Designed and built by the Stanton brothers in Christchurch, the Stanton-Corvette was an advanced sports racer in its day and is still a regular sight on South Island circuits. Eoin tells the story of this ground-shaking Kiwi special
Words Eoin Young | Photos Terry Marshall
The Stanton-Corvette thumped into rumbling life, shattering the paddock silence of the Powerbuilt Raceway at Ruapuna Park on a freezing Sunday morning.
The night before there had been rain and hail at Jade Stadium while the All Blacks trounced the Lions. Now we were transported back in racing time to a car created by a Kiwi crew that pre-dated the Chevrolet-engined McLaren CanAm cars by a couple of summers. The grandstands named for Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme watched the circuit quietly, without spectators.
There was a McLaren CanAm family resemblance in the Stanton, perhaps generated by the more recent snub nose that replaced the original chisel front as raced by Maurie Stanton in 1964, and later by speedway star, Geoff Mardon. It actually looked quite elegant in a brutally home-made fashion.
The Stanton brothers
In fact the Stanton brothers had made a habit of anticipating racing design. They were both in their twenties in 1953 when they built the big aero-engined special with an inverted four-cylinder 6.1-litre Gipsy Major between the driver and the back wheels. Only two teams had done this before them with any success — Auto Union with 373kW (500 horsepower) in the 1930s and Cooper with a 500cc in the 1940s.
The brothers were always short of finance so they cobbled up their own parts or robbed them from road cars
The brothers were always short of finance, so they cobbled up their own parts or robbed them from road cars. The special was ready for the first New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore in 1954. In a profile written recently by Rochelle Evans, she says, “The car qualified 17th out of 42, but was left out of the final because it didn’t have the look of British and Australian imports. A motoring journalist described it as a ‘slab-sided ugly duckling’ which required streamlining ‘to tear less of a jagged hole in the air.’ Maurice and Charlie went to the race officials and successfully pointed out race regulations could not exclude any car because of its looks.”
They were allowed to start from the back where they couldn’t be seen, and Maurie had made his way up to seventh before retiring with worn brakes. Bear in mind that the brakes had been borrowed from a Morris Minor!
It had been decided after practice at Ardmore that Maurie would be the driver, and Charlie would be the engineer. It was an arrangement that worked well. Maurie set an Anzac land speed record at 173.8mph (280kph) and won hill climbs, but the car had its limitations when it came to the longer-distance races that were becoming popular. The brothers were bending the performance envelope of the old engine, running it to 3200rpm when the factory manual recommended a maximum of 2400. The oil boiled. Charlie observed that “The piston rings fluttered and there was so much blow-by into the crankcase that the oil was boiling and Maurice was driving with one eye on the oil pressure gauge and the other on the track.”
Chevrolet-power
The McLaren team in Britain had fitted an aluminium Oldsmobile V8 in place of the four-cylinder Coventry Climax engine in the Zerex in 1964, but it was 1966 before Bruce could be persuaded to switch to cast iron Chevrolet power. Bruce was convinced that the lighter weight of the Oldsmobile was a must-have, but Chris Amon and fellow-Kiwi team mechanic, Bruce Harre, felt that the extra power of the heavier Chevvy would more than make up for the weight difference. They went to the lengths of strapping plumber’s lead to the chassis rails around the Olds-powered car’s engine bay to equal the extra weight of the Chev — and Chris went out to lap Silverstone faster than he had been able to in testing a few hours before! Bruce took some convincing that Chris hadn’t been driving out of his skin just to prove his point — and then went on to follow the Stanton’s lead and fit Chevrolet power!
The brothers decided to go back to a layout they were familiar with and started to build a space frame rear-engined car
The Stantons avidly read motor racing magazines from all over the world and were aware that American V8s were becoming popular in performance cars around 1957. They imported one to replace the four-cylinder Gipsy, but there was an immediate problem of increasing the wheelbase, so they set out to build a new car. The result was an ungainly, lengthy machine that poses the question as to how much worse the Cropduster would have been with the Chevrolet mill fitted in place of the Gipsy.
White Elephant
Charlie, now 85, recalled that the only rear-engined cars then were the small Coopers, and there was no suitable transaxle available, so the decision was taken to build a front-engined single-seater car. Immediate problems were skinny tyres and too much muscle from the Chevrolet V8.
| The Stanton-Corvette |
|---|
| Type numbers of the various Stanton-Corvette specials — list provided by Charlie Stanton. Mark 1 Front-engined ‘White Elephant’ Mark 2 Rear-engined single-seater Mark 3 The first sports car Mark 4 Sports car rebuilt after Maurie Stanton’s Waimate crash, driven thereafter by Geoff Mardon |
“The only racing tyres were 600×16 for lighter cars and we had far too much wheelspin. The harder Maurice drove, the slower the lap-times were because of the wheel-spin.”
The front-engined car raced for only one season in 1960. “It was useless,” Charlie recalled. “It was painted white and we called it The White Elephant.” After that the Stanton racers were always red. “I read somewhere that the car was once painted pink, but it never was while we owned it.”
They were the first to run slicks, and they ran into a lot of trouble with the scrutineers. “We bought the fattest road tyres we could find and had a retread company buff all the treads off. The scrutineers didn’t like them at all, but in the end they were accepted.”
Birth of the Stanton-Corvette
The brothers decided to go back to a layout they were familiar with, and started to build a space frame rear-engined car with aircraft air shock absorbers, a Borg Warner T10 gearbox and a 1935 Ford V8 car differential. The Austin Healey 100S had disc brakes, but they were not available to the brothers in New Zealand, so they made their own discs and callipers.
“He was enjoying it so much that we had to black flag him to get him off the circuit! He thought he had been getting clutch slip — but it was actually wheelspin!”
The rear suspension was later converted to twin coil springs each side at the rear, and in front they used Mini hydralastic units. They made their own rack and pinion using chains and sockets. Firestone was persuaded to import some of the new, fatter tyres used at Indianapolis.
The brothers then took the decision to rebuild the single-seater as a sports car for the 1964 season, with the object of running in sports car races as well as the feature event. This lasted as long as it took Maurice to show well, winning the sports car race and finishing second in the trophy race. From then on the rules changed and sports cars were banned from the main events.
Maurie had crashed in Mt Maunganui and at Waimate he crashed again, hitting a power pole and fracturing a hip and leg, eventually being extricated, soaked in leaking fuel. The risk was starting to outweigh the rewards and the brothers agreed to offer the drive to Geoff Mardon, the speedway rider who had been up with the best on the international cinder scene. Geoff was in the same frame as Barry Briggs and Ronnie Moore. He would later marry Ronnie’s sister, Val.
It has been said that if Mardon had concentrated on championship points more than prize money, he would have run Ronnie close for the two world titles he won. Geoff’s best finish was third in the 1953 championship. He had raced his own 500cc Staride on New Zealand circuits, and also gained a name for himself in the RA Vanguard. He was up to third place in the Dunedin street race behind Ross Jensen and Bruce McLaren when a rear wheel came adrift.
Reunion
Geoff was out at Ruapuna when Russell Greer brought the quiet track to life that Sunday morning, and he instantly accepted the offer of a drive. He was immediately back to form, remembering the days when he raced the big Stanton-Corvette for real. Geoff was 78, Greer 59. It reminded Russell of offering Maurie a drive at Ruapuna after he had restored the car. “He was enjoying it so much that we had to black flag him to get him off the circuit! He thought he had been getting clutch slip — but it was actually wheelspin!” Mardon talked about his major moment at Waimate. “We only had three laps of practice, and I was flying on the first lap when I totally missed the right-hander at the end of the pit straight and crashed straight ahead into a shop window. I remember that the window was full of Scalextric model cars!”
The space-frame had been stretched to accommodate two seats, but the original monoposto pedigree is still there. The central steering column remains. The steering wheel, now on the right, is connected to the original column by chain-drive¦ In rear view, the car sits squat. The massive chains either side of the differential are a metal signature of the Kiwi special. Russell Greer has owned the car for 30 years. It was navy blue when he bought it from an advertisement offering the car “with potential to convert to a road car.”
“It was one of those things. I needed it¦ I had to have it! I took it home and showed it to my wife, Cheryl. She said ‘D’you think you’ll ever grow up?’”
The Stanton-Corvette’s engine now displaces 5.7 litres (350ci) — ask Russell Greer what sort of power it has, he grins, and says “enough”
| Stanton-Corvette Memories |
|---|
| David Young remembers the Stanton Corvette as a shadow flying over his 1.5-litre Cooper single-seater at the end of the straight at Mount Maunganui in 1964. And that’s all he remembers. The Cooper was mangled from the dashboard back and he was knocked unconscious. It was the first lap of practice for the main race, and David was tailing Tony Shelly’s 2.5-litre Lotus 18 down the long back straight. “Shelly braked at the 400-metre board and I closed right up on him and braked. The next thing I remember was putting on opposite lock because I’d lost control, and I don’t remember anything else. The car was pinned against the fence. Some people said my car somersaulted. The Stanton definitely did. It went end over end over Shelly. He said he saw the shadow come right over him. The Stanton landed on its wheels. It was a bloody miracle. That’s only what I’ve been told. Pity you can’t ask Denny [Hulme] about it. He was standing on the inside of the corner. He said if I hadn’t been there, Maurie would have hit the inter-island ferry (in Wellington).” Maurice apparently never braked at all. He would say that the Cooper was a dull colour “the same as the day” and he simply never saw him. “The Cooper was practically written off,” says David. “We took it back to Pukekohe where Jack [Brabham] and Bruce [McLaren] kept their cars for the Tasman Series. My car was crushed from the dashboard back but Colin Beanland, Bruce’s first mechanic when he went to Europe, made new tubes, welded them all in place and straightened things out.” Charlie remembered that the car was demolished front and rear, and credited Maurie’s escape without serious injury to the fact that he had fitted a four-strap safety harness, well before the fitting of this equipment in racing cars became first an acceptable, and then a mandatory requirement. |
Geoff Mardon in Stanton-Corvette in Timaru street race
Enough power
The Stanton-Corvette’s engine now displaces 5.7 litres (350ci) — ask Greer what sort of power it has, and he grins, and says “enough.”
Charlie remembers that they had 373kW (500bhp) when Geoff Mardon was racing the car. He had visited Traco Engineering in California when Wally Willmott was there, working on McLaren’s Traco engines for the CanAm series.
“It was one of those things. I needed it¦ I had to have it! I took it home and showed it to my wife, Cheryl. She said ‘D’you think you’ll ever grow up?’”
Messrs Travers and Coons were renowned as being economical with information when strangers were about, but Charlie obviously came with good Kiwi credentials, and an introduction from Willmott would have done no harm at all. “Jim Travers gave me all the information we needed to build our engine to full Traco spec, but we never had our engine on a dyno,” Charlie says. There was more than enough power for the home-made drivetrain. “The Borg Warner T10 gearbox kept stripping teeth, and then the Ford V8 diff couldn’t handle it and we were stripping teeth from it as well.”
Mardon had been able to race on an equal footing with Andy Buchanan in the 250LM Ferrari, but when the Elfin CanAm car came on the scene the Stanton’s days were numbered.
The car was sold to Jim Boyd in 1967, and Charlie went to the UK. Bruce McLaren had originally offered him a job whenever he decided to come to Britain, but when he arrived there were no vacancies in the McLaren team. Bruce was as good as his word, however, and arranged for Charlie to work in the Brabham engine preparation workshop. He was delighted to be assigned the task of working on the Repco V8s for Denny Hulme — and history records that Denny won the World Championship that season, with Charlie Stanton’s reliable power behind him.
Hands on
The brothers retired from hands-on racing when Charlie went to Britain, but Maurie maintained his involvement and worked with son Andrew on building a Ford V8-engined coupe along the lines of a Cobra, and it still appears at classic events in New Zealand. The Stantons had originally modified a modest air-cooled vee-twin BSA three-wheeler sports car to four wheels and improved performance. In restless retirement Maurie bought another BSA, performed the additional wheel change, and fitted the performance 1000cc vee-twin he had used on the original car. That first BSA had been blue, but the later car was red and is now owned by Barry Gurdler in Christchurch and campaigned in vintage trials.
Maurie died in 1997. Charlie and his wife live in restless retirement in Nelson. His hobby is paragliding these days, and he is the second oldest glider pilot in the country.
On Queen’s Birthday weekend this year, Charlie had a double celebration — he was appointed a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, on his 85th birthday. It was fitting recognition for one of New Zealand’s true motor sport pioneers.
Although originally on an equal footing with Andy Buchanan’s Ferrari 250LM, when the Elfin CanAm car came on the scene the Stanton’s days were numbered.
