HTCAV – PAST CHAMPIONS - JUST CARS

HTCAV – Past Champions

Words: Chris Ralph

Photos: Phil Wisewould, unless indicated

It’s amazing to think that the HTCAV has been around for almost 40 years. Members have come and gone, and championships have been won and lost. As the years rolled by, the realisation came that maybe a winners’ list might be a good idea. Raggedy memories have holes and much digging was necessary, so readers, please correct the early records if necessary.

Start with a J

The Historic Touring Association of Victoria began in 1981 as the Appendix J Register of Vic, to celebrate the pre-1965 years of Touring Car racing, grouped in the CAMS Manual as Appendix J. The Register was started by a bunch of enthusiasts at a pub (where else?) in North Melbourne. They ran a race or two at Calder in 1981 and more in 1982, including a support race for the ATCC Sandown 500. Watching three-wheel-lifting Lotus Cortinas leading the pack ignited the crowd, including your humble writer who was on the grid by April the following year in a Cortina GT that had been built by Harry Firth for the Shields brothers, licensees at that North Melbourne pub where the HTCAV was born.

Brainwave - a Championship!

Around 1985, some bright spark thought the club should have a championship. It would be democratically based on a class capacity system - the more runners in your class, the more points you could score. As many as 13 pushrod Cortinas might front for a meeting, joining a handful of the more fancied Lotus Cortinas. At the end of the year, expensive twin cam engine failures often saw the simpler but more reliable GT Cortinas take the Cup.

From Chris Anderson in 1988 to Nick Cascone in 2009, pushrod Cortinas won the Championship eight times and Lotus Cortinas two, one of them being the great Jim McKeown in 1997.

The Club’s first president, the late Paul Trevethan, may well have won the first HTCAV championship in the ex-Moffat Lotus Cortina but it can’t be confirmed – a fire in Richmond’s Anchor & Hope hotel run by the legendary Lou Molina destroyed many early records. Others are stuck in a factory in Moorabbin, beyond the travel distance in these cloistered COVID times. Nonetheless, the Cortina remains the ‘winningest’ (ugh) car over the last 35 years.

In terms of drivers, the amazing Ted Brewster takes the biscuit for the most championships in his Morris Cooper S – four over a period of ten years, while Jervis Ward is the only person to have won in two different cars.

Enter the ‘new boys’

In the mid ’90s, the group was extended from pre-65 to pre-72 to include cars from the Improved Touring Cars period; the name changed to the Historic Touring Car Association. The gates opened and the Holden Torana became the new Ford Cortina as entries flooded in. From the late Ian Jones in 1999 to Stephen Pillekers in 2016, Toranas won five times, each with a different driver.

A Datsun 1600 has won six times – two highly developed cars sharing the wins. Russell Pilven won a record three consecutively in 2010-12 and the same car carried Harrison Draper to victory last year, while David Brown won in 2014 and 2016.

A very elusive prize

It’s never been easy to win the HTCAV crown, but a popular class and a fast, reliable car is a good start. Above all, turning up to more meetings is very helpful. Only a competitor’s best five results count; which in some years has seen people enter up to eight meetings in a big lunge at the championship, only to fall short in the final count of five.

The old formula of rewarding class-based victories hasn’t changed over the years, it’s the only way to give everyone an even chance. Smaller capacity classes often provide winners, but in 2019 the biggest numerical group had the biggest engines – Over 5000cc – yet it was still a Datsun that took the title.

Over the years, racing and camaraderie has always come first - but some have thrown every trick in the book into trying to win the Cup. Competitors cadging drives in mates’ cars when theirs had broken to scare up just enough points to get them over the line… Choosing a well populated interstate meeting to snaffle a bag of points under the rules of the day… (Grumbles from those unable to travel took that option off the menu for some years.)

Interestingly it’s usually a battle to the very end – the result often isn’t known until the last race of the last meeting of the year, which makes year-end celebrations all the more explosive!