Compared with the early-1960s, there are now around seven times as many vehicles competing for space on Australia’s roads. So, no surprise, some stuff had to change …
Yes Eddie, you’re so right! That’s what we used to do! – was my immediate reaction to reading a blast-from-the-past observation by Eddie Ford early this year in his Restored Cars magazine.
Eddie was recounting the time when as a teenage petrol-head he got the chance to be alone behind the wheel of his father’s new farm ute. Their old 1940 Ford ute had made way for a then-new 1956 Ford Mainline.
What’s a boy to do but investigate what difference Y-block OHV V8 power makes to a Ford ute’s performance? After some satisfying fishtailing action on the dirt road leading from the farm to the nearby rural highway, Eddie swung the Ford on to the bitumen and let ’er rip. On a slight downhill run with his boot buried in the mat, the Ford’s stylish ‘bubble’ speedo maxed out at a bloke-pleasing 97 miles-per-hour (156km/h).
If it’s true that the past is a foreign country, it’s extremely foreign in territory occupied by traffic-density figures and related attitudes to what’s reasonable behaviour on the road.
When Eddie and I were young fellas, the amount of traffic on country roads was minimal. Consequently, Victorian motorists enjoyed certain freedoms on ‘derestricted’ country roads where a prima facie 50 miles-per-hour (80km/h) limit applied.
This enabled any motorist charged with exceeding 50mph, to argue that their speed was not unsafe having regard to all circumstances – weather, traffic density, vehicle condition, driver experience, etc.
The arrangement gave you a fighting chance of knocking out some quite impressive point-to-point times at up-tempo speeds, like, say, trying to beat your PB time from Melbourne to Mount Hotham, with some degree of impunity.
Importantly, it also accommodated answering the what’ll-she-do-flat-out? question that your mates would invariably ask when you rocked up in a ‘new’ chariot.
Everyday cars of the era were actually not particularly impressive performers – they didn’t shove you back in your seat under acceleration, and the unsophisticated engineering and technology reflecting suspension and tyre design produced underwhelming lateral g-forces and much tyre squeal in anything approaching fast cornering.
What most cars could do, however, given enough road at full throttle in top gear, was to work their way up to top speeds way beyond today’s highway speed limits.
And the important takeaway was the number the speedometer needle was pointing to just before you backed off after a few kilometres at full noise (sadly, occasionally coinciding with the failure of the tired old machinery you were so mercilessly caning).
This number was what you took back into the competitive environment among your petrol-head mates. The fact that speedos almost universally overstated the actual speed was beside the point. Having no other ready means of measuring it in those days, we pretty much settled for the numbers the speedos gave us.
Eddie’s speed commentary resurfaced for me recently when Editor Angelo shared with a bunch of us that an American mate of his had purchased a restored Allard Palm Beach Mk II roadster, a stunning early-1950s sports car.
Unlike the early V8-powered Allards, this example of the British marque boasted a Ford Zephyr six under the bonnet.
Mention of a Zephyr motor prompted me to share that I was a Zephyr fan as a teenager, because in the absence of responsible adults you could reliably coax Zephyr speedos up to the 90mph (145km/h) mark, a feat beyond the capabilities of the contemporary ‘grey-motor’ Holdens, unless you were valve-bouncing one down a steepish hill.
This pleasing performance from the Ford was despite the fact that its primitive exhaust-manifold design seemed to totally ignore Gas-Flow 101 theory.
The ‘hockey-stick’ manifold was essentially a straight length of roughly 35mm steel tubing clamped along the cylinder-head with square cut-outs positioned to match exhaust-port locations. At the front, a 180-degree bend with a flared mouth set the ‘manifold’ up for connection to the exhaust system to direct exhaust gas rearward through the muffler.
A final point about Eddie Ford’s boot-on-the-mat stint in Dad’s new ute – I couldn’t avoid the what-if thought that the Mainline would have topped the then-magic ‘ton’ (100mph/161km/h) if it had the 3.7:1 diff ratio of its sibling Customline sedan, instead of its 4.09:1 commercial version.
It was in fact a 1956 Ford Customline that first ‘cracked the ton’ for me and my mates in the early-1960s. The boasting rights for achieving that triple-digit, trophy-speed were considerable.