Walkin' a Lonely Road

When it hit the streets in mid-1988, the VL Commodore SS Group A SV "Walkinshaw," better known as the Walky, was the fastest and most expensive Holden ever made. It was also, by a considerable margin, the most painful to look at.

Today, after thirty years of ever-more-yobbo Holdens aimed at the knuckle-dragging AC/DC crowd, it doesn't seem that outrageous. But in a decade when Holden was trying to market itself as urbane and European, the Walky was far from subtle, standing out in traffic even in its gentle Panorama Silver paint scheme. At the vehicle's launch, Holden executive John Crennan was prompted to state: "To some people it may be over the top, but everything on the vehicle is there for a good reason. In many ways this is the most advanced car ever produced in Australia."

...Which was mostly because it hadn't been developed in Australia at all. The most prominent and recognisable part of the car, its outlandish bodykit, had been developed by Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR), based at Oxfordshire in the U.K.

The Sleeping Lion: Holden Special Vehicles
Scott Grant, managing director of HSV for about five minutes there ten years ago, once claimed that, "The birth of HSV and the reveal of the very first VL Group A SS Commodore – commonly referred to as the 'Walkinshaw' – took place at the 1987 Sydney Motor Show." While that much is true, the big reveal was done via a giant giant billboard with a full-size cardboard cutout, not the machine itself. The display also featured a pre-production version of the new Group A racing engine, Holden's first V8 to be fitted with fuel injection, with the real gravy being a cutaway plenum chamber showing the huge induction trumpets and twin throttle bodies, a work of art by 1987 standards. A single example of HSV's new wheel design was also on show.

The only image I can find is from the brochure, ironically as cutaway as the engine itself. (Source)

However, there wasn't actually a single production-spec Walkinshaw anywhere in existence at that time. Indeed, the outfit that would build them technically didn't exist yet. The display itself carried the new legend "Holden Special Vehicles," as Holden managing director Chuck Chapman and TWR founder and namesake Tom Walkinshaw had chosen this very event to announce their new joint venture. So how could they show off a production-ready car and engine when the ink on the contract was barely dry? Because the Walky was never meant to be a Walky. If things had gone according to plan it would have been another Brock, put together in Bertie Street by the crew at HDT Special Vehicles.

Back up to 1986. With Peter Brock slowly losing his mind over the Energy Polarizer, Holden had gone looking for someone else build their high-performance offerings and run the race team, just in case it all went pear-shaped. By happy coincidence, about this time GM in Detroit had finally overturned their long-standing "no race" policy, which had been in place since the Le Mans disaster of 1955 and made subterfuges like the Holden Dealer Team necessary in the first place ("No no, it's our dealer network that's racing. No sir, we're certainly not subsidising them or providing free cars..."). With the ban lifted, Holden were able to be fully and publicly involved at long last, founding a new branch of the company especially to liaise with the racing teams – Holden Motor Sport, or HMS.

The first boss of HMS was one John Lindell, and it was he who brought British touring car, sportscar and later F1 outfit Tom Walkinshaw Racing into the Holden family. Having campaigned Rovers and Jaguars in Europe for several years, with great success, by 1986 the granite-browed Scotsman was on the lookout for his next big project, and his eye fell upon the humble VL Commodore. Tom seems to've nursed a desire to win Bathurst, not just as an entrant but as a driver, and having experienced the Commodore as a rival in his first two Bathurst campaigns (and then seen it beat all comers, against the odds, in 1986), he'd probably decided it was a case of horses for courses. In a Commodore, he’d have a better shot at winning Bathurst than with anything else being campaigned at the time – and, given this was pre-Sierra RS500, he was probably right.

Yes, I said two Bathurst campaigns – the year before the Big Cats, Tom entered his works-backed Rovers in 1984's Group A "preview" class. He'd carried that torch for a while, it seems.

Whatever his deeper motivations, Tom asked HMS to back a team of TWR Commodores in Europe. With the Brock issue still up in the air Lindell was only too happy to oblige, flying two plane-loads of cars and parts to TWR's Oxfordshire base at the end of 1986 so they could assess the VL's development potential. At this stage it was just a one-off development contract – "Please fix our aero, here's a couple of samples to get you started" – but that December, possibly strategically, Lindell informed Brock that they would be encouraging TWR's campaign.

I flew back from Japan after racing at Mount Fuji and found myself on the same plane as Tom Walkinshaw, who was putting a deal together to build special vehicles. I knew nothing of it, but it showed how far we'd grown apart in the latter part of 1986. – Peter Brock

Which really should've been clue number one-thousand or so for Brock to knock it off already, but he tended to just tune out things he didn't want to hear. In any case, TWR's preliminary aerodynamic work won them a purchase order to continue, as Lindell realised that the existing VL Group A would need a major update to stay competitive. He also had his eye on a possible export model and/or racing special that could show off the new fuel-injected 4.9-litre V8 globally. At that stage the plan was still to have TWR finalise the car and then contract Brock and HDT to build the production version and race it, which is what had happened with the previous VL Group A (the red one). That car had been signed off and finalised before HDT were allowed to touch it, and any extra input from TWR this time around didn't meaningfully change that equation.

But then of course, in February 1987, Brock found himself exiled from Holden over the HDT Director, a very necessary decision that nevertheless cost Holden their prized go-faster cottage industry. TWR's development work wouldn't be finished until July, which left a tight deadline if they were going to have the new car ready by November. Holden suddenly realised they had to get a whole new wing of the company founded, staffed, furnished, waltzed through the legal and paperwork minefield, and then put a brand-new car on the road – all in just 10 months.

To speed things up, the obvious trick would be to contract someone already established, someone with experience who could be relied on to know what they were doing, and it seemed inevitable that that someone would be TWR. Holden released the tender in May 1987, and sure enough, Walkinshaw's submission was the one chosen, beating out eight other proposals from around the world. On 15 October 1987, TWR signed the initial ten-year agreement that created Holden Special Vehicles.

The official opening of HSV came on 17 February 1988. Inaugural HSV chief John Crennan had reportedly been recruited at the 1987 Adelaide Grand Prix, leaving his job as national marketing director to become managing director of HSV. The all-important marketing and public relations job was given to a man hand-picked by Walkinshaw himself, Brock's faithful lieutenant and co-driver from the glory days, John Harvey. Slug's first task was finding HSV a suitable property to use as a base, and he settled on a site at Notting Hill in Melbourne's south-east industrial belt, even though he could foresee parking would eventually become a problem, especially when they had 500 VL Group As to build in short order. "We were running out of time," he said.

The Elephant in the Room: That Aero Kit
Cd, or coefficient of drag, was the Next Big Thing for car designers of the 1980s. Arguably it had started with the Audi 100 of 1983, which managed to combine a Cd of 0.30 with remarkably unremarkable styling – it was around 30% more aerodynamic than most other cars of the time, yet was neither a weird-looking experimental nor a svelte low-slung sports car (technically Ford beat them to the punch with the Sierra, but that was regarded as a very odd duck when it was new – the nickname "Jellymould" said it all). After the Audi, other manufacturers started adopting their shallow-angled rear glass, high boot lines and underfloor guidance panels chasing ever-greater open-road fuel efficiency and, yes, higher speeds.

Audi 100, the quiet revolution. (Source)

It was to this end TWR coughed up possibly the most elaborate bodykit ever put on a production car, comprising huge front and rear spoilers, door and sill side skirts, C-pillar fairings and a large bonnet bulge which incorporated cold air (engine) induction, hot air (radiator) extraction, and sufficient clearance for the new fuel injection system. This monstrosity was not the result of stylists working out of a think tank at Fishermens Bend, but of painstaking testing carried out in the U.K.'s MIRA windtunnel at simulated speeds of up to 240km/h – tests which, rumour has it, tended to strain the local electricity supply. The silhouette that emerged earned the car a plethora of nicknames, from the somewhat flattering "Batmobile," to the deeply unflattering but possibly more descriptive "Plastic Pig."

There were 21 or 22 fibreglass pieces, each of which had to be painted separately. It was a massive task co-ordinating suppliers and painters. It was the hardest I ever worked. I rented another property and put all the parts on newspapers on the floor so they wouldn't be damaged. I regularly left home at six in the morning and went to one painter for the day and one for overnight to get them finished. I’d get home at six or seven and worked weekends. – John Harvey

In a press interview in 1987, John Lindell admitted the Walky's aerodynamics had been honed to work on a race car at race speeds. The catch was the regulations required all bodywork on a Group A car to remain stock-standard, the idea being to preserve the link with the showroom product and ensure the racing really did improve the breed. Holden, however, was perfectly willing to do things the other way around and put this ludicrously impractical bodywork on a road car, even if it had a detrimental effect on sales. The bodykit did indeed prove too extreme for the street, and most dealers supplied the lowest skirts and lips in a box, allowing the owner to choose whether they wanted to apply the full racing look or be able to get over a speed bump. It also contributed to a noticeable weight gain, the Walky weighing in at a rather bulky 1,340 kilos, with the complex bodykit accounting for at least 65 of them.

Via Facebook page, "VL SS Group A SV - Walkinshaw."

But that didn't mean the fibreglass was a failure. Harvey – who had shared the Rothmans VL with Allan Moffat in 1987 on fast European circuits like Monza and Spa – knew firsthand how at high speed the car seemed to hit an impenetrable wall of air, and yet was unnaturally nervous through high-speed corners. TWR's own testing had produced similar conclusions. Ergo, TWR's aerodynamicists had worked hard to reduce drag and increase downforce, and they succeeded on both counts.

With a Cd of 0.40, the standard VL was bad even by the standards of the 1980s, which is why it took so much bodykit to correct it. At the front was a very deep air dam, in appearance similar to the one on the previous Group A, but in function quite different. The brake cooling ducts had been moved toward the centre of the car, and the standard VL grille was virtually blanked off – the large duct under the bumper provided adequate airflow, said John Lindell. More importantly, the used cooling air was extracted by way of a large vent in the bonnet: excess under-bonnet air pressure had been a major problem with the VL Group A, as it tended to create lift at the front end to the point of almost negating the effect of the air dam. New side-skirts were developed to help channel fast-moving air under the car and improve downforce. The skirts featured three vents on either side, which allowed a controlled leakage of air out from under the car. These vents allowed a good balance between low drag and racy downforce.

It was aft of the B-pillar that Holden's race special looked the most radical, however. The VL’s sixth window – the one that had been such a key to the success of the VK – was covered by a one-piece panel that extended aft of the C-pillar to form a "fence" on either side of the raised boot lid. This panel markedly improved the air flow around the C-pillar, although Lindell admitted at the time that it had taken quite a battle to get it accepted by Holden's styling department. It was claimed that together Walkinshaw's fibreglass panels dropped the Cd to a slippery 0.34, an improvement of about 25%, correspondingly lifting its top speed to 235km/h and making it far more stable at speed than its red predecessor.

Another via Facebook page, "VL SS Group A SV - Walkinshaw."

So it did the job, but TWR's elaborate body additions were a challenge for local suppliers, and not for the "official" reasons given. The Walky was largely built on Holden's Dandenong line, where the upgraded mechanicals and different interior trim, which included an all-new Holden sports seating package to replace the Scheels favoured by Brock, were fitted to standard VL bodyshells. The cars were then transported to the HSV factory in Notting Hill to have the aerodynamic bits and pieces fitted and finished. That the bodykit didn’t really fit has long been common knowledge, and traditionally it was blamed on the fibreglass pieces themselves. Because of the rush they were actually made in Britain by a firm called Dove Plastics, and at this time British manufacturing quality was proverbially awful, witness jokes about Lucas, Rover and Jaguar. But we had the wrong end of the stick entirely: the real problem was that Holden's antiquated build processes were delivering VL bodies that varied in critical dimensions by centimetres, when TWR's aero parts were designed to close up all the gaps. Poor Dove had actually supplied TWR with the components for its factory-approved Jaguar bodykits, so the quality was top-notch, but they ended up wearing the blame for a bodykit that nobody liked.

By My Deeds I Honour Him: V8
Thankfully, Holden made up for it with the engine, the latest version of their special 4.9-litre V8. By now there was no disguising that it was an iron-block, carb-fed, pushrod-activated throwback trying to compete in a turbocharged, computerised, DOHC world. It might have been well-developed and battle-hardened, but as a concept it was much more classic Trans-Am than modern BMW M division, let alone something that – god forbid – was now going to be hanging around well into the 1990s. It was well past time it was modernised.

Tom Walkinshaw had previously added fuel injection to the SD1 to create the Rover Vitesse and Vanden Plas, the cars the SD1 should've been all along, so he was well aware of the gains that could be made with this more modern and precise method of fuel delivery. This aspect of the project, however was all-Australian, the hard work done by a local team under the direction of Holden Engine Company engineer Warwick Bryce, with the dyno work to fine-tune the fuel injection system and inlet manifold design undertaken by Larry Perkins.

Early experiments from Bryce included this twin-plenum setup on vertical rams. (Source)

Mods to the engine started with a strengthened block with four-bolt main bearings – now cast iron instead of steel, as it was stiffer and easier to machine to the correct tolerances. The Formula 5000-based crankshaft was carried over from the previous model, as were the strengthened conrods (fun fact: rewind the clock far enough and the V8 would trace its lineage back to the L34 engine of 1974, which had been crafted by Repco based on their thunderous Formula 5000 engines, at a time when memories of Jack Brabham's two F1 World Championships were still fresh).

At the heart of it though was the new Bosch/Delco multi-point fuel injection system, featuring a totally different cross-ram inlet manifold with twin throttle-bodies (one for low rpm, one for high). Apart from provision for injector nozzles in the combustion chambers, the new heads featured a slightly different valve arrangement: hitherto the exhaust valves for the middle two cylinders on each bank had been set adjacent to each other. With the fuel injected engine, this was changed so that exhaust and inlet valves alternated all the way along the head, thus allowing for a more even distribution of heat through the heads.

In addition, new exhaust extractors were developed in conjunction with HM Headers (the same people who’d supplied the Phase III) to handle the flow of exhaust gas from the differently-configured cylinder heads. The new headers featured a two-piece version of the high flange developed for the previous year's Group A SS, which allowed race teams significant freedoms in exhaust design and development – the rules said exhaust systems were free after the first join, so once again Holden made that first join as early as possible to give the teams as much freedom as they could. A 65mm pipe, new three-way catalytic converter and a reworked muffler completed the road car’s exhaust system, however, damping down the power but meeting noise limits down at the RTA office.

Under-bonnet view wasn't exactly a work of art, but it all worked just fine. The boxy inelegant plenum was working around intake architecture designed for a carb. (Source)

In road trim the engine developed around 180 kW at 5,200 rpm, and a claimed 380 Nm of torque at 2,800, both healthy increases over the previous Group A's 137 and 345. It wasn't the most powerful Holden ever made – it couldn't be, in those emissions controlled, post-ULP times – but it was the most powerful in a long, long time. Which sounded promising, but the extra power had largely been eaten up by the weight gain: 0-100 remained a claimed 6.5 seconds (more like 6.9), and times over the standing-quarter hovered stubbornly around the 15-second mark (14.95 measured at one point), no better than the old VH "Brockmobile." In the brochure Holden also claimed the Walky would do a combined 9.2 litres per 100km – yeah right, on a long downhill, maybe. Call it 14.5, guys, and then we’ll talk.

All that said, there’s more to performance than volcanic power. HMS also spent a lot of time looking underneath Les Small's racing Commodores to see if there were any useful changes they could adopt, but in the end it was decided to leave the Group A's suspension unchanged from the previous model – meaning stiffer springs, stabiliser bars, and Bilstein gas-filled shocks all-round. They kept the previous car's 16x7 wheel dimensions, although they were not the Momo star pattern favoured by Brock, and fitted with sticky Bridgestone RE71 tyres. The drivetrain scored a higher-capacity clutch to handle the extra torque of the new engine, Borg Warner's excellent BT5G 5-speed manual gearbox, and the ever-reliable 3.08:1 final drive ratio with four-pinion limited-slip diff (made slightly more reliable by shot-peened gears). As long as it had some well-chosen ratios, the Walky felt fast and fun, able to outrun anything in those days that wasn't expensive and Italian. Compared to the wallowing donor car, which could spin an inside wheel even in the Maccas drive-thru, the Walky was a much tidier, more responsive beast. "Nor," promised the brochure, "is it spartan. This Group A is the most comfortably furnished ever, with luxury equipment such as power windows, power door locking, 4-speaker stereo AM/FM radio-cassette, air conditioning and a security system. Each car complies fully with Australian Design Rules, and carries a full Holden warranty."

Interior was functional but a bit bland, with none of the character of a Brock. (Source)

Despite that, it was still a difficult sell. After the spike of the early 1980s, petrol prices were now definitely coming down so there was a growing market for performance machines, but this one seemed especially hard to swallow. For starters, it was a Walkinshaw Commodore, not a Brock Commodore, and the price was almost as over the top as the gregarious bodykit, with an initial asking price of $47,000 (almost $100,000 in 2015). That really was ludicrously expensive for a Holden, beating the previous record-holder (the original VC-based Brock) by nearly twenty grand in contemporary dollars – and the VC had been an ultra-low volume special aimed at doctors and lawyers. When initial demand was strong, HSV made the mistake of adding another 250 units to their initial planned batch of 500, taking the total to a whopping 750. But the Walky, slated for release in November 1987, didn't actually enter production until 10 March 1988, with homologation not approved until 1 August. By then, the rival EA Falcon had arrived and made VL Commodores – all VL Commodores – look decidedly out-of-date. Everyone knew the next generation wasn't far off, and after the VN arrived in August, most of the second batch stayed on dealer forecourts (some of them for years) until sold cheap, or were even stripped of the bodykit and resprayed to hide the fact they were unsold Walkies. (Of course, since then they've become quite collectable, and the original, No.001 – which was given away as a prize at Bathurst later in the year – is now valued at up to $300,000!)

Early Days Are Always Strange
A bit off-topic, but it's so delightfully weird I just have to share. In the early days HSV had trouble getting enough cars together to satisfy their 50-plus dealers around the country – the fuel-injected V8 wasn't available for lesser models until April 1989. To fill the gap, HSV set about creating a more sedate Calais SV88 model, which was released in May 1988. Using the standard Calais V8 as a donor car, they added the last of the V8 carburettor parts originally intended for various Brock models, eking out just 136 kW, and then made it worse with a 3-speed Trimatic ("Traumatic") auto, the only driveline that was available. On the exterior, new front and rear spoilers were fitted, along with a louvered grille and a set of HSV alloys. The acres of fuzzy velour on the interior were too little to really justify a price tag above $40,000. Since it was aimed at the businessman in a hurry, it had Australia’s first onboard car phone and fax machine as a staggering $3,300 option. Only 150 were ever produced.

Later, HSV released their weakest and most hilarious offering, the SV1800, a rather tepid tweak on the LD Astra hatchback (which in itself was really an N13-series Nissan Pulsar). A part of the Button Plan jigsaw aimed at getting volumes of individual models above 40,000, the Astra/Pulsar had dropped in sedan and hatch versions in 1987, powered by Holden’s 1.8-litre Family Two engine, putting out a respectable 79 kW. There was no sports model in the lineup, leaving the door open for HSV to work its magic. Sort of. The engine wasn't touched, and instead the SV1800 came with a bodykit, new wheels, tweaked suspension and some stickers. That was all. 0-100 in 11.7 seconds and a 400-metre time of 17.5 was slower than the standard car, and a world away from the 9 seconds claimed by HSV. Braking was compromised by rear drums – unforgivable when the Pulsar came with discs as standard. In the end only 65 of the "Baby Walky" were produced before production ceased in early 1989, an obscure footnote in HSV's history.

Never mind that, what was the real thing like on the track?
As a racecar the Walky held a certain amount of promise. In race tune the V8's 180 kW would become more like 335, achieved at a bellowing 7,000rpm, roughly the limit of valve spring technology in those days (and as per the rules, its kerb weight would become a slightly lighter 1,325kg). Late in 1987 Larry Perkins and Allan Grice had started receiving support from HMS, part of the new branch's efforts to ensure privateers had access to all the latest homologation parts and data. John Lindell believed Perkins and other top Holden race teams such as Les Small's Roadways would ultimately develop their own fuel injection electronics using the Bosch/Delco system as a base. Privateers, however, would be able to buy a range of microchips from HMS which enabled them to tune the standard system to suit varying circuit, ambient temperature and altitude conditions. (This sort of thing, by the way, is why you still see so many more Commodores on the Supercars grid than Falcons – 8 to 14 at the moment, which is still more Blue Ovals than we’ve seen on the track in a long time. HMS will look after you, keep your team supplied with parts and technical data even if you're regularly finishing 22nd. By contrast, with Ford you're more or less on your own.)

But fuel injection fundamentally changed the character of the engine: the carburettor versions had bags of torque low down, but while the fuel injection gave it more top-end power, torque was not as much improved as it should have been. Peak power and peak torque were also felt to be too close together. That said, the V8 remained responsive to exhaust system modifications, so this was still an area where a privateer team, if prepared to do a little homework, could find some useful power gains. Race teams also typically used the Ford 9-inch diff (as used in Johnson's Sierras and Brock's Bathurst-winning VL the previous year) rather than Holden's LSD, because it was tough, inexpensive and ratios were easy to come by – and as long as it fit in the standard housing, the Group A rules said you were all good anyway.

Would a Walky have made a huge difference to Perkins' ATCC campaign? Doubtful. Would he have turned down the extra performance it offered? Also doubtful!

Chief among these teams would of course be the official factory squad. The name "Holden Racing Team" first appeared in 1988, but it wasn't the same entity as the later Lowndes/Skaife golden age. The task of setting up HSV was so vast it was too much to ask Tom to run a race team as well, so the job had been farmed out to Larry Perkins, who ran a single-car team for the 1988 championship. The car (chassis PE 004) ran a splendid but not classic red, white and black livery with "Special Vehicles" along the sides, but Perkins' own sponsor Castrol on the nose. Under the skin, this HRT was actually Perkins Engineering, who was contracted to build and run the cars for two years on behalf of HMS with a handful of people from HSV and TWR helping out. So although this was the "factory" team, Holden was really only on board as a sponsor.

The Walky made its race debut in Australia in September 1988 – unless it was in August, or possibly July, and not in Australia after all. Yeah, it's like that. Everyone remembers Sandown as its first dance, but I'm afraid the reality is messier and less patriotic than that. Ideally it would have made its debut in the hands of Perkins early in the 1988 ATCC, but it was delayed in the changeover from HDT to HSV. Instead, as recently recounted in Australian Muscle Car #102, the car made its world racing debut at Amaroo Park in early July.

(Source)

The word "car" is doing a lot of lifting there, however – it was a tube-framed Sports Sedan, not a Group A touring car, and it had started life as a Torana A9X. In the tail of 1987, owner-driver Bob Tindal had simply decided he wanted to upgrade and went with the upcoming Walkinshaw VL. A set of the fibreglass panels were "found" (ahem) and the team took moulds of them to make their own copycat panels (interestingly, the fibreglass originals were felt to be too heavy for a Sports Sedan), before Tindal returned them with sudden and suspicious haste. Where he borrowed them from has never been established, but we know that when the car was taken off the trailer for its first hit out at Amaroo Park, Round 3 of the Toledo Tools Sports Sedan Series, HSV's people went white and threatened to sue. Tindal called their bluff and raced anyway, preparing to argue that it was just coincidence and his car couldn't be a Walkinshaw because he'd never seen one, they hadn’t been released yet, and got lucky when their bluff really was just a bluff.

It's a good story, but a curious footnote rather than real history. The debut of the car proper, not just the panels, came on 21 August in Round 10 of the 1988 Dunlop British Touring Car Championship, held at Brands Hatch in Kent. At the wheel was BTCC regular Mike O'Brien, who'd been driving this particular ex-Allan Grice VL for Alan Docking Racing for several months now. (The forum experts reckon it was the VK Gricey had brought to Europe for the 1986 ETCC, but I disagree. I'm guessing it was the orange Bathurst car from 1987 – in a test drive, the Motor Sport writer expressed surprise over its power steering system, which also caught out Win Percy at Bathurst, and surely you wouldn't fit power assistance to a racecar on a whim, especially one destined for the sprint-based BTCC. The interior trim in the Motor Sport article looks more like Grice's '87 car than his '86 as well, but these things can be changed. And of course, I could just be wrong.)

(Source)

O'Brien had taken the car to many and varied – but never consistent – results, a pole at Oulton Park and a win at Snetterton rather offset by carburettor woes that refused to let the car run cleanly and cracked cylinder heads that led to frequent overheating. Upgrading to Walkinshaw spec was a welcome break, as was gaining full Autoglass sponsorship, who provided the rather attractive red-on-white #7 livery. With the upgrades O'Brien found an improvement of 2.2 seconds a lap compared to his previous visit in July, but such was the pace of development he was only one place further up the grid. He eventually steered it to 13th place, which was okay for a brand-new car but well off the pace of the dominant Sierras. What the car really needed, the Docking team decided, was a thorough testing and development programme, but that was something they were not in a position to undertake – literally, as their position was the U.K. Holden was fairly apathetic, and even the token assistance they got from Vauxhall apparently kicked up a fuss within GM. Go figure.

Tom Walkinshaw himself got to drive his new toy a week later at the Birmingham Superprix, Round 11 of the BTCC, on 29 August. His mount was TWR 022, the car he'd first raced as a normal VL at the Nürburgring WTCC round the previous year. Now it was upgraded to Walky spec (indeed, the photos pretty strongly hint it had been the prototype), still dressed in the same yellow-and-purple #12 Herbie Clips livery. The headline event at the Superprix was an open-wheel race, in this case for FIA International Formula 3000, but like our Gold Coast Indy the crowds were really there to see the tourers.

The new Commodore brought in plenty of excitement around the narrow turns of the street circuit especially with Walkinshaw behind the wheel. He did really well considering he took a year out earlier on and his Holden was missing fourth gear. Also he never used his Yokohama qualifiers so his 5th place on the grid was very impressive. – 8w, Birmingham Superprix – Britain's most controversial circuit?

Note that Walkinshaw only qualified the car: he never got to race it. Formula 3000 driver David Hunt (brother of James) lost control of his Lola at Loctite Turn and had, in his own words, "a monster shunt." The car tore right through the tyre barriers and punched a hole in the brick wall of a wholesaler; thankfully Hunt walked to the ambulance under his own power to be kept overnight with concussion (he remembered nothing of the day prior to being in hospital), but the car was carried away on two separate recovery vehicles. This, plus another shunt that triggered lengthy delays, ultimately saw the other two races including the BTCC round cancelled, as the organisers were legally obliged to return Birmingham’s streets to the public at 6pm. Still, 5th on the grid against Sierras, without sticky qualifying tyres and missing a gear? That was pretty solid verging on impressive.

Fast, narrow and dangerous: Birmingham had a few things in common with Bathurst. (Source)

On the same day (but slightly earlier thanks to timezones), the Walky made Australian racing debut in Oran Park's Pepsi 250 enduro. Unusually, there was only one Sierra on the grid, a new one dressed in the colours of Colin Bond's Caltex team. No longer leasing MM1, the ex-John Giddings car, this was a new one put together by Bondy himself, chassis CXT1. As a brand-new car it wasn't quite ready for the event, demonstrated by it failing with just 15 laps done, which couldn't have impressed co-driver Alan Jones much.

With none of the big Sierra teams fronting, the 100-lapper became a race between the Peter Brock/Jim Richards BMW M3, and the GTS-R Skyline driven by George Fury and the rising youngster Mark Skaife. In the event the Mobil team made their one pit stop and got the #05 M3 back on track quicker than the Gibson crew, and Skaife couldn't quite pedal the Skyline quickly enough to make up the difference. Peter Brock took the win, his first and only in the BMW, and his first on the road since Wellington 18 months earlier.

A race so minor, the only image I could find was a Pressreader sample of an AMC listicle.

Garry Willmington meanwhile shared his #50 Walky with John Leeson, qualifying only 14th and then suffering a DNF after just 4 laps. That the car could do a lot better, though, was revealed by its fastest race lap – 1:18.02, or more than six-and-a-half seconds faster than its qualifying time! That was a warning for the future if ever there was one, but few were there to see it – with the Australian Endurance/Manufacturers Championship not running this year, this was a minor, stand-alone event that had drawn a tiny 17-car grid and crowds to match.

Just five days later Tom got his second chance to drive the Walky in anger, this time in the RAC Tourist Trophy at Silverstone, Round 10 of the ETCC. His car was most likely TWR 022 once again, still in its Herbie Clips colours but this time with the #46 on the doors, because the ETCC of course was a different series. Tom and co-driver Jeff Allam qualified 9th but had a disappointing race, running behind most of the Sierras with the M3s to finish 15th overall. Walkinshaw found the Commodore's performance level to be about the same as the factory Nissan Skyline GTS-R, which was a pretty good sign considering it had about the same power, but was much heavier – clearly, that low-drag bodywork had done its job. With all the Sierras buzzing around they'd also set the tenth-fastest lap of the race, which was faster than all the BMWs and some of the Fords, but not the sort of thing you could spin to sponsors. Nevertheless, Tom must've felt at least somewhat confident: this was surely the car that would deliver him that longed-for Bathurst win.

(Source)

With that though, the foreplay was almost at an end. Next on the calendar was no standalone minnow, nor some exotic overseas venture, but a major local event sure to bring out the best in Australia – and perhaps more than just Australia. Next up was the Sandown 500.