Before the race kicked off, there a certain amount of talk about the older drivers stepping aside to make room for young blood. They weren't without a point: Peter Brock and Colin Bond had been doing this since the 1960s; Allan Grice and Dick Johnson hadn't been far behind, showing up in the early 1970s. But all the same, there were two ironies to that sentiment. Firstly, a quarter of the field in '92 were Great Race rookies, which might've been the highest ratio since the race was inaugurated in 1960. But secondly, and more importantly, Mark Skaife was already a champion; Glenn Seton would soon follow; Cameron McConville was busy warming the bench over at DJR, and though he wasn't here this weekend, Russell Ingall had already made his Great Race debut with the Bob Forbes team. The next generation was already here, but first they'd have to earn their spurs racing against the Old Guard.
The Best-Laid Plans
As the broadcast opened, the talk among the commentators was all about the weather. In rural NSW there are really only two seasons – Winter, and Summer – and some years it can flip from one to the other in just two weeks. The first Sunday in October often straddled that boundary, resulting in volatile and unpredictable weather, and 1992 was a prime example. As the day dawned it was unusually cool, just 8 degrees Celcius, with a high of 18 expected and a 30 percent chance of showers. I have no idea why the prediction was so low; even the commentators said it looked more like one hundred, and light rain was falling even before the race start.
So in true Bathurst style, plans started going awry even before the race began. From 7:30 to 8:00am they held the traditional morning warm-up, and it was during this session that ex-motorcycle and Formula 1 pilot turned BMW star, Johnny Cecotto, got baulked by a backmarker on the dive into Forrest's Elbow. Forced to throw out the anchors, Cecotto put the Benson & Hedges M3 into a spin that rammed its nose into the rock wall on the outside, damaging the team's newest and fastest car barely two hours before its big day.
The car was bundled off to the TAFE garage for emergency repairs, but it was anyone's guess whether it would be ready in time to make the start – at the very least it was likely to lose that hard-won 9th place starting position. Cecotto was at least willing to discuss what had happened with Channel Nine pit reporter, John Brady.
Cecotto: Well I was in a slow lap coming into the pits and a very slow car, a little car on the left side of the road moved completely to the right immediately, without seeing me. He let past a car in front of me and I was coming, he blocked me completely. I braked hard not to hit him and I was close to hit him. I try to spin, but by spinning I hit the wall.
Brady: The damage is pretty severe. The TAFE guys down here [are] trying to straighten up a chassis rail?
Cecotto: Well the front is quite bad. I hope they can fix it.
The incident also collected Wayne Gardner, who drove over some of Cecotto's discarded fibreglass and cut the right front tyre, not realising it until he arrived at the bottom of the Chase with no grip for braking! Thankfully the kitty litter was waiting to receive the Strathfield Car Radios VN without damage, but it had been a harsh initiation for the Bathurst rookie.
While the TAFE mechanics worked, pit straight moved on to the usual pre-race extravaganza, which started with the Bridgestone Holden Precision Driving Team, who dazzled the early arrivals by balancing their Commodores on two wheels, ramping over the top of each other, and other stunts of that nature. From there we moved on to the traditional $10,000 pit stop competition, which opened with an intra-BMW duel between the mechanics of Tony Longhurst and those of Peter Doulman, which went the way of the B&H lads. The second semi-final between Allan Grice for HRT and the Caltex crew of Colin Bond was won by the Holden boys, setting up a finale between Longhurst and Grice. The tension proved too much for Frank Gardner's people, who couldn't get a wheel nut on fast enough to beat their HRT rivals, leaving Grice free to cross the finish line and claim the ten grand for Holden. He might've only driven for the team three times, but he hadn't half been worth it to them.
When it was time to sing Advance Australia Fair, the honour went to a silver-haired man with a warm smile by the name of Col Joye. He was introduced simply as "Rock Legend", meaning you were already supposed to know who he was, so of course yours truly here had to look him up. Turns out that, together with his band the Joy Boys, he'd been the first rock artist to have a number one hit Australia-wide, thanks to the 1959 single, "Oh Yeah, Uh Huh" (not making that up). More recently, in 1990 he'd made the news after having a fall while using a chainsaw to prune a tree for his neighbour. Thankfully the chainsaw didn't feature in his injuries, which were bad enough all on their own: he fell six metres onto the brick pavement below, hitting his head and entering a coma, as well as sustaining serious lower back injuries. Just being alive today was a big deal.
As the final bars of the national anthem echoed around the grandstands, there came the traditional call for the drivers to start their engines, and in short order 20,000 horsepower roared into life to shake the pavement. Snarling straight-sixes and belting four-cylinders – both with and without the whistle of a turbo – joined in chorus with the baritone rumble of the V8s, a celebration of the Age of Oil. With the V8s set to take over next year, we would not hear its like again.
As the forty-six starters set off on their parade lap, winding side-to-side and making little lunges to warm both tyres and brakes, speculation in the commentary box turned to the strategy game. The Sierras were expected to make their first stops around lap 32, making for a five- or six-stint race, depending on how things developed. The Nissans and Commodores probably wouldn't go much further, but the yellow BMWs were banking on making their first stops around lap 66, aiming to get to the finish in just three stints. Six hours and a thousand kilometres from now, someone would be King of the Mountain for 1992, but who? Would Longhurst pull a rabbit out of the hat with the BMW's unique combination of speed and efficiency? Would it be Johnson, who'd found something extra in his last year with the Ford Sierra? Would the new breed of V8 touring cars prove faster over the distance and hand a surprise win to Seton or Grice? Or would Fred Gibson's Nissans overcome everything the governing body had thrown at them and emerge triumphant anyway, making a double Bathurst champion of the 25-year-old Skaife?
Oh, who were we kidding, it was going to be Godzilla, wasn't it? The only question was by how much...
So It Begins
As they lined up for the start, two-by-two, the weather was already closing in grey and overcast. Despite the warnings however, there was no sense we were about to embark on a grand folly, so when the ten-second horn sounded, forty-six drivers selected first gear and held the clutch, and their breath. Forty-six engines strained at the redline, filling the air with heat haze, and at last, the starter raised the Australian flag and then swiftly flung it downwards. The Great Race of 1992 had begun; fate had decreed that it would have no end.
As usual the GT-Rs shot off the line like an electric shock, but starting behind the front row there was nowhere for them to go, and Skaife remained firmly behind Dick Johnson as the pack snaked its way up Mountain Straight for the first time, still a wondrous sight to see – all colour and intensity and startling speed. The order as they crested the top of the Mountain was the red cars of Johnson, Skaife and Mark Gibbs, followed by the first HRT Commodore of Tomas Mezera, then the blue-and-yellow Walkinshaw Commodore of Larry Perkins, with the white Cenovis Sierra of Klaus Niedzwiedz chasing their tail.
Johnson pushed hard in his Shell Sierra but couldn't make a break on Godzilla. Skaife closed up across the top of the Mountain and stayed with the little Ford down Conrod, so either Johnson had turned down the boost to make the finish, or Skaife was racing with more power than advertised today (or both). Johnson flashed across the finish line to lead the first lap of the day, but for Mark Skaife it was clear the chase was on, and he was intent on running Johnson down. It took two laps: down under braking into Murray's at the end of the second lap, there was a criss-cross, and then Skaife got a nose up the inside of Johnson and pounded on his expensive water-cooled brake system, emerging onto Pit Straight having relieved the people's hero of the race lead. It was no desperate send, just a businesslike rearrangement of the race order, a move that said simply, "Things will be thus". So already we knew who would be disputing this race today, if there would be any sort of dispute at all: barring pit stops, no other car would lead the Tooheys 1000 today.
While all that had been going on, however, the King of the Mountain had been sitting stock still! Peter Brock had waited for the green with characteristic intensity, popped the clutch on his #05 Mobil VP Commodore and... hadn't moved an inch! Instead of making a sharp getaway, the Holden had instead snapped a tailshaft, leaving it unable to go anywhere under its own power. As the rest of the field headed up the Mountain, Peter had to get a push from the mechanics to get him out of danger before they all came back again!
The marshals managed to get the car back in the pits for repairs, and of course a pitlane reporter was there with a microphone to find out what had happened quick-smart.
John Brady: Peter, a far from perfect start. You just let the clutch out and crunch?
Peter Brock: Yeah, it's broken a tailshaft. It's a brand new tailshaft put in this morning, which was purely precautionary. And I can say in twelve years racing Commodores, I've never broken one. So it's a rather interesting situation. I'll just thank all the drivers that came up behind me there, gave me enough berth, because boy oh boy, I was looking in that mirror for a while, I can tell you!
He wasn't the only one having trouble. On lap 4, Kevin Waldock brought his #28 Ampol Sierra in for a long stay in the pits; he'd broken a universal joint on the start, and the rigmarole of fitting a new one cost the team four laps. We know this because one of the pit crew that day was John Hewson, then-leader of the Liberal Party and therefore the federal Opposition Leader. It was Hewson who launched the famous "Fightback!" economic policy that featured a GST at its centre – which Good News Week's Paul McDermott later mocked as "Backdown!" when it was withdrawn – a package that would later be taken up by John Howard. He would lead the Liberal Party to defeat in this election cycle, subsequently being ousted as party leader in favour of Alexander Downer and then quitting politics entirely. A fairly bland man according to the memories of those I asked, but still: could you imagine Peter Dutton handling spare tyres for a nobody team at Bathurst? No way, a former policeman like him would be itching to hand out speeding tickets!
These things are never self-contained, however, and on the following lap Mark Gibbs in the GIO GT-R was seen to be using his windscreen wiper – even though it wasn't yet raining. Word from the pits bubbled through that he'd copped a spray of oil from somewhere, and it didn't take a Rachel Riley to put two and two together and conclude it had probably come from Bond. Either way, he was now having trouble seeing and Gibbs rather generously chose to pull over before the Dipper and let Perkins, Mezera, Seton and even Anders Olofsson in the other Nissan flash by – no point holding them up. As he rounded Murray's Corner he took a line down the start/finish straight that took him very close to the pit wall, allowing the Bob Forbes team to throw a bucket of suds over his windscreen. That idea might ring a few bells for long-time fans, but no disaster came of it this time: the windscreen got a wash it badly needed, and the only negative outcome was that a puce-faced official came and told the Bob Forbes Racing crew not to try that stunt again, thankyou very much! In the end, Gibbs pitted on lap 13 to have his windscreen cleaned properly, so the team chose to change the front tyres while they were at it. After a 30-second stop, he was back out on track and no harm done.
Truth was, as the first hour ticked away the pace settled down and everyone found their spaces, as they always did. On lap 20, a businesslike Fred Gibson told the cameras: "The whole thing is what we thought would happen – the pace dropped off very quickly and we're all doing 17's and 18's now. … It's going according to plan so far." From out on track, a comfortably 2nd-placed Dick Johnson likewise told the commentary team: "Car's pretty good. Just sort of cruising at about the pace we want to go. I would've liked to've tried to put a bit more pressure on the Nissan, but that's one of them things. Actually I might give [ARDC boss] John Large a call shortly and see if they want to put another hundred kilos on them at the next stop!"
So if anyone was the mover and shaker in the early laps, it was Win Percy, who passed Larry Perkins on lap 12 and then dispatched Klaus Niedzwiedz in short order as well. After shadowing the German for a lap and a half, Percy pointed his Commodore to the outside on the entry to the Chase, and then bravely held it flat. He arrived in the heaviest braking zone in the country alongside Niedzwiedz completely by surprise, and thus was able to relieve Eggenberger's star driver of 3rd place before he even had the chance to fight back. That left only Dick ahead of him, still in 2nd, with Skaife now far off in the distance (he had a 14-second gap on lap 16).
In truth though, this was not an unusual phenomenon in endurance racing. In the early stages of a long race, the heavy-hitters would all be running with reduced revs, a bit less boost, babysitting the tyres and brakes and whatnot, their focus firmly on the serious business of making it to the end with a package strong enough to take the win. In this environment, those aggressive enough – foolish enough, even – to run absolutely flat-chat could look a lot faster than they actually were. Case in point, Percy, who was driving a new car with no real prospect of winning, in what was really a very public test session for the Holden Racing Team. There was nothing to be learned if nothing on the car broke, so he might as well drive it flat-out and see what happened – he was already lapping in the 2:18 bracket, and pulled out an impressive 2:17.3 on lap 18. Of course, it might have been entirely personal, too – after spending their careers with rival European powerhouses like Eggenberger and TWR, Percy and Niedzwiedz had a long history, and it would've felt pretty good to put one over his old rival. It's not like there'd been many chances to pass an Eggenberger Sierra back when he'd driven a HR31 Skyline, after all...
The spray on his windscreen however revealed that the promised weather had started to arrive: Channel Nine's chopper cam showed rain approaching from the north-west, and the commentators confirmed light rain had started falling outside their windows. For the legion of Dick Johnson fans parked around the circuit, that was disheartening news. Rain is supposed to be the great equaliser, a chance for great drivers to overcome mediocre cars and get the results their talent deserves. That wouldn't happen today: with their much-despised four-wheel-drive systems, rain would only put the GT-Rs on another level, elevating them from, "more competitive than they really should be", to, "forget it, go home". Right now Skaife was nearly 20 seconds ahead of Johnson, with Johnson a stable 20 seconds ahead of Win Percy. The only hope we had for a competitive race today was if it stayed bone-dry and gave our Dick plenty of traction to make the most of his turbo-boosted rocketship.
But no, the official weather report said to expect heavy rain within the hour, so teams got busy preparing wet-weather tyres for the expected flurry of pit stops. The exception of course was Gibson Motorsport, because, as John Brady told us:
The Nissans are really taking their time over it, because they can stay out without going to the intermediates for a lot longer than anybody else. And if it happens to go wet and go dry, they won't even have to stop and that will just make this a cake walk for them, if the cars stay in one piece.
Persistently Raining
By the time Brady finished that piece to camera, on lap 23, the rain had already started coming down, so at the end of that lap Klaus Niedzwiedz became the first to dive into the pits for wets and a fresh load of fuel. It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out, but it wasn't: as the stop dragged on, Rudi Eggenberger himself jumped into the cockpit to plug in his laptop and check the telemetry, while the mechanics got busy removing the left-front tyre – the one they'd just bolted on, mind – in an attempt to cure... something. The steering rack was loose, so it was soon revealed poor Klaus had broken a tie rod end. The car sat there for at least two-and-a-half minutes while they swapped in a new one, dropping a lap.
While he sat there, Dick Johnson became the next to blink, pitting the #17 and climbing out to put John Bowe behind the wheel instead. The tyres were changed and the fuel topped up in a routine stop for DJR, but for whatever reason, Win Percy instead stayed out on slicks, losing buckets of time in the process. Maybe he needed to hit a certain lap to trigger their strategy, maybe he was banking on a Pace Car intervention to give them a free pit stop, or maybe the team was busy using Brad Jones as a guinea pig for the conditions, changing from slicks to intermediates to full wets in the space of about five minutes, leaving no time to pit their prime car. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to pan out: Percy finally pitted to hand over to Allan Grice on lap 26, coincidentally at the same time as Graham Moore, who handed the Strathfield Car Radios VN over to Wayne Gardner – for his first-ever race stint, at Bathurst, in the wet!
There were so many tyre stops it was absolute chaos in the pits, and to top it all off, the TV images showed there was a loose rock lying on the track just before The Cutting – which hadn't actually been dug out when anyone crashed, but no-one knew that at the time. Since it was technically off the racing line, it would remain in that spot for a number of hours yet.
The real winner amidst the confusion was Anders Olofsson, who rose from 6th place to 2nd in the #2 Winfield GT-R, simply by staying out when everyone else was pitting. Fred in fact confirmed that there was no intention to pit early even now it was raining – they had 4WD, so they were fine! It emerged Gibson's attitude wasn't bravado, but was purely practical – they were nearing a scheduled stop anyway, and they weren't losing any time, so why not stay out? Skaife ultimately peeled off and brought it into the pits at the end of his 30th lap: wet-weather tyres went on, and they gave it a full load of fuel while the best wet-weather driver in the country strapped himself into the hot seat. After 34 seconds, the car was dropped and Jim Richards was released for his first stint of the day – still in 1st place.
Two laps later it was Olofsson's turn, again on their planned pit window anyway. In a 30-second stop the car was turned over to Neil Crompton, who rejoined in 3rd, prompting John Brady to breathlessly exclaim: "Thirty seconds to get the driver in, change the tyres, on schedule anyway – they don't even know it's raining!" In fact they did know it was raining, because after a couple of laps the stopwatch started sending readings, and it seemed Jim Richards was only doing 2:41s on his rain tyres – 8 seconds slower than Skaife had been on a wet track on slicks, and nearly 24 seconds slower than they'd been going in the dry. But hey, it was the same for everyone. Although the rain was real it was still relatively thin and misty, with a dry line remaining on Mountain Straight or anywhere else the grade levelled out.
Indeed the thin, misty nature of the rain was part of the problem. Brock had pitted on lap 27 to take on a set of Bridgestone wets, and in the meantime started a trend by having the mechanics wipe the inside of his windscreen, just to remove the layer of condensation that had built up. The sudden drop in temperature when the rain came (to say nothing of the wind chill factor at 290km/h!) meant the steamy interior of a racecar could become chronically foggy, and it would prove a bit of an epidemic today. When Glenn Seton pitted for his scheduled stop on lap 34, he had a mechanic wind down the the passenger-side window to let some condensation out so the windscreen didn't fog so much. Wayne Gardner’s solution a moment later was even more extreme: he had the crew tape a brand-new length of ducting into the car to blow fresh air straight at the screen. In short, windscreen fogging was a real problem today, and it would only be worse if your equipment was malfunctioning. Allan Grice pitted early after just a handful of laps to have his windscreen cleaned, and it ended up being a very long stop, nearly two-and-a-half minutes stationary. It emerged the wiper was playing up, sliding off the edge of the screen, and they couldn't get the spanner in behind the bonnet to tighten whatever needed to be tightened!
Still, it could be worse: Bryan Sala had given his #50 Queensland Plastics Sierra a striking orange-and-yellow livery this year, like they'd sprayed the car with white undercoat and then thrown a couple of buckets of highlighter ink over the top. It was the right scheme for the conditions, but it couldn't help when, on lap 34, Sala hit the wall on the steep climb leading up to The Cutting. A quick read of the situation would tell you that – shades of 1980! – he'd run over the rock and written off his Ford on the unforgiving walls of the Mountain. But in this case your intuition would be wrong: he had a crumpled right-front corner, which was the wrong side to have dislodged the rock, and the replays later showed he'd simply lost the tail in the middle of Griffin's Bend, slid wide and overcorrected into the opposite wall. Sala thus became the second official retirement of the Great Race, and however terminal things were for his car, at least the driver emerged unhurt. The same could be said for the third retirement of the race, the #40 Garry Willmington Performance Walkinshaw, which detonated its engine on lap 29.
For the fourth retirement of the day, however, you could not say that.
How We Lost Hulme
On lap 35, with the race just past the one-hour mark, the broadcast abruptly cut to show a yellow BMW parked up against the wall on the right-hand side of Conrod Straight, just before the kink into the Chase. It was the #20.
The second of the Benson & Hedges BMWs had started from 18th on the grid, embarking on its first stint with 1967 F1 champion Denny Hulme at the wheel. Denny had pitted on lap 25 to be the team guinea pig for wet-weather tyres, rejoining still at the wheel for another stint – one that he would never finish. By lap 33 the rain was getting heavier and Denny radioed the pits on the way through Forrest's Elbow, complaining he couldn't see. Thinking it was due to the rain, the team did nothing. But this was more than just rain: Denny had suffered a heart attack on Conrod Straight, at more than 270km/h.
The replay showed the BMW had got a wheel off the track and clouted the wall on the left-hand side, which either broke its suspension or punctured its tyres, as it left its driver unable to prevent it hobbling back across the track, where it came to rest up against the wall on the right-hand side. Denny's last act as a mortal man was to bring the car to a relatively controlled stop: when the marshals and medical car reached the scene, they found him collapsed over the wheel, and understandably they pushed the panic button to call for a proper ambulance. That automatically triggered the first Pace Car intervention of the race, on lap 36.
Ironically the Pace Car was yet another GT-R, a Black Pearl example with Victorian rego EPX-118, and it was driven today by Graeme Bailey, the Chickadee proprietor who'd co-driven to that stunning privateer victory with Allan Grice back in 1986. He didn't wait to pick up race leader Richards, immediately backing the field up into a queue of subdued revs and hesitent drivers, leading them slowly around and around the Mountain. The whole grid – Jim Richards among them – was forced to drive slowly past the accident site over and over again, getting a good look as one of those old Ford F150-based ambulances pulled up, did its grim work and then drove away with Denny in the back.
In hushed tones the commentary team struggled to understand how such a minor accident could require such massive medical intervention. There was speculation about spinal injuries, as Doug Mulray had noted they'd put a neck brace on him and pointed to the lack of lateral neck support in the cars those days, suggesting maybe he'd suffered some sort of whiplash when he hit the wall. It would take a couple of hours for the truth to come out: not until he'd been extracted and driven straight to Bathurst Hospital (no stop at the circuit medical centre) that the doctors confirmed it had been a heart attack. A life in racing had come to its bittersweet end: New Zealand Gold Star champion for 1961; Can-Am sports car champion in 1968 and 1970; and of course, Formula 1 World Champion in 1967, driving for our own Jack Brabham. He'd also done the rather unlauded job of carrying the McLaren team through its darkest years, bridging the gap between the death of founder Bruce McLaren in testing at Goodwood, and its takeover (and emergence to championship contention) under Teddy Mayer. Denny Hulme had survived the most dangerous era of motor racing worldwide, so it was with horrible irony that he'd become the first World Champion ever to die of natural causes* – and it had still come at the wheel of a racing car.
Haere rā, mate.
Haven't the Foggiest
Somewhat appropriately, the line of cars behind the black GT-R rather resembled a funeral procession, but in touring cars as in Formula 1 the race always goes on: Denny would not have wished it otherwise. The scoreboard showed Jim Richards leading, John Bowe chasing, Neil Crompton in 3rd, Johnny Cecotto 4th and a very concerned Tony Longhurst on standby to take over, even as he wondered what on earth had happened to his teammate. Allan Grice was in 5th and a lap down after that long stop to fix the truculent wiper, so the Pace Car intervention had actually been quite fortunate for him.
As it had for the Gemspares team, for that matter. On lap 30, the #26 Gemspares Walky had parked at one of the driveways on Mountain Straight, its driver alighting for a brisk jog back to the pits. In a repeat of Sandown, however, the Pace Car period allowed them to get a tow back to the garage, where the car was repaired and able to rejoin. At the accident site, meanwhile, the rescue crew packed up and waited for the field to file by before getting the recovery vehicle to tow the now-useless BMW away.
The question now was how long the Pace Car should stay out. The rain didn't seem to be getting any heavier, but the clouds were getting lower and lower, and conditions were taking a turn for the worse... or briefly so, at least. In the ten minutes or so it took the Pace Car to peel off a handful of laps, the low cloud band that had been making visibility so difficult departed again and the race brightened, even if it didn't dry out. That was enough for Race Control, who turned the lights out on the Pace Car on lap 42, indicating they were about to go back to green.
There was another memorable quote from Jean-Pierre Sarti during Grand Prix, and that was when he said, "Whenever I see something really horrible, I put my foot down, hard – because I know everyone else will be lifting his." A quarter-century on we saw that champions still drove like that, because when they waved the green at the start of lap 43, Jim Richards flattened it and simply sprinted off into the distance. Never mind showcasing the advantage of 4WD in the wet, Richards had just seen one of his oldest friends carried away in an ambulance, and for all he knew the cause had been a racing accident, something that could also befall him. For any sensible person that would be an excuse to take it easy for a while, but these were a different breed: Richards put his foot down and pulled out a couple of hundred metres before Hell Corner alone. By the time the rest were back to racing speed, he had vanished up Mountain Straight, disappearing into his own spray. Remarkable.
For the rest, it wasn't such smooth sailing. A lap after the green, Steve Harrington crawled into pit lane with an electrical problem, as the Perkins team went to work on the battery in the boot. Then on lap 50, Brad Jones brought in the #15 HRT Commodore with a blown fuse, and – no luck at all if not for bad luck! – it was the fuse for the windscreen wiper. But the worst for this kind of problem was Charlie O'Brien in the #9 Cenovis Sierra, who came in for yet another pit stop right behind Jones, this time so the Moffat mechanics could pop the rear hatch (where the battery was located) and spray some hydrophobic agent on the leads. Basically, the humdidity was so high today that water was condensing on the wires and shorting out the electrics. Asked about his troubles, Moffat was only too happy to run his mouth for the cameras:
Allan Moffat: Well the very first one, all throughout practice Charlie never locked up one brake, then three laps into the race he got a flat spot [that] cost him his tyres, so that set him back rather nastily. Klaus burned up a set of rain tyres. Charlie stayed out for a long time on dry tyres trying to out-guess the weather, finally had to succumb to the wet tyres. And has just come in – prematurely as far as the fuel is concerned, because every time we stop, we fill it up with the juice – and complaining about a misfire. There's so much water on the track, we may have got something into our motronics. We've changed the spark plugs, splashed our CRC 5-56 all over everything in the engine bay, and tried to – keep laughing mate, it's a great product!
From their warm, dry perch in the commentary box, the broadcast team were indeed having a laugh, but it was appreciation for Moffat's gamesmanship rather than mockery. "He's always looked after his sponsors, Mr Moffat!" said Doug Mulray, unfortunately drowning out what Allan said in the meantime.
Moffat: Klaus is doing a great job, a bit too aggressive for my liking, from what I can see of him coming onto pit straight. But he's a professional driver and their orders are to bring them home alive.
Mike Raymond: Yes I was going to say, it's early days yet, but can you remember a topsy-turvy 1,000 like this?
Moffat: Well, only when I was behind the wheel myself, Mike. Peter Brock and I had a hell of an up-and-down in 1972 and the track got the better of me and Peter went on to win in his XU-1. But no, in the last ten, fifteen years we haven't seen anything as nasty as this.
It was worth pointing out the team's #10 car was now two laps down on the leaders, so if Klaus was being aggressive it was for a reason. The #9 meanwhile was just touring, the misfire still not cured, co-driver Gary Brabham (ironically in his Nissan-branded IMSA race suit) back to the pits a lap later but was immediately told to keep going, as Klaus was inbound and they didn't want to stack. Looking further afield, it was noted that Mark Gibbs suddenly had the passenger-side door of his GIO Nissan stoved in, having been caught up in in a messy three-way accident that crumpled Wayne Park's right-front corner and John Bowe's left-rear. "Well, there was a wall of spray," was Bowe's recollection later, "and as I got there it was Gibbsy. I jinked left and missed him, thank god, and as I did someone hit me up the backside. I don't even know who it was." Both Fords came in to have their respective teams strip the broken bits away and tape down whatever was left, but Gibbs elected to carry on, promoting Johnny Cecotto in the lone Longhurst BMW from 4th to 3rd. Only Cecotto and Niedzwiedz were currently racing – the rest were just trying to survive.
Even the King of the Mountain wasn't finding it a very comfortable throne today. Peter Brock might have mastered these conditions in 1972, but twenty years on was another day and, on lap 53, he was seen in a tangle with Allan Grice at Forrest's Elbow. Worse, in his haste to rejoin Grice misjudged how far he needed to reverse out, meaning he tore Brock's fibreglass front splitter off on the way past. And just to punctuate the incident, Klaus Niedzwiedz arrived on the scene at full noise in a deliberate drift – he was not intimidated by the Mountain, even in the wet, and was still milking that Sierra hard!
Peter initially continued without pitting, apparently unaware the front bumper was about to part company with the car. You could hardly blame him if he couldn't see that, however, as it was unlikely he could see anything through an opaque, completely fogged-up windscreen. Two laps later Brock was given the inevitable mechanical black flag, although he claimed not to see it himself – he pitted because his pit crew called him in on the radio. While the mechanics reattached the splitter, they also gave 05 a fresh load of fuel and a driver change, meaning Manuel Reuter now hopped in for his first stint on the Mountain.
Now out of the car, however, Peter was able to explain to Richard Hay what had happened.
Brock: I think that Allan Grice... I should have a word to him, he might be elected to parliament but he's not elected the most popular driver on the racing track, I can tell you. There was a train of cars with I think Brad Jones at the front, Larry Perkins and myself, all trying to get by Brad Jones. And Grice came along and tapped me going into the corner. Spun me around. And then to make matters worse – to add insult to injury – he put it in first gear and ground my spoiler off!
Hay: It's been a pretty awful weekend for you so far, conditions aren't helping either?
Brock: No, but I've been in those situations. You drive with some grey matter.
Reuter rejoined roughly a lap down, while Brock went off to discuss the incident with HRT manager Wally Storey; no shouting match, but clearly angry and with a stern finger in Storey's chest. Not something you often saw from the even-tempered Brock, and doubly amusing given he'd be driving for this team within 18 months...
Meanwhile, the sky was darkening again as the fog returned. At this moment, only Richards, Crompton, Cecotto and Bowe were still on the lead lap – a solid effort for Cecotto, and an absolutely Homeric feat for Johnson and Bowe, who had the worst possible car for the conditions. Sure, in its final year the RS500 had become a tad more driveable: CAMS imposing a 7,500rpm rev limit had handily removed one variable from their tuning problem, leaving them free to maximise torque across that rev range; and of course, the Stone Brothers had come on board to get the cars handling properly. Even so, in conditions like this they were a nightmare – not even the Stones had the stones to tame an engine that added 300 kW between 4,000 and 5,000rpm!
Basically, it was dreadful. The whole car was hugely under-tyred for the amount of power it had, so every time it got on boost the whole thing would just burst into wheelspin. So what you had to do was drive it so that as it touched boost you instantly changed gears. And because it'd break traction the instant it hit boost, the fact that it didn't have much power off-boost was a godsend. ...Inside the car, because the thing had an absolutely massive turbo, the floor of the car used to get massively hot. In fact, it used to get so hot I actually burnt my foot several times on the floor.
And because of the heat, when it rained it caused huge problems. When water leaked into the car the whole cabin would steam up. The windscreen in particular went instantly foggy. So at Bathurst I remember having to go up Mountain Straight, loosen off my belts and use a hanky that I'd jammed between my legs to wipe a little hole in the windscreen. I'd have to do that every lap. It's about the only time in my career that I've thought, "What am I doing here?!" – John Bowe, AMC #77
That thought probably didn't go away when, on lap 58, we had the accident everyone had been dreading. The worst kind of shunt to have at Bathurst was always to rear-end a slower car on Conrod, where speeds were at their highest and the walls were close and eager to claim you. With half a dozen Corollas on track, and visibility compromised by spray and deepening fog, everyone had this one at the back of their mind, but thankfully this worst-case scenario didn't quite come to pass. Instead, the #7 Caltex Sierra of Bosnjak – which was four laps down on the leaders – had unexpectedly caught up to the #29 Marathon Foods Walkinshaw, which was nine laps behind the leaders – and rammed it from behind. The big Holden was further down the order even than some of the 1,600cc cars, but given this was a privateer entry, it was entirely possible they didn't have any wet-weather tyres and were having to tip-toe around on slicks. Either way, Bosnjak simply hadn't seen the black rear end of the Walky in its own spray, and so hadn't realised there was a car in front of him until it was too late. At the last second he tried to jink, but there was no time left and he ploughed into the back of the Commodore at close to top speed, and from there they both pinballed into the walls. Both cars were now scrap, but to everyone's immense relief, both drivers emerged completely unharmed.
So the Pace Car was deployed again, which gave the race a bit of intrigue at last – the leading Nissan was due for a pit stop, so they team would have to get it done lightning-quick if they wanted to feed back out before the Pace Car closed pit lane and they lost a lap. Sure, the #1 was fast enough that there was every chance they could get that lost lap back... but did they really want to have to push it that hard, in these conditions?
As it developed, all three leaders pitted on lap 60 – Richards, Crompton and Cecotto. Crompo climbed out to hand the #2 Nissan back to Olofsson, Richards returned the #1 to Mark Skaife, while Longhurst took over the #25 for his sole stint behind the wheel today. As with everyone else, the Longhurst team spent a good long while in the pits seeing to windscreen, and the time taken proved crucial, as the #18 Shell Sierra came in while he was sitting still and – because the #17 was in the pits already taking service – it had to stack, just sitting there blocking the pit lane! Tony managed to box around it with a three-point turn, but it delayed his run not insignificantly, and it couldn't have helped his blood pressure much.
In truth, the steamed-up windscreens were getting beyond a joke, with Glenn Seton admitting he'd actually been looking out the side window of his Falcon to see where the white lines were – which the commentators summed up as, "Motor racing by Braille." From pit lane, John Brady gave us a quick rundown of the teams' solutions:
The common problem here is keeping the windscreens clean and un-demisted [sic], there's been some amazing tricks tried. The Glenn Seton Ford's been using Coca-Cola on the premise that the water might at least stick to the sticky surface and drip, whereas Brocky earlier was using half-cut apples on the inside in the hope he'd get it slippery and the fog wouldn't stick.
The apple was weird enough that it required an explanation, so Brock was confronted by another Channel Nine pit reporter, Bruce McAvaney:
My father told me a story about an old T-Model or something he had, with an apple, so I thought I'll try the apple. Then we went back to the high-tech stuff, and the only thing that worked with me was I got one of those windshield cleaning devices you see down the service station, and stuck it down there beside the seat. I dragged it out and sloshed the windscreen coming down Conrod Straight.
That reminded Yours Truly here of Bathurst only a couple of years ago, when Jamie Whincup was storming down Conrod in the rain while busy cleaning his windscreen with a squeegee... and then taking his other hand off the wheel to shift up. I don't know why that little moment isn't on YouTube, because it really needs to be, but in that case Triple Eight had been careful to magnetise the squeegee so it wouldn't rattle around the cockpit, and cleared the whole device with the officials before the race even began. On that note, McAvaney immediately spotted the problem with what Peter had done, asking: "I wonder if that's legal or illegal, Brocky..." But Peter, being Peter, cheerfully replied, "It'll be illegal! But I'll tell you what, I watched that bloke in the Sierra bash into the Commodore and I thought, 'Illegal or not illegal, at least I can see!'"
Bowe meanwhile had come in for a scheduled stop under the Pace Car, meaning he was also available for an interview while Dick headed back out to keep circulating. So while the leaders slowly completed their 62nd lap – it was once more getting very dark out there – Bowe reminisced to Brady on the stint he'd just finished, during which it had rained so heavily that his wiper had utterly demolished the "Tasmania Holiday Isle" sticker on the windscreen!
John Brady: One bloke very happy to be out of the rain, John Bowe. How was it out there?
John Bowe: It's a hell of a way to make a living, isn't it? It's atrocious. Honestly, in all my years of motor racing, it's the worst conditions I've ever seen.
Brady: Even as a Tasmanian?
Bowe: Even as a Tasmanian. We don't get rain that heavy down there.
Brady: The demisting problem, everyone's having troubles seeing out of the cars. Obviously the altitude up and down the Mountain's just making it a nightmare, as well as the heat?
Bowe: Well, y'know, I guess we didn't see the rain coming before the race, and the inside of the screen misted up really badly, and you just couldn't see. I got my hanky out of my pocket at one stage and gave it a wipe, but it's not the answer. Now we've demisted it and put the other window down it might be a little better, anyway. You drive into a wall of spray, and that's why there's all these accidents. You just can't see.
By lap 63 the rain was really belting down, so heavy that Tomas Mezera's wiper actually broke loose from its mounting trying to clear it. The Mountain was now completely invisible, sequestered behind a wall of grey cloud. Surely it was time to discuss a red flag? Nope, instead the rain thinned again over the following lap, and although the track was still soaked, visibility cleared significantly. Race director Tim Schenken explained his reasoning to John Brady:
Tim Schenken: We've just had a weather report from Orange, where the weather is coming from, and the advice is this weather passed through half an hour ago and it is lifting as you can see when you look out now, it's much lighter. We're going to keep the Pace Car out until the circuit's what we would call raceable – it'll still be very wet, but of course we've still got a lot of streams running across the road. And once that is cleared up we'll restart the race.
John Brady: The fog as well must have been a worry, made you pull the Pace Car out in the first place?
Schenken: Yes. It's very important that the flag points can see from one to the other, and in those conditions when that visibility isn't there, then we put the Pace Car out.
Brady: How bad does it have to get before you think about calling it off?
Schenken: Well the Pace Car can go as slowly as you like. I don't want to stop the race, and I don't want to call the race off. So we will just live with the Pace Car, and worry about the weather while that car's out. Once the weather starts to lift, we'll be out.
By lap 66 the rain had basically stopped, so visibility was no longer really a problem, but there was still a huge amount of standing water on the track, especially down at the bottom around Hell Corner. The crowd on the hill were shouting that the Pace Car should bugger off, so to speed things along track staff dressed in Dryzabones, Akubras and gumboots (they are wonderful, they are swell...) came out to dig drainage ditches and help clear the water.
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| The river at Hell Corner. Would that make it the Styx, then? |
And indeed, by the start of the next lap, the lights were out on the Pace Car to indicate that the race was ready to resume. On lap 68 the field was led across the start line once more, ironically, by one of the 1,600cc Toyotas – class cars and lapped traffic had all got bunched up behind the Pace Car like driftwood. But we were finally back to green, and as the race resumed some late-braking from Manuel Reuter got 05 into Hell Corner ahead of the slower traffic – he was way down in 34th, so even in these conditions there was little to lose and much to be gained by taking risks.
Leading the actual race however was still Mark Skaife aboard the #1 GT-R. On lap 69 he broke free of the pack and within a lap was again circulating like a metronome; the body language of the car didn't even look all that different in the wet. There wasn't much chase from Olofsson in the sister car, and while Dick Johnson on the other hand was chasing hard, the turbo Sierra just couldn't find the traction to be any real threat. Longhurst was still in with a chance, but the #25 BMW had dropped down to 4th in the process of putting him in the car, while 5th was the faithful Gibbs/Onslow pairing aboard the GIO Godzilla. These were the only cars still on the lead lap.
They were battered, they were bruised, they were tired and, although they would never admit it, they were more than likely a little bit scared. But with only 70 laps completed, they were barely halfway home. To be concluded...
*To confirm: Farina and Hawthorn had both died in road accidents; Ascari had been killed testing a sports car at Monza; Clark and Rindt had both died in racing incidents; and Graham Hill lost his life in a plane crash in 1975. All the rest were still alive.
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