ALLCOMERS

Allan Dick tracks the making of a true Kiwi legend.

Words: Allan Dick

There are two eras of New Zealand motor racing that bring tears to the eyes of those of us who’re becoming old-timers and stares of disbelief to those of more tender years.
They are “The Tasman Series” years and “Allcomers”. The Tasman Series brought us something that would be unbelievable today — top line Formula One drivers in the latest Formula One cars.
Allcomers provided us with Frankenstein monsters of saloon cars created from the builder’s wildest imagination, with barely a creative boundary or a rule in sight. It really was anything goes. And the strange thing was, both eras overlapped, creating what really was a Golden Age of motor racing — at its peak from 1964 to 1967 — drawing crowds that today just wouldn’t be believed.
During that period, the time in between seasons — the New Zealand winter — what passed for lines of communication then buzzed with rumours, gossip and innuendo about who was doing what and building what sort of car for the coming season.
Stuff like — “Rod Coppins is taking the Corvette engine out of his Chev coupe and putting it into a MkII Zephyr. . . .”
Or “have you heard that John Riley is not only converting the Lotus-Climax single-seater into a Olds V8 sports car, but he’s got another Olds V8 he’s putting into an Anglia — both will be painted Candy Apple Red. Can’t wait!”
Or “Have you heard Ernie Sprague hasn’t retired, he’s importing a Holman & Moody Galaxie.”
The result was that by the time of the first race meetings of the new season, interest among enthusiasts had reached fever pitch.

Notoriety
Allcomers was never an official term, it just sort of grew into common usage in an organic way.
Initially, it was applied to a programme-filling race for saloons, often the last race of the day, and usually run without any classes, so it was open to “allcomers”.
But the term gained notoriety when in 1963 and again in 1966 the rather proper chaps from The Motor Racing Club at Wigram wanted to include a couple of rather questionable ‘saloons’ along with the regular competitors.
In 1963 Englishman, Geoff Richardson, was here on his honeymoon with his new wife and he brought with him a Ferrari 250GT Berlinetta — possibly the first road Ferrari ever seen in this country.
The Motor Racing Club staged a race to allow Richardson to have a run in the Ferrari and because they knew they were pushing it in terms of having the 250GT accepted as a saloon, adopted the term “allcomers” — later it grew the capital “A”.
In 1966 when Scuderia Veloce arrived for the international meetings, they brought a 2.5 Brabham-Climax for main events and a Ferrari 250LM for sports car races. The 250LM really was the Sophia Loren of racing cars. The Motor Racing Club decided the spectators would probably appreciate the opportunity of seeing the 250LM in action more than once. So, they dragged out the “Allcomers Saloon” category again for the last race of the day and made it absolutely clear that any car with two seats and a roof was eligible.
Obviously, the 250LM was the chief candidate, but in the month before the meeting, speculation was rife about who was going to convert what car into an Allcomers saloon by adding a roof.
In the finish the only driver to take advantage of this was Timaru’s Brent Hawes with the Tojeiro Jaguar. He fabricated a quick-fit roof for the out-and-out sports circuit racer that was obviously sturdy enough to satisfy the scrutineers that it wouldn’t fly off mid-way down the back straight!
After placing in the sports car race, Hawes and his team bolted the roof on and went saloon car racing.
Spencer Martin in the 250LM won the race, but such was the pace of the top saloon cars by 1966 that second place was taken by David Simpson in his Fastback, Twin-Cam Anglia — today remembered as an Allcomer — with the Tojeiro Jaguar third.

Musclebound Monsters
Allcomers was what happened in a vacuum of regulation and eventually resulted in the wildest mechanical creations New Zealand has ever seen — great throbbing motors jammed into musclebound monsters with bulging flares, enormous tyres mounted on widened steel wheels, built by brave men with oil and grease under their fingernails and gas-axe burn marks on their forearms, with one purpose in mind — to go like hell.
Mention Allcomers today, and even people who were still years away from being born when it all ended, will say “the best time ever in New Zealand motor racing, it should never have ended.”
Sadly, it had to end because Allcomers had got out of control. And it happened quickly. The peak of Allcomer racing was brief — barely two, maybe three seasons only — but the impact was huge, and the legend has grown.
The only rules were that the car had to pass the rather rudimentary scrutineering regulations for the safety requirements that existed in those days. Wobble the wheels and they didn’t fall off — off you go racing then. It really was the wild west of motor racing.
And it ended with the 1967 season in a way that was fit and proper — the championship was dominated by a car that really was the King of Allcomers, the ground-shaking, thunderous, ugly brute of a car that was the Custaxie! Customline meets Galaxie.
A 1956 Ford Customline, gutted of everything that could be unbolted, gas-axed or cold-chiselled out, fitted with a one piece, streamlined fibreglass front, the body lowered over the chassis and equipped with some very cleverly designed suspension, powered by a whopping 7.0-litre side-oiler Ford V8 engine, similar to those that had powered the Ford GT40 MkIIs to victory at Le Mans in 1966.
The final piece of this Allcomer puzzle was the driver — tall, dark, handsome and multi-talented Robbie Franicevic. The driver’s seat was so far back it always looked like Robbie was driving from the rear seat — the steering shaft was yards long! This combination dominated that final season before saloon car racing got educated and was given “Rules”. And the satisfying thing for supporters of Allcomers, was that the Custaxie beat everything including one of the sanitised cars that were to become the new standard of saloon car racing next season — the Paul Fahey Shelby Mustang.
For the first couple of meetings in late 1966 when it first appeared, the Custaxie was plain white and a cross between ugly and weird. But once the season got into its stride it got broad, gaudy, bright red and blue stripes and painted across the plain, unadorned rear was the legend — “Colour me Gone”. That became such a catch-cry that in a more commercial era they could have had it emblazoned on merch’, sold it and made a fortune.
But where did all this come from?

Creating a National Series
Automotive snobbery — a refusal by the sport’s governing body in the early ‘50s to accept that saloon car racing was anything but a frivolous category to give unsophisticated spectators who didn’t understand the finer points of single seater or sports car racing, something to keep them entertained.
Some organisers added a third category as a sort of afterthought and “cheap thrills” for the plebs. At first, they didn’t know what to call this class. Some called them “Stock Cars”, others “Closed Cars”. But they weren’t taken seriously by officialdom.
Feature races in those days were often processional, devoid of much action whereas this programme-filling afterthought of a class provided spectators with cheap thrills.
For the drivers, this really was a case of “run what ya brung” — a term that today has lost all real meaning. You drove to the circuit in your daily driver, whipped off the hubcaps, put masking tape on the headlights, made sure there was nothing loose in the interior to fly about and get stuck under the brake pedal or wallop you on the head, and off you went to play at being Fangio.
This class accepted pretty much anything. It was a rare opportunity for people who dreamed of being Stirling Moss to actually race. Winning wasn’t important, having an opportunity to have a thrash around, even if it was right at the tail of the field, was what was important.
This class of racing was so inconsequential that when motor racing got organised to the point the controllers of the sport decided it was time to have national championships, they had just two. The New Zealand motor racing championship was the Gold Star and there was also the New Zealand Sports Car Championship. Nothing for “saloons”.
But, by the mid-to-late ‘50s it was obvious that saloons were becoming a serious class and winning a saloon car race became more and more a thing of status.
Creating a national series for saloon car racing was left up to the newly created New Zealand Racing Driver's Club (NZRDC).
Saloon car racing was riding a wave of popularity and growing importance, and drivers began travelling to distant meetings, chasing “series” points. And the quality of the cars also improved to include some — like Jaguars — that punters exclaimed “fancy racing a car like that, it costs as much as my house!”
And drivers began to modify their cars to make them faster.
One of the first drivers to take this Racing Driver’s Club Series seriously was Rangiora builder Harold Heasley who had swapped his very quick MkI Ford Consul for a self-modified, extraordinarily fast Humber 80, and he became New Zealand’s first saloon car “champion” even if it wasn’t an official championship. The fans didn’t care, they just loved seeing Harold driving the wheels off that little grey Humber.
There’s no record of the exact date when there was the awakening to the fact that (a) saloon car racing had to be taken seriously or (b) that we needed “regulations”, but it must have been around 1963/1964, because running parallel with the “Allcomers” in that 1965/1966 season we also had a version of the international Group Two that allowed restricted modifications to cars that remained relatively standard to look at. But before we embraced this brave new future, Allcomers went mad.

Beginnings
To be fair, even back in the ‘50s, when saloon car racing was a frivolous affair, we had the beginnings of Allcomers.
There’s no record of who was the first to tread on the roadway to Allcomers but back in 1936 the Everson brothers of Auckland designed and built a remarkably advanced little sports coupé called a Cherub. It had a hint of the Bugatti Atalante about it but about quarter sized! It had a 250cc single-cylinder motorcycle engine mounted in the rear, but driving the front wheels. There’s a suggestion three or four of these tiny but advanced cars may have been built but by 1953 one had made its way south to Dunedin, owned by ‘Snow’ Smith who had replaced the motorcycle engine with an 1172cc side-valve Ford 10 unit. Smith competed in the “Stock Car Race” at the 1953 Dunedin “Round the Houses” street race, so maybe this was the first Allcomer? Eligibility for this race was stretched to include sporty convertibles with hoods up, or down!
Also, in 1953 the man who was to become a saloon car racing legend, Ernie Sprague, repowered his side-valve Morris Minor, replacing the original 918cc engine with an 1172cc Ford 10 unit. Not a huge capacity increase but the Ford engine was more easily coaxed to provide more power.

New Zealand’s Most Radical Allcomer
Without any doubt that would have been the Morrari —it appeared in late 1963 and was a concoction from the fertile, Jim Beam-lubricated minds of hot rodders Garth Souness and Glynn Jones, with some help from John Riley. The latter had traded a 1955 Ferrari Super Squalo Grand Prix car from the last person to own/race it, Bob Smith. Nobody wanted it so Souness and Jones converted it into a ‘saloon’ by fitting it with a side-valve Morris Minor body and powering it with a Corvette engine. Souness drove it infrequently over a couple of seasons — he really was a part-time racing driver. Coincidentally, Souness’ previous racing saloon had also been an Allcomer — a 1932 Ford V8 coupe, heavily modified, but powered by a late model, overhead valve V8.

Allcomer Contenders
This was also the era of the pre-war American coupe along with the newly arrived Minis and 105E Anglias. The coupes were popular in the North and South Islands. The 1938 Chev coupe was the most common, and the fastest was created by Rod Coppins who replaced the old Stovebolt six with a Corvette engine to create a car that still exists today as the legendary Ron Silvester car even though very little of the original car remains.
An oddity was Red Dawson’s 1938 Willys coupe which he powered with a Corvette engine.
Rod Coppins went on to create a car that is possibly the most legendary of all Allcomers — the fabulous MkII Zephyr-Corvette, a car that virtually became the blueprint for the explosion of Allcomers that was about to happen. Especially when the Coppins’ team released the full power of the Corvette engine by routing the exhaust headers vertically through the bonnet.
John Miller’s Renault Dauphine Corvette would also have been close to the top of the more extreme Allcomers. A gutted Dauphine with a lump of Chev V8 crammed into the space behind the driver using a boat Vee drive to get the power to the diff.
Neil Doyle’s Anglia Corvette is another. Neil bought the Anglia new and modified it, finally creating a car that looked like the monster in the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The Doyle Anglia was at its wildest when it still had a more-or-less standard body profile, but wide braced steel wheels and the exhausts up through the bonnet in stack form made it look terrifying.
Readers may think that New Zealand was awash with Corvette motors at that time — no, they were just plain old Chevrolet lumps of various capacity and vintage made to sound potent by borrowing the “Corvette” moniker.
Frank Radisich’s Humber 80 was another extreme hybrid for how it was engineered.
To find “balance” the MkVII Jaguar engine was mounted inside the cabin, not in the back seat like the Miller Dauphine Corvette, but alongside the driver resulting in barely enough room for the driver who was wedged tightly between the engine cover and the door. The Jaguar engine was later replaced by an Ernie Sprague-built MkII Zephyr engine.
In Dunedin, Bruce Jenner’s short-lived, Chev-powered, MkII Consul/Zephyr was one of the scariest Allcomers I ever saw.
Then from Auckland there was the Jenning’s Special — it looked like a tiny pre-war Fiat Topolino, but with a long bonnet that hid a big chunk of Lincoln V8. In truth, the only thing that was “saloon” about this car was the body, the chassis was fabricated.
And there were some combinations that were just plain odd. Like the FJ Holden powered by a Studebaker V8 engine that Garry Pedersen drove at Pukekohe from time to time.
Ivan Cranch, an Auckland veteran of many classes, made his MkI Consul hustle by fitting a Jaguar engine — presumably a 3.4-litre MkVII motor.
A crowd favourite around Auckland at this time was Colin Lumsden’s 1957/1958 De Soto Firedome V8 that first appeared with wire wheels — duals at the rear to control the wheelspin — then later, widened steel wheels and stack exhausts.
Not everyone chased the big engine, small car route. Lotus twin-cam-powered Anglias were also popular and successful with a strong power-to-weight ratio.
The radically developed Fastback Anglias of Paul Fahey and David Simpson were true Allcomers even though they lacked the engine capacity of the monsters.
Austin A40 Farinas and Morris Minors were both popular as the basis for often radical racing saloons. Kerry Grant’s two A40s were fast and while his first was reasonably standard, bar an engine swap, his second was more radical and devastatingly quick.
Wellington’s Peter Bennett built a wedge-nosed A40 that became a legend around Wellington — and is now racing in vintage racing in the USA I believe.
Clyde Collins’ Fowog was a radical approach to building a racing Morris Minor, with lightened body, 1500 Ford engine and a shovel nose that took some getting used to. And it was fast.
Then Clyde followed that up with the Fordina — ostensibly an Austin A40 Farina that had been chopped, channelled, given a long, needle-sharp snout and powered, variously by either a Twincam or a 1500 Ford pushrod motor.
Minis lent themselves well to this automotive mayhem with a roof chop creating what became universally known as a Minisprint (the name of an English company that appeared to have done it first).
An unusual combination came from Wellington’s Trevor Williams who built a Vauxhall Victor powered by a 2.0-litre Bristol engine.
But it wasn’t just the bizarre mechanical combinations that saw Allcomers exploding out of control. The lack of any restrictions to body modifications was equally as weird — and was really the thing that killed Allcomers.
The aerodynamic noses and breadvan backs on the Anglias of Paul Fahey and David Simpson created a sensation and became much copied.
For the 1966/1967 season, Jack Nazer’s Lotus twin-cam-powered Anglia looked nothing at all like a 105E with its radical body reshaping — it looked more like flying saucer drawn by a five-year-old kid.
In the Deep South, talented panel beater and coach builder, Robin Officer, created a Mini that was so radical it was impossible to identify its origins.
And Neil Doyle’s Anglia Corvette was much more an amorphic GT car once it got a fast front, lowered roofline and fastback.

Sanity Prevails
So, at the end of the 1966/1967 season it was all over for Allcomers was it? Well, you can’t hold back Kiwi ingenuity, and the Group 5 regulations that replaced Allcomers for the 1967/1968 season were gradually relaxed so that within three or four seasons, we were pretty much back to where we had been, except that sanity had prevailed and if you called it a Mustang, it had to be identifiable as a Mustang and there were restrictions on exchange swaps and other technicalities.
And, in the South Island there had been revolution – edicts from Wellington had been pretty much ignored and Allcomers continued to be embraced. But here too, eventually, came the realisation a racing saloon had to be recognisable, and the creation of the Open Saloon Car Association (OSCA) led to sanity.
That pre-1967 period created the Kiwi Allcomer legend that, in fact, was resurrected and continued for many years.