Ford Falcon's life as a dog

The first Ford Falcons were dogs. But an audacious stunt saved the brand - and the company, writes BILL TUCKEY in True Blue, 75 years of Ford in Australia.

If it hadn't been for the craziest stunt in the entire history of the Australian motor industry, Ford Australia's Falcon might not have celebrated its 40th birthday the other day.

In 1965, Ford announced it would try to run five bog-standard new XPs over a total of 70,000 miles (113,000km) at the You Yangs proving ground outside Melbourne.

This demanded an average speed of 122 km/h over the new 3.6km handling track - a narrow, winding, climbing, plunging, coarse-surfaced mad bitch of a road with no straight longer than 400m.

It would be done in the full glare of publicity. Had it failed, Ford Australia may well have been ordered to stop local manufacture. As it was, its market share had dropped below 10 per cent.

This was mainly because the first three Falcons were dogs. The original 1960 XK, with the American boulevard ride, immediately went into front-suspension collapse, clutch-failure and ride-bottoming modes.

The next, the XL, was marketed with the slogan Trim, Taut and Terrific, which we motoring writers amended to Trim, Taut and Treacherous.

The third was the XM. It was better, but by this time the private buyer and worse, the fleets, had sucked enough lemons.

I remember the XM press launch with a shiver of horror. Ford Australia's competition manager Les Powell, a boisterous bear of a man, set the test drive programme as a timed rally starting in Melbourne's CBD at 8 am on a drizzly Monday, the first stage demanding we average 83 km/h out of the city. Four cars were inverted or crunched before the end.

Powell was given the job of organising the You Yangs durability run. It was the creation of the charismatic Bill Bourke, who had been seconded from Ford Canada to be assistant managing director of Ford Australia at the age of 37.

In the United States Army in the Second World War, Bourke made lieutenant at 18 - the youngest commissioned officer in the US ground forces. After the war he served in Europe as a counter-intelligence officer. Among his tasks were tracking Nazi war criminals and persuading valuable German scientists to move to America.

Bourke - whose most famous quote in Australia ran something like "I live for the day when you will see no Japanese cars in any RSL club car-park" - was a dynamic operator who would make dramatic announcements while his assistants followed behind, sweeping up the broken glass.

The (probably apocryphal) story was that he announced the You Yangs record attempt in the belief that the planned high-speed oval was ready. It hadn't even been started, but it is difficult to assume that the street-smart Bourke would not have known that.

At the You Yangs, the first XP was flagged away at 8.28 am on Saturday, April 24, 1965, to the sound of generators throbbing away in a tent city - there was no regular power - with just a bank of lights across the start-finish line where the cars were refuelled out of four-gallon drums.

Powell began with 12 of Australia's best race and rally drivers, including Harry Firth, Kevin Bartlett and Bob Jane. Soon the raw track surface was chopping out a set of tyres in 12 laps. At one stage, the entire daily national production of Dunlop SP41 tyres was being trucked to the You Yangs testing ground.

Every car crashed. After being pulled back into shape with power-jacks, each car was stitched together with wire, leather straps and race tape.

The track started breaking up and marshalls were constantly sweeping up rubber and gravel and patching holes.

The cars had to be driven flat-out to keep up the average. Drivers came down to two-hour stints. Soon a notice went up on the bulletin board of the Light Car Club asking anyone with a racing licence to report to the proving ground.

On the second Sunday, Ford Motor Company president Henry Ford II, on a special visit to Australia, decided to helicopter out to see what was going on. Several senior Ford executives found urgent reasons to visit Hobart, Perth or Darwin.

Max Gransden, later to become director of sales and marketing, said: "He didn't have to stay too long to come to the conclusion that we were out of our bloody minds ... he left no doubt in anybody's mind that he thought we were a bunch of damn fools."

At 1.42 the next morning, Les Powell waved the chequered flag at Wild Bill McLachlan in car No 3, the only one that hadn't rolled. They'd done it. Car No 1, a red two-door, was the most battered, so they put that on display in the foyer of the Southern Cross, then Melbourne's classiest hotel.

The crowds were enormous, the media gasped for adjectives. Wheels magazine gave the XP its coveted Car of the Year award. The Falcon - and, more importantly, Ford Australia - was saved.

The next year Bourke, now managing-director, invented the Falcon GT that started the run that turned Ford Australia into the performance car company. It was derived from a V8 version of the XR developed for police use - and it became a legend.

Ford built 596 GTs between March 1967 and February 1968, all deep gold-bronze except for 12 finished in silver with red stripes to match the cigarette packaging of Irish tobacco company Gallaher, the new sponsor of what had been the Armstrong 500 at Bathurst.

Firth and Fred Gibson won the race in October 1967 in the debut of the Falcon GT. Three XT GTs won the team's prize in the inaugural London-Sydney Marathon the next year. Then followed the GT Phase II and Phase III.

Ford's Special Vehicles built four Phase IVs before the world's fastest volume production car was killed-off by a Melbourne Sun-Herald front-page story which screamed: 160mph super-cars soon. The politicians and police jumped on the "speed kills" bandwagon.

Holden had been working on a 5.0-litre V8 version of the Torana XU-1, and Chrysler on a 5.6-litre Charger. But all three companies quickly decided to give in to government threats to stop buying their cars for fleets.

Ford sales gradually eroded those of Holden. But in October 1978 a rapturous reception for the new Commodore - smaller than the Kingswood it would replace, with European styling, ride and handling - bode ill for the Falcon.