shifting transmissions in the business, it was no four-speed manual. And, most critically, the big American sedan was hobbled by four wheel drum brakes, which as you will see was the key consideration in the Barnard team’s race strategy.
The Push-Button Brake Saver
Given the amount of careful hand-fettling that went into the preparation of many Bathurst cars in those days, with lots of blueprinting and balancing, you would expect a car that ran as trouble-free as the Dodge would have been given the same once-over by a team of skilled mechanics.
Not so, according to Derriman. Amazingly, the big Phoenix ran virtually as it had been purchased from the Chrysler dealer earlier in the year, with some minor adjustments to make it better suited for Bathurst duties.
“John had a friend who was a genius with automatics so the transmission was sent to him for a bit of adjustment,” he said. “We knew the drum brakes would burn out very quickly if we didn’t nurse them along all day, particularly at the end of Conrod Straight, so this transmission guy came up with something that made a big difference.
“What he did was make it work like a pre-selector for changing down to second gear (at a set road speed). So each time you were coming down Conrod you could pre-select second at any stage and when you got towards the end of the straight and the car had coasted down to about 90 mph or so, it would automatically change down so that it acted like an engine brake.
“That allowed us to gradually slow the car at the end of Conrod rather than having to stand on everything right at the end of it. We virtually let it coast down to (Murray’s Corner) each lap because it was that one big stop that killed the brakes in those cars.
“Before the race we had so many people telling us that we didn’t have a hope in hell of going the distance on those tiny (11-inch diameter) drum brakes, but we did get through as scheduled with only one stop for a new set of front brake shoes and that was largely due to the engine braking.”
Sharp and Derriman never used first gear and only changed down to second gear two times each lap. One down-change was at the end of Conrod which they held for the run along Pit Straight and up through Hell Corner. The second was at the end of Mountain Straight for the run up to The Cutting, across the top and down to Forrest’s Elbow.
“The only thing that came out of the car prior to the race was the transmission,” Derriman said. “Everything else was untouched. The 318 V8 ran just as she was. All we did was give it a tune up and fill it with some good quality oil. It was a really lazy motor, you know, a real workhorse type of engine. It had plenty of torque, so you didn’t need to rev it very hard.
“We also lowered the car a little bit from standard to make it handle better. With the torsion bar front suspension that was pretty easy to do, as you could just wind it down. We lowered the back end a little bit to match it and that was about it.”
The Dodge was entered in the ‘Unlimited’ Class E for cars with a retail price above $4500. The only other entries in that class were four 1.6 litre Alfa Romeo GTVs which were expected to not only dominate the class but also give Ford’s new XR Falcon GTs a run for outright honours.
Derriman admits that the arrival of a huge Dodge Phoenix at Mount Panorama caused mixed reactions. While spectators loved it, their enthusiasm wasn’t shared by many competitors.
“They thought it was a bit of a joke to be honest,” he said. “There was a bit of adverse publicity from David McKay who was a motoring journo for one of the newspapers at the time and he was pretty scathing about the vehicle (let’s not forget this is the same David McKay who became a mobile chicane driving a stock standard Volvo 242GT on radial tyres 12 years later in the 1979 Bathurst 1000!)
“What made it more interesting was that during the race I had David behind me in his Audi (Super 90). We were doing about equal lap times because I was faster on the straights but he’d catch me across the top and unbeknown to me he was getting very irate because I wouldn’t just move over and let him past.
“Fact is, I wasn’t aware of any of that and really there wasn’t much I could do about it. You know, we took up a hell of a lot of road coming down through The Esses in that thing!”
Drive to Survive
After qualifying the big Dodge mid-field in a capacity 60-car grid (Sharp’s fastest lap was 25 seconds slower than the pole position time set by Ian Geoghegan’s Falcon GT), it was decided that Barry Sharp would drive the first and last stints with Derriman doing the middle stage.
“The key difference between Barry and myself was that he was a bit quicker than me over one lap but I could lap a bit more consistently, so that’s why I was given the long middle stint because I could drive to the target time that we’d set for several hours and really look after the car.
“I found that once I got into a groove and got all my braking points sorted out and all that sort of stuff, it became quite comfortable driving such a big car. In fact, the Bathurst track suited the Dodge better than the shorter circuits like Oran Park and Amaroo.
“I had to get used to holding myself in place through the corners on the big bench seat. Barry struggled with that more than I did because he was bigger than me, but being smaller and lighter I could keep myself pretty upright without too much trouble.
“Back on those days we used to run them on ridiculously tiny radial tyres which we’d pump up to very high pressures. I think we changed about three sets of tyres during the race, but I can’t remember which brand we were using. By today’s standards they were frightfully skinny given the size and weight of the car, but we didn’t have any blow-outs or other problems with them.
“An interesting thing was that the steering wheel wasn’t round, it was oval-shaped. So if you ever had to swing hard left or right, it had so many turns lock to lock that you had to be careful which bit of the rim you grabbed for as it swung around, because sometimes there’d be nothing there!”
Derriman said that John Barnard was over the moon after not only finishing the race in his first Bathurst 500 as an entrant, but also scoring a place in the top 20, beating one of the Alfa GTVs to claim fourth in Class E and finishing two positions ahead of the only other V8 automatic in the race - an XR Falcon ‘police pursuit’ prototype driven by constables Fred Sutherland and Allan Mottram.
“The target was just to finish the race, stay out of trouble and drive to a plan,” Derriman concludes. It worked. We didn’t have the slightest mechanical problem all day. Not one hiccup.”
Back in those Series Production days, the Bathurst 500 race was primarily a demonstration of a car’s durability and engineering quality. And in that sense, you would have to say that in 1967 Chrysler Corporation came through with flying colours!
