Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry S
Three quick things I'd like to note on Murray Carter:
- The Carter Corvette that he self built in the late 50's early 60's was a fantastic car. It looked great as a sports car, not so good as a GT. It is still around in historic racing.
- Murray was portrayed as the poor privateer taking on the works team. In fact he got significant unofficial support from Ford. The Ford works team at 6 Mahoneys Road did not have an engine dyno, but Murray did. All the Ford engine development for the Fords was done at Murrays. Frequently when they left good parts were "accidentally" left behind......nudge, nudge
- Murray's Sierra was very late in its introduction. When it left for an Oran Park ATCC round it was only half finished. Unfortunately there was a truck drivers strike/blockade on Razorback and Murray could not get past. So they unloaded the Sierra off the semi trailer and finished building it on the side of the road.
This is an excellent article on Murray's racing life:
http://www.speedcafe.com/2011/05/06/55227/ |
I loved the tale of his trip to Wanneroo in (IIRC) 1981... he left late, and knew it, but ran hard all the way across the bottom of the country, arriving in the West with the glovebox of the truck stuffed to bursting with speeding tickets... or so the story goes...
The Lot 6 push found Murray a great ally: in the case of some parts that weren't exactly kosher (apparently metalurgically, sometimes other parameters), Lot 6 would use Murray as the control sample for the scrutineers... he was often the only non-works Falcon around in the early Group C days, and usually off the pace of the works cars... so the logic would be that Murray's car would just have to be legal... so on more than one occasion, a Lot 6 an would be at Murray's workshop bright and early on a Monday morning with a set of their "slightly fuzzy" parts for Muz to install before the CAMS scrutes arrived for a look at what he had, to compare to the sample from the works cars....
Bob McWilliam, who co-founded Phase Autos with Wayne Draper, worked for Murray, and so many of Murray's paint schemes came from the pen of Wayne Draper... Murray also had a Ford development car for the Repco Trial in 1979 - apparently it was a hack with the XD underpinnings - but didn't fare well when the clutch and bell housing filled up with bulldust. Murray hadn't fitted all the guards up underneath and when the car stopped, somebody asked him why the guards weren't fitted to the bell housing.. the reply "I never put them on the race cars"...