“Radial Tuned Suspension” was the message in the classic 1977 TV Commercial featuring Peter Brock driving the Holden Torana LX.
What better advocate could you have for explaining what Holden engineers did to transition vehicle dynamics from bias-ply tyres to steel-belted radials than Peter Brock?
“Watch me straighten this corner!”- Peter Brock
Neither the Holden Torana LX nor nine-time Bathurst winner, Peter Brock need an introduction, so we won’t. Instead let’s take a quick peek into the Radial Tuned Suspension story.
If you’ve watched our video, you’ll agree it sounds amazing, and it was for the time. But what Holden was really saying was: “we tuned the suspension to work with the tyres”.
That’s a given in this day and age, and some car brands even go so far as to get tyre manufacturers to make special tyre treads and compounds to suit their latest car. But in the 1970s it was big news, coming at the same time that Holden moved away from bias-ply tyres to steel-belted radial tyres.
Holden’s decision to publicise this move under the Radial Tuned Suspension banner was a marketing masterstroke.
And here’s a little Easter egg lurking in the Radial Tuned Suspension story. One of the engineers behind RTS was a young German by the name of Peter Hanenberger.
Hanenberger explained RTS at the time thusly: it is designed to “reduce vehicle roll when cornering, improve straight-ahead stability and improve vehicle handling and load carrying ability on all types of road surfaces.”
Hanenberger returned to GM’s Opel division in Germany soon after, but would come back to Australia early in the 2000s as its Managing Director – a position in which he could unleash Holden’s true engineering genius and give us modern icons like the reborn Holden Monaro, the Crewman 4-door ute and the Cross8 Commodore offroader.
Not all of Hananberger’s visionary achievements reaped commercial gold, but his work on RTS was one of his biggest gifts to Australia.
Lastly, can you name the stretch of road used in the video? It looks a lot like the Arthur’s Seat climb on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula.
