First published in the September 2004 issue of Street Machine

It isn’t often that manufacturers invite race teams into their factories to build their own race cars but that’s what Holden did back in the late 1970s when it was creating the awesome LX Torana A9X. Of 405 A9X Toranas produced by Holden, just 33 received this special attention. These lucky few had the code GMP&A stamped on their compliance plates. This stood for General Motors Parts & Accessories, which might not sound too exciting but it produced some of the most thrilling race cars ever built in Australia.

The regular A9X was an amazing car itself. Built on the floorpan of the upcoming UC Torana, the A9X featured a number of significant improvements over its predecessor, the L34, most notably four-wheel discs and a big Salisbury limited slip diff. Relocated suspension pick-up points improved the suspension geometry, making the A9X one of the best balanced Australian-built road cars of its day. The race cars also scored tough T10 gearboxes and L34-spec motors.

Impressive stuff, but the GMP&A program allowed race teams to refine this potent weapon into a certified Ford-killer. At the time, Australian touring car racing was run under Group C rules.

These cars were based on production models: race teams built their competition cars by taking a car off the showroom floor, stripping it down and starting again with a complete rebuild.

But in 1977 Holden took the unique approach of asking the teams what they wanted and then invited them into the Dandenong production plant, near Melbourne, to oversee the build of the bodyshells. This was the foundation of the cars that would eventually take the Mountain.

“Holden won a lot of friends when it did that,” says Big Rev Kevin Bartlett, who was one of a number of team representatives who walked down the assembly line with the shell destined for his race team.

“We were able to have our special brackets welded on, for things like seat mountings, harnesses and other small things that sometimes might be difficult to do once the shell was back at the workshop. “We could also have them leave off brackets and other bits of hardware we didn’t need on the race car.”

Legendary race car builder Ian Tate was another who spent many days inside the body shop at Dandenong watching his shells being stitched together. “We’d get a call to tell us to be there at 9.00 am the next morning,” Tate says. “We’d spend a day following the body through each stage making any modifications we wanted as we went.”

The differences often weren’t dramatic — they looked pretty much like any other Torana bodyshell, until you homed in on the details. Then you saw that they had no sound deadening, there was no caulking compound sealing the body seams, the paint was so thin you could almost see through it … If you looked even closer you could see that there were extra spot welds holding the panels together.

These mods had a major impact on race day. Leaving out the sound deadening saved about 36kg, Tate says, and that was welcomed by anyone wanting to cut a quick lap of Bathurst in October.

Tate was also careful to make sure the painter gave his shells the lightest possible spray to save every little bit of weight. While he was leaving things out of the bodyshells he was building, Tate was also adding the extra spot welds. “They were spot welded every inch instead of every three inches,” Tates remembers, “and the welders did a much better job of welding them than they normally did.”

Once bodies were delivered, team mechanics sourced their own components like engines, gearboxes, diffs, suspension, roll cages and fuel tanks to complete the build.

But this extra effort didn’t pay off immediately. Peter Brock did manage to put his A9X on pole for its Bathurst debut in 1977 but the final result was quite different — Alan Moffat and Colin Bond’s famous one-two formation finish for Ford in 1977. Undeterred, Holden continued to develop the A9X into the wild Mountain tamer it became.

In 1978, Brock and the A9X not only won the Australian Touring Car Championship but also Bathurst, with Jim Richards. Bob Morris then won the 1979 Championship in his A9X.

The A9X was at its awesome best at Bathurst ’79, when Brock and Richards won by an incredible six laps and rubbed salt into the Ford wounds by casually reeling off a new lap record on the final lap of the race!

If that wasn’t enough, another seven A9X Toranas followed Brock and his fabled Marlboro-backed Holden hatchback across the finish line to cap off one of the most dominant performances ever seen at the Mountain. There was no doubt about it, 1979 was Holden’s pay back for Ford’s formation finish in 1977 and justification of the GMP&A adventure.

Bowden’s beauty

The Absinth Yellow GMP&A car in our pics is owned by the Bowden Collection in Queensland. The bodyshell was supplied to Les Small for Roadways Racing in Tasmania and used as a back-up car for its lead driver, Garth Wigston.

Roadways subsequently sold it to a Tasmanian racer, Roger Stanley, who raced it locally before selling it to Bruce Spicer for Porsche driver John Latham to drive — to a top 10 finish at Sandown. It never raced Bathurst — Latham had ‘insufficient experience’ for the Mountain despite his national sports car title.

Its next owner sidelined it for many years until it was bought by the Bowdens for their stunning collection of Australian racing and muscle cars. It wasn’t until they bought it that they realised they had something special.

“Everything was different on it,” explains Dan Bowden. “There’s very little that’s the same as the other GMP&A cars. “Each team sourced their own parts when they built them up, so it’s not surprising that they are different.”

The originality of the car is also exciting for the Bowdens. “We knew it was straight but were amazed to find no filler or evidence of abuse. It really is a perfectly preserved Group C, GMP&A hatch with all the mods,” enthuses Dan.

In detail:

1. Standard-bore L34-spec HZ block, with all the original goodies including X-marked rods. The donk currently runs a 750 Holley double pumper, though the Bowdens are on the lookout for a Bathurst-style twin 48 IDF Weber set up.

2. One of the few deviations from race spec: the brakes were returned to road-going HZ-style discs after the car retired.

3. A rare, original GMP&A drop tank. Purchasers were given a shopping list of firms who could supply all the necessary parts to create a complete race car.

4. Note the hump on the side of the transmission tunnel — GMP&A cars had a hole cut in the console to make room for the Super T10 transmission. Teams were supplied with a blister to weld over the hole after the gearbox was fitted.

5. One of Street Machine’s most famous give-away cars, the White Pointer A9X was a GMP&A car. The car was built up for Holden exec Tony Connolly who intended to race it but never got the chance. The race driveline was removed and the road-spec gear dropped in. There it sat, with just 13km on the clock, until we bought the car and gave it away to a lucky reader! The White Pointer is now owned by a collector in West Oz.

6. A close-up of the seam welding on the inner guards, which gave extra structural strength.

7. Some of the work done on the GMP&A cars was quite rough, as this picture shows! This is the spare wheel well, belted out to make room for the fuel pumps and drop tank.

8. The exhaust is a genuine HDT Group C item.