And so the week of the Great Race arrived, fell into its comforting routine. The big pro teams held their usual extended test sessions (thinly disguised as promo and media days), even as more and more of the small-dollar privateer outfits started showing up. Although Australian motorsport was tilting more and more professional every year, racing at Bathurst was not yet out of the question for those with real jobs. As one anonymous team owner told in Auto Action magazine special, The Great Race:
In 1990, we ran a Commodore on $100,000. That included buying the car and most of the spares, and freshening up an engine. The co-driver came on board for Sandown and Bathurst and contributed 20 to 25 percent of the budget, and brought some pitlane equipment, and I think, wheels, with him. We had eight people in the team, none of them got paid, and we all lived in a house near the track for the week.
Admittedly that $100k becomes $197k when transmogrified to 2019 dollars, but the point stands; in 1990, the concept of an entire grid of drivers who'd never done anything for a living except drive racing cars was as unimaginable as... well, as the idea of a $10 million annual budget.
Grid Coordinates
The upshot was that the Bathurst entry list was as jam-packed as Sandown's had been lean. And, as had become a feature of the Australian scene, most of these entries were crammed in with the big boys of Class A: forty-two of the fifty-three eventual starters were in the outright class, leaving just eleven divided between the Goldilocks and Tiddler classes.
[So, just to get them out of the way: Class C was once again Formula Corolla, with eight of them split between the works team's AE92 hatchbacks, a group of privateer AE86 coupés, and a lone FX-GT. Class B meanwhile was down to just three entries – three! – one of which was the dreadfully slow Bolwell-Twigden BMW 323i, so count it out. That left the class a straight fight between the #54 Bryce Racing BMW M3 of Brett Riley (and a name later famous for his achievements in German cars, Craig Baird), and the #51 Monroe Mercedes 190E of Phil Ward & John Goss – the same one that had been showing up every year since 1987. What had happened to the JPS team cars in the last couple of years, I don't know for a fact, but given the team's association with Trevor Crowe I'd guess they ended up sold into New Zealand. Anyone know for sure?]
So that left the race firmly the province of the outright class, for cars with engines above 2,500cc, according to FISA's increasingly irrelevant turbo equivalence formula. On the day that meant twenty-one Holden Commodores, sixteen Ford Sierras, three Nissan Skylines and two oddballs – the MA70 Supra Turbo of Toyota Team Australia (drivers: John Smith & Peter McKay, who would also do time in the commentary box), and the badly outdated BMW 635 CSi of the Gulsons, father Ray and son Graham. This car had been excluded on FISA's 110% qualifying rule in 1988, so that it was allowed to start this year spoke of the ARDC being more malleable than FISA, a grid that was in need of fillers, or both.
The darling of the event was unquestionably the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R of Gibson Motorsport, with their gun driver pairing of Jim Richards & Mark Skaife. Most of the pre-race gossip (and odds tabulation among scowling bookies) had centred around this car as fans, commentators and not a few team bosses tried to calculate where its ridiculous speed zero-summed with the likelihood of it exploding before the second hour. Given the car had proven a bit of a glass cannon, a few since have wondered why Gibson hadn't brought along one of their old HR31s as a backup – after all, that car had finished 3-4 last year, out-performing all but the winning DJR Sierras. Well, Fred Gibson has explained why in the current (at time of writing) issue of Australian Muscle Car, which naturally includes a deep dive into this remarkable race.
We simply had to take the GT-R. Nissan had committed to running the GT-R and we were over-budget well before we got to Bathurst.
You try explaining to the heavies at Nissan that the GT-R was not ready to win Bathurst. They'd quite rightfully ask, "What do you mean it's not ready? You just asked for X amount of dollars and it's not ready?"
Going to Bathurst with two different cars would have been a lot of work, given the limited resources we had. We had to work our tails off to get the GT-R to Bathurst that year because it was plagued with that many dramas it wasn't funny. ... We were running late and the only option was to go with one car. – Fred Gibson, AMC #119
So their only backstop, if you could call them that, was to come from a pair of privateer entries. The first were another father-and-son pairing, Alf Grant having a steer with his son Tim in a green #2 GTS-R backed by chain restaurant Sizzler. I hadn't realised Sizzler had been in Australia that long, to be honest, but at the time it seems they were on the rise, with the 1990s being the peak of their business. The other Nissan in the race belonged to our old friend Chris Lambden, once more taking his #23 Beaurepaires GTS-R out for a hit with co-driver Greg Crick. Both were ex-Gibson cars, obviously, but the opaqueness of Gibson's chassis management makes it difficult to be sure whose cars were whose. The broadcast mentioned that the Sizzler car was Mark Skaife's 1989 car, but actual chassis numbers? Forget it.
In truth, though, no-one would put serious money on an unknown quantity like the Nissan. Instead, the smart money was riding on the veritable fleet of Fords, the car that had won the race for the last two years running (three, if you counted 1987). This year there were sixteen of them, about half of whom had also been at Sandown, starting with Peter Brock's Mobil team and chassis AR1. They were a bit of a ramshackle outfit by this stage (and doubly so for the #6 Andrew Miedecke/Charlie O'Brien car), but you could never discount Brocky at the Mountain. He had Andy Rouse on hand to co-drive for him once again and, continuing a tumultuous relationship with Australia, the Englander crashed spectacularly in practice when he tripped over Matt Wacker in Murray Carter's #14 Sierra, careering on two wheels into the fence at the Dipper. Moffat, Johnson, Brock, Eggenberger and now Carter – he really was making Ford Bingo his life's work, wasn't he?
Another in the Ford ranks was Kevin Waldock's #28 Playscape Sierra, as seen in pretty much every round of the championship this year. The clues to this car's identity were buried in my notes years ago and only rediscovered this very month, which serves me right for not covering 1989 in any detail. Turns out Waldock was actually the entrepreneur behind Blast Dynamics, the explosives company that had sponsored Andrew Miedecke's car in 1988. Come 1989, Waldock decided this racing thing looked like fun and he wanted a go himself, contracting Miedecke Motorsport to build him a car – MM5 – which Miedecke shortly took back after he obliterated his own MM4 in that infamous Lakeside ATCC crash in April. To make good on the contract, Miedecke built Waldock a new car – MM6 – a straight Rouse kit-car which debuted at the Oran Park finale in July. Once Miedecke shut down his team and moved over to join Peter Brock for 1990, the simplest thing for Waldock to do was found his own team on the Gold Coast using former Miedecke personnel, including Kiwi whiz-kids Ross and Jimmy Stone on the spanners.
This arrangement, I think, explains the "teammates" listing on the Wikipedia page for the #38 Andrew Bagnall car, chassis MM3, which had spent the last twelve months mothballed as Bagnall stayed out of the ATCC. The very 90's-looking livery came courtesy of carryover sponsor Gullivers Travels, plus New Zealand's TV3, with co-driving from 1986 Australian touring car champion Robbie Francevic and car prep by the Stone Brothers – an all-Kiwi lineup. Thus, it seems the Playscape and Gulliver's Travels cars weren't really "teammates" so much as, "out of the same workshop".
After years of collaboration, Francevic's old team owner Mark Petch had opted for a clean sheet this year, entrusting his entry to an all-international driver pairing – Italian star Gianfranco Brancatelli, and new BTCC champion Robb Gravett. If the car looked familiar in its #40 Whittaker's Peanut Slab livery, that's because it was the same ex-Wolf Racing car (chassis MPM1) Petch had been campaigning for the last two years. As a sweetener, though, Gravett had brought along his winning Mountune engines into the bargain: definitely a car to watch.
Colin Bond had his #8 Caltex car (CXT1), but very little chance of using his trick tyre setup at a race this important. Ray Lintott had his Valvoline car, DJR3, shared with highly successful sprintcar driver Garry Rush. Murray Carter still had his #14 Sierra, MC1, with the aforementioned Matt Wacker. And Glenn Seton Racing had poached Andy Rouse's usual co-driver, David Sears, to share the #35 Peter Jackson entry with Glenn himself. Sears had driven Tom Walkinsaw's Jags in the ETCC back in the day, and had since gone to Group C sportscars with some success (including 3rd in that year's Le Mans 24-Hour), so he was no mean steerer. But he'd have to be in a team that had put the Senna-esque talent of George Fury into his own #35, with help from the consummate professional Drew Price. Having won Sandown a month earlier the Seton team arrived with a skip in their step, but in the event proved only the best-funded (and fastest) of these Sierra mid-pack runners.
So the pointy end once more came down to six cars: red, white and yellow. The two Johnson cars were the #18 for Jeff Allam & Paul Radisich, chassis DJR5, while Dick and Bowe had #17, DJR6, the newest and last of Johnson's cars built new for Bathurst; both were built to the same spec for this race, meaning both were capable of winning.
And of course, there was Allan Moffat Racing, once again functioning as the local branch of Eggenberger Motorsport, with support from Rudi Eggenberger himself and his star driver, Klaus Niedzwiedz. In fact, Rudi had brought along an all-German lineup, planning to put Frank Biela alongside Niedzwiedz and push the Australians out of the crucial #10 ANZ Sierra completely. Latter-day F1 Safety Car driver Bernd Schneider was also to have made an appearance for Moffat, but was called back to drive an Arrows A11B in the Spanish GP at Jerez instead – so late that Channel Seven didn't have time to re-edit their pre-race driver intros. His place was taken by Belgian journalist and Eggenberger regular Pierre Dieudonné, who flew out from Europe at the last minute.
Allan had entered himself in both cars, but it was a formality only. Nobody yet realised Allan Moffat was already a retired racing driver.
After the Fuji retirement decision, armed with both Will Bailey's imprimatur and the still-enthusiastic support of Rudi Eggenberger and his team, I determined that I would make one race my goal. There would be no touring-car championship contested, no Sandown 500 – just Bathurst. [sic: the #9 had made appearances at both Sandown and Phillip Island!]
One roll of the dice. Bet it all on the black.
I ran Klaus Niedzwiedz and Frank Biela in the lead car and Pierre Dieudonné and Gregg Hansford in the second. Although I had no intention of competing, I cross-entered myself in both cars.
On the Thursday I suited up and took both cars for a sighting lap. No-one knew my intention, not even Rudi. I remember it as surreal, an out-of-body experience. At the time it was just another lap: total concentration, feeling out the car, looking for strengths and weaknesses, always respecting the track, knowing that this was Thursday and it was too early to take a risk.
That night, alone, I played the laps back in my head. It was like I was hovering above each car, critiquing my own performance. I knew I'd driven Bathurst for the last time in a race car, and I was okay with that. Better to go out when you're near the top than to emerge bloodied and bruised from a career in decline. There's still, though, an emptiness in your gut.
"On Thursday Moffat set off on a few last laps of the Mountain in each of his immaculate white Sierras. As nobody else realised the significance of this occasion, he was left alone to his reflections and memories.
"It was a quiet, unheralded conclusion to a magnificently obsessional and successful driving career."
That was the only epitaph ever written about my retirement. The words were those of Bill Tuckey, the now-deceased doyen of gonzo motoring journalism in his coverage of the 1990 Bathurst 1000. I couldn't have asked for more. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain
And the Commodores? Well, believe it or not, one of them was wearing a strikingly similar livery to the Seton Fords! The #3 Peter Jackson "Search for a Champion" Walky was there specifically to give a chance to young up-and-comers Peter Gazzard and Rick Bates, who'd been selected for the job by a committee of established drivers including Jim Richards and Allan Grice. (As a side note, Rick Bates' twin brother Neal was also in the race, down to drive the works #71 Toyota Corolla AE92. With John Faulkner, no less.)
It wouldn't be a NSW event without the Lansvale Smash Repairs team: Trevor Ashby & Steve Reed were now running PE 004 as the #4, a Perkins car that was now onto its third owner in as many years. The car had been run by Larry himself in HSV colours back in 1988, been the "2" of the HSV 1-2 in Adelaide that year, and thence gone to Llynden Reithmuller for 1989. Now it was the Lansvale team's new Walky; a busy career. Incidentally, the "1" of that 1-2, chassis PE 005, was also in the race as the #33 Pro-Duct Walky, racing in the hands of Bob Pearson & Bruce Stewart.
Perkins himself however was racing a new car built just for the enduros, PE 010, but apart from the "Castrol" logo on the nose it was rather bereft of sponsorship. Sad fact was, "Perkins Engineering" on both doors was the largest logo on the whole car. Larry this year might've been a highly experienced privateer, a privateer with unusual insight into how to get the most out of a Commodore and a lot of contacts behind the scenes at Holden, but a privateer nevertheless. No wonder he had to keep selling hardware.
Mind you, some were even less well-off: Brian Callaghan's son, Brian Callaghan, was set to drive the #43 Mobile Concrete Pumping VL Commodore with John Gerwald and another name from a later era, Jason Bargwanna. This car was just an '87-spec VL Commodore, not even a Walky, meaning it was going to run, well, like it was carrying a load of concrete. Callaghan Sr and fellow speedway star Barry Graham had seemingly put the team's budget into the #32, which did feature the Walkinshaw body panels and fuel-injected engine. And Bill O'Brien, as was his custom, was teaming up with 1975 co-winner Brian Sampson in his powder-blue Everlast Batteries Walky, chassis PE 003. More about them at the end of the race.
Despite two uninspiring years, Bob Forbes Racing had expanded to two cars with a pair of cherry-red Walkies backed by insurance giant GIO. This team was something of an open-wheel fraternity: for the #21, Forbes maintained the young'un Mark Gibbs paired with last year's Formula Holden champion, Rohan Onslow. For the #13 however he teamed the vastly experienced Kevin Bartlett with a Great Race debutante who'd just won the Australian Formula Ford championship: Russell Ingall.
I thought I'd try to help some young guys. Denys Gillespie put me on to Mark Gibbs. Denys worked at Suttons Chullora; I think he must have known him from dealer sponsorship of Gibbs' production car.
Ingall was a friend of Steve Knott, who was doing his Formula Ford engines, and Steve said to me, "Why don't you give Russell a go in the touring car?" So I did. That was his first Bathurst, but he was good.
They'd resurfaced the track that year. During practice, he came in and said, "This thing's not right; it's lifting wheels here" and so on. We were running it with the setup from the previous year, when the car was sliding around more – there must have been more friction on the track with the new surface. So Russell knew what he was doing, and really helped with the set-up of the car even though he had no experience driving a touring car. – Bob Forbes, AMC #96
Then there was the factory Holden team, Win Percy's HRT. Required to run two cars at this, the biggest dance of the year, they'd coughed up a second car simply by turning around the ex-Perkins car Win had been driving through the ATCC. This car, PE 008, they'd then put in the hands of the youngsters Neil Crompton and Brad Jones. Crompton was known quantity from the Perkins/HSV days, but Jones had got the drive by cornering Tom Walkinshaw himself in the lift down to breakfast in Macau. "I took the lift up and down for 30 minutes waiting for an opportunity," he said. "Then he came in and said, 'Morning,' and I said, 'Morning' and I couldn't believe I'd blown it. He was not an easy guy." But Brad unquestionably deserved the seat, having spent 1990 doing what the Holden Racing Team had not – winning races and championships in the Commodore. After some exploratory seasons at the Thunderdome, Brad had put his foot down to win the AUSCAR title over the summer of 1989/'90 (round wins coming on 15 October '89 and 27 January '90), and two weeks after Bathurst he was due to have his first race in the VN, several months ahead of HRT.
No question, Brad Jones had generated more positive press for Holden this year than Win Percy, let alone his old fart of a co-driver, Allan Grice. And as for their car, the #16 in the iconic black-and-white "lion" livery? That was Tom Walkinshaw's own car, TWR 023, abandoned in Australia after that disastrous 1988 campaign that had seen it drop out with broken suspension within five laps. It had been sitting in the corner of the HRT workshop for the last two years because no-one wanted to touch it, just in case it was cursed. If you wanted to put money down on this car, sorry but you couldn't: they were running at literally unbackable odds. But then again, why would you risk your hard-earned on such an entry? They obviously weren't going to win.
Tooheys Top Ten
If Nissan had expected to take pole position with their new car, they were disabused very quickly: 11th-fastest in regular qualifying meant they'd miss the shootout altogether, and a spin in practice indicated the drivers were still coming to grips with the new car on this undulating and unforgiving circuit.
Instead, the shock of Friday's qualifying session came from the yellow Benson & Hedges Sierras of Tony Longhurst Racing. Tony himself was at the helm of the newest of the team's cars, TLR5 (identifiable by its yellow roll cage) with the #25 on its doors, to share with Formula Holden racer and sometime engine-builder Mark McLaughlin (no relation to the three-time Supercars champ turned IndyCar racer). Alan Jones, teamed with fellow F1 World Champion Denny Hulme, got either TLR3 or TLR4 (black cages) as the #20, meaning it's essentially impossible to be sure which exact car they had. Either way, in practice Tony absolutely set the crowd alight when he set a scorching 295km/h trap speed down Conrod and then unoffically broke the lap record. The lap was timed at 2:13.84, 0.01 seconds faster than George Fury's time in the turbocharged Nissan Bluebird back in 1984 – despite tyres that were half the size of the Bluebird's steamrollers, and despite the extra distance added by the Chase! The difference the new car made seemed to be negligible, however, as Alan Jones came along later in the session and equalled that time in the older car, down to the last hundredth of a second!
The bookies shortened the odds on Longhurst for Saturday, but Friday's fireworks were nowhere to be seen come the Tooheys Top Ten. As the slowest of the ten, Allan Grice was first up in the #16 HRT Commodore, and set a 2:16.17 – a solid lap given the car, but even so he sounded disappointed with it:
Just wasn't quite right as I came out of The Cutting and went for the right-hander as well. But, um... it's done now, just not good enough.
Brancatelli in the Mountune-engined Peanut Slab Sierra was next, but an eventual 2:22 was well short of what everyone had been expecting from the car. Gregg Hansford's #9 ANZ Sierra had been sent out with a full race setup on, so his 2:17.97 was actually a very good effort. Klaus Niedzwiedz had no such issues, however, putting in his usual phenomenal shootout lap to clock up a 2:13.94 – barely a tenth behind the Longhurst's new record, but fast enough for provisional pole.
Ze Germans had laid down a marker for the session, and it was going to be an uphill fight for anyone to match it. Perkins in his white #11 Walky gave it everything, hanging out the tail and generally throwing it around, but even so came out slower than Friday. Brock in his #05 Mobil Sierra was of course tidy yet spectacular, the car both nervous as hell and completely under control as he three-wheeled it through Reid Park and McPhillamy. Fireworks aside though, 2:14.71 was almost exactly the same as he'd set on Friday, though of course it could've been faster.
Actually I missed a couple of gears, I went into fourth instead of second up there before, and I thought maybe it cost me a little bit. But I... it was a pretty good lap.
Seton in the #35 Peter Jackson Sierra set a 2:15.77 to put him on the second row alongside Brock, then along came hot favourite Dick Johnson, who in his #17 Shell Sierra cut a 2:14.17 to be nearly a tenth quicker than on Friday. Even so, he was disappointed.
Aw, felt alright but... wish it had the grunt it had yesterday, I tell ya.
Then came the laps everyone had been waiting for, those of the B&H team. In the #20 Alan Jones roared up the Mountain ready to set the place alight, only to encounter a gearbox problem coming out of The Cutting. That little hiccough bumped him from an easy front row start to row five.
Longhurst in the #25 might've expected to rectify that for his team, but the lap just never came. After a run that didn't look like anything special, barring a violent kerb-hop on the entry to Caltex Chase, the stopwatch told the story – 2:16.01, slower than yesterday, and slower than Klaus Niedzwiedz, who took the $15,000 cheque for pole home to Moffat.
...Klaus put the ANZ Sierra on pole with a spectacularly brave and forceful lap. When it came to a hot lap in a Sierra, you couldn't be smooth and sympathetic. Brutality was the only requisite. At 39 years of age and on top of his game, Klaus delivered. His teammates were 8th. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain
I find it interesting that both Longhurst and Johnson suffered slow times or complained about a lack of power in the Top Ten, because they were the two teams that'd had fuel advantages for the last two years. I've been informed that Bathurst actually provided control fuel to the teams for the race, so it sounds to me like their ARDC's own fuel became mandatory on the Saturday: that would explain why Johnson especially could lose so much grunt in only 18 hours. No matter, the grid was now locked in, with Klaus Niedzwiedz occupying more poles than any German since 1945, and Dick Johnson set to start alongside him on the front row. The following morning, Dick's #17 won Dulux's "Best Presented Car" award and a sizeable cheque; both these things had happened last year, so the Johnson team must have been crossing their fingers that it was an omen.
One of the benefits of buying the DVD is getting to see all the pre-race razzamatazz and, maybe, some otherwise-obscure piece of racing trivia. One of these was a short Group E Production Car race held on Sunday morning before the main event – somewhat ironic when this brand of racing is what had made Bathurst in the first place, but a chance to compare the recent past with the distant.
Pole for the Group E race belonged to Tony Scott in the #6 Bridgestone VN Commodore, with a brisk 2:50.10 lap. Compare that to Allan Moffat's 1970 pole time of 2:49.3, and it might seem that wasn't much progress for twenty years... except Moffat's Phase II Falcon had 5.8 litres of engine under the bonnet, not 3.8! If I had to guess, I'd say those old muscle cars were faster heading up the Mountain than their modern counterparts, but slower across the top as the (slightly) better suspension and two more decades of tyre development played their part. Down Conrod it was probably a wash, the lesser power of the six-cylinders matched to much better aero than the old, squared-off beasts.
Some familiar names in Group E included Steve Masterton, who'd last raced in Group A in 1985 but had been forced to drop out as his father's home-building business took a big hit in the mid-1980s recession: Production Cars were a lot cheaper to run. Newly-crowned series champ Kent Youlden should also be familiar to V8 Supercar fans – his son Luke co-drove with Ricky Bobby David Reynolds to their fabulous 2017 Bathurst victory.
We had a great year, won the Production Car championship, the Yokahama Series, we won the Goodyear Cup at the Grand Prix and we won the Yokahama 300 at Winton by nearly two laps.
We had a great year, then we backed it up again in 1991; back-to-back titles were terrific. – Kent Youlden, Speedcafe
Even so, they were rather slow and lumbering beasts, not really recognisable as racing cars to modern eyes. So once the Production Cars had had their moment, the tension started to build. The real thing was now less than an hour away. Bathurst 1990 was about to begin.
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