I doubt that he thought anything about the engine at all...
He would have had to supply that himself. The story says, "meant to have", which probably means he tried to buy one and couldn't. There were certainly none in Australia and quite likely at that time there were no 6.5-litre Chevs in Australia either.
Where the story is really interesting to me is in the part where it's said he didn't buy the Ferrari. I knew that there must have been some sort of shennanigans going on, 'selling' it to a Kiwi and then 'buying' it back again was a way of avoiding taxes, which were exorbitant. So D-d-d-avid has done some paperwork with him, been able to show some sort of cash transfer, then repeated the process to get the car back, then paid the duties and taxes on a nicely aged and worn out model.
Some of the story doesn't ring true. Andy ran the car for about a year, but it reads like it was on again and off again. Being called to come to the Farm unexpectedly just wouldn't have happened, the entry was made in his name and that meant he knew three weeks beforehand. And I'd take the 280kmh at Bathurst with a grain of salt, too. That had to be one of his first drives in the car. Spencer had done 2:34.2 the previous year, Buchanan 2:37.4, and Ian Geoghegan did 2:30.8 the next time it appeared, in 1968, and John Medley's book says he was timed at 154.1mph - 248kmh.
Checking the reports, Andy's first drive of the 250LM was in fact at Bathurst at Easter in 1966, his last at the NZ Tasman races of 1967. Bill Brown drove it at Sandown's Tasman meeting in '67, its first appearance again in Australia, and was entered but never ran at Bathurst. He did drive it on through 1967, however.
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Edited by Ray Bell, 18 June 2020 - 15:29.
