Motor sport success has played a key role in changing public perceptions of many car makes and models over the years. One of the best examples of this was the Toyota Celica when it competed in Australian touring car racing in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

Sydney Toyota dealer Peter “Willo” Williamson became the first driver to enter the Japanese coupe in the Bathurst 1000 in 1977, much to the surprise (and amusement) of many class competitors and motoring writers who dismissed the new Toyota entry as little more than a curiosity.

Back then the Celica was often referred to as a “hairdresser’s car” by hard-edged Aussie male enthusiasts who saw the little Japanese coupe as being designed for female buyers more interested in perfume than performance.

However, Williamson’s belief in the nimble Japanese coupe was destined to evolve into so much more than just a multiple 2.0 litre class winner, which changed perceptions of the Celica almost overnight.

His touring car racing efforts, particularly at Bathurst, have also been immortalised through TV coverage of the Bathurst 1000 by the Seven Network.

The sight of Williamson’s pit crew captured live on camera during a frantic pit stop in 1978, viciously attacking the Celica’s damaged boot lid with an axe to try and access the fuel tank, is an unforgettable memory replayed countless times on YouTube and DVDs.

What occurred the following year, though, was of far greater historical significance. For it was Williamson and his little Celica that made history by carrying the world’s first in-car TV camera, which during the 1979 race beamed live images and driver commentary to a spellbound international TV audience.

 

1977

Williamson’s entry of a 2.0 litre twin-cam RA23 Celica GT in the 1977 Bathurst 1000 was largely ignored, as no-one took it too seriously based on perceptions of the much tamer LT version seen on Australian roads.

The much hotter carby-fed GT twin-cam version was not sold in Australia but was allowed to compete here as it complied with global FIA Group I homologation rules based on a minimum of 5000 identical models being built and sold.

In fact, what drew most attention to the high-revving Japanese coupe was the large ‘rising sun’ motif painted on the roof, which was reported at the time to have upset some World War II veterans.

The Under-2.0 litre category (Class C) was a hot-bed of competition that year with 25 teams and eight different brands that included proven class contenders like the Ford Escort, Alfa GTV and Alfetta, BMWs and Triumph Dolomites.

However, there was plenty of humble pie being eaten after the first official practice session when Williamson whistled around the Mountain to record a best lap time a staggering 1.3 seconds faster than the rest of the pack! Not surprisingly, he started from pole position.

Williamson’s co-driver was the talented young Queenslander Gary Scott and come race day all eyes were on the surprisingly quick yellow Celica.

Sadly for Williamson, the new car limped into the pits after the first lap with a blown clutch. It returned to the race many laps down after repairs, only to retire for the day with engine troubles after 76 laps. The Class C victory went to the Alfa GTV driven Garry Leggatt and British ace Derek Bell.

PETER WILLIAMSON: “I was a Toyota dealer and plainly to me the Celica GT was a good way to go. I had faith in it but Toyota (AMI) didn’t. Well, not initially anyway. Various people in the industry, including a few motoring journos who should have known better, told the Toyota people at AMI that if I ran that car I’d make a fool of myself so I got a lengthy letter from them saying that they would prefer it if I didn’t run the car. Anyway, I ignored that and went ahead as I had a lot of belief in the Celica’s potential. In those days there were limitations on things like diff ratios and all of that, so we had to fit (large diameter) 15-inch wheels to gear the car taller so it wouldn’t blow up going down the straight.”

 

1978

Williamson returned to The Mountain the following year, determined to avenge his teething problems in 1977 having enjoyed 12 months of testing and sorting the car. He’d made many changes and improvements, including his preference for smaller diameter wheels (lower centre of gravity etc) thanks to a wider choice of diff ratios being made available.

Class C (Under 2.0 Litre) was again a hot-bed of competition with the greatest threat to come from the well prepared Ford Escort RS2000 driven by Rod Stevens and Bill Evans. Williamson’s new co-driver was Mike Quinn, who was not only a talented driver but also his brother-in-law.

Williamson again showed superior pace in qualifying to claim pole position for Class C (36^th overall) triggering one of the great Bathurst class battles between the Williamson/Quinn Celica and Stevens/Evans Escort RS 2000.

The two cars were locked in an intense battle all day, drawing away from the rest of the Class C pack at a prodigious rate. Proof of their speed was that when the chequered flag fell after nearly seven hours of competition, they were still both on the same lap - which was six laps ahead of the next competitor in Class C!

The Escort team’s narrow victory was helped by an incident that delayed Williamson’s first pit-stop, after Dick Johnson’s Falcon Hardtop hit the rear of the Celica hard enough to prevent the boot being opened when he pitted for refuelling.

On live TV, his pit crew’s frantic attempts to access the fuel tank by trying to cut through the sheetmetal with several brutal blows from an axe, have become part of Bathurst folklore.

This dramatic incident cost them crucial time they could not make up (see the YouTube clip below).

1979

After two years in the RA23 GT, Williamson returned with a new car for the 1979 Bathurst 1000, in which he had already won the Under 3.0 Class and finished a stunning fourth overall in the Australian Touring Car Championship (ATCC) behind three A9X Torana V8s.

It was the larger, heavier second generation RA40 twin-cam GT coupe, which Williamson’s team built locally using a fresh body shell and well-developed engine and drivetrain components. Today he describes it as “a pretty ordinary car, with carburettors and a wet sump.”

Williamson’s pioneering efforts with the Celica during the previous two years had not gone unnoticed by other competitors. As a result, two more Celicas joined Williamson and Quinn in the 1601-2000cc Class C ranks for Bathurst that year, with one (Williamson’s RA23 GT from 1977-78) driven by NSW chicken farmer Graham ‘Chickadee’ Bailey and Doug Clark with another entered by Wally Scott and Peter Walton.

Williamson’s new Celica had more than its fair share of publicity in the days leading up to the race as it was to be the first car equipped with Channel Seven’s innovative ‘Racecam’ in-car camera, which for the first time would beam live images from the cockpit to millions of TV viewers watching at home.

The Racecam technology, which used a microwave link to transmit in-car vision, sound and driver chat via a chopper hovering high above the circuit, was an Australian invention and a world-first that would soon have TV broadcasters around the globe wanting a piece of the action.

The first Racecam unit was a goliath by today’s standards, featuring a pan-and-tilt camera head that could be adjusted via remote control from the pits. When installed in Williamson’s Celica, the whole kit resulted in a 27 kg weight penalty (from 1980 he was allowed to remove the car’s front passenger seat to compensate, as it weighed about the same).

The Racecam’s extra bulk certainly didn’t seem to be too much of a burden in the race, with Williamson and Quinn claiming their first victory in Class C. Not only that, they finished ninth outright and the first non-V8 car to cross the line behind eight A9X Toranas.

It was an outstanding result for the Celica, eclipsed only by the history-making success of its Racecam unit which triggered a global revolution in TV coverage of motor sport. “Willo” had provided not only stunning images and sounds but also some colourful commentary from the driver’s seat. A star was born!

WILLIAMSON: “Two blokes, John Porter and Peter Larsson, approached us at Amaroo Park when we were standing around at a barbeque after a race meeting there. They said they had this idea for an in-car camera but Brocky and the rest didn’t want anything to do with them. Anyway, I listened to what they had to say and it took me about 40 seconds to make a decision and we took it on. They did say it would require a fair commitment from us and that they’d need a fair bit of our time to help develop it and make it work, because it was just an idea at that stage."

“Eventually Channel Seven agreed to fund its development and I remember going out to Oran Park every other week driving around and around with helicopters flying overhead as they experimented with different links and cameras and all that. It took a fair amount of time to work it all out."

“It wasn’t perfect on the day of the race (at Bathurst). It rained a bit and when the trees got water in them it messed with the link, so when that happened they would yell out to me on the radio to switch this and turn that to cope with the problem and it worked.” Porter and Larsson would later move to the US where they established Broadcast Sports Technology (BST) and covered all major American motor sports with their innovative in-car camera system.

 

1980

Williamson was really on a roll by 1980, becoming a household name after his Racecam debut the previous year. And he went one better than the previous year in the ATCC, not only cleaning up the Under 3.0 Litre class again but also finishing third overall in series points beaten only by Kevin Bartlett’s big Chevy Camaro and Peter Brock’s title-winning HDT Commodore.

And he went back to Bathurst with his second new car in two years, glowing in a coat of bright green paint his mother hated! This was another RA40 twin-cam GT complete with the latest cosmetic upgrades, the most prominent being the rubber bumpers and four rectangular headlights demanded by the all-important US market regulators.

The Celica benefitted from further technical freedoms including Group 2-style wheel arch flares to accommodate larger tyres and the highly developed 2.0 litre twin-cam engine now featured mechanical fuel injection.

In addition to the Williamson/Quinn green machine, the Under 2.0 litre Toyota attack was bolstered by two more Celicas in the hands of Graham Bailey/Doug Clark (now in Williamson’s car from the previous year) and the Scott/Walton machine.

Again Williamson showed great speed in qualifying to take pole position in Class C, which was quicker than many competitors in the bigger 3.0 litre class.

His in-car commentary skills on Racecam also went up a notch this year, particularly when he came across a big Chevy Camaro that was holding him up severely through The Esses. “Move you big Yankee thing!” he yelled, much to the amusement of TV viewers enthralled by the spectacle of racing around Mount Panorama as though strapped into a front passenger seat.

Ironically, it was Racecam that would lead to Williamson’s withdrawal from the event. When the Celica’s normally bullet-proof engine started to misfire, Williamson guessed that the electrical demands of Seven’s in-car camera were overloading the alternator.

His guess turned out to be correct as the battery died. The crew later discovered that errors had been made during the Racecam installation in the new car, particularly in under-estimating the camera unit’s peak power requirements.

Even so, Bailey and Clark were flying in the ex-Williamson Celica from 1979 now in Chickadee colours and raced to a popular victory in Class C and 12^th outright.

WILLIAMSON: “I use a few one-liners during normal conversations so I decided when I first started doing the commentary (on Racecam) I’d just stick with a few one-liners, which worked out fine because they were so familiar to me I didn’t have to think too much about what I was saying."

“In 1980 Toyota started to change their attitude towards us, because by then they had Ove Andersson running the works rally program in Europe and perhaps started to realise that we knew what we were doing here as well and that they should be a part of it. After 1979 with the Racecam, I started to get $250,000 a year from Toyota which was only half our annual budget."

“I was told to look after the ‘chicken man’ (Graham Bailey) because Toyota wanted to win the Manufacturers Championship, so whatever we did to our car we did to his car because we needed a bit of a backstop. In those days Toyota also had an arrangement with Dunlop in Japan so if they had any trick tyres coming up he got the same tyres we got. He was never cheated out of anything.”

1981

Despite contributing to Williamson’s retirement at the Mountain the previous year, the international publicity and endless fan mail he was getting for his in-car entertainment gave the Sydney car dealer a major advantage in public profile when chasing commercial sponsorship.

In stark contrast to previous giant killing ATCC campaigns, Williamson found the competition much tougher in 1981 after finishing third in the Under 3.0 Litre class behind a pair of V6 Ford Capris driven by team-mates Colin Bond and Steve Masterton.

A controversial change to the usual Bathurst class structures based on engine capacity resulted in the 60-car field being divided into three classes based on engine cylinders; Class A – 8 or more cylinders, Class B – 6 cylinders and rotaries and Class C – 4 or 5 cylinders.

This resulted in naturally- aspirated 2.0 litre cars like the Toyota Celica being in the same class as a pair of new works-prepared turbocharged Nissan Bluebirds, which caused a fair degree of unrest! Even so, the new Nissans were expected to experience teething troubles in their first Bathurst appearance against the proven speed and reliability of the Celicas.

Williamson arrived at Bathurst with his third new car in three years at The Mountain. It was another RA40 rubber bumper model that incorporated all the expertise gathered from four seasons of racing.

Today, Williamson remembers it as the best Celica of the four he built and raced.

As expected, with the turbo boost wound up, one of the new Nissans bumped Williamson from pole position. And also true to script, the Bluebirds were beset with mechanical problems in the race, allowing Williamson and new co-driver John Smith in orange-coloured car to race away to an emphatic four-lap victory in Class C.

WILLIAMSON: “That orange 1981 car was a really good car. In Japan they’d been running a 2.0 litre sports car category for some years and Toyota developed a 2.0 litre four-valve engine for it so we used the cranks, rods, shafts, oil pumps, dry sumps, twin-plate clutches and all that beautiful stuff they made for the sports car engine."

“It wasn’t all Japanese stuff, though. We used Kugelfisher fuel injection (from Germany) and the camshafts were from Brian Hart in the UK. By then we were revving the engine to 8500rpm (7500rpm in the early cars) and it had a genuine 200 bhp."

“To get some weight out of it I sent one of our guys over to CAC (Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation) and he brought back bucket-loads of aluminium nuts and bolts which we used to replace all the steel ones in the car. That trimmed a lot of weight out of it because when we’d finished we threw all the old steel nuts and bolts into a 12-gallon drum and it was so heavy you couldn’t pick it up! Toyota also made things like magnesium diff centres and gearbox housings, so we used those as well. In the end it only weighed 1040 kgs."

“Unfortunately I destroyed that car at the Manufacturers Championship round at Surfers Paradise in November that year. It was wet and I speared off at the end of the straight and rolled the thing about 40 times. It was a terrible shame.”

 

1982

After a five-year campaign that changed the perception of Celica from hairdresser’s car to Bathurst star, Williamson was suddenly a non-starter in 1982 after destroying his 1981 Bathurst car.

On reflection that crash was probably quite timely, for two reasons. One was that Williamson had decided it was time to move on from the Celica after racing the same model for five years. The other was a second change in two years to the race’s class structures which now split the field into just two divisions based on engine size - Class A (Over 3.0 Litre) and Class B (Under 3.0 Litre).

This forced the 2.0 litre Celica into an unfair class battle with not only the Nissan Bluebird turbo but also the more powerful 3.0 litre Ford Capri V6. Such a seismic shift in philosophy by the race organisers hastened the demise of the Toyota Celica at Bathurst.

In Williamson’s absence, the best performing Celica RA40 twin-cam driven by Graham Bailey and Steve Land could manage only seventh fastest in Class B behind two Bluebirds and four V6 Capris.

Sadly it retired with engine problems, leaving the Scott/Walton car to finish sixth in class. It was the end of the Celica era at Bathurst.