What Happens in the Dome, Stays in the Dome

There's a basic rule here in Australia - whatever America can do, we can do smaller. They had a Civil War lasting four years, we had a Eureka Stockade that lasted all of ten minutes. They own all of Hollywood; we made The Castle and rent out Hugh Jackman. And where they have NASCAR, the massive, ultra-popular, floor-it-and-turn-left league of stock car racing and personal fiefdom of the France family, we once had a funny little stocker series called AUSCAR.

Yes, Australian Stock Car Auto Racing. It's easy to forget now, but back in the 90's it wasn't that obvious V8 Supercars were the future. The proto-V8 series was deep into a turf war with the rival Super Touring category, and while they were busy pouring weed killer on each other's grassroots stock cars germinated into a hydroponic potplant of a category. Their growth was limited by just one thing - there were only two paved ovals in the entire country to race on.

When it was new, Adelaide's half-mile Super Bowl must have raised a few eyebrows - 200-metre straights matched by 200-metre corners banked at 7 degrees, a recipe for raw speed above anything the country's dirt ovals had ever produced. But it was a bagel compared to what Bob Jane had in mind; he'd been paying court to Little Bill France in 'Murka since the 60's, talking long and hard about bringing NASCAR back home, and in 1981 he got his wish: they would build a clone of Charlotte Motor Speedway, the NASCAR-est of all the NASCAR tracks, on the outskirts of the Melbourne suburbs.

It happened at Calder Park for one simple reason - Jane owned it. The oval took six years to become a reality and cost $54 million out of his personal piggy bank, but he got it done, and it was glorious: the turns banked at a cool 24 degrees, steeper than all but the scariest tracks in the U.S., and at 1.8km long it only just escaped the "short track" label. This was going to be like racing around a toilet bowl. But since "toilet bowl" lacked marketing appeal, they wisely tied it into a bogan icon - Mad Max - and named it the Thunderdome.

Now they just needed some cars to race on it. NASCAR held up their end and came among us in February '88, a mixed field of local drivers versus some full-time good ol' boys from Dixie including Bobby Allison, winner of the Daytona 500 only a few weeks earlier (handy for street cred, that). But their machinery was all imported weapons-grade NASCAR, too expensive for the Aussie dollar to risk on a regular basis. If the dome was going to be used more than once a year, we'd need an el cheapo Australian NASCAR to fill in the rest of the year. That's where AUSCAR stepped up.

Unlike the purpose-built American cars, AUSCAR stock cars were built more like touring cars, starting out as a production Commodore or Falcon body shell with a roll cage welded in, basic cockpit fitted, and loaded with a Holden 308 or Ford Windsor engine (both 5-litre V8s if you're part of the civilised world and think in metric). That meant the steering wheel and pedals were on the right-hand side of the car, which, combined with the Coriolis effect, meant AUSCAR races turned right for 500 miles; if that's how the water was going to run down the plughole, then obviously we'd have to follow it. For the same reason, getting drunk on Australian beer makes the room spin the other way. And like Australian beer, it made long-time NASCAR fans dizzy.

This Falcon-versus-Commodore formula really caught on, especially since the touring car scene was in the middle of the Group A years, dominated by cars from overseas, but only when the cloud of official protests that hung over it like a bad smell dissipated enough to get an actual race started. Australian petrolheads needed something else, and AUSCAR answered the call.

Surprisingly, it lasted right up until 1999, although by then it was a weed of a championship compared its popularity before V8 Supercars stole the show. But in its glory days the grids were full and the racing was hard, and the undisputed king of the Thunderdome was the man from Albury, Brad Jones. These days he runs a V8 team with his brother Kim, but in those days he taking his Commodore and pulverising AUSCAR to the tune of five championships in a row. In our video above, filmed just hours before taking his final crown in 1994, he scares the life out of Channel Nine presenter Simon O'Donnell with a few laps around the circuit he made his own (incidentally, O'Donnell is one of those elite few who have played both cricket and Aussie Rules football at the highest levels. In Australia that should have made him a demigod or something. These days he breeds horses. Go figure).

It's still there today, a monument to Australia's pathological desire to have a go at literally everything, but although it's largely forgotten it would be an exaggeration to say it rots. The Thunderdome isn't part of the cohort of old abandoned ovals from the early 20th Century - Brooklands, Monza, AVUS, Sitges, Montlhéry. It's too new for one thing, but more importantly, it still receives a modicum of TLC. Because for a surprisingly reasonable sum, you too can don the Nomex pyjamas and hit the Thunderdome to have your bladder emptied by a maniac with a CAMS license (weather permitting). Which keeps it in just good enough nick to preserve the hope that maybe, just maybe, the dome might once again see some days of thunder.