1970 Hillman Hunter London-Sydney rally tribute

By: Owner with Guy Allen, Unique Cars magazine

Date: 18.11.2022

1970 Hillman Hunter London-Sydney rally tribute

1970 Hillman Hunter London-Sydney rally tribute

Andrew Cowan tribute

Paul Anderson set about building a tribute to Andrew Cowan’s winning Hillman Hunter from the 1967 London to Sydney Rally. And it wasn’t a show pony, but was set up to tackle the 2022 re-run of the punishing Australian leg of the legendary event. Here is his story

This rally car is one of a string of Hunters I’ve had and was pulled out of a swamp in Bargo and I paid $50 for it. It was a Hunter Royal with everything on it, including all the trim. It was an automatic and I didn’t want the auto. I have another Hunter.

My road-going Hunter is a Royal 660, so it’s a GT. I rescued that from a shed in Bega and I restored that partly because my passion is Chrysler, including Chargers.

How did the whole Hillman thing start? I was going to Chryslers on the Murray as ‘that guy who has a project’, and I’d had enough of being him. I began to wonder what other Chrysler products are out there that I could restore and take to the event while the Charger was in progress?

In 1968 Chrysler bought the Rootes Group and rebadged them in Australia, so the HE got a lot of Australian content. It’s actually a Chrysler Hunter Royal 660.

Meanwhile I’d owned the Charger since 1990. I paid two grand for that one, an R/T replica at the time, and people thought I was mad. It was my daily driver. I made that mistake that everyone does, took it off the road and got it bead blasted. Thirteen years later, it’s a very different car, fuel-injected five-speed 265, custom everything. It’s a good fun, fast car.

As for the Hunter Royal, it has a 1725cc engine with alloy head and the 660 has twin Strombergs. However with the rally car I wanted to replicate what Andrew Cowan had and it ran what was called a Holbay engine.

Holbay was a performance house like Lotus. They modified the engine and the head and put another camshaft in and put Webers on it.

I got the engine built by a fella called Simon Nuske, he’s Mr Rootes – everyone goes to him. Absolute master. I gave him the block out of this car and over the years searched for a Holbay head and found original Holbay headers. Like the Charger ones, there are Webers designed specifically for that engine. Twin forties with twin 32mm chokes. It’s a pushrod motor with solid lifters and dual valve springs. The cam grind is really good – it’s very torquey. That goes with a four-speed manual transmission.

I’ve searched the world to find a Laycock overdrive, and I can get some from the UK, but they have to be reconditioned before they enter the country due to asbestos. There is one guy in the UK who does them, and only completes one every six months. It’s uneconomical to get one, but if I get two I can offset the cost. It’s an hydraulic overdrive on the gearbox. It’s a huge expense and so I’ve come up with a work-around.

Ian Pyett helped me rebuild the diff, after most shops told me to go away. He also helped me with parts and donated the 15-inch hillman wheels for the rally, and the bonnet emblem!

It's running Macpherson strut front end, with a brace across the top. I reinforced the strut towers and mounting points, front and rear, for rally work. Really, it’s built like a Sherman tank. The shocks are Koni adjustables off a VP Commodore, something we discovered by trial and error. All I had to do was change the bush at the bottom for a Hunter unit. The back also runs a spring helper, an old idea that involves using an extra leaf. The front springs are a match for a Nissan Pintara.

The shells get rust in the sills, rear quarters, anywhere where water gets to the bottom. In the case of my Charger, I could buy repair panels, but there are none for a Hunter. So everything had to be made. I taught myself to weld to restore my Charger.

I sprayed this car and the 660, myself, in acrylic. It means I can use it and have fun with it.

The Charger, however, was sent off to a professional.

Brakes on the Hunter are disc/drum, with no power assist. I didn’t want another thing going wrong and took the non-power option. It’s not a heavy car and they work fine.

Andrew Cowan built the Hunter with Rootes UK support. Up to then he had raced Hillman Imps in the UK rally scene and was very successful. They test-drove an Imp, but realized that with a third driver and all the spares, they needed something bigger.

They found an old Hunter rally car up the back of the Rootes workshop. It had hit a tree and had been left there, so they pulled it out and straightened it. They took the Hunter to their test track and flogged it, with everyone having a bet on how long it would last. It went all day and they couldn’t break it. They were surprised at how strong it was and so they went ahead and prepared it for the London-Sydney.

They did lots of recces, but only as far as Bombay. Cowan had never driven in Australia before.

As a test-run for our cross-Australia re-run event, we did the Tamworth Tour with the historic rally club and flogged the car. It went really well. A few minor things went wrong, but the car kept going. Sometimes it was little things, such as putting in drink bottle holders, so they weren’t flying around the cabin. Another: My mate was doing the road book and dropped the pen. It was the only one we had and we couldn’t find it, so we know to have spares for the long run, which is around 5600km and half of it dirt.

We built a front bash plate originally out of 3mm aluminium, however we were advised by the people at Tamworth that you really wanted to start with 3.5mm steel, and if you wanted aluminium, you’d have to triple it. As it happened, I had some steel plate which is easier to work with. Remember this is a touring rally, so instead of non-stop in three days (as they did in 1967) we’re doing it in about 11.

So while much of the underside of the car was reinforced, I was able to forego one or two other features, such as the double-skin steel roof used by Cowan. He needed that to carry gear with the third driver on board, while we could avoid the extra weight and loading anything up there.

The Hunter is one of the easiest cars I’ve ever worked on. It was imported here as a CKD (complete knock-down to be assembled locally) and you can get to everything with a three-eighths, a half-inch a nine-sixteenth and a five-eighths socket or spanner. That’s it, your complete toolkit!

Cowan’s car was by no means the fastest out there. In his book on the event, Why Finish Last?, he wrote: "All the time we knew that in a straight test of speed we were not going to look at Roger Clark’s Lotus Cortina, but we had the confidence of knowing that I could drive flat out all the way in our car and it wouldn’t break. So we had a fast tortoise to Ford’s hare…

"Although the tough sections in Australia were at night, I must say looking back on the event I had never driven a car so hard for so long as I did that Hunter. We knew we had to gain every second we could and I drove flat-out, grabbing whatever time I could for meals. In the whole Australian section we were never overtaken, except on the Nullabor plains by (which was unsealed) Ford Falcons which were cruising at 110mph (180km/h) and we were running at a modest 85mph (135km/h).

I and friend Denis Crowley did the majority of the work on the body and interior. He’s a boilermaker by trade, which you can imagine is a really useful set of skills for a job like this. Unfortunately he had to pull out of the event, where he was acting as support crew, so my brother Rod kindly stepped in at the last minute. Paul Saigar is my invaluable co-codriver. Two people who offered invaluable advice were Ian Morton and Paul Marshall from the UK.

Meanwhile Katrina my partner offered a lot of support that made the whole exercise possible.

All up it was always intended as a tribute car, rather than exact replica. For example, the sharp-eyed Rootes fan might notice the rear tail-lights are Australian and different to what was on Cowan’s car.

We’re pleased to report the car finished the 2022 re-run with no major issues. It lost many of the stickers and pretty much all the paint on the underside. One section in particular, on the old Eyre Highway, seemed to consist entirely of water and rock, but we all came up fine in the end.

The Hunter is not fast. But you speak to every owner and it’s the most fun to drive. I can’t explain it, as it doesn’t push you back in the seat like the Charger does. It’s not loud, but man they are fun to drive, such a great little car.

Recommended books:

Why finish last? Andrew Cowan

Race Across the World, John Smailes

Event revival website:

Perthtosydneymarathon.com.au

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