Shepparton folk are lucky enough to share a postcode with motor-racing royalty; many would know Bryan Thomson’s name well.
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Such is the size of his fame, Thomson’s household name extends far beyond being recalled in just Goulburn Valley homes.
Between 1953 and 2003, he dominated the discipline, beginning in the saddle of a motorbike before taking the wheel of an Austin-Healey race car for his first start in a race at Barjarg in 1959.
In 1960, he purchased Lou Mellina’s Monza Holden racing car and went on to win 20 races from his 57 starts at its helm.
His career took off and he piloted 30 cars that he raced all over Australia and in the United Kingdom in various classes.
Two of those beasts — one original and one exact replica — currently grace the showroom floor at Kialla’s Museum of Vehicle Evolution.
One, the original, is the Mercedes-Benz in which Thomson won the Australian Sports Sedan GT championship.
The second is a replica of a Chevy V8-powered Volkswagen that impressively raced at 29 meets over two years.
For the laymen among us, we know these cars look the part of head-turning race cars, and the fact they won races with our homegrown hero behind the wheel is enough to know they’re special pieces of motoring history worth taking a look at.
For the petrol heads among us, there’s a whole lot more to the story of these two track stars.
When the sports sedan class was just beginning in the early 1970s, new rules allowed rear engines in the competition.
Taking full advantage of the opportunity, the truck salesman Thomson and racecar engineer Peter Fowler created the Volksrolet, which collected 23 firsts, 14 seconds, six thirds, two lap records and 43 major placings in its 56 starts.
When Thomson retired from racing in 1975, the VW was sold and neglected. It was rarely started and its paintwork faded. After being sold a second time, it was stripped of its McLaren parts and scrapped.
In 1980, Fowler continued his innovative creativity and built the ‘Shepparton Mercedes Chev sports sedan’, first using the quad valve engine he and Thomson built for the VW.
It was first driven by a young John Bowe the following year and an even younger Brad Jones the next.
After that, it was parked for a year before Thomson came out of racing retirement and financed further development.
The Merc’s bodywork was updated and it was fitted with a twin-turbo 2-valve Chev V8, destroked to 4.2 litres to meet the capacity limited for forced induction. It raced with almost 1000 brake horsepower.
Thomson drove the fire-spitting Merc to his first national title after more than two decades of racing at an elite level, winning the 1985 GT Australian Championship.
In 2020, the Mercedes became a part of the Simon Pfitzner Historic Sports Sedan Collection.
Then, an agreement between Pfitzner and Fowler to create a tribute car to the long-gone Volksrolet was struck.
Besides the bonnet from the original car being used in the build, the rest was created from photos, notes and memories of it.
The two interesting morsels of automotive history with a very local connection will be on display at MOVE for the next few weeks before moving elsewhere.
Check them out while they share your postcode.
Senior journalist