V8 Rulers

V8 engines are at the heart of Australian touring cars, giving name to our premier motorsport category and this publication. With Supercars set to move away from the V8, we look back at how the engine configuration came to rule in Australia.

- Matt Coch

Few people can claim to have been there when modern Australian motorsport was born, but Fred Gibson can. In 1967 he was half of the team, together with Harry Firth, that claimed the first Bathurst victory for a V8-powered car.

It was a controversial race because the result only became clear hours after the chequered flag fell, but it’s one that has gone down in history.

Another two decades would pass before any other engine configuration would win at Mount Panorama, by which time the mighty eight-cylinder had become the accepted standard of our sport.

Gibson has been there throughout, firstly as a factory driver with Ford, then with Nissan during the Group A period and finally working with TEGA as V8 Supercars appeared on the scene in the mid-1990s. There’s not much he doesn’t know or wasn’t involved in first-hand.

“Jack Hinxman, knowing him as well as I did, he was very much for the family car running at Bathurst,” says Gibson.

“Back in the day, the ARDC, which used to run Bathurst, I think they saw growth in the family car – not a British car. The Mini wasn’t a family car at all, it was a little rocket ship, but it wasn’t a family car.”

Indeed, the V8 engine already had a following at Bathurst. Local resident George Reed raced at Mount Panorama before and after World War II with some success, powered by a Ford ‘flathead’ V8 engine – the first V8 simple and affordable enough for mass production.