The local motorsports team recreating rally history
“So the car is a very special car,” says team manager Nigel Buttriss of their Fiat 131 Abarth.
“This is a car that in the late 1970s, early 1980s was the car to have in rallying.”
It was a Fiat 31 Abarth that won the 1981 Rally of Portugal and the very same car that was raced with success in Australia by rally legend and three-time Australian Rally Champion Greg Carr.
Getting the 50-year-old Fiat up and racing has been the dream of father and son owners Gerry and Leigh Gotch. Gerry, a lifelong motor racing enthusiast, actually spent ten years working as service crew with Greg Carr.
“We decided to try and resurrect a complete replica of Greg Carr's World Cup car,” says Gerry. “So we bought this car out of a museum in Belgium and brought it home and completely stripped it…
“So, it's taken us a while to get things organised, getting parts imported from the UK to make it original. The dash and everything is originally, the suspension, so it's pretty much all original, explained Gerry.
Even down to the paint scheme, he says, which has been carefully recreated from photographs and includes Carr’s sponsors at the time: Harris Farm Markets, Lovell’s Springs and Gazebo Hotels.
“We’ve certainly gone for the full 1980s experience!” says Nigel. “Modern rally cars are all four-wheel-drive and this is a two-wheel-drive and a rear-wheel-drive at that!
“We have a regular H-pattern gearbox like an older car…it's naturally aspirated. So it has a particular sound, if it's going for a forest you can hear it echoing through the trees.
“Certainly very much a different driving style. The driver has to be able to use opposite lock, they'll be full sideways coming through the corners… So certainly, for a spectator, it is much more interesting watching one of these older cars. Not quite as fast, but you can see the driver is working!”
However building a racing car out of a half-century-old museum exhibit is not without its challenges, especially when it comes to a vehicle like the Fiat, which was notoriously tricky to work with in its day.
“It’s been a whole learning experience for the team to work out how to make the car work well and get the reliability out of it,” admits Nigel.
“Even in the day when Greg Carr was driving it, there was no one in Australia with experience of it, getting the reliability was also an issue for that team.
“The last 12 months have been trying, but we came up with a plan at Christmas time about what we're going to do this year and we've worked through that, we're now on top of it and we feel confident now to go back out on the rally stage.”
Fortunately for Nigel and the team today, they have been able to learn from some of those past mistakes.
“We've been able to reach out and talk to some guys who worked on the original race cars,” he explains. “There's a guy in Sydney, Ross Smith who also built the engine for this car and we’ve been able to ask him how did you do this or what did you do? And they've been really forthcoming helping us learn how to do it and help us run the car.”
The Team Gotch Fiat really had their first outing of the season at the Bathurst Rally on September 23, with Leigh Gotch in the driver’s seat alongside navigator David Green.
After nearly nine hours of driving the car finished first in class (2WD 1600-2000cc) and 18th outright to an elated team, who are all looking forward to seeing what this car can achieve.
“All the hard work we did… it's just paid off,” says Nigel. “We came up with a methodical plan, we worked through that and the proof is in the decent result we just had at Bathurst.
“Now we've got the Oberon Rally coming up on the 4th of November and we're really looking forward to that. And from there, we're going to go down to rally in Victoria and then we’ll stop again, do testing and work out our schedule over Christmas and hopefully be back for a full season next year.”