Bathurst '89: Mountain Redemption, Pt.1

After the controversy and legal chaos of the last two Bathurst classics, the 1989 running of the Great Race was refreshingly straightforward, with few crashes and no safety cars. In a straight pistols-at-dawn fight of reliability and speed, the race was dominated by a single car that led all 161 laps, capping off two years of total tyranny for that team and its drivers. For Dick Johnson, the 1989 Tooheys 1000 was a jewel he had waited a long time to affix in his crown, and victory was sweet.

But not inevitable.

Tantric Racing
Dick arrived at Mount Panorama in 1989 with a substantial chip on his shoulder. The reasons why went back to 1980, when he'd hit the rock in Tru-Blu at the rise through Reid Park. Dick and his wife Jillie had mortgaged their house to pay for that car, so abruptly writing it off from a comfortable lead at the biggest race in the country – a race that could have made them for life – was a heartbreaking blow. Dick spoke to the TV cameras with tears in his eyes, telling them if he didn't get $20,000 to rebuild Tru-Blu he was finished.

Of course, within the hour people from all across Australia were ringing in to pledge money to rebuild the car, turning Bathurst 1980 into an impromptu telethon – "Dick Aid", if you will. And then, seeing a huge marketing opportunity, Ford Australia got on the horn and promised to match the public's donation dollar-for-dollar. With that arsenal, Dick had been able to build Tru-Blu II, the car with which he won the 1981 ATCC after a hammer-and-tongs battle with Peter Brock.

That had left Bathurst '81 the only mountain left to climb, and Dick had duly taken the lead and held it for most of the day. But late in the race things had come awry. Chasing hard after Dick in a similar XD Falcon, Bob Morris had tripped over Christine Gibson (wife of Nissan team owner Fred) in yet another Falcon and set off a colossal accident. The pile-up had blocked the track, and co-driver John French (who was at the wheel at the time) was forced to come to a halt at The Cutting and switch the car off while it was all cleared away. That process had taken more than an hour.

In the meantime, Tru-Blu II had developed a bit of an oil leak, so when the way was finally clear and the car fired up again, it let out a huge plume of white smoke. That raised a few eyebrows around the paddock: Dick insists it was nothing serious and they could've finished the race as they'd run it so far, but Bob Morris says he could've caught French and won instead. And then there was Allan Moffat in his works-backed Mazda RX-7: he'd been some way behind at the time, but he'd also made his final stop so, unlike Morris and Johnson, he could've got to the end without a time-consuming pit stop to refill the tank with awkward hand-held fuel churns.

But the organisers read the rules and decided enough of the race had been run that they could call a result, so Johnson was declared the winner, but in the eyes of many he wore a tainted crown: the feeling was that he couldn’t have won the race if it had been restarted, or if it had run uninterrupted in the first place, and that the organisers had arranged things to bring the Dick Johnson fairytale to its logical conclusion. In short, Dick hadn't taken the chequered flag that day, and had never won a full-length Bathurst.

The problem was he'd never run so well again. In '82 he’d been out of contention completely, fighting to get the rear suspension in the new XE Falcon to behave; in '83 he'd pitched it into the trees in Hardie's Heroes, necessitating an overnight rebuild; in '84, like everyone else, he'd been cast into the shade by Peter Brock's VK "Big Banger" 1-2; in '85 and '86 he'd been saddled with a gutless Mustang; and in '87 he’d had the worst Bathurst of his life, both his new Sierras failing virtually on the opening lap in front of a paddock full of corporate guests from his big new sponsor, Shell. And in '88, he’d finished a fighting 2nd in one of the three cars he'd entered, but that was nothing to brag about – 2nd was merely the first of the losers, and he’d been eclipsed all day by the ANZ Sierra of Ford rival Allan Moffat.

But now – on the third year of a three-year deal with Shell, in the fastest Sierras on the planet – Dick had the best chance he would ever have. If he wanted to win a Bathurst 1000, rather than the Bathurst 747, it was probably now or never.

First Among Equals
As they once said of Michael Schumacher, "Crushing domination may be impressive but it ain't show business." I can't speak for the event itself, but Bathurst 1989 is a tougher writing challenge than the Great Races of '87 or '88. There were no close battles and no dramatic reversals of fortune, with the result clear pretty much from the word go. But a victory is only taken because someone else didn't quite rise to the occasion, so perhaps the best way to illustrate Johnson and his team's achievement is to highlight who they beat that day – a grid of quality drivers, some of them legends, and most of them in other Sierras. The state of play had basically been set by the preceding Australian Touring Car Championship, which I haven't covered this year because reasons.

Handily though, the first six minutes of this video amount to a season highlights package, so go nuts.

The new kids on the block were a team owned and run by a literal kid, Glenn Seton Racing. The official reason for Glenn quitting Gibson Motorsport was that Nissan didn't want tobacco sponsorship on their cars any more. It's a claim I find a bit fishy when Gibson picked up Winfield sponsorship only a couple of seasons later, but that might have to do with the Fuji Bank Scandal and Japanese economic crash slashing Nissan's budget, combined with the team having to lay the groundwork for the upcoming Ford-vs-Holden formula, a place Nissan money couldn't go. Either way, Seton had left the works Nissan team after two good years and one lean one to start afresh, and had walked off with the lucrative Peter Jackson contract in the process.

Throughout 1988 Nissan said they didn’t want to be associated with cigarettes. Ken Potter, who was responsible for sponsorship at Phillip Morris, approached my dad because they still wanted to be involved in touring car racing. That’s when we made the decision that this was probably the best way to control our destiny. – Glenn Seton, Australian Muscle Car #80

With a first-year budget of $800,000 (or roughly $1.6 million in 2018), Glenn and his engine-builder/father Bo had elected to run a Sierra, which they saw as the best way to be on the pace immediately. The new #30 Glenn Seton Racing Sierra hit the track in a splendid blue Peter Jackson livery, and was immediately as fast as your standard Rouse-sourced RS500, but not quite on a level with the DJR machines.

The first year was really, really hard. We only had the contract to run one car, but we actually built three cars that year. I lost one in that big crash at Lakeside.

We had nothing. I think we had about five people all up, including myself and Bo. There was a lot of work but not a lot of reward. – Glenn Seton, AMC #80

With Seton out of a Nissan, however, there was a seat spare at Gibson Motorsport, and it hadn't taken Freddy long to pounce on Jim Richards. With Peter Brock shifting his team away from a BMW and into a Ford, Gentleman Jim was out of a BMW drive for the first time since 1982, and officially on the market.

I realised in the HR31 days we needed to get an experienced driver on the team to really tutor the young guys. And I said, "You write out a list of six people, I'll write out a list of six people on a bit of paper, and we'll look at the lists." At the top of both lists was Jim Richards. – Fred Gibson

Unfortunately, like the Schumacher/Räikkönen/Ferrari situation in 2006, there were now three drivers to try and fit into two seats. Someone was going to be pushed out, and it was inevitable that someone would be George Fury. Despite having been with the team since its founding in 1981, Fred was never going to trade a young up-and-comer like Mark Skaife, let alone a driver at his peak like Richards, for one who was, whisper it, now a bit over the hill. Like Schumacher however, Fury went down swinging, taking a final win in that wet & wild ATCC round at Winton.

I'm not silly. He had three drivers happening at the same time and I kept doing silly things like winning the touring cars at Winton... He nearly sacked me at Winton, I could see it coming, and then we won the race!

I mainly didn't like it because I didn't like Mark [Skaife], and I didn't think that Mark was the way to go, but Fred wanted somebody young to push on with because he'd just lost Glenn Seton. I think Mark's father had a bit of input, so Freddy was pushing Mark and I kind of took that badly. – George Fury, AMC

So in his final Bathurst, Fury was slotted to be lead driver in the #3 HR31 Skyline, paired with Swedish journeyman Anders Olofsson. The #2, the team's lead car with all the loving attention from the mechanics, would be driven by Richards and Skaife, who apparently had no problems working together having won the awkwardly-named ".05 500" at Sandown immediately before Bathurst.

Pictured: actually Skaife at the Winton ATCC round.

Then there were the long-suffering Commodore runners. The championship had in fact become the first since 1970 not to feature a factory Holden attack at all: the Walkinshaw organisation had tried to get their own squad started and brought two cars to the opening ATCC round at Amaroo Park, intending to have Win Percy and Neil Crompton drive the whole season. Unfortunately, they'd immediately got their arses handed to them, the cars lapping several seconds off the pace. Seeing there was zero percent chance of beating a turbo car in a sprint race, and there were few marketing benefits to running around at the back, and with plenty on their plate getting Holden Special Vehicles off the ground, TWR didn't bother showing up after that. Which left the privateer Holden teams to run their Walkies – or even ordinary VL Group A's – without any factory support at all, a gamble the company could get away with because the VN was now on sale and the VL no longer needed promoting in the first place.

But it was unthinkable that there wouldn't be a factory Holden team at Bathurst so, doubtless with a resigned sigh, Larry Perkins scrounged up three cars and headed to the Mountain. They arrived in an iconic new livery, matte white with a black Holden lion on each side, which coincided with the first use of the name "Holden Racing Team". Given they hadn't been seen since Amaroo however, there were plenty of jokes about the Holden Not-Racing Team, and once again Holden was really only there as a sponsor: this outfit was still really Perkins Engineering, and the Perkins/Walkinshaw partnership would be coming to an end very soon.

There were no imported TWR cars this time, as all cars were prepared locally by Perkins. The #16 was a new car built that September, chassis PE 008, and it would be driven by Larry himself with help from last year's winner, Czech gun for hire Tomas Mezera. The #7 on the other hand was chassis TWR 022, the prototype car Walkinshaw himself had first driven in Birmingham, and would be in the hands of TWR's preferred drivers Win Percy and Neil Crompton, who was also pulling double-duty as a Channel Seven commentator. (The third car, the PE 005 that had won the Adelaide GP support race last year, was only brought along as a spare and didn't race).

Of BMW M3s in the 2.5-litre class, there were now precious few. They'd learned by now the Bathurst circuit really didn't suit them, and tellingly there were no works cars entered at all, with the premier entries coming from John Sax Racing of New Zealand. Their two cars (the #56 of Sax himself with Graham Lorimer, and the #57 of Craig Turner/Kent Baigent) would basically be racing against the Bryce Racing entry (the #50 Plaspak entry of Brett Riley and former JPS team engine man Ludwig Finauer), and the #52 of Peter Doulman/John Cotter.

In the 1.6-litre class it was, as usual, an intra-Toyota matter, with the works E90 Corollas (in FX-GT hatchback form) of Toyota Team Australia competing against the older AE86 coupés of Bob Holden's team, plus a couple of other dreamers.

Car pictured in 1990.

An interesting variation however was TTA putting their two prime drivers, John Smith and Drew Price, into a brand-new MA70 Supra Turbo. The car really deserves a write-up all its own, which I haven't done because again reasons, so we're lucky Mark Oastler has already done one for Shannons Club. For our purposes, suffice to say the Supra was a rear-wheel drive Celica with a 2,954cc 7M-GE DOHC straight-six engine, either naturally-aspirated or boosted by a single turbo. The option of NA or turbo created an interesting problem for race teams, as it meant they could either run NA in the 3,000cc division with 10-inch tyres and 1,035kg minimum weight, or affix a turbo and incur the FIA's x1.7 equivalency formula and be considered part of the 5,500cc tier, restricted to 12-inch tyres and a beefy 1,400kg minimum weight.

In the long run the turbo was the better option, as the heavyweight Supra couldn't get within 50kg of the 1,035 limit. But it did leave the Supra racing in the same weight class as the Jaguar XJS back in 1985, without any more power. Although Toyota had produced an evo 500 model, the Turbo A, it hadn't gone far enough: throttle body, intercooler and turbo sizes had been increased for more power, but the new turbo unit was still smaller than the Sierra's and it used the standard factory exhaust manifold. Like everyone else, Toyota had simply been caught out by Ford's "big turbo" version of the Sierra, even though it rendered it useless on the road, and the FIA increasing the turbo equivalence from 1.4 to 1.7 in an attempt to rein in the Sierra had wrongfooted the Supra badly. Supra Turbos had run well in Japan in 1988, but in Australia in 1989, not so much: a 1,400kg Supra was never going to trouble a 1,185kg Sierra with the same power or more.

Contrary to a popular myth, none of the Supras that raced in Group A were built by Toyota Racing Development in Japan. Of eleven known works cars, seven were built by Taichi Oiwa Motor Sport, aka TOM'S, Toyota's legendary in-house tuners. It was one of these cars that had been dispatched to Toyota Team Australia, where it had come home a fighting 5th at Sandown.

The Four Horsemen
In truth though, all these other cars were just making up the numbers. When it came time to hand actual money to the bookies, it was really a question of which Sierra you thought was going to win. And even within the Sierra ranks of 1989, there were only four that were in with a real chance of victory, the four horsemen of Australian racing: Johnson, Brock, Longhurst or Moffat.

The white horse was the Eggenberger car of Allan Moffat Racing, as Allan's sponsors at the ANZ bank had proved as good as their word. After the humiliation of last year, Rudi and Allan had braced themselves to cop a blast from bank chairman Will Bailey. Instead he'd given them a second chance, hissing the magic words, "Next year, bring two cars."

And so they had. Rudi had brought along his usual battery of computer screens and suitcases full of EPROM chips to keep the all-important Bosch Motronic 1.7 engine management system in the pink of health. The #9 car that had failed last year was kept around as the team tortoise, with Gregg Hansford and Pierre Dieudonné at the wheel, but the real strike weapon was the new #10, chassis EGMO 7/89. This car, which only ever raced with the #10 on its doors, was destined to end its career with just four entries in its CAMS log book – Bathurst in 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1992. It was a car built to win just one race, and it had been entered with Eggenberger's Klaus Niedzwiedz as lead driver. Moffat himself was listed as co-driver, but co-driving duties on the day instead went to a young German named Frank Biela – a future DTM, BTCC, Sebring and Le Mans champion for Audi, but at the time just a highly-rated youngster like Mark Skaife.

Rudi came back this time not only with a new car to supplement mine but with no fewer than three of his works drivers – Klaus, of course; Frank Biela, a 25-year-old member of Ford's Youngster team who'd go on to win Le Mans five times for Audi; and Pierre Dieudonné, disqualified winner of the 1987 Bathurst. My contribution was Gregg Hansford, who deserved redemption.

A lot had changed in a year. In 1987 and 1988 it was fair to say the Europeans held the upper hand. They were state of the art in their development processes, spurred on by the intensity of competition and the demands of the vast European market.

But Australians are a resilient bunch... Pretty much every counter-measure for performance deficiencies in the Sierras – things like engine overheating and weak axles – had been developed by local engineers and tested to destruction in the cauldron of the local touring-car title.

When Rudi turned up, he was faced with an entirely different prospect from that which he'd experienced in the previous two years. No doubt his car was stronger and better than anything he'd built before, and my current car would receive near to similar upgrades, but he was up against cars that were purpose-built for Bathurst. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

One of those was Peter Brock's Mobil #05. Unlike the two Rouse-built cars with which he'd started the year, this car was a new one, chassis BRT S1 – Brock Racing Team, Sierra #1 – built (as mentioned previously) by Dencar in Melbourne. This car had made its debut at Sandown, driven by Brock and Paul Radisich, but as a fully paid-up and rather high-profile Rouse customer Brock had been able to tempt Andy himself into coming Down Under to co-drive. The pairing of the nine-times King of the Mountain with a three-time Sierra BTCC champion was sure to make some very serious people in pitlane nervous.

Rouse dropping it through The Dipper

Then there was Tony Longhurst's #25 Benson & Hedges Sierra. What was remarkable about this team is that their competitiveness came from the sheer experience and racing nous of Tony's mentor, Frank Gardner. Frank had been one of the loudest voices protesting Eggenberger's win in 1987, the result of which had cost Ford the World Touring Car Championship; that fact made him persona non grata at Ford, so you could bet your bottom dollar no-one at Ford Motorsport was in a hurry to crate up the latest chips and development parts and ship them to Frank's team. They'd had to do it all on their own, a mission made a little easier by the local parts supply opened up by Dick Johnson, but still... if you were making a movie about this time they'd be your heroes, a team of underdogs punching far above their weight.

If Gardner was Yoda and Longhurst was Luke, then the X-Wing was the car itself, chassis TLR2, was a left-hand drive car that had probably started as a Rouse kit-car, but with its performance lifted to another level by Gardner's incessant testing and canny race prep. Being funded by B&H probably helped too: tobacco advertising was about halfway along its evolution from being allowed to advertise anyfuckingwhere, to not even on their own packets like it is today. TV advertising had been banned back in 1973, and about the time of this race parliament was actually in the process of drafting the Smoking and Tobacco Products Advertisements (Prohibition) Act, which would shortly ban it from print media as well. But some furious lobbying would see them leave open "accidental and incidental" viewing that would allow sports advertising, such as football games (any code) and motorsport. Tony Longhurst Racing's budget was looking secure for the time being, at least.

Then there was Dick Johnson's #17. The team had built a new car, DJR4, for Dick to win the ATCC – then built another new one, DJR5, for the season of endurance. The development on these cars never stopped in the entire six years Dick raced them, and as an engine man at heart Dick's focus was always going to be on that turbocharged 2.0-litre donk, which was now reaching its peak.

When we were starting to pump some horsepower out of them they were splitting blocks and things like that between the welch plugs – blowing the thing in half! So through our, say, engineering nous and a bit of forward-thinking, we ended up bolting the head studs right through the main bearings and that’s what held the whole thing together! When you pulled the heads down you were virtually holding the block together as well! – Dick Johnson, AMC #77

In 1988 he'd had the most power, great for sprint racing, but suspect reliability over any distance greater than 150km or so. Now in 1989, after two years of playing around with the management system, Dick finally found a way to maintain that volanic power without sacrificing reliability. He still had to de-tune slightly – down from 462 kW to, say, 410 or so – but that was okay when the opposition had to peg it back to 335 kW for this sort of distance.

The most visible changes however were the wheels. From the same BBS three-piece wheels everyone else was using, DJR had made the switch to striking gold seven-spoke wheels seen on the cars from mid-1989. Made for the team by Castalloy in South Australia, the aim was apparently to give better brake clearance than the BBS wheels, although it didn't hurt that they were stronger and stiffer as well. The design mimicked the aftermarket seven-spoke alloy wheels Ford were selling at the time, and had "DJR" cast into the front face. Like the 9-inch "Dicky diff" and Holinger gearbox, these wheels joined the Sierra's worldwide parts catalogue, and ended up appearing on several international Sierras.

It was still going to be a tough fight, of course – Tony Longhurst was the reigning champion and now knew how to win; Rudi Eggenberger had finally won this year's Spa 24 Hours, a distance greater than three Bathursts back-to-back, so his enduro cred was unquestionable; and Peter Brock always seemed to find a little something extra here at the Mountain – but overall Johnson and his team knew they had a real shot at this one. They knew it in practice, they knew it in qualifying, and they still knew it when the top-ten shootout began and the gloves finally came off. All excuses were officially cancelled; now, it was go time.

Tooheys Top Guns
The Shootout started rough when Andrew Bagnall planted his Gulliver's Travels Sierra in the wall at the top of the Mountain. Says the most recent issue of Australian Muscle Car:

Bagnall looked like an accident waiting to happen through the first half of his Shootout lap. Sure enough, he speared off the track at Sulman Park in the Gulliver's Travels-sponsored Sierra, side-swiping the concrete for 150 metres, to the delight of the crowd up-top. Given that the fictitious Gulliver endured a series of mishaps, disasters and wrecks, Bagnall’s team was aptly named. – AMC #112

Unlike Johnson’s off from '83, however, the car was salvageable and the TAFE smash repair crew were able to get it running, ready to start from pit lane on Sunday. Alan Jones in the second Benson & Hedges Sierra then started a trend by going more than half a second slower on his shootout lap than he had in qualifying: Glenn Seton, Brad Jones and Andrew Miedecke all had the same problem, with Jim Richards a massive 1.23 seconds slower on his lap than he had been on Friday. Clearly, the track had lost some speed overnight.

Again, that's actually Skaife at Amaroo, but no matter.

But with the herd done, we were down to the Big Four. Johnson, Brock Longhurst and Niedzwiedz were in a completely different race from the rest, having qualified more than a second clear of the herd but within four-tenths of one another. Niedzwiedz had been given the choice of ANZ Sierra and opted for EGMO 7/89, the new #10, widely touted in the build-up as the fastest Sierra ever to come out of Europe. Klaus nailed in a great lap, admirably smooth and fast, and he emerged slower than his best time on Friday, but still 0.4 seconds quicker than the next runner. His time in P1 however lasted only until the next car took to the track: Klaus was immediately pipped for pole position by Longhurst, Brock and Johnson in succession.

It came as a bit of a shock when Klaus was comprehensively beaten in the top ten shoot-out, 4th behind Peter Brock, Dick Johnson and Tony Longhurst. The other car was just outside the top ten, perfectly positioned. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Rudi blamed a poor tyre choice on his part, but the radar told another story: 245km/h up Mountain Straight and 279 down Conrod was, amazingly, a fairly lacklustre pair of figures when Dick Johnson was around posting 252 and 285km/h, respectively. It seemed, just like the ATCC, Moffat's cars had the best handling but the worst engines. Rudi probably scowled to himself and had another rummage through his collection of EPROM chips, and started thinking about Sunday.

Tony Longhurst stepped up in his yellow B&H Sierra and pulled out a mammoth effort to post a time identical to his lap on Friday, 2:16.98. Sure, it was no faster, but with everyone else actually going slower that seemed likely to put him in the box seat for pole position.

And then along came Brock.

Working the wheel through Hell Corner; twitching under power, the rear trying to break loose; Brock was sublime, neat and tidy in a car that was anything but. There was a tiny chirp from the front tyre as he slightly over-braked it into The Cutting; smooth through Sulman and Reid Parks; up on the kerb at McPhillamy but with no loss of control; sliding it into the Esses, then two-wheeling it down through the Dipper; flitting like a shadow between the walls to the Elbow; quick as a flash down Conrod, bouncing and lurching through the lightning-fast kink that started the Chase; and across the line to stop the clocks at a momentous 2:15.80. Not only was he faster than Longhurst, that was eight-tenths faster than his own best lap in qualifying on Friday. At last, someone had managed to improve their time.

"That's good!" he said with masterful understatement when they stuck a microphone in his face: "I'm very happy about that." But as soon as the scrutineers got a look at the car, they realised the lap was owed more than just brilliant driving: an onboard fire extinguisher nozzle was found pointed at the intercooler. Presumably it hadn't been there on Friday, so the popular inference was that the extinguisher had been spraying supercooled halon onto the intercooler during the lap, keeping it extra cool to boost horsepower.

Nothing was proven of course, and there were no actual rules dictating where the fire extinguishers had to point or about when they could be discharged, so Brock couldn't be stripped of his pole (his record sixth at Bathurst). Snippy, the teams' association (not CAMS) settled for fining him $5,000 for a "moral infringement" of the rules (which reminds me of a line from Billy Connolly vehicle The Man Who Sued God: "What are you after? Some kind of moral victory?" "Yes, I would prefer it to be moral, if possible." Which was the Rouse philosophy in a nutshell).

Anyway, there wasn’t much sting to a $5,000 fine when the prize for pole position was a solid $15,000 – and then later the same afternoon the team also won the Esso pit stop competition, picking up another $20,000 for their trouble.

Dramatic reconstruction.

Dick Johnson was now the only one left who could knock Brock off his perch, and he was up for it, the car feeling better than ever.

Complete with windows, a fresh polish and an engine that had finally reached its peak, our car conquered all as we floored around the Mountain. It drove sensationally. Full of grunt and roar up the hill, balanced and precise across the top, and lethal coming down, we recorded a stunning time of 2:14.58 [sic]. We were the car to beat with the quickest time. Brock was also ominous, less than a second behind in his Sierra.

We moved into the Tooheys Top 10 and pulled out an almost perfect lap. Under immense pressure, we clocked a 2:12.898 [sic], which was good but not good enough.

Thanks to some devious trickery, we were relegated to second place. Bordering on illegal, Brock discharged his halon-gas fire extinguisher, which was angled across his intercooler, giving him added horsepower going up the straight. He copped a $5,000 fine but kept his pole. We weren’t concerned because we knew we could outlast and outrace him the following day. – Dick Johnson, The Autobiography

Not sure where he’s getting his numbers from, because elsewhere it’s on record that he did a 2:16.58 in qualy and a 2:16.79 in the Shootout, but no matter. Without the halon trick he too went slower than on Friday – still faster than everyone else, but slower than Brock. He and John Bowe would be starting the Great Race from 2nd place... but given that was on the racing line, whereas pole had the inside line but started from the dirty side of the track, that wasn’t such a bad place to be. Sunday’s Great Race would tell the tale.