Holden Monaro 427C — BrandWiki

Holden Monaro 427C

car name	Holden Monaro 427C
category	Australian Nations Cup Championship
constructor	🇦🇺 Garry Rogers Motorsport
team	🇦🇺 Garry Rogers Motorsport 🇦🇺 Team Brock
drivers	🇦🇺 Garth Tander 🇦🇺 Nathan Pretty 🇳🇿 Steven Richards 🇦🇺 Cameron McConville 🇦🇺 Peter Brock 🇳🇿 Greg Murphy 🇦🇺 Jason Bright 🇦🇺 Todd Kelly 🇦🇺 James Brock
front suspension	MacPherson struts, coil springs, anti-roll bar
rear suspension	Semi trailing arms, coil springs, anti-roll bar
length	4789 mm
width	1841 mm
height	1397 mm
wheelbase	2788 mm
track	1559 mm (F) 1577 mm (R)
engine name	GRM designed Chevrolet LS6
capacity	7.0 L
configuration	90° V8
turbo/na	naturally aspirated,
engine position	front engine, longitudinally mounted
power	2002: 700 hp @ 6700 RPM, 780 ftlbf @ 4800 RPM torque 2003-04: 600 hp @ 5700 RPM, 780 ftlbf @ 4800 RPM torque with 30mm FIA air restrictors
gearbox name	Holinger
gears	6-speed
type	Sequential shift plus reverse gear
weight	1400 kg
lubricants	Valvoline
tyres	Dunlop OZ Wheels Front: 18 x 11 inches Rear: 18 x 13 inches
debut	2002 Bathurst 24 Hour
races	50
wins	18

The Holden Monaro 427C was an Australian built and designed GT style race car based on the Holden Monaro CV8 road car. The car ran in the Procar Australia-run Australian Nations Cup Championship and at the short-lived Bathurst 24 Hour race at the famous Mount Panorama Circuit in Bathurst.

Concept

In 2002 Holden Motorsport was looking at running a Holden Monaro in the first ever Bathurst 24 Hour endurance race against the likes of the Lamborghini Diablo GTR, Ferrari 360 N-GT, Chrysler Viper ACR and Porsche 911 GT3 that were regulars in the Nations Cup Championship. After the Holden Racing Team reportedly turned down the job of building the Monaro, Garry Rogers Motorsport accepted the task of building the car as well as running it. The Monaro was originally intended to be debuted in 2003, but after the go ahead had been given for the Bathurst 24 Hour to be run in November 2002, the car's build and development time shortened to just 9 months.

The Monaros ran a GRM developed version of the Chevrolet Corvette C5-R's 7.0 litre (427 cui) motor which had taken numerous class wins in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the American Le Mans Series as well as outlasting the

2002

Bathurst 24 Hour

In its race debut at the 2002 Bathurst 24 Hour, the #427 Monaro was driven by Tander and fellow V8 Supercar drivers Steven Richards, Nathan Pretty and Cameron McConville. McConville's first drive of the car was actually during qualifying where he qualified the car in second place on the grid. As expected, GRM's regular driver Garth Tander started the race and using the power of the 7.0 litre engine was able to take the lead almost from the start. Although Holden cars had a strong reputation at Bathurst and the similar engined Corvette C5-R's had scored numerous class wins in GT endurance racing, the Monaro was seen as too new pre-race and wasn't really considered a chance of winning or even finishing its debut race despite the relatively low quality of the field with only 3 or 4 of the 36 entrants considered a true chance for outright honours. While the 7.0 L engine with its off the shelf GM racing parts was mostly a known quantity, many felt that the Monaro's other racing components would have suspect reliability. Although as veteran driver, twice Bathurst 1000 winner and winner of the innaugural Bathurst 12 Hour Allan Grice pointed out, the Monaro shared a lot of parts with V8 Supercars which had over 10 years of proven Bathurst race history, while fellow (7 time) Bathurst 1000 winner Jim Richards, who is also the father of Monaro driver Steven Richards, labelled the Monaro "A better V8 Supercar".

Holden had expected that the Monaro would be given a rev limit of 6,700 by Procar as that was generally what the Le Mans Corvette's used. However, when GRM got to Bathurst they were informed that the Monaros had to be set for 5,700 rpm, a full 1,000 below expected. As driver Nathan Pretty would later point out, the 7.0L V8s had shown in testing that they didn't make their true power until well after 6,000 rpm so in racing the drivers never got to exploit the real power of the engines, though the torque levels of the engines did often compensate for that loss of power, especially at Bathurst. It was the lower rpm limit that saw a drop-off in power, and a higher overall weight, which was put down as the reason the Monaros didn't match the V8 Supercar times on Mount Panorama.

After Tander used the torque of the 7.0 litre V8 to take the lead from the John Bowe driven Ferrari 360 at the start, the car suffered an early flat tyre which dropped it to second behind the Cirtek Motorsport Porsche 996 GT3 RS of David Brabham, while the high revving, 3.6 litre V8 Ferrari had already suffered the first of two engine failures early on and was out of contention. Then, just a few hours into the race after re-taking the lead from the Porsche, the entire fuel cell of the Monaro needed to be replaced, dropping the car 13 laps behind. The team overcame the fuel cell problem as well as the car becoming jammed between gears just before sunrise after Nathan Pretty was hit by the BMW 318i of Debbie Chapman in The Chase, which also caused damage to the driver's side door. The Monaro spun and stalled, jamming the gearbox, forcing Pretty to get out and rock the car back and forth to clear the problem, a task made difficult by the Monaro's Sequential transmission and its 1400 kg weight. By the 18-hour mark (10 AM Sunday morning), the Monaro had clawed its way back to second place, only three laps behind the leading Porsche. Then after a trouble free run, the Porsche broke a half-shaft with Brabham at the wheel, causing the car to pit for four laps. Sensationally, the Monaro pitted at the same time as the Porsche to replace rear suspension bolts that had broken away from the chassis. The GRM crew won the pit race and the Monaro was able to return to the track and re-take the lead for good with just over 4 hours remaining. When the Porsche returned to the track, Allan Grice, told to drive as fast as possible, hit the wall on the top of the mountain while attempting to lap the Mosler MT900R driven by Mark Pashley which broke the Porsche's rear suspension and took it out of contention. Upon its return to the track Darren Palmer put the car into the wall at Griffin's Bend with no steering, a legacy of the Grice crash.

The Monaro ran in the lead for the last four hours to win the race by 24 laps from the British entered Mosler MT900R of Martin Short. In the race, Tander's fastest race lap of 2:14.3267 was actually quicker than Brad Jones' pole time of 2:15.0742 and quicker than McConville's qualifying time of 2:16.8792 (in the warm up session prior to the race, Tander had actually recorded a 2:13.6871 which was the fastest time of the session by some 6.3313 seconds).[3] With the demise of the Bathurst 24 Hour and Nations Cup after 2003 and 2004 respectively, Tander's 2002 fastest race lap time stands as the Nations Cup class record lap for Mount Panorama.

2003

Nations Cup

It was then widely expected that regular GRM V8 Supercar driver Tander would drive the car in the 2003 Australian Nations Cup Championship, and Tander himself stated that he would like to race the car. However, with input from Holden Motorsport it was former AUSCAR and part-time V8 Supercar driver Nathan Pretty who was given the drive instead. Pretty went on to score numerous race wins in the series, including round wins at Symmons Plains and Winton, but would finish third in the eight round championship behind the Lamborghini of Paul Stokell and John Bowe in a Ferrari.

Following the Monaro's dominant Bathurst 24 Hour win, Procar enforced the use of air restrictors on Monaros (as they did other competitors in the name of parity) which they would use for the rest of their racing life. The FIA approved 30mm air restrictors brought power back down from an alleged 700 hp to around 600 hp, though torque would remain the same at around 780 Nm.

In 2003 GRM built a second car for the legendary touring car driver Peter Brock which would make its on track debut in Round 2 of the championship at Symmons Plains in Tasmania. Brock had driven the Bathurst winning Monaro at the Nations Cup support races at the 2003 Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne before the start of the championship a few weeks later in Adelaide. In Melbourne the car ran with Brock's famous #05 rather than its usual #427, winning all four races after battling with the Lamborghini Diablo of Paul Stokell, though Brock admitted that he would not have won any of those races had Stokell not struck trouble in each race. He then drove the new car, painted red and, until late in the series, without the Monaro teams sponsorship of Just Car Insurance (GRM's usual major sponsor in V8 Supercars was Valvoline), in the Nations Cup Championship alongside Pretty, though he did not win a Nations cup round or race until the opening race of the final round at Surfers Paradise. Pretty and Brock finished third and fourth respectively in the 2003 championship.[4]

Bathurst 24 Hour

Against a much better quality field than in 2002, including the Stokell Lamborghini, a new 5.0 L BMW M3 GTR V8 for John Bowe, the Ferrari 360 N-GT with David Brabham leading the driving, the Martin Short Mosler MT900R that had finished second the previous year and had since won the 2003 British GT Championship and the GTO class at the 2003 1000 km of Spa (finishing 6th outright), as well as numerous international and Australian Porsche 911's of various specifications, it was the Brock Monaro which won the 2003 Bathurst 24 Hour with V8 Supercar drivers Jason Bright, Todd Kelly and Greg Murphy sharing the driving. The winning car from 2002, driven by the same four drivers as the previous year, finished second, only 0.3505 seconds behind after 527 laps (5 less than in 2002) and 24 hours of racing.

After easily qualifying 1-2 with Tander claiming pole with a time of 2:13.2856 (the fastest ever Monaro and Nations Cup time around The Mountain), 2.7 seconds faster than Murphy in 05 and some 4.4 seconds faster than John Bowe in 3rd, the Monaros controlled the race which was run in wet and dry conditions with the rain at one point (after just a couple of hours) coming down hard enough to have the entire field of 46 cars stopped on the pit straight for almost 10 minutes for safety reasons (also due to the lightning, race broadcaster Channel 7's camera operators around the circuit were forced to stand down from their metal tube scaffolds). The main opposition was expected to come from the Nations Cup winning V12 Lamborghini Diablo of Paul Stokell which also included talented young Danish driver Allan Simonsen in the driver lineup. However, despite Stokell having the speed to match the Monaros in the early laps, its challenge was thwarted by numerous punctures and they would eventually finish 40 laps down in 8th place. With seven minutes to go in the race, and with the two Monaros of Murphy and Tander running nose to tail, team boss Garry Rogers gave his drivers permission to race each other to the finish, with orders to respect the work put into the event by the team and not to take each other out.

Demise

The GRM built Monaros have the distinction of winning both the first and last races they competed in. After the debut victory in the 2002 Bathurst 24 Hour race, James Brock drove his Monaro to victory in the last race of the 2004 Nations Cup Championship at the Mallala Motor Sport Park in South Australia. It would prove to be not only the Monaro 427C's last win, but the last ever race of the Nations Cup Championship as Ross Palmer could no longer afford to fund the series and PROCAR was disbanded after failing to find a major sponsor.

The series was replaced in 2005 by the return of the Australian GT Championship where the Monaros, with their 7.0 litre engines, were ruled ineligible due to the lack of a road-going 7.0 litre Monaro.

After their 2002 Bathurst 24 Hour win, it was expected that the Monaros, with their all-powerful (and some thought unfair) 7.0L V8s, would come to dominate Nations Cup racing. However, while the Monaros were definitely suited to the Mount Panorama Circuit with its long hill climb, long straights and fast, flowing corners, Australia's shorter, tighter racing circuits didn't suit the Holdens, which were mostly bigger, heavier and with less aero and braking ability than their opponents. While the Monaros did get some race and round wins in Nations Cup, including surprisingly twice for Nathan Pretty in 2003 and 2004 at the tight and twisty Winton Motor Raceway, it was the more track-focused Italian sports cars such as the Lamborghini Dialbo GTR and Ferrari 360 N-GT which would largely dominate the race wins over the two seasons the Monaros ran in the series.

The 2002 Bathurst 24 Hour race-winning Monaro currently resides at the National Motor Racing Museum, located outside of Murray's Corner at Mount Panorama in Bathurst. The 2003 Bathurst 24 Hour winner is currently owned by a historic car racing enthusiast, the third Monaro driven by James Brock was placed under auction on 20 February 2020.[9]

Greg Murphy drove the 2003 Bathurst 24 Hour winning No.05 Monaro at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed.[10]