Is it me, or is this unreadable?

James Laing-Peach remembers driving the 1200 Coupe in its celebrated Bathurst Class A win in '73.

It was a magic little car to drive.

It was one of those rare cars that had the magic touch.

Into somewhat unforgiving circumstances that original 1200 5-speed racer came in the spring 73, a fearsome long distance season ahead. Sandown, Bathurst, and Surfers plus grueling sessions of testing. It wasn't expected to be competitive. The 1200 could only hope to win on weight and handling.

We only had one, despite trying to replicate it on two occasions. It never had a name (as in nickname). I couldn't tell you the chassis or engine numbers or any other ID and any nightmare of psychedelic colours would have been better than the baby-cack yellow and black overlaid with Datsun red, white and blue livery. Yuk!

It was built in Japan to a formula. After two seasons of the 1200 sedans and with John ?a?burgh as the team manager at the time, we gave Nissan's race dept. in Japan a set of numbers with the brief comment that if they couldn't come up with the specification not to send anything. They couldn't meet the spec. Could we find the difference to make it competitive!

We knew the GX dual port heads and five-speed were mandatory, and getting CAMS acceptance could be difficult. Homologation went down-to-the-wire on the Saturday morning of Bathurst, despite being cleared for the Sandown race two weeks before.

There were magic moments with this car. The "heavies" never tired to take a line from you. Brock, Moffatt, Grice, Bondy - once you were into the threshold of Castrol Curve past Reid Park along the Skyline at Bathrust they knew the quickest way was to nip ?? in behind. The little Datsun was as quick (or quicker) than anything else over the top to the start of Control.

And it loved to fly. This was all tip-of-the-fingers stuff. It was great exhiliration to put in a complete lap as near to perfect as you could because traffic, fuel load and tyres dictated an ever changing trim.

I'd often wondered where the little Datsun ended up -- obviously it went on to fly another day. It was built a winner.

This looks like it came from an old FF&R magazine. I might have to go back and see if I can find the article.