23 June: A Year of Godzilla

The next race with full YouTube footage important race was Round 7 of the championship at Mallala, north of Adelaide in South Australia. It was a weekend where the headline was politics, and if you're the tinfoil-headgear type, a race where the outcome was determined before the race even started.

Sniping Across No-Man's Land
Mallala saw a return to tiny grids, with just twelve cars able to make the trip across to the Adelaide Plain. The only reason we talk about Wanneroo and not Mallala when discussing sparse grids was because Mallala featured John Vernon in Peter Verheyen's Toyota Corolla GT AE86... although the word "featured" is doing a lot of work there; he was getting seat time, nothing more. "Quality rather than quantity" was Channel Seven commentator Mike Raymond's take on the situation, an attempt at positive spin that could've turned an electron into a positron, but later in the broadcast even he had to admit the grids this year badly needed filling up.

Source

On the other hand, Mallala had been resurfaced since last year, which was a nice upgrade all-round. A lot of the bumps had been smoothed and a couple of corners had been tidied up, and in the commentary box Neil Crompton pointed out that where last year there'd been a certain amount of off-roading and corner-cutting, this year there were proper kerbs in place to define it all a bit better. Overall it was a nice quality-of-life improvement, and the drivers enjoyed their track time a whole lot more.

Pairing nicely with the new tarmac were some new tyres. All three of the tyre giants supplying the series were now firmly into the "experimental compounds ahead of Bathurst" phase, with Bridgestone having given Brock new rubber to qualify on and Dunlop doing the same for Dick Johnson, as noted, since the Amaroo round. Now Yokohama joined the party as well, with Longhurst revealing he too had some softer tyres for this weekend. And if Longhurst had them, you could bet the Nissan team had them as well, which brings us neatly to the question of politics.

Early June saw a CAMS motor racing commission airing various options to slow down the GT-R for 1992 and bring it back to some sort of parity with the rest of the field. Among the ideas floated were forcing the cars to run in rear-wheel drive only; putting air restrictors in front of the turbos like contemporary WRC cars; or reducing tyre width so the GT-R was limited to the same amount of driven rubber on the road as a rear-drive car in the same tier – which would've meant 5½-inch pizza-cutters on all four corners!

According to reports at the time, Gibson did actually test some of these options. At the time, the World Rally Championship was also run on the Group A rulebook, but with 40mm air restrictors in place to limit the amount of air getting into the turbo and so limit engine power. So far they'd proven very successful (the infamous Celica cheat was still a couple of years away), and at Wanneroo such air restrictors had allegedly been in place for the qualifying, but not the race, contributing to that Johnson/Percy front row. They also tested the car in RWD-only mode with the front drive shafts removed, which they found added two whole seconds to their lap times at Winton.

Unsurprisingly though, Gibson Motorsport and Nissan Australia threatened CAMS with legal action if they tried to make any of this stuff mandatory, Fred Gibson pointing out the cars were built to meet the rules and that his team shouldn't be penalised for doing a good job. CAMS asked Gibson to come up with a counter-proposal of their own if they were so smart, but if the team did so they dragged their feet about it. Why would they – why should they – slow down their own car? After a multi-million dollar investment in the GT-R (to say nothing of the investment of head office in Japan), one could argue the team and company deserved to win a couple of championships, but that was a rather myopic view of things. The reality was that nobody, not even Gibson, could ignore the harsh economic reality of 1991 forever, and getting the economics right would mean at least paying lip service to the question of entertainment. Sorting this out would ultimately mean considering the question of the ATCC as a sport versus the ATCC as a TV show, and coming down on one side or the other. This wasn't over.

Nor, for that matter, was the question of drivers. It was common knowledge by this point that Win Percy, both lead driver and boss hog of the Holden Racing Team, would be quitting Australia and returning to the U.K. at the end of the year. He'd only taken the HRT job in the first place because it was supposed to be a one-year gig – it was no part of his plans to drop out of the European scene for too long and be forgotten – and this second year was a product of enthusiasm following that unexpected Bathurst win more than clear-sighted career planning. But 1991 was proving hard going, with the VN Commodore not really turning out to be any faster than the old VL, so Percy was starting to pack his bags and keep one eye on the exit. That meant there would shortly be a full-time, fully-paid race seat opening up with the factory team of one of Australia's premier car-makers. And the name everyone seemed to be connecting with that seat next year was Jim Richards.

The rumour wasn't without foundation. Although blessed with a million-dollar budget that was the envy of teams at the time (hell, adjusted for inflation, a lot of teams today), Gibson Motorsport was not exactly flush with cash. What was enough to build the fastest Sierras on earth was barely adequate to run a pair of Nissan GT-Rs, and there was no guarantee the current dominance would be able to continue next year. Nissan Australia was sinking fast and the cost of the race programme was a tempting shoot for the bean-counters always looking for something to prune. If the budget from Nissan was cut, Gibson would have to revert to just a single car for 1992, and that single driver would probably have to take a pay cut. Mark Skaife, a young and cheap driver who did the bulk of the testing, fulfilled multiple roles in the workshop and ran a road car business on the side to pay for his Formula Holden activities, was a near-perfect fit for such a role. For a driver starting to get into the "retirement planning" phase of his career, however, a salary probably meant more than a fast car. For Jim Richards, the HRT gig was surely a temptation.

The problem for Gibson was, how do you go sponsor-shopping when you've just lost your star driver? A bit hard to promise them the world and convince them to put up the big bucks when it's all going to be riding on a driver not much better than a rookie, with only a single win to his name. The way you squared that circle, I think, was to make that rookie the 1991 Australian Touring Car Champion. Sure Richo, you go to Holden if you want to, mate, but leave the #1 decal at the door on the way out. That'll be on Skaifey's ride for 1992, thankyou very much.

So it was that when the Gibson team unloaded their cars for the weekend, the faster of them – almost certainly GMS GT-R 3, which had been Richo's ride all year – suddenly had Skaife's name under the wing mirror. Richards had been palmed off with the older and slower GMS GT-R 2. Officially, this was for testing and setup purposes ahead of Bathurst, but that only makes a marginal kind of sense – any kind of experimental part was going to be on Mark's car first, because he was the superior test driver (as Jim readily admitted) and was not the team's championship contender. Maybe they wanted Mark to race their prime car on the new Yokohamas to gauge their effectiveness, but I really don't see a reason they needed to do that at a race weekend and not, you know, a tyre test. A few like to see this move as Fred putting Richards in his place, but Fred doesn't strike me as that kind of petty – hard-nosed and ruthless in the mold of Frank Williams, maybe, but not petty. No, I'm putting my money down on it being Fred's way of throwing the championship to Skaife, ensuring his team would keep the reigning Australian Touring Car Champion for the difficult negotiation season ahead. After all, with 92 points to Richards' 110, with a maximum of 60 still on offer, Skaife was still eminently capable of taking this championship.

Either way, these shenanigans basically decided the race.

You Know How It Goes, Sing Along...
It was gusty and overcast on race day, with a touch of rain only fifteen minutes before the start. For once though, the cars starting near the back weren't praying for rain – the 4WD Nissans would only have gained even more of a traction advantage in the wet, so there were a few sighs of relief when the track dried out before the starting gun and we were set for only a standard massacre after all.

Would it be redundant at this point to say when the flag dropped, Skaife took off like a slingshot and was never headed again? Well, when the flag dropped Skaife took off like a slingshot and was never headed again. He simply drove off into the distance leaving Seton, Percy and Bowe to crowd three-wide into that first turn – setting up that classic photo I've used as the page image above. By the fifth lap, the GT-Rs were lapping one second quicker than any other car in the field, and by lap 20 the gap from Richards to the pursuing Glenn Seton was the full length of the back straight. By mid-race, Skaife had a yawning 8.7-second gap over Richards, who in turn had another 15.6 seconds in hand over Seton. Once again, the race was over; now we just needed to complete the 50 minutes.

Seton was best of the rest in 3rd, heading up a train of two Commodores (Percy ahead of Brock), then the two Shell Sierras (Bowe ahead of Johnson). The duel between Percy and Seton was intense but not flashy, as Seton would open up a gap any time they hit the straight and he put 410 kW to the ground – only to lose it again when they hit the next braking zone, the Holden Racing Team having held on to their Bathurst-winning carbon metallic brake pads.

Alan Jones had an interesting weekend: he tried to qualify with a light fuel load and ran dry on his hotlap, failing to set a time and thus forcing him to start dead last. Then late in the race he lost a valve spring and his engine started missing at the top end. One wonders why a known diva like Jonesy was putting up with this...

But that was about the only source of entertainment in the piece, as the first half of the race was all very follow-the-leader – were it not for the crowd you could've mistaken the round for a track day, with a handful of drivers just going around and around. It was only in the second half, once tyres started to kill off the pace, Tony Longhurst started to come into his own. Tony admitted to the commentary team after that his biggest problem this weekend was getting sufficient heat into the tyres, which must have broken the hearts of the Holden and Ford teams when they heard it. In an age when the Sierras and Commodores were switching to ever-harder rubber trying to stop them melting too soon, the BMWs were having to fit softer rubber than expected to try and switch theirs on!

Either way, the first victim in his sights was Dick Johnson. Anywhere the road straightened Dick powered away, but as soon as they jumped to the brake pedal Tony was all over him again, worrying him left and right, the little yellow car sniffing for a way through. We never actually got to see the move, sadly – another Channel Seven ad break, no doubt – but by the time they dialled up Skaife for a mid-race talk, he was past both Johnson and Bowe and hunting down Brock for 5th.

Brocky put up some resistance, but not much. Tony simply out-braked him into the Northern Hairpin, running smoothly up the inside and see ya later. Next on the agenda was Win Percy, and it only took a couple of laps as like Peter, Winston didn't fight much: they all knew how the M3 worked by now. Up the inside at the Northern Hairpin again, and Tony was through. Next up, Seton.

Young Glenn had been suffering fading brakes for a few laps now, as evidenced by a late-race lock-up that the cameras barely caught. Nevertheless it was Seton who was Tony's most impressive overtake that day: got a nose up through the right-hander at the end of the Penfolds straight and got alongside, then held it through the following left-hander knowing it would be immediately followed by another right-hander onto the start/finish straight. Seton didn't give ground lightly and the scrap slowed them enough for Percy to close back up again, the three of them engaged in a brief three-way skirmish. But in the end, Tony kept the place. In the latter half of the race, he'd risen from 8th to 3rd purely on merit, with a series of solid passes on hard-nut racers – but there was no way he was going to catch the GT-Rs today. 3rd would have to do.

The following duel between Percy and Seton was almost as good: the Sierra's brakes might've been shot, but there was nothing wrong with the Commodore's. Daringly, Win committed to the outside move into the Northern Hairpin, knowing it would give him the inside through the sweeping left-turning Repco Corner that followed. It was a brave gamble to commit to standing hard on the throttle for that section, knowing his Holden V8 would have to match the turbocharged muscle of the Cozza, but Winston was a wise old head and knew if he could edge Seton onto the marbles the Ford driver would be the one to run out of grip. Sure enough, Winny hung Seton out to dry and, power deficit or not, decisively took the place. He'd been ruthless though, forcing Seton over the kerbs at the apex of the Hairpin to compromise his launch onto the straight, and he also gave Seto a little nose shave at the highest-G part of Repco Corner. Racers gotta race, and in the end they saved the event from being almost terminally dull. As Mark Oastler admitted, this was what Group A was supposed to be about – multiple cars of very different types and makes all battling it out. It was just a shame we hadn't seen more of it this year, and that it was happening so far down the order...

Mallala?

Inevitably, Skaife crossed the finish line and greeted the chequered flag, winning by 16.8 seconds over Richards, who was only 2 seconds ahead of Longhurst by the finish. They'd eked 41 laps out of the alotted 50 minutes, with fastest-lap honours going to Skaife thanks to a 1:09.48. Pole, fastest lap and the win after leading every lap – job done, I'd say. Was it all his own work, though, or a gift from his team boss? You be the judge. He had the faster car and the softer tyres, that much we know for sure...

Neil Crompton in fact stuck his head through the noose and asked Richards whether Skaife had a better car today, but the New Zealander maintained a truly impressive poker face: "No, he just drove better on the day," he said. "I couldn't do anything about it, and I slowly drifted back into Tony's clutches." "I think it's a good birthday present for the car," said a happy but tired-sounding Skaife. Even for these ultra-fit specimens, an hour running flat out could be quite a strain.

His comment raised a good point, however: having debuted at this race in 1990, the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R was now a year old. As the car blew out its first candle, it wasn't a bad idea to consider that in 1990 it had emerged from its first qualy session in 3rd place with a time of 1:10.89; a year later, it was pole with a 1:08.98. Who says there’s no such thing as progress? But it was clear, with that kind of development rate, the sport would have to do something radical to rebalance the scales, and soon.