Falcon Gone: One man's memories

John Jacker can point out exactly where his office was in Ford’s old product engineering centre in Geelong; the gardening section of Bunnings.

“If you go in the flower pot section that is where I was sitting,” laughs Jacker.

“Bloody design engineer one minute, flower pots the next. Thanks very much,” he japes with good humour.

Yep, what was once home to some of the most important engineering in Australian automotive history has long been bulldozed and replaced by a homewares centre.

It’s the sort of story that is symbolic of the slow destruction of the Australian car manufacturing industry, that entered its death spiral proper earlier this month with the closure of Ford’s facilities and will be followed in 12 months by both Holden and Toyota.

And Jacker is symbolic of that decline too: one of a generation of smart blokes and women who liked to work with their hands and head, and who spent their careers within one automotive company or the other.

In Ford’s case, at least, there’s a silver lining because product development continues on in Geelong after manufacturing closes – at a site built on the other side of the highway to Bunnings.

Nowadays retired in the Geelong suburb of Highton, Jacker is a vibrant 70-year old with a passion for Ford, for cars and for life itself. He is happy to admit he was the terror of his street when it came to loyalty.

“I used to tell everyone here that if they bought anything other than a Ford, I’d hunt them down,” he laughs.

Jacker was born in Austria, migrated to Geelong with his parents in 1954 aged seven, educated as a mechanical engineer at the Gordon Institute, started at Pilkington Glass in 1968 and then moved up the road to Ford in 1977.

Ford was a family affair as his father had literally walked across the road from the Norlane migrant hostel to start with the Blue Oval.

“I did warranty and reliability, I did engines, I did transmissions, I did axles, I did clutches. Never anything to look at, always under the bonnet!” Jacker laughs.

There were also periods for him spent on Louisville trucks and in sales and marketing, but the bulk of Jacker’s time and fond memories centre around the time spent in development. He loves the Falcon above all and is very saddened by its loss. But he remembers some of the testing he and his fellow engineers subjected it to with a laugh.

“We were cutting the radiator hose and making sure the car could do 1000km afterwards,” he recalls.

“No-one else was doing this.

“We weren’t allowed to say it. ‘And why not?’ we asked. ‘Because the other Ford cars couldn’t do it’ we were told. ‘JJ don’t open your mouth about that -- we have Focus, we have Mondeo and none of them do it’.

“We had the square pothole test,” Jacker continued. “It is a massive dead-square hole 200mm or 300mm deep. We would not accept a failure on that. We took the Commodore over and ker-runch a wheel fell off. Took the Toyota over and bang a wheel fell off.

“And we are going ‘this is too hard ,why are we going to be the only guys who have a car that passes the square pothole test?’ They said: ‘It’s in the rules, Ford wants you to pass it’. It [the rule] was written back in the 1960s when potholes were a big issue.

“It was always holding us back. If we were the Falcon car company we would have gone way, way ahead. But we weren’t, we were Ford,” he laments.

Jacker also looks back fondly on the development of the Territory SUV, but admits it took too long to get a turbo-diesels engine into the vehicle. But that simply reflected how tough the budgetary constraints were in the Australian industry.

“The diesel should have been right up front but we didn’t have a package that was really suitable,” Jacker recalled.

“We tossed up all the diesels we could get our hands on; we had Volvo, we had Jaguar and all those to pick from, but none of them suited.

“Until the one [from Land Rover] ended up coming out, it was economics… It’s always good for us to sit back and say ‘we should have some of this or that’ but it was ‘how many dollars have we got? Nuh we haven’t got another $800 million for this program’.

“An engine program was just so big -- especially for Australia.”

Which is why Jacker looks back on the overhaul of the inline six-cylinder for the BA Falcon of 2002 as such a big deal, as well as the return of the V8 engine in 1991.

“The V8 put us back in the motorsport area, which put us back in with the young kids… But the double overhead cam with the BA was like a breath of fresh air for the engine.

“It blew Commodore off the map because the engine was just so good and reliable and then we put it into Territory.

“It was such a fight to do and there were only handful of guys involved; there was Alex Mishura, Ken Stanford, Tony Boot and myself. We were the four engineers that upgraded that engine.

“We all had our parts; I had the front-end drive and all the accessories, Ken had the camshaft, Alex had the crankshaft and Tony had the fuel pump and oil pump and the sump and all that… It was a huge fight with the four of us as to whether we could package it. And then all of a sudden the first one came off the line and it was just look at that, look at it run!’.”

For all the hardware achievements, it’s people like Mishura, Boot and Stanford – his fellow engineers - who Jacker talks most affectionately about.

“The people made it and that’s why I still go back and keep in touch with them,” he says.

“It was just the passion for Ford that kept driving us. We loved Ford, we hated Holden, we detested Toyota. We didn’t care about Chrysler because they were nothing anyway.”

He says it was that passion that kept them going when they could see a long way out that Ford in the USA wasn’t all that keen on its Australian subsidiary continuing to build vehicles.

“I felt that as far back as the early 1980s… They didn’t understand what the Falcon meant here in Australia. Our management was always fighting for us but when they went over to see big brother…

“But we were of the opinion that we could show the USA a better way and we had the talent to be able to demonstrate that to them,” Jacker explained.

In the end, for all the effort and all the undeniably good vehicles delivered at a cost the US could never have hoped to match, the end was confirmed in 2013.

Jacker says the overwhelming emotion felt by him and his Ford mates was disappointment.

“I personally believe and I think a lot of other people believe that the car industry in total led all manufacturing in all of Australia. If we introduced a new tri-lobular screw that could be put into anything and be locked on; Ford had it, Holden had it, Toyota had it… Then all of sudden Alcoa had it, such and such had it and everyone had it.

“New ceramics and plastics; we introduced ceramic liners for pistons; we introduced ceramics into the overhead cam engines. We were the leaders. Now who is going to lead in Australia today?

“Nobody! We will rely on everyone to give us the stuff. We were an inventor, now we are just a servicer and a fixer,” the proud engine tells motoring.com.au.

Now when Jacker drives down the highway toward Melbourne in his trusty diesel Ford Courier not only will Bunnings sit where his old office once was, all those proud factories that started to appear in Geelong in 1925 will no longer be part of the family.

“It’s like I am going to lose my grandmother, it’s like a relative is going to be gone.

“It was bad enough putting flower pots in my seat, but now the whole factory is going to be a carpet place or something.” Jacker stated.

Related reading:
Ford boss fronts media as factory closes
Ford Falcon: From Catastrophe to icon
Falcons fly the flag at Bathurst
Ford Falcon 1964 Review
Last Aussie Fords almost done
Falcon Friday: Fast facts
Falcon Friday: Ford R&D 1960s-style
Top Five: Falcon race wins
Falcon Friday: Ford’s five finest Falcons
Falcon Friday: Why we’ll miss the Ford factory
Falcon Friday: History of Ford Australia’s large car
Ford Falcon Ute: A rich history
Ford retires Falcon Ute