From spending frosty mornings watching cars barrel down Canberra’s notorious ‘Mineshaft’ to managing Subaru’s Championship-winning team in the 1980, Cliff Chambers has a long association with rallying. In this series, of which this is part four of 10 instalments, he takes a look back at the cars that have been most influential in the sport.
Include ‘rally car’ in a word association test where participants are aged 50-plus and there’s a big chance their response will include the Datsun 1600, or more simply the ‘Datto’.
The 1600 – also known as the Datsun 510 in the US, or Bluebird in its native Japan – that arrived in 1968 took affordable family motoring to new levels and would influence the rally world for longer than any other model.
Finnish rally star Rauno Aaltonen, when testing an early 1600, was unimpressed by its handling, noting its initial understeer that transitioned to violent oversteer. However, those were ideal characteristics for a car with its handbrake buried under the dash and out of reach of seat-belted drivers needing to negotiate tight turns.
The 510’s first significant Australian win came in 1970, when a car driven by African Safari specialists Edgar Hermann and Hans Schüller shared victory with a Citroën in the 1970 Ampol Bicentennial Trial.
Modified SSS versions like theirs weren’t sold locally, and 1600s didn’t achieve their greatest success in Australia until the car was seemingly in its dotage. Late in the 1970s came a major change to National Rally regulations, allowing ‘Group G’ as a virtual ‘silhouette’ formula for rally cars.
Drivers who were sick of seeing the Ford Escort and factory-backed Nissan Stanzas win everything could now fit expanded 2.4-litre engines with multiple Weber carburettors, giving them the ability to extract 170kW from their decade old Datsuns.
In 1982, such a combination brought the late Geoff Portman in his ‘Grunter’ 1600 the first of two Australian Rally Championships to be won by drivers using 1600s.
Today, despite being more than 50 years old, 1600s remain viable as introductory and Club level competition cars and amongst the growing ranks of Historic Rally contestants.
Want to know more about the history of automotive rallying? Click here to find out.
