 |
| Tony Longhurst, no idea where, or when. |
Yokohama Cup – Race 1
Saturday 4 November dawned with a bad case of déjà vu for the teams – it was another burning hot day on the streets of Adelaide, just like the one they'd endured in 1988. As was now expected, the prominent TV coverage had enticed a sizeable grid of 33 starters, a mix of the full-time professionals and the keen weekenders from the AMSCAR series in Sydney. A standout on the grid though was Phil Ward in the Mercedes 190E Cosworth, a car which had been rolled at Bathurst last year but since been repaired and was now sponsored by the not-for-profit Heart Foundation, with a love heart around the #8 on the doors.
Peter Brock was starting from pole, with Tony Longhurst alongside on the front row. Both got good starts and made it into the first turn okay, but in that first-turn chicane Brock used a bit too much of the throttle and pitched himself into a wild tankslapper. Longhurst stuck his nose in to try and get past but Brock held the place, while further back Mark Skaife's #12 Nissan Skyline took a hit to the side from Win Percy's HSV Commodore, who was barging his way through. That flicked Skaife nose-first into the wall at the first corner, and although he emerged from the car okay, that was the end of his race.
Down the long Brabham Straight the order was Brock, Longhurst, Seton, Miedecke, the two Dick Johnson cars, and then Colin Bond – Sierras filling all places from P1 to P7! (8th, and therefore first of the non-Sierra runners, was one of the HSV Commodores, which was some comfort to the parochial crowd in the grandstands.) The early running was enlivened by a scrap between Colin Bond and Glenn Seton in evenly-matched Sierras, although that came to an end heading into the final hairpin, where Bondy got a bit too brave with the brake pedal. He locked up the rears and pitched himself into a spin that ended in the middle of the road, just outside the apex of the hairpin. That was off the racing line, so it seemed like the rest of the field would get through okay... all except Win Percy, who rammed the Sierra with the nose of his own #16 HSV Commodore, shoving Bond off the track and into the sand, and breaking off the left-hand corner of the Walky’s aero face. Percy really was having a rough day, and was spreading it far and wide.
Then poor Andrew Miedecke was seen off the track, his Kenwood car stereo-backed #6 Sierra sporting a dislodged rear bumper, suggesting he'd taken a hit from behind – and, oh yeah, the car was on fire. More déjà vu – he'd already lost a car to a fire after a bad accident at the Lakeside ATCC round earlier in the year, and with his finances precarious he could ill afford to lose another. It took the attending marshals a few moments to realise there were actually flames licking from the underside of the car, but once they did the extinguishers came out and the incident was over before it could really begin. If all that wasn't enough, Bond was being shown a mechanical black flag for having bodywork dangling after the shunt with Percy... but before that could make any real difference the red flags came out and the session was stopped completely.
It emerged a shunt between the #53 Peter Doulman BMW (class winner at Bathurst a couple of weeks ago) and another car had completely blocked the road. Replays revealed that Doulman had tried to go up the inside of Lawrie Nelson's #29 Mustang at the Dequetteville Hairpin, but Lawrie either hadn't seen him, or decided to shut the door, or Doulman just hadn't left himself enough room to finish braking. Whatever the cause, the result was the front-left corner of the BMW making contact with the right side of the Mustang and jumping upwards, clambering over the Mustang in frightening fashion. Doulman's left-rear tyre actually left skid marks on Nelson's A-pillar and bonnet (and no doubt Nelson left some more in the Mustang's seat). Just behind, the #52 BMW was lucky to see the clash coming and avoid it, but Doulman ended up battered and bruised on the outside of the corner, with Nelson hot and bothered on the opposite side. All drivers emerged unharmed, but with this impromptu chicane now in place the stewards wisely stopped the race to clear the cars.
This was no mere yellow-flag safety car, everyone went straight back to the pits to prepare for a proper restart. This was declared a new but shortened race (9 laps instead of the originally scheduled 15), so they gridded up again in the order they'd started the first race, not the order they'd worked out in the four laps they'd managed on track. That meant there were a few empty grid spots as some failed to take the new start: Miedecke's car was fire-damaged; Nelson, Doulman and Skaife had crash damage; Bowe had suffered an engine failure. Colin Bond, however, rejoined after hacking off all the bodywork that had been ruined in the collision with Win Percy; without that fouling on the wheels, he was ready to go again.
The second start was like the first, with Brock, Longhurst and Seton all getting away smartly. Dick Johnson however – starting with an unobstructed view after the two cars ahead of him had both been taken out – got a lousy start and found himself being swamped from behind by Percy's fast-starting HSV Commodore. Into the braking zone the light Sierra had the edge, and Johnson stayed ahead, but it was ugly and messy; Johnson got into a tank-slapper like Brock's, while no-one less than Jim Richards was forced over the ripple strips in his quest to avoid a major pile-up. Forcing nearly 30 cars through that opening chicane seemed a recipe for madness every time.
Around the first lap it was once again Brock leading, Longhurst chasing, with Seton 3rd and Johnson 4th. Behind Johnson, Percy was reaping the benefits of his aggressive start and was running 5th, ahead of the two remaining Skylines of Jim Richards and George Fury. Down the Brabham Straight Brock had to go defensive, keeping to the right to defend the inside line from Tony Longhurst. Both went very deep on the brakes but Brocky made a slight mistake on the exit, dipping a wheel into the dust on the outside of the hairpin. To Longhurst, that was an invitation on an embossed card: he got alongside through Turn 13 but Brock hung it out on the tyres in glorious fashion, keeping his speed up and getting him out of the turn ahead. Then out of Turn 14 Longhurst was a tad too aggressive with the power button and got a hint of a tank-slapper, forcing him to lift and concede the place.
Through the next few laps the top four were still tied together, drafting and defending along the Brabham Straight, but with Brock just barely eking out some distance as the laps counted down. Then, out of nowhere, Johnson made his move. In the commentary box, guest commentator Alan Jones had opined that Johnson had been getting into the turns too aggressively and thereby losing out on the exit; it seems Dick had been listening, because with the race half over he finally got the run out of Brewery Corner just right and set himself up with a speed advantage all the way down Brabham Straight. Both Longhurst and Seton went defensive, but there was nothing they could do about it: Dick simply drove straight past them, stood on the brake pedal at just the right moment and tipped the car into the hairpin, having gone from 4th to 2nd in one move.
As if his day couldn't get any better, then Brocky went into Turn 4 on the East Terrace too hot, lost the back end and spun; that was him done and dusted. Dick had gone from 4th to 1st in the space of half a lap and, feeling cocky, he was now throwing the car into the turns and steering it on the throttle in exactly the style you couldn't with a turbo, mostly just for the fun of it.
A tad more circumspection might have been warranted: although Seton soon headed for the pits with a problem, Tony Longhurst was still in the hunt and trying to reel Johnson in, the dethroned Bathurst champion chasing down the reigning one, even though it seemed a hopeless cause. But in motor racing the rule is to always apply pressure, you never know... and sure enough, with just one lap to go, Dick finally overdid it and lost the rear heading into the quick left-right complex at Turn 7. He kept the Sierra's whaletail off the wall – barely – but embarrassingly ended up facing the wrong way as Longhurst and Brock blasted by. Game over. With only a lap and a half to the flag, there wasn't time to get back in the race, so that's how they finished: Longhurst took the win, with Brock 2nd. Win Percy was a solid 3rd for Holden – legacy of that demon start – with Richards 4th, Bond 5th, Fury 6th and Johnson a chastened 7th.
There'd been no smoke puffs to indicate a brake lock-up, so it seemed Johnson had simply been caught out by creeping temps at the rear. Interviewed by Barry Sheene as he walked back to his pit bay, a jubilant Tony Longhurst confirmed that this had been the case:
The front brakes were fading on everyone else's car. I was tempted to wind it to the front, but you could see Brock and Dick locking up at the rear so I just left my balance how it was. And eventually that's why everyone was spinning off the track, their back brakes were locking up because of the heat.Tell me Frank Gardner wouldn't have been proud of that!
Yokohama Cup – Race 2
The second race on Sunday morning revealed why the previous afternoon had been so hot – there'd been rain on the way. Apparently it was dry in the early morning, but sometime around 11:00am a good soaking rain started to pelt down, and by the time the Group A cars headed to the grid the puddles were deep and plentiful.
Despite that, Sunday's race turned out to be the more straightforward of the two. This time both Longhurst and Brock bogged down at the start, but once again Win Percy got away smartly in the Commodore, only to be completely eclipsed by Richards making a blinding start, zipping between the two Sierras on the pit straight and into the chicane in P1. Around the first lap Richo led with Longhurst chasing, a small gap to Colin Bond 3rd in the Caltex Sierra, then Brock in the Mobil version, then Johnson and Grice in the FAI Commodore. George Fury didn't have it so good, trailing a bumper bar halfway around lap 1 suggesting someone had rammed him from behind – for which he was given a mechanical black flag. Not the farewell he'd have wanted from touring car racing, but no-one leaves through the front door in this business – well, almost no-one, but more on that in a moment...
Down into the final corner Bondy got a run on Longhurst and dive-bombed into the hairpin alongside him, driving on tippy-toes. Both got through without contact, and having taken a wider, faster line out of the turn Longhurst got a better drive back onto the straight and stayed in 2nd – but both were having trouble dealing with Jim Richards right now. Perfectly happy in the conditions, the New Zealander had that Skyline absolutely hooked up and was perfectly happy to kick the tail out under boost. Today he was driving more like George Fury than George Fury, in fact.
Through Turn 9 onto Jones Straight, Richards climbed over the kerbs and Colin Bond had a mad moment with yet another tankslapper, but Longhurst kept his composure, hinting at what was to come next. Having patiently got his tyres and brakes up to temperature, by lap 2 Longhurst was able to follow Richards through Brewery Corner for the first time, and from there it was just a matter of planting his foot and waiting. On a long straight like the Brabham, there was absolutely nothing Richards in a 345 kW Nissan could do to hold back a 410 kW Ford. Imperiously, Longhurst moved across and took the line off Richards, swept through the hairpin and resumed the march, now firmly in the lead.
The difference in body language between Bond and Longhurst was instructive; Frank Gardner of course preferred softer setups that let the tyres live, which could've explained why the yellow #25 looked so controllable and the red and white #6 looked like a fish dropped on the floor. All the same, sheer talent and experience meant Bond was able to pull the same move at the hairpin on Richards as he had on Longhurst a lap earlier, and this time he made it stick – albeit with a minor love-tap mid-corner. A lap later and Dick Johnson was able to pull off the same trick, with even more aggressive contact made: Richards' grandstanding hadn't amounted to much in the end.
The windscreen wipers remained on because the spray hung in the air with the concrete walls hemming it in, but the rain had stopped. The track wasn't really drying, but it wasn't getting any wetter either, not that it would've mattered in a race this short. Further back, Grice was at his fabulous best trying to catch Brock, sliding the big FAI Commodore out of the turns, forcing that primitive rear suspension to live with the grunt of a 5.0-litre race-tuned V8. After very nearly getting past at the hairpin, he kept the pressure on and got it done at Turn 4. Despite frustrating levels of wheelspin, however, Brock kept the fight alive and repassed him two laps later.
By the finish Longhurst had hit his rhythm and was driving with beautifully controlled oversteer, an astoundingly difficult thing to do on a wet track in a car where the difference between 100 and 400 kW was only 1,000rpm. Clearly at the end of an entire year in this car, his right foot was perfectly calibrated to driving it and he was reaping the benefits. On the final lap, using the crude stopwatch/YouTube timing method, it seems Bond was roughly 2.5 seconds behind, too far back to think of winning the race. Longhurst had done this one pretty easily, just cruising and collecting. Bond battled on but 2nd was all he could expect today; Johnson had risen to 3rd and continued to close, but just ran out of laps.
So Tony Longhurst had won both races, in very different conditions, demonstrating mastery of the streets of Adelaide and taking home the Yokohama Cup (despite his team actually running on Dunlops). Why had he been so good over this sort of distance? Another theory, take it or leave it – because that year Tony had also won the James Hardie Building Products AMSCAR series, whose lucrative prize money made it the series any Sydney-based team built their schedule around. This year there had been four rounds, all of them (except the first, which was also Amaroo Park's ATCC round) extremely short, sharp sprints of 5-15 laps only. In this pressure-cooker environment, getting off the line and nailing in every lap perfectly was crucial, and the driver simply had to be on it from the first lap to the last. Despite fierce resistance from Brian Callaghan's yellow Walkinshaw Commodore and Colin Bond's Caltex Sierra, Longhurst had managed to win eight consecutive races spread across three rounds – basically every AMSCAR race except the shared ATCC opener. Short, multiple-race formats were very familiar territory for Tony, as they were to Colin Bond, who'd been at the pointy end of both races despite the setbacks. Tony had won the AMSCAR title for the third time, of what would ultimately be a record five, so taking the Adelaide GP support races as well was just the icing on the cake.
 |
| How we first saw it. |
With hindsight, however, the really significant moment of the broadcast had come during the red flag period on Saturday, when the commentators pointed out that this was (intended to be, at least) the last outing for Nissan's HR31 Skyline. The replacement R32 had been homologated and was being used as the Clerk of the Course car this weekend, looking sumptuous in a deep ruby red paint. "It's quite a business," said an impressed Alan Jones. "Four-wheel drive, four-wheel steer, thirty-two valve, twin-turbo... a little bit heavy, but they seem to think they can get the horsepower into it that'll make it really competitive. Certainly a beautiful-looking car..."
Godzilla was coming.
InterTEC 500
I retired from driving after Klaus Niedzwiedz and I won the Fuji 500 in Japan, held a few days after I turned 50. – Allan Moffat, AMC #77
One of the few who hadn't been in Adelaide, however, was Bathurst runner-up Allan Moffat. He'd instead taken his #9 car – the older one, which had contested Bathurst in 1988 and been the team tortoise this year – to race in the InterTEC 500 at Fuji Speedway, season finale for the All-Japan Touring Car Championship. It was Japan's most important touring car race, and to help out he'd brought along the winner of the last two events, star Eggenberger driver Klaus Niedzwiedz. In his final appearance as a professional racing driver, the man who'd been the first to win Bathurst driving solo would in fact be nothing more than a co-driver. If ever there was a sign of how much times change, this was it.
As an end-of-year treat, a celebration of our expected great Bathurst victory, I'd accepted an invitation for Klaus and myself to enter the Fuji InterTEC 500, the final round of Japan's touring-car title. Klaus had won the race the previous two years. It was to be held on the weekend of 10-12 November 1989, my 50th birthday. I requested racing number 39, the year of my birth. It was a nuance lost on just about everyone and I wasn't making it known.Allan's determination never to be a 50-year-old racing driver went deep. Johnson and Brock would cheerfully brush past this barrier, but for Moffat the aversion was strong thanks to experiences in his youth – experiences the purely Australia-focused youngsters could never have had.
Mount Fuji Raceway is one of the fastest and, for some, most fearsome circuits in the world. Certainly it is among the top ten. It sits beneath Japan’s tallest mountain, Fuji san, at 3,776 metres a perfectly symmetrical cone-shaped active volcano whose peak is under snow most of the year.
The race track was built in 1963, initially to attract NASCAR-style racing to Japan. They built a banked corner, the Daiichi Banking, and it had a habit of killing people.
After the final double fatality of several, they abandoned it, although even today you can walk over the back of the track behind turn one and stand on its near-vertical ellipse, just as you do at Monza.
Fuji is renowned for two things: the never-ending right-hand corner onto the main straight, 300R, where 300 stands for the radius of the corner in metres – an extraordinary length; and the straight itself, which is an engine-bursting 1.5 kilometres long.
Just as Mount Fuji is one of Japan’s sacred mountains – in Shinto mythology the permanent residence of the primordial God of the Universe – so Fuji Raceway is a place to be approached with reverence.
The six-heat Japanese championship had been decided by the final round. Masahiro Hasemi, who’d come 10th in the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix in the short-lived Kojima F1 car owned by a local banana-importing baron, had already claimed the first of ultimately three touring-car titles in a Nissan Skyline GT-R [sic – in 1989 it was still the GTS-R, just like in Australia].
So there was nothing to play for, except glory. The Japanese pushed their Skylines and Supras well past the limit. By three-quarter distance Hasemi had blown up and so had pole-man Kazuyoshi Hoshino.
Klaus and I pummelled our way to the lead, establishing an almost one-minute gap on the Toyota Supra of Masanori Sekiya, who a few years later would become the first Japanese to win Le Mans. (He loves the place so much he flew his fiancée over there so they could be married at the track.)
You cannot discount these fellows. They are fast, talented and fearless. The guy running 3rd, Keiichi Tsuchiya, has now, in his sixties, re-established himself as the Drift King, the undisputed global superstar of tyre-shredding sideways racing.
Sekiya and Tsuchiya got caught up in their own battle for 2nd, which gave us some relief.
Late that afternoon, we took the chequered flag in 1st place at an average speed of 156.9km/h.
When you stand on the podium, peeking just around the corner of the grandstand, opposite your left is Mount Fuji. It's a surreal sight.
I told no-one, made no announcements and blew no trumpets. But that day, the anniversary of my 50th year on this earth, I retired from professional race driving. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain
In my youth, as a young driver in America when I was based in Detroit, Goodyear took me under their wing. And on two occasions I was invited by the head of racing to go down to Indianapolis for the month of May. Not to do anything, just to soak it all up.
There was a misconception that it's a race, but Indy was really a war between Goodyear and Firestone. And for the whole month of May, not just one weekend like Bathurst.
So 33 cars started the race, and all the top teams had two cars. They would get them "into the show," as they called it, on the first weekend. They would still have two spare cars, and brought them out as money earners on the second weekend of qualifying.
So I saw a bunch of old guys, some past Indy champions and some not-quite-top brass, and they needed the pitcrew to help lift them into the cars. Then I saw about four guys helping this old guy get into the car, and the scariest thing I ever saw in my life was they were holding his hands and placing them on the wheel. They needed to do that because he had been in a big fire and his hands were all burned, and when they healed he had them set so he could hold a steering wheel.
It burned me. I said I would never be a 50-year-old race driver. I would have only been 26 or 27 at the time, so it was a long-term plan. – Allan Moffat, AMC #79
No comments:
Post a Comment