On This Day... the Motorcraft 100

So, Adelaide. Adelaide. City of Churches, home of the Fringe Festival, the Hilltop Hoods and, in one of the great mismatches of history, the Australian Grand Prix. SA's always been a centre for weirdness, but not the flamboyant awesome kind of weirdness of Salvador Dali, the weirdness of a housewife who wakes you at 3am to offer you fresh-baked scones and insists on vacuuming the carpet twice over, once with the grain and once against. It's one of the few places in the world where Coke isn't the number one beverage: Farmers Union outsells it three-to-one.

Something deeply unsettling about that.

This weirdness trickles down to the cars they make, or did, back when they still made them. Mitsubishi released a Magna with a special cupholder that could hold a square Farmers Union carton as well as the round bottles decent human beings use – but no matter how good the Magna is, there's never been a Magna GTI, and it's hard to imagine what one would even be like.* It was the same with Chrysler before they sold their factories to Mitsubishi: the Valiant was a thoroughly adequate car, but it was also infected with Adelaide, so it was about as sexy as a tax accountant's waiting room. When William Balthrop took over as Chrysler MD his first act was to axe the Charger/Pacer racing programme, preferring to spend his promo budget on golf tournaments instead. That says it all.

Hey, could be worse. Ford and Holden both got infected with Melbourne, and look where that got us.

So you could be sure that when it was time for Adelaide to host a round of the ATCC, it was going to be a venue all its own. When Chrysler was testing the Charger, that venue was Mallala, a twisty little circuit that really should've ironed out that understeer. It came back in the late Group A era and gave itself to to the Skylines like the weaboo little whore that it was. But in between was a period of about 15 years where the racing happened at a track called the Adelaide International Raceway.

What made this place different was the distinct impression that it started as a dirt oval and just sort of grew from there. The "Super Bowl" was probably the first paved oval in the country, but its diminutive size – 200-metre straights matched with 200-metre corners, banked at 7 degrees – suggest to me that it was just a paved version of a dirt oval. But when it opened in 1971 Sports Sedans were about to become the big thing that drew the crowds, along with, to a lesser degre, touring cars. So they needed a road course as well, and put in a really simple one, linking the drag strip back to the Super Bowl by a simple-as-you-like corner complex and back straight.

Even in this longest form AIR could produce sub-minute lap times, so despite the name the Motorcraft 100 was actually pegged at 150km, to ensure the customers got their full 40 minutes of racing. The price was that the extra distance would require the drivers to be very careful with their tyres – Dick Johnson got on record as saying some would even have to pit to make it to the finish. He'd know, in the heavy Mustang he was probably one of them.

Qualifying saw George Fury's run of pole positions abruptly ended. Peter Brock was back after a jaunt racing in Europe, and the extra kilometres over there had seemingly done him a world of good, claiming the top spot with a 57.91 laptime. Fury probably could've been faster, but the Nissan's turbo engine really penalised you for getting on the power too early when coming out of the speedbowl – which was exactly what you needed to maximise speed down the long front straight. With a few extra corners the weight of Brock's Commodore might've slowed him down some more, but with so few of those the AIR circuit was totally dominated by that straight, which made up nearly half the lap. Advantage brute force and natural aspiration, assuming you knew how to use it – John Harvey's sister car was back in 7th, beaten by 1.2 seconds.

Spotlight Car: None. Or rather all of them, sort of...
There was no standout car at Adelaide, but there were intriguing signs of the ongoing development war. Brock's pole wasn't purely down to his talent, extraordinary as that was: it was also down to some engine upgrades the Holden Dealer Team refused to clarify but claimed gave an extra 12 kW. But that extra power came at the cost of reliability, and when the engine let go on the back straight Brock decided to return to the pits – immediately, cutting across the grass and entering pit lane from the wrong end. Race control slapped him with a disqualification, stripping him of his fastest lap.

Similarly, the two Peter Jackson Skylines had been fitted with experimental new pistons, but the nature of experiments is that they sometimes fail. When Fury started blowing smoke after just a few laps, he wisely parked it and walked away with a DNF. With the team leader down for the count Seton put in a brilliant drive, completely making up for his Sandown indiscretions, but by half-distance his engine had likewise given up the ghost. A double DNF wasn't much reward for the effort the Gibson Motorsport team had put in, but that's the nature of the game sometimes.

More interesting was the Volvo Dealer Team, who'd entered a second car for a young up-and-comer by the name of John Bowe. Former team boss Mark Petch has recently outlined where he sourced this car: surprisingly, despite being right-hand drive, it wasn't built in Australia, but in Switzerland (not helping the case that it's a completely different country from Sweden). It was originally built by Rudi Eggenberger and, when he became a Ford entrant instead, inherited by Belgian outfit RAS Sport as a spare car to be used for R&D. Since one of the ideas they were testing was whether right-hand drive would give an advantage on tracks with mostly right turns, the T-car ended up converted to RHD and fitted out with all the latest up-to-the-minute upgrades. Enter Mark Petch, in Europe shopping for a new car for the Volvo Dealer Team.

John Stewart and I attended the 3-day Monza RAS tests and agreed to purchase the RHD T-car at the end of the test program despite the fact that none off the works drivers felt their was any real advantage. Thomas Lindström however thought that we would get a small advantage with the RHD as changing gears with your left hand was very natural for drivers in Australia, so on his advice we purchased the car on behalf of Volvo Australia, and had the car airfreighted to Australia, just in time for the 4th round to the ATCC in Adelaide. – Mark Petch, Shannons Club

It was painted in VDT colours (not a huge job, they were the same as the RAS team's Nordica colours) and given the racing #4, but since it was a new car that needed a shakedown, championship leader Robbie Francevic elected to stick with his trusty #10 instead, leaving the new #4 to Bowe. Qualifying showed that the new car was fast, Bowe stopping the clocks at 58.71 seconds to Francevic's 59.54, or the difference between 3rd on the grid and 10th. But Francevic had spent his practice sessions getting the car to baby its tyres rather than go for outright speed, which proved him wise when one green bottle after another tumbled before him. Robbie Francevic did his best impression of Alain Prost that day, driving smoothly and keeping up a strong rhythm until the opposition wilted, and so took another impressive victory.

On the championship table, it was now Francevic first, daylight second: with a massive 110 points, the Aucklander was a full 46 points clear of Tony Longhurst, who was only second thanks to consistency and those handy small-capacity bonus points for his BMW 325i. Fury’s DNF cost him, leaving him on a static 54, while Graeme Crosby headed a tense three-way struggle between himself, Dick Johnson and Jim Richards, with 46, 45 and 44 points respectively.

Robbie Francevic was more on top than ever, but everyone else's cars were getting faster – and his was not.

* Right now Magna fans are probably throwing things at the screen and wondering if I've forgotten the TH Magna Executive, which was lighter than the Sports but had the same 3.5-litre V6. Mitsubishi advertised it as having 147 kW at 5,000rpm, and hoped nobody noticed it actually redlined at 6,000rpm. So, up to 150km/h or so, it was as fast a contemporary HSV – imagine the look on the Haitch-Ess-Vee owner's face when he squirted off at the lights and realised he was unable to pull away! My answer is that, a) they were very careful to hide all that performance under a nothing-to-see-here body and badge, thus proving my point about Adelaide after all, and b) what Magna fans?