Telling the story of the 1991 Tooheys 1000 is a bit like 1989 – a bit of a challenge, because right from the start, everyone knew who was going to win. The Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R had always been fast, but after clobbering the ATCC and then lifting the Sandown 500, it was now a proven product over a distance as well. The difference is, for Dick Johnson's awesome victory of 1989, you could fill up the page with the woes of all the other teams, as their various breakdowns and misfortunes brought drama aplenty. That won't work this time. With three works Nissans on the grid, it was as obvious as a fart in a diving bell that every other team could put together a perfect run and still expect to finish no better than 4th. So there was no doubt in anyone's mind that Godzilla was going to win this year; it was only a question of by how much.
Back In Black: The Tooheys Giveaway Commodores
Holden's malaise for the Group A era had been that they spent the entire period at least a year behind schedule: Peter Brock racing at Bathurst '85 in a virtual road car; the Blue Meanie not arriving until 1986; the VL Walkinshaw not showing up until 1988, and so on. But in 1991, it reached a new level of absurdity: it was bad enough that for the majority of its life, the VN Commodore had been represented on-track by the older Walky, but by the time the VN entered its first Mountain classic it had actually ceased production – September '91 had seen the Elizabeth plant switch over to the updated VP model instead. The necessary 500 VN SS Group As had not yet been built, and indeed never would be, as they would soon be surplus to requirements.
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Most of those VN homologation cars had come in that horrible Durif Red colour, but at least two came in the colour they should've been all along – black. They were not for sale in that hue, but instead were prizes waiting to be won at the Great Race itself, the famous Tooheys giveaway cars: Unique Cars' Scott Murray tells it best.
Great Race sponsors Tooheys were all over it. Not only did they supply neck-oil in quantities today's race goers can barely remember, they ran a coupon competition on Tooheys Draught slabs. Not for tacky Chinese-made lanyards or bobble-head dolls, but for some serious HSV metal (and plastic). "Win a unique 'Group A' V8 and one for your mate", read the posters. In the paddock was a small fenced-off petting zoo with a stickered-up truck in the background and merchandise aplenty. The fate of those two black beauties was left to drunken chance.
Chassis number 123 wore a New South Wales 1000V8 registration plate, while chassis 161 (the number of race laps) got a 2000V8 plate. The lucky bugger who won both cars was announced during the 1991 Bathurst weekend broadcast...
Awesome? You bet. But I think it was also a sign of how in-demand the VN Group A wasn't. "Hey Holden, can we have a free car to promote this year's Great Race?" "Actually Tooheys, could you take two?" Yikes...
The Buildup Begins
There was some good news, however: for the first time all year, we had something approaching a full grid. Fears that the Bathurst entry list would have to be padded out with Group E production cars proved unfounded, as we had a full 47 Group A touring cars entered. Still a fall from the heights of 60 starters and more waiting on a reserve list, but by the standards of 1991 it was a virtual superabundance.
The weekend began with the usual Wednesday test and practice day, thinly disguised as "media day", which saw several top teams arrive and start turning laps early. One such team was of course Gibson Motorsport, but for them the buildup to Bathurst '91 was huge – after all the expense, all the telling Japan they needed to do things differently, the team had better goddamn deliver. To that end they'd spent the nearly two months between Oran Park and Bathurst pushing through yet another round of upgrades for the GT-R, consisting of a new rear diff and a new you-beaut set of brake callipers for maximum stopping power at the bottom of the hill. The Nissan LSD that had carried them this far had been done away with in favour of a simple spool diff, which was joined by decent shafts and CV joints to ensure the tail of the car was strong enough.
It took a while to convince the team that a spool diff would be a performance advantage. Nobody wanted to do it because they were running a Nissan clutch-type LSD which had been reliable. To keep them that way we were pulling them out after every event and diff oil temps with the clutch-type diff were very high.
After Oran Park 1991, there was the usual Bathurst test day and we set up a diff with a spool in it, we just pulled one diff out and put another in.
Skaife was in the car, he was around a second and a half faster. He said it just improved the car in all areas, braking, improved the power down and there wasn't a real big complaint about push. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
The single biggest breakthrough, however, came when Heaphy acquired some specially-made Alcon callipers that of the same type used by the NISMO team at the Spa 24 Hours that year. These replaced the AP callipers the team had been using for the ATCC.
What we had was kept very quiet, no other team knew about them. If you see any footage of pit stops at Bathurst, particularly in practice, you'll find that there were a lot of blokes around the front wheels. These callipers gave us the ability to do 90 laps before a pad change whereas we could only get 30 using the AP. The disadvantage was that each pad cost $800 and had to be specially made. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
After much umming and ahh-ing had decided to bring two cars rather than just one, putting both their regular drivers Jim Richards and Mark Skaife in the #1, and running the backup #2 for former Toyota works driver and consummate professional, Drew Price. Co-driving for this car would come courtesy of a Group E racer from the central coast, Garry Waldon, whose main qualification was probably that he was available. The decision to run two cars had been made quite late, and while Drew Price had no doubt been signed all year as the team's reserve driver, most other pedallers were likely committed to rides elsewhere. That said, Waldon had been national Production Car Champion back in 1988 in a turbocharged Mazda RX-7, so he knew how to keep a turbo car in one piece. Five wins in eight rounds was nothing to sniff at...
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| Garry (or Gary – sources differ) at Amaroo Park, 1988 (source) |
Obviously, however, this second pairing were under strict orders to keep the car off the walls and be ready to hand it over to Richards and Skaife if needed; they were there for insurance, no more. Speaking of which, thanks to the GIO machine of Mark Gibbs and Rohan Onslow, the Nissan squad now had a backup car for their backup car – if both works GT-Rs failed, you could bet your bottom dollar Bob Forbes Racing would suddenly have full works support. And with Gibbs now comfortable in the car, the team found they could lap the Mountain in the 2:18s virtually without effort – slower than the works cars, maybe, but easily as fast as anyone else on the grid.
Dick Johnson Racing had again brought along three cars, though only two of them were technically his. Chassis DJR4 had been sold to New Zealand's Mark Petch just after the ATCC, but it still ran this weekend in Shell colours as the DJR team's third entry, with the #19 on its doors. It no doubt had a fairly conservative state of tune, as it would be in the hands of young New Zealanders Kayne Scott and Greg Taylor. By contrast, DJR5 – running in John Bowe's traditional #18 – was entrusted to the more experienced pairing of Paul Radisich and Terry Shiel: the former was a star in the making who'd impressed last year, and while the latter had been out of the game for a couple of years now, he was a former Sandown winner and still considered a safe pair of hands.
The #17 however, chassis DJR6, was the team's real hope, with Johnson and Bowe themselves slated to share the driving. That said, they were apparently running the same gambit as the Gibson outfit, with the cross-entry paperwork filed in triplicate so they could take over the #18 if need be. Unfortunately, we never found out how fast the World's Fastest Sierras™ could be through the speed trap on Wednesday, as one car suffered a split bore early in the day, and the other mysteriously detonated engine within the first couple of laps. It was the start of a disastrous weekend for the Johnson team.
For the privateers, things were little better. The situation for the Callaghans, Brian Sr and Brian Jr, was typical: they'd been forced to join Bill O'Brien's Everlast Batteries team just to make the grid. It was due to be O'Brien's last start with PE 003, the Walkinshaw VL built for him by Larry Perkins, and parting would be more sorrow than sweetness: it would eventually complete just 116 laps after a multitude of problems with the rear axle seal, and would not be classified.
Brian was an old speedway mate of mine. He was struggling to come up with a budget to continue racing at Bathurst at the time so we pooled our resources together. – Bill O'Brien, Australian Muscle Car #98Then there was poor Allan Moffat. Losing his ANZ funding early in the year was a blow, but he was still able to put together a deal to get a logo on the side of the storied #9 Sierra – in this case, it was multivitamin concern Cenovis. It was still the first time he'd pulled the car out of the garage all year, as quite a few in the media noticed.
"Moffat's unique Bathurst preparation was to keep the cars in the shed and bring them out once a year," Bill Tuckey mockingly commented.
Well, I was not in a position to do much more than that.
Cenovis Vitamins came on board and stayed with me for the duration. They were a good and enthusiastic sponsor, but not blessed with ANZ-type funds. Along with Dunlop, who were prepared to pay money as well as provide tyres, I was able to field a locally-based two-car Sierra team in 1991, but without Rudi and therefore without his works drivers. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain
Rudi Eggenberger would indeed be sorely missed. He might not've been at the forefront of Sierra development anymore, but he'd still built both the Moffat team cars, and knew them inside out and back-to-front.
After several years of effectively being Eggenberger Motorenbau Down Under, Allan Moffat Racing could do nothing but watch as Rudi switched to the DTM series instead, and with it to the Opel Omega 3000 Evo – horror of horrors, a GM product! That meant both Rudi and his driver, double Bathurst polesitter Klaus Niedzwiedz, would instead be racing at Brno that weekend (in a country that was still called Czechoslovakia...). That Brno was technically a non-championship race suggested Bathurst had rather slipped in their priorities, but it made no difference to Allan: the Swiss maestro who'd once built the world's finest Sierras simply wouldn't be making his annual Mountain pilgrimage this year.
The cars were being prepared by Ian Walburn, who was also spannering for Queenslander Charlie O'Brien, once a member of the Holden Dealer Team. At the time Charlie was contesting Bob Jane's NASCAR series at the Calder Park Thunderdome – a giant $28 million flawed investment in bringing America's favourite speedway pastime to Australia. I asked Charlie to be one of my drivers and that's how his NASCAR Thunderbird ended up in my 711 [Malvern Rd, Toorak] workshop. It was a horrible piece of rubbish beside the Sierras. I wasn't happy – but a deal is a deal.
Alongside Charlie I'd secured Gianfranco Brancatelli, the European and Italian touring-car champion, winner of the Spa 24 Hour and the Macau touring-car race and a so far three-times Bathurst competitor whose best finish at the mountain had been 7th in 1987. It was his personal goal to do better, but he was surprised and dismayed when he arrived to find Rudi wasn't there.
I'd not misled him but he'd expected to be driving not just an Eggenberger car, but directly for Rudi. It was all I could do to persuade him not to go home before the first practice started.
I'd secured two of Jack Brabham's three sons for the other car – elder brother Geoff and middle brother Gary, but Geoff was badly injured in an American sports-car testing crash just before Bathurst. Four broken ribs and two compressed vertebrae kept him away.
At the last minute I secured New Zealand all-rounder Steve Millen to replace him. Steve and Charlie O'Brien had raced each other in the 1970s and he came with Charlie's strong recommendation. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain
But without the Swiss elf tuning the engine and his star driver at the wheel, Allan Moffat had to watch helplessly as Charlie O'Brien surprised all by proving faster than Brancatelli, putting the #10 Cenovis Sierra on the grid 12th with a 2:18.28. Last year's pole lap by Niedzwiedz, a two-minute, thirteen-second banzai monster, must've seemed an awful long time ago...
In any case, Richards took the headlines on Wednesday, setting a fastest lap of 2:14.95 and a fastest speed on Conrod Straight of 299km/h. Only Win Percy came close to matching that in his HRT Commodore, cutting the speed trap at 297km/h. In Thursday's official practice sessions it was Skaife's turn, as he put in a lap of 2:12.84 to claim provisional pole... which was impressive, when you considered the team was actually spending most of their time on the brakes! Wednesday had been spent bedding in brake pads for both cars, with Thursday spent experimenting with different pad combinations, as well as different spray patterns from the water cooling. They also brought back their controversial reversable brake duct system, reasoning that Bathurst was run by a different sanctioning body to the ATCC, so there might be some leeway in the rules.
Skaife and Richards made sure to get some seat time in the #2 car as well, just in case they ended up driving it on Sunday. And meanwhile the Bob Forbes team proved they didn't lack for speed either: early on Thursday they had an ECU problem that caused the engine to run roughly, but Gibson sent over the tech support kid to plug in a laptop and run some diagnostics, whereafter it ran perfectly. There'd been some concern the GIO team's Dunlop tyres might hold them back, but it turned out they needn't have worried. Since they had a slightly smaller diameter than Gibson's Yokohamas, the GIO car proved 4km/h faster up Mountain Straight than Skaife, even if it left them slightly slower down Conrod. Gibbs put in a best lap of 2:15.45, compared to a 2:20 or so for Drew Price in "his" car.
By the time the track closed on Thursday, GT-Rs held the fastest, second-fastest and third-fastest times, all of them achieved (so it was claimed) on full race setups. This meant the Nissan teams were free to spend Friday honing their race setups rather than chasing more speed in qualifying, leaving them extremely well-prepared for Sunday. And at the heart of it all, the really promising thing was that Richards had been able to get within a second of Skaife's quickest time, even with a full tank of fuel. This was going to be one fast race.
Tooheys Top Ten
So with the prelude done, Saturday brought the traditional Top Ten Shootout for pole: one lap, one chance; shame or glory. In living rooms around the country, Tooheys were cracked, phones were taken off the hook and bums settled into couch grooves ready for some of the most-anticipated television all year.
Which isn't really what we got. Instead, the broadcast started with Gary Wilkinson noting an "air of fatalism" around the shootout this year, thanks to the yawning five-second gap between the Nissans and the slowest of the shootout contenders. Five seconds just for the top ten was a horrific gap: to put it in perspective, the entire grid in 2020 was separated by less than 2.7 seconds heading into the Shootout (ignoring Jake Kostecki's qualifying crash...)! So nobody was likely to be very gung-ho about their lap today: just put on the race setup, keep it off the walls and try to maintain the good starting position they'd already achieved. There was no reward for heroics.
Therefore, it was abundantly clear both at the track and in the nation's loungerooms that only one lap counted today, and that wouldn't be coming until the very end of the broadcast. That we ended up getting some of the most iconic shootout footage of all time as well was an unexpected bonus.
David "Skippy" Parsons went first in the second of Glenn Seton's Peter Jackson Sierras, having put in a "remarkable" 2:17.54 on Friday. With nothing to gain he just held it on-line for his lap, no fireworks, and thus pulled out a 2:17.58 – slower than yesterday, but only just.
Win Percy, on the other hand, drove the factory HRT Commodore hard. He used all of the road through Hell Corner, got taily exiting The Cutting, put a wheel in the dirt through Sulman Park and got dangerously close to the wall on the run down to Forrest's Elbow. He'd managed a 2:16.96 on Friday, but for the Shootout all that aggression netted him only a 2:17.73 – also slower than yesterday.
Dick Johnson's lap was somewhere between Skippy's and Percy's: grimly aggressive but not flamboyant, pushing hard and coming close to losing it through McPhillamy. He surprised everyone by taking fifth gear through the Chase instead of leaving it in top, but the result was a 2:16.03 – not only the first 16 of the day, but a second-and-a-half faster than Skippy in a similar car. "Oh, it wasn't too bad..." said the racing driver in the industry-standard monotone, before cycling back to the topic that had really been on his mind all week: the endless series of apparently-random engine failures plaguing his Sierras. It turned out all the TV broadcast equipment stacked around the Mountain had been interfering with the ECU that kept the 2.0-litre turbocharged Cosworth from blowing itself to pieces!
We found our problem that was giving us a lot of problems early in the week, and even yesterday when we detonated another engine. It was the intercooler-type... [the] temperatures were up that high only because the computer said it was, and... [laughs despondently] ...believe it or not, it's your Channel Seven microwaves up there! But in one spot down the straight it gives our computer a false signal, and absolutely puts it on full advance and detonate [sic] an engine. But we've fixed that problem so it should be alright tomorrow.
And then came Peter Brock. He'd done a 2:16.44 on Friday, in a car that was sprung noticeably softer than the works equivalent of Percy. That might've pointed to a less extensive roll cage than the works cars, but it might also have indicated stickier Bridgestone qualifying tyres as well, so who knew really? Peter entered the session with a practice engine fitted, meaning he could afford to blow it up, so of course he was spectacular.
How many times have you seen that lap already? The car leaped over the crests and gave him a huge lose on the ripple strip at McPhillamy, but of course Peter was on top of that in a jiffy and attacked the next turn with his confidence undiminished. Peter absolutely threw 05's tail over the crest at Skyline, and deliberately provoked the back at the Elbow to get it turned in. Another big lose out of the Chase meant the time was compromised however, and the stopwatch told the story: 2:16.07, only barely slower than Johnson. It was only later we found out a silly mistake meant he'd left pit lane with the brake bias set to counter a full fuel tank, not a light qualifying load. What might have been had the car not been set up wrong...
It was appropriate that the man who had to follow that act was Larry Perkins, because it was like that between them this year. Peter's showboating would've meant zilch to him of course, and with a 2:16.02 he'd earned some cred for being the fastest of the Holdens on Friday, faster than either Brocky or Percy. Larry however was running his race engine, so the fireworks would be kept to a minimum. And indeed, despite being fastest so far at the second sector, and running a scorching 277.9km/h through the speed trap on Conrod, his final time was a 2:17.01, nearly a second slower than Brocky. Couldn't resist a dig at the Nissans though: "They're a racing car, not a touring car!"
John Bowe was next, and he was a man rapidly approaching the peak of his powers and, just quietly, was now assuming the mantle of DJR's lead driver: although Dick would heartily dispute that if you were foolish enough to tell him, he was in fact becoming a mere figurehead. Not using Bowe to qualify a car would've been like leaving a cruise missile on the shelf, so even though his name was on the windscreen of the #17, he was now qualifying the #18 car on behalf of Radisich and Shiel. A brisk but unfussed lap produced a 2:15.68 – the first of the 15's, and the fastest so far.
Given DJR'd had Bowe qualify the second Sierra, it's a bit of a mystery why Gibson Motorsport didn't get Jim Richards to qualify their second car as well. Richards being slower than Price sounds about as absurd as Richards not wanting to do it in the first place, so I'm hazarding a guess that Drew Price really, really wanted the job, and Freddo couldn't think of a particularly compelling reason to stop him. Either way, he hit the track with nothing much to prove and produced a "copybook lap", in the judgement of the commentators. The stopwatch agreed: 2:16.30, not earth-shattering for a GT-R driver, but hardly a disgrace either.
There was a brief intermission as Glenn Seton, the fastest non-Godzilla driver of the weekend, headed out for his Shootout lap. He still had the practice engine in it so he could afford to grenade it, and he'd had the fastest Sierra all year long, in defiance of the powerhouse Dick Johnson team. He also had Bridgestone rubber and the disappointment of Sandown to exorcise. 255.9km/h up Mountain Straight was a good start; smooth and deft across the top of the Mountain was a good middle; and 287.4km/h down Conrod Straight was a worthy finale that produced a 2:14.90, the fastest lap yet.
Mark Gibbs hadn't been boasting when he claimed he'd finally got his head around driving the Nissan, and the way he attacked his shootout lap showed proved it, with a nice little slide coming out of The Cutting. 256km/h up Mountain Straight was a little quicker than Seton, but Mountain Straight was a power straight, and the Nissan had more power. 285 down Conrod told the story, as Conrod was an aero straight, and the Nissan's aero was one of the few weaknesses in its game. 2:13.88 was his final time – the first of the 13's and, as it turned out, the last.
Because Mark Skaife was next, and he was not here to play silly buggers: he and his team were here to chew bubblegum and break records, and they were all out of bubblegum. "Mark's fast, fit and aggressive and he's done a lot of miles in the car," said Neil Crompton of his career rival, and sure enough, the lap was simply sublime. No undue aggression, just brilliantly controlled: 258km/h made him the fastest man up Mountain Straight; 293 made him the fastest back down Conrod as well. The final time was a staggering 2:12.63, not only the fastest time of the day thereby securing him pole position, but a lap that would stand forever as the fastest lap a Group A touring car would ever do at Bathurst.
Despite that, Skaife was his usual understating self when they stuck a microphone in his window: "It was a pretty good lap," he said. "I got bit untidy in a couple of spots, but that is about as good as we could do." Similarly, there were no premature celebrations at Gibson Motorsport. After all, they'd been here twice before, in 1984 and '86, and both times they'd gone home disappointed. This time they wouldn't be punching out until the job was done. To whit, complete crossmember assemblies, engine, gearbox, driveshafts and uprights for the front and rear had been bedded-in at Calder Park prior to Bathurst. These had been pulled out for practice and qualifying, and were now being re-installed on Saturday night for the race.
It was a major, major effort, but the time that we saved with the guys not having to work all night preparing cars was a big advantage. I can clearly remember Fred being concerned that the team was sitting around having dinner on the Saturday night at around 7:30pm and him saying that in all his years at Bathurst we seemed a bit too organised. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
Qualifying was over. The race started tomorrow.
