And so, at last, the 1990 season reached its conclusion with a very special race: the Nissan 500, the grand opening for the new Eastern Creek Raceway built in the hills of western Sydney.
The circumstances of the track's development are better detailed here: suffice to say that with the 500cc motorcyles going to Phillip Island and Formula 1 to Adelaide (Adelaide!), the suits behind Australia's most iconic city were none too pleased at having missed out on the headlines. Their return serve was to build a brand-new, FIA-certified permanent circuit in the city's west. Sydney had a robust motorsport culture already, of course, but it was a bit lowbrow compared to the polished international events now being held in Victoria and South Australia. However beloved by the fans, Oran and Amaroo Parks were always going to be a bit rough around the edges, holdouts from an earlier time when a glorified school tuck shop would suffice for a concession stand, and you didn't need to build grandstands because families would bring picnic blankets. Even if they could be upgraded to meet the first real stirrings of safety culture in motorsport, they wouldn't exactly lend themselves to blue-chip sponsors: Rolex and Qantas were never going to be seen promoting a Sports Sedan race at Oran Park. And that's before we mention the real core of the Sydney motorsport scene, the speedways – Liverpool and Parramatta might have produced some fond memories, but clay was never going to attract a top-level FIA championship.
Thus, Eastern Creek. Technically the circuit had opened with a dress-rehearsal Superbike race, but I haven't been able to find a single detail about it other than it happened. My friend who's into bikes (whom I keep around to meet diversity quotas) commented that Superbikes were a very new category back then, so it was unlikely they would've got the international series. Given the Australian series apparently started in 1980 and was revamped into the Australian Superbike Championship in 1989, the machines and riders definitely would have been around, but whether this was a championship race or not (and even who won) are complete mysteries to me. Anyone know for a fact? Comment box, please.
Either way, now in the fight of their lives to remain a local manufacturer, the money for the opening 500km enduro had been put up by Nissan Australia, creating the Nissan 500 (usually called the Nissan Sydney 500 to differentiate it from the race of the same name over in Wellington). Nissan's money attracted a sizeable 41-strong entry list, which whittled itself down to a more workable 36-car grid. Most of these were very familiar to us: Chris Lambden in the Bearepaires Skyline; Alf & Tim Grant in the equivalent Sizzler machine; Garry Willmington in his privateer Supra; Mark Gibbs and Rohan Onslow in the GIO Walky; John Cotter and Peter Doulman in one BMW M3, Brett Riley and Craig Baird in another, racing for class honours against Phil Ward & John Goss in the Monroe Mercedes; Kevin Waldock in the Playscape Sierra; Ray Lintott and former AMSCAR champ Terry Shiel in the Valvoline Sierra; and of course a whole slew of Sydney-based privateers in Holdens, spearheaded by Trevor Ashby & Steve Reed in the Lansvale Smash Repairs Walky (no debates about whether Eastern Creek should go to Ashby or Reed – an enduro would need both of them).
But as usual, these cars were only grid-fillers. The real race was sizing up between the five big professional teams of Dick Johnson, Peter Brock, Tony Longhurst, Glenn Seton and Fred Gibson. The catch was, this being the end of the season (with Bathurst now firmly in their rear-view), budgets were basically dry and all these teams were running on fumes.
It surprised no-one that the cash-strapped Holden Racing Team didn't even make an appearance, as whatever budget splurge they'd got after the problems at Sandown had been spent on Bathurst (and rightly so, given the results). Dick Johnson Racing only brought along a single car, the #17 for Johnson himself and sidekick John Bowe, which was actually chassis DJR4, Bowe's ride for this year's ATCC and used since then by Paul Radisich and Jeff Allam at Sandown; it hadn't raced at Bathurst at all. In other words, they'd basically entered the team's T-car, pressing it into service while DJRs 5 and 6 were back at the workshop being rebuilt for 1991.
By contrast, Peter Brock brought along two cars, palming the #6 (one of the Rouse-built ones) off on some old friends, Queensland pay driver Charlie O'Brien, and talented Tasmanian dairy farmer David "Skippy" Parsons. For himself Brock retained car AR1, the most recent and fastest of his Sierras with the #05 on the sides, which had been in use throughout 1990. With Andy Rouse returned to the U.K., co-driving duties rotated back to Andrew Miedecke, although the Port Macquarie used car salesman was a bit touch-and-go this weekend. Unable to put fast laps together, Miedecke had gone to see the circuit doctor, who diagnosed a problem that affected his balance. "I had a bad ear infection that got worse and worse from Thursday onwards," explained Miedecke. "By first thing Saturday [i.e. race day] it was so bad that I went to a private hospital in Bondi to have the pressure released. I was pretty determined to get back to the track and do the race." Somehow, Miedecke was cleared by the doctors, and although he still wasn't a hundred percent when start time came around, his pace wasn't too far behind Brocky's. Just to be safe, Neil Crompton had been given enough practice laps to clear him to race if Miedecke bowed out.
Tony Longhurst and Frank Gardner also brought two cars along, their yellow-cage TLR5 for Tony himself and established co-driver Alan Jones, while the other was more or less rented out to a pair of pay drivers – specifically, the Brabham brothers Gary & David, sons of triple F1 World Champion, Sir Jack Brabham. It was their first time ever sharing a car together, but that car was either TLR3 or 4, one of the black-caged Sierras, which came as a bit of a shock to these open-wheel specialists. Both had contested Formula 1 this year, Gary with Life and David, ironically, with Brabham, so a car with a roof with its extensive suspension travel and huge roll angles took a bit of getting used to. Once he got his head around it though, David admitted enjoying the challenge of the Sierra, which required a whole different approach from a car with huge wings and no weight. Gary probably thought the same, but we don't talk about Gary.
Glenn Seton also brought two cars, but didn't end up running them the way he'd planned. It might've been expected that the Sandown-winning pair of Seton and George Fury would team up for another 500km event, but Fury had put his foot down. Even though he knew perfectly well Glenn would always get the better of the team's Bo Seton-built engines, he refused to share a car with Glenn any longer. "Glenn wanted me to co-drive for him and my ego wouldn't handle that," Fury remembered. "I wanted my own car. The last race I did was at Eastern Creek in an endurance race. It turned out that the two cars weren't the same and I thought, 'Oh, bugger that.' I was over it by then. The enjoyment was there, but the politicking..." Fury ended up lead driver in the #30, shared with Drew Price.
So that left Seton in need of a co-driver, but he found quite a neat solution. With his own car having worn the wall in Adelaide only a week before, Colin Bond was a free agent, so the pair did a quick handshake deal to share the #35, even though that meant climbing aboard in his red-and-white Caltex race suit rather than a blue Peter Jackson one! Ironically though, one of Bondy's own cars was on the grid that day, the #19 Caltex machine leased out to the father-and-son duo of Ken and John Matthews. One presumes that deal had been done before Bond had wiped out his own ride in Adelaide, leaving him stranded.
And lastly of course, there was Gibson Motorsport, who were pitching their sole remaining GT-R Skyline at the event in the hope they could take at least one major race victory from a disappointing endurance season. They experimented with various spring and sway bar settings looking to get the best out of Yokohama's hard "S-compound" tyres, and seemingly found something that worked. Despite that, the team as a whole were not in the best of places this weekend: not only was Mark Skaife only barely cleared to race after his Adelaide shunt (busy-bee Crompo practiced this car as well), Fred Gibson had to be marked absent as he was in hospital with his arm in a sling. So, no team leader, just one car and only one-and-a-half drivers to complete a 500km distance at a completely unknown circuit – it was going to be a tough couple of days.
Qualy Questions Queried
In qualifying on Friday, Richards of course took pole with a lap of 1:35.26, but the shock of the session came when it wasn't a Sierra that took the number two spot – it was Larry Perkins in his Walkinshaw Commodore, chassis PE 010. With an all-new Holden coming next year, Larry had a nice little spares inventory that needed using up, so he decided to blow the lot of it on this race. For qualifying he'd fit the car with a special 8,400rpm grenade engine and changed down two diff ratios for maximum acceleration: even better, he'd got himself a supply of Dunlop D15 tyres, the same ones developed especially for HRT to use at Bathurst. Presumably that meant he'd also got some of HRT's wider Castalloy wheels, giving him more lateral grip to hang on through those long, constant-radius corners. The result was a banzai lap of 1:35.66, only four-tenths behind the Nissan and one of only three cars to break into the 35s (the other being Tony Longhurst, with a 1:35.78). His race settings would be more sensible, obviously, but such a turn of speed was shocking from a car that was supposed to be the tortoise rather than the hare. And most worrying, he would maintain the advantage of those Dunlop tyres throughout the race – a fact which became even more important given what happened a few hours later.
Because on Friday night, while everyone but the Perkins mechanics were in their hotel rooms punching zeds, an sizeable storm front blew through the area and reportedly dropped an inch-and-a-half of rain in less than an hour. All the rubber that had been laid down over the course of practice and qualifying was completely washed away, returning the track to "green" status, just as it had been at the start of the weekend. All the setups that had been lovingly dialled in over the course of those sessions had to be thrown away, with new settings improvised or simply guessed at: the teams would just have to wing it. Worst of all, the green track penalised some tyres more than others: Alan Jones revealed that the Longhurst team's Yokohamas liked a bit of oil and rubber buildup, and that in the morning warm-up the track was much slipperier than it had been in qualifying, especially off-line where the dust left by the rain wasn't being cleared away by passing racecars.
So, an unexpected P2 for Perkins, who had the advantage of special Dunlop tyres. Godzilla was on pole, but with the handicap of Yokohamas, and no guarantees it would be able to go 500km without a problem. Seton was a proven winner over this distance, but he too was on Yokohamas, and had an unfamiliar co-driver to deal with. And the Brock and Longhurst teams were theoretically in the mix, but only if their cars held together – with new machinery on the cards for both these teams in 1991, every component they had now well out of warranty and ready for the scrapheap.
So many questions, so few answers – this could be a hell of a race.
Race Day: Revenge of the Repressed
The Nissan Sydney 500 had been set for 125 laps of Eastern Creek's 3.930km "Grand Prix" circuit, or 3½ hours, whichever came first. And joy of joys, after the Grand Prix in Adelaide, Murray Walker had stayed in the country an extra week to join the commentary team for this race. Since it was being broadcast on Nine's Wide World of Sports rather than Channel Seven, that meant we got Darrell Eastlake in place of Mike Raymond, plus Win Percy (who had nothing better to do) and Alan Jones on a shift basis, when he wasn't driving the B&H Sierra.
And so, for the final time on Australian soil, the class of 1990 lined up on the grid, ready to take starter's orders. Tachos strained as the multi-cylinder symphony filled the air; first gears were selected but clutches held in as the red lights came on, held for a deliberate pause, then went out and turned green. The Nissan Sydney 500 was on.
As expected, Jim Richards fairly leapt off the line and pulled out a gap of 50 metres before the first corner. Perkins and Longhurst were rather less boisterous, making slower getaways that left them vulnerable to a pouncing John Bowe, who made his first attempt to gain places through the long, sweeping Turn 1. But Richards was showing Godzilla no mercy this day, throwing the GT-R into a nice little slide on the entry to Turn 2, then winding it through the twisting complex at the back of the circuit, while Brock moved up to 2nd and Longhurst, who'd made a good initial start but then bogged down, a fighting 3rd. 4th was Larry Perkins, then Bowe in 5th and Glenn Seton in 6th.
The first incident came soon. Approaching the end of lap 1, Brock made a mistake exiting the Turn 9 hairpin and got a wheel up on the kerbs, raising a tiny puff of dust. Although trivial in itself, that mistake was enough to give Tony Longhurst a speed differential down the following straight, putting him ahead by the time of Turn 10. Brocky really ought to've relented at that point, but sometimes a racer's gotta race, and he tried to get the place back on sheer bravery, going around the outside into the tricky kink before the final left-hander. With better tyres it might have worked: on cold Bridgestones however, it became a classic case of ambition ahead of adhesion. Alan Jones had warned it would be slippery out there, and sure enough, Brocky lost the back end on the dirty line, got into a tank-slapper, nearly caught it but then over-corrected and spun the other way, planting the shiny white Mobil Sierra firmly in the sand trap. He managed to trickle out and rejoin, but with the field still compressed he'd lost an ungodly number of places, rejoining way all the way back in 20th. Scratch one Peter Brock, first of the big five to fall.
The second was Tony Longhurst. On lap 3, Larry Perkins dived under him into the final turn, emerging onto the front straight in 2nd place. While Larry pulled away, Tony then found himself fighting door-to-door with an opportunistic John Bowe, leaving the yellow Sierra 4th by the time they started lap 4. That 4th was reduced to a 5th in the process of negotiating Turn 1, as Tony's battle with Bowe had put him on the outside line heading into the turn, leaving him vulnerable to a feisty Glenn Seton as well. Dropping 2nd to 5th in half a lap was a bad sign, but it was nothing next to the midfield cars "streaming past" on the laps that followed, leaving the yellow car floundering down in 12th.
When they asked team manager Frank Gardner what was wrong, he told them with his usual tact, "If I knew that, I would fix it." In fact he did know, sort of: it was an electrical gremlin of the kind that had sidelined the car in Adelaide, one they'd been battling with all weekend. When it hadn't re-emerged during the morning warm-up they'd dared to hope, but no such luck: it had merely been lying low for the race. Tony's car was fast while it was working, but it only seemed to be working every other lap: in the meantime he was losing time he would never get back. So Tony Longhurst and the Benson & Hedges team were out of contention too, and we were yet to see lap 10.
So although Godzilla had no peer this day (or any day), the closest it had to a challenger came in the person of John Bowe in the #17 Shell Sierra. Unusually, Johnson had allowed Bowe to take the start which, given how strategies worked out, implied he would be in at the finish as well. Since those were the two most important parts of the race – and between them made up two-thirds of the total distance, leaving just the middle third for the co-driver – that was a tacit admission that Bowe was now the faster of the pair, which couldn't have been easy on Dick.
But it wasn't half paying off. Charging from the very first lap, Bowe benefitted from the demise of both Brock and Longhurst, then caught up to Larry Perkins as early as lap 8, just as they hit the first round of backmarkers. Bowe menaced him for a lap while awaiting his chance, then down the front straight, he got it: catching a tow behind the slippery Commodore, he applied the full power of a Dick Johnson Cozza to pass Larry just as they crossed the line to begin lap 10, powering into Turn 1 firmly ahead. From 5th on the grid, Bowe had fought his way up to a deserved 2nd in only ten laps.
But of course, 1st place was nowhere in sight. By the end of the second lap, Richards had pulled out a gap of three seconds: a lap later, it had become five. By the time Bowe was hounding Perkins on lap 8, Richards had been a full six seconds up the road. By lap 15, when the gap was being measured back to Bowe rather than Perkins, it was a full ten seconds. By lap 20, it was a scarcely-believable fourteen. On lap 21, however, it went back to zero in a damn hurry.
From following Brock's charge back up through the field, the cameras abruptly cut back to show the Nissan limping into pit lane with its chin spoiler scraping along the road! The tyre bouncing along behind it told the whole story: the left-front wheel had parted company with the rest of the car, basically out of nowhere. The loose wheel rolled into pit lane and eventually impacted the tyre barrier inside the concrete wall, bouncing high and then crashing back down behind, safely out of the way.
Richards sheepishly limped Godzilla back to its pit bay, where the waiting Gibson mechanics leapt to work – there was no guarantee something critical hadn't broken, after all. Win Percy speculated that he'd ground the bottom off the brake disc, but the worst didn't come to pass. After a quick check to make sure everything was still there, all the Gibson mechanics did was fit a new wheel and drop the car, sending Richo back on his way. Some have said Richards was lucky the failure happened so close to the pit entry, minimising the time lost, but it wasn't really luck: Richards had felt there was something wrong and already decided to head for the pits. That also possibly explains what the commentators wondered on the day – why didn't the team change the other four wheels and top up the tank while they were at it? The answer seems to be that they simply hadn't had time, it had only been a few seconds from "I can feel a vibration" to "I'm coming in". They simply hadn't had a chance to bring out some tyres and calibrate a fuel churn.
So with an easy victory once again snatched away by a mechanical failure, an impressively Zen Jim Richards rejoined in 12th and carried on with the job. Channel Nine's pit reporter, Charles Stewart, tracked down Mark Skaife for an interview, but it had all happened so fast Skaifey still had his mind on other things.
Charles Stewart: Mark, what on earth happened?
Mark Skaife: Well the tyres on the car, Charles, are still fine. What we decided to do was come in a little earlier, so that we were gonna have to make one full stop and a half stop. So we've done our half stop now, and we'll do one full stop later in the race and then I'll get in the car. So Jimmy's done one and a half, sort of, stints.
Stewart: But he came in without one front wheel?! How does that work?
Skaife: Exactly right. I'm not sure what's happened there yet. But we'll go and have a look at that now, I've just looked at the tyres.
Stewart: Really worrying?
Skaife: Well, the tyres are fine. But the wheel coming off is fairly worrying, yeah.
So now the race lead belonged to John Bowe, with Larry Perkins not all that far behind, hanging on like "a shearer's dog with a bone" in the words of Darrell Eastlake. Although the occasional little slide from the rear of that white Commodore gave away that Perkins really was hooking in, it didn't seem like he had anything over the red Sierra ahead of him. Bowe was having to judge the boost and try and average out the climb rate of that turbo, sure, but he had enough in hand to make it work. Perkins just had to wring its neck and wait for tyre deg to start kicking in.
He didn't have long to wait. Perkins inched up on Bowe during the next ad break and just, as they cut back to the live feed, BAM. Going deep into the braking zone for Turn 2 – the left-hand hairpin that followed the front straight and nearly-flat first corner – Bowe lost the rear of his Sierra and spun, landing in the dust going backwards. Larry, of course, slipped through and absconded with the lead, but Bowe wasn't beached and got going again almost straight away. He was able to rejoin without damage, but had to wait for Glenn Seton to nip by as well, lest he be slammed for a dangerous rejoin. He rejoined 3rd, chastened but unmarked.
So with those two having sorted themselves out for now, attention turned back to Peter Brock, who'd provided the entertainment in the first stage of the race. From 20th at the end of lap 1, he'd risen steadily through the ranks to be 7th by the time the Nissan shed its wheel. Flat-out was how Peter loved to drive, but it came at a price: he'd started on the hardest Bridgestone compounds he could find, and even those weren't hard enough. Although the pit window for a two-stop strategy opened somewhere between laps 40 and 45, Peter was compelled to pick a prior point to pit for pneumatics and petrol, pulling in at the end of lap 30. He handed the car over to Andrew Miedecke.
Charles Stewart: Well Peter Brock has just come in, a little bit earlier than you'd hoped, Peter?
Peter Brock: Yeah, I was hoping for lap 35. But, ah, we're still on schedule basically, it's just tyre wear. Well, tyres sort of having a bit of a blister in this hot temperature. But we're sort of half-happy considering the start of the race where I got pushed into all the muck on the side of the track and it was just like driving on marbles actually for a few seconds.
Stewart: So how is it out there at the moment? You've been making up a lot of ground, is that a position that you enjoy?
Brock: Yeah, a bit of incentive, a bit of a red flag to a bull. Basically, if you keep on-line, do it nice and clean and accurate, you're gonna go well. It's going to be a fantastic race as it wears on, I'm sure of that. And to see Larry Perkins out in front is fantastic. Good racing.
On lap 32 Seton followed him in, but although it had the appearance of a routine stop, it was still too early. Most tellingly, Seton himself stayed in for a double-stint rather than hand over to his co-driver. Seems likely they'd planned to stop around lap 40, but with the track washed clean overnight the tyres just couldn't make it, so it was better to just come in than keep losing time on the track.
Tony Longhurst tried a similar trick, but for a different reason. Coming on lap 37, his first stop was closer to the theoretical ideal than these earlier-stoppers, but tyre wear was the least of his worries right now. Tyre wear on a Sierra was mostly caused by the turbo lag breaking into wheelspin, and that was a problem Tony would've dearly loved to have, given his sick engine was cutting out more or less at random. Alan Jones excused himself from the commentary box and headed down to pit lane, ready to take his shift, but in the end Frank Gardner left him on the bench for the moment. Jonesy told us why when Charles Stewart inevitably came visiting with his microphone.
Stewart: Alan, what have you heard about what's going on?
Jones: Well, we don't really know. We've had some trouble all weekend with some electrical problem. The car just literally cuts itself off and I've been up on the pit counter and he's passed a few times literally in what appears to be angel gear, with the engine just dead. It may be the same old problem re-occurring. Frank Gardner's now suggested something that we make it a little bit easier for the oil tank to breathe, because it might be creating a little bit of a pressure, and putting a bit too much load on the pump, and therefore affecting the whole electronics. If that's the case we might leave Tony in to do one more stint because he at least is familiar with what's going on, whereas if I jump in I have to cope with learning how to drive the car with its problems.
Later, Jonesy revealed that the car was refusing to rev higher than 6,000rpm, which was about 1,400 down on where it should've been. The problem seemed to be related to engine temps – as soon as the car got hot, it wouldn't go beyond 6,000, which was a kick in the teeth on such a warm day. With a load of fresh fuel after its first stop the car seemed happier, but it remained to be seen what would happen once temps started climbing again. For now, the only treatment was to cross the fingers and go as hard as possible.
The contrast with the Perkins Engineering garage was stark: Perkins made his first stop from the lead at the end of lap 43, pretty much right on the money. Intriguingly, Perkins had let it be known that he planned to change brake pads at his first stop rather than the second, so two new brake pads, four new Dunlops and a handover to Tomas Mezera were all on the cards. With Bowe's spin they had an extra 28 seconds in the bank, so they had time to get the stop done as they pleased, working with grim briskness but no real tension. True to claims that it was hot, Larry had his helmet off as soon as he was out of the car, although that might also have been to facilitate communication with Mezera, who was now strapped into the driver's seat. While the car was standing still Bowe rocketed past to re-take the race lead, but the team didn't flinch, they just calmly finished the job. With the pads done, new wheels were bolted on (still five-studders!), and the car was dropped and sent on its way. They had been stationary for 45 seconds, meaning Mezera fed back out in 11th, but that would quickly become 3rd again as the traffic ahead all pitted. And their only real rivals still had a brake pad change of their own in their future.
Speaking of whom, by the time Perkins was pitting, Dick Johnson himself was standing by with his helmet on. Spin aside, Bowe had put together a very workmanlike first stint, so it wasn't until lap 44 that he had to come in – again, right where you wanted to be. Bowe pulled up exactly on the marks, pirouetted out of the car and yeeted his seat insert to make room for Dick's larger backside. The boss climbed in as his crew refuelled and re-tyred the car, Bowe holding the seat belts out of the way until they were needed. It was a quicker stop than Perkins, so Dick rejoined ahead of his main rival, but that didn't really mean much when the strategy had yet to play out. The meat of the race – its middle third – was still to come.
With Mark Gibbs also pitting the GIO Commodore, on lap 47 Jim Richards resumed the race lead in the GT-R, having spent the last forty minutes doing his usual impression of Moses with the traffic. Glenn Seton was circulating behind him in 2nd, with Tomas Mezera now 3rd, Dick Johnson 4th and Drew Price, who'd taken over the other Seton team Sierra from George Fury, in 5th. All these cars were expecting a promotion once the Nissan made its first genuine stop, and they got it – but unexpectedly, they also got to keep it.
On lap 52, Richards finally pitted for real, with all four wheels still attached. Jim stepped out and Mark climbed in, then sat and waited as the mechanics changed the front brake pads – this was going to be a long stop. As the seconds ticked by, however, and the stop dragged on... and on... and on, it became clear that even with a pad change, this was no routine pit stop. The Nissan was in trouble. The bonnet was lifted and a confab of mechanics gathered around, trying to work out what wasn't doing what it should've. It was only later that Richo would tell us the car had been overheating slightly just before the stop, hinting that it had started losing its coolant. Accounts differ, so it's not entirely clear whether the car had blown a head gasket or – a bugbear familiar to all the tuners out there – torsional stress from the stupendous horsepower being asked of it had actually cracked the block, but either way the result was the same. After three minutes without moving, the team decided the car was a lost cause and put it away. A bitterly disappointed Skaife never even got to drive.
The GT-R was only the most high-profile of the retirements, of which there would be a few, as there always were in an endurance race. Garry Willmington had brought his turbocharged MA70 Supra into the pits as early as lap 1, ultimately dropping out on lap 25 for reasons unknown. Chris Lambden's HR31 Skyline was likewise seen parked near the pit exit after lap 18, suggesting he'd pitted to fix a problem, and failed. The Matthews pair, father and son, found their Colin Bond rent-a-car less than reliable as well, dropping out on lap 28 for reasons unexplained. And on lap 64, even the well-run GIO Walkinshaw of Mark Gibbs and Rohan Onslow would see its engine expire, the ambient or the pace on the day too hot for the car to handle.
The demise of the Nissan team put Glenn Seton into the race lead for the first time, although Murray Walker apparently thought it was Colin Bond, which was as amusing as it was confusing. Good old Murray was welcome in the commentary box any time, but he gave away his unfamiliarity with the Australian scene more than once. Helpfully filling in the viewers on what an experienced driver was Colin Bond and what a good season he'd had in 1990, when it was clearly still Seton at the wheel, was only part of it. He also got excited thinking Peter Brock's engine was about to expire, when in fact he'd merely gone back to his ultra-smoky sprint-race exhaust layout. Charles Stewart later cornered Andrew Miedecke on lap 84 (after he'd finished his stint on lap 77), and asked bluntly if the smoke was a sign of a problem. "No I don't think so, that's one of our secret weapons," was Miedecke's cheerful reply. "It's really nothing to worry about and we believe that car will be running strongly at the end." Well, Murray hadn't been here for Symmons Plains, had he?
Anyway, with Seton (not Bond) now leading, Mezera was only 11 seconds behind, and Dick Johnson slowly working his way back toward the front as well (impressively, the Lansvale team had got themselves up to 6th outright before their mid-race pit stop – not bad for a pair of part-timers). By lap 61 Seton had eked the gap out to 15 seconds, as Mezera struggled to match his pace in a fat, fuelled-up Walkinshaw Commodore. Seton was also driving the thing ragged, the brake lights that stayed on deep into every corner giving away that he was doing a lot of left-foot braking, trying to keep the nose on the ground and make it turn. It might have been proof the Yokohamas were struggling, but at this point it was working, as by lap 65 the gap to Mezera was nearly twenty seconds.
On lap 73 – just past half-way – Seton finally made his second pit stop. He handed the car over to Colin Bond, who as previously noted did look rather out of place in the wrong sponsor's overalls, but no matter. With a change of front pads it was a long stop, over 39 seconds, so by the time Bondy got going again the car had dropped down to 3rd, behind Dick Johnson. By lap 77, the gaps were 16.17 seconds from Mezera to Johnson, with another 25 seconds back to Bond in 3rd. Colin had commented that Seton's car was much easier to drive than his own Caltex machines, with a more linear throttle response thanks to tuning by Bo Seton, who'd once built the best Capri V6s in the business. Less boost to save the tyres was a wise approach in a 500km enduro, but it did leave the car a little bit short of ultimate pace, and now it was Bondy's turn to struggle with a full fuel load and lose time bedding in brake pads. The #35 would not lead the race again.
Because on lap 87, Mezera finished his stint and brought the #11 in for its final visit to the pits. On the schematic it was a quick stop, with only a driver change, some fresh rubber and a fuel top-up planned... but you know what they say about battle plans. The right-rear wheel proved stubborn and took several seconds to remove. The mechanic responsible doubled down, revved up the air gun once more and finally got the damn thing off, quickly fitting its replacement, but the whole procedure had been delayed. What should have been a 20-second stop had taken 27 seconds, and Perkins shot away with the tyre squeal muffling his language – that little problem might have derailed his entire strategy.
Dick Johnson sniffed an opportunity and went for it. He was already driving his Shell Sierra just as hard as he knew how, shaving the gap down to 11 seconds before Mezera pitted, and with the stop delayed he seemingly had the thin end of the wedge he needed. The fight for 2nd place between Perkins and Bond was now taking place 44 seconds behind his leading Sierra, but including time to traverse pit lane, 44 seconds was about how long his next pit stop would take. And it couldn't have been far away, either, given he was now 44 laps into his stint.
Exactly how it played out I don't know, because the broadcast as it appears on the DVD seems to have lost about eight laps – we cut abruptly from lap 88 to lap 96. It was on this lap Johnson finally made his stop, the proud #17 Sierra receiving four new tyres, a fuel top-up and a change of driver, rotating back to John Bowe. There were no hiccoughs, and the #17 zoomed away from its final stop to re-emerge in 2nd place – right behind Perkins. The gap between them was now down to just 2.5 seconds, with nothing between either car and the chequered flag but each other.
Charles Stewart: Dick, two seconds between your car and Larry Perkins. Fairly nail-biting stuff for you?
Dick Johnson: S'good race ay? Took a good while to get my backside into gear, my eyes have been playing up in the last week. Fortunately I overcame that and started trucking on and doing decent times. But, it's going to be a hell of a race to the end, and I think it'll be good for the guys if they can have a win this year.
Stewart: Is it going to be hard for you, sitting here in the pits and watching Johnny Bowe drive?
Johnson: No, I've got every confidence in the guy. He's an excellent driver and I know he'll do his very, very best. And hopefully just bring the car home.
Stewart: Yes, well what about the car? Has it been having any problems with it at all?
Johnson: The car's absolutely perfect. It's a credit to the guys, they've done a fabulous job on the car, and in their pit stops. We made up like ten seconds in the pit stop, and that's what it's all about in a professional team, and I think we've got the best in Australia.
Stewart: Can you make up the two seconds?
Johnson: I sincerely hope so. I betcha John will be trying his damnedest!
By lap 101 the gap was down from 2.09 to 1.82 seconds... but then was back out to 2.2 seconds as they started lap 102. The pace was absolutely merciless, but the speed of the two cars was actually fairly even, so the swings were down to imponderables like mechanical failures or traffic. With so much of the lap spend in long, constant-radius corners, getting stuck behind a backmarker could easily lose you a second or more. On the face of it, then, you'd put your money on the younger guy to be a bit more reckless and take more risks in traffic, but you reckoned without the determination of Larry Perkins when he had a win in his sights. Another lap and Larry had stretched the gap out to 3 seconds, just by being more daring in the traffic.
On lap 107 the margin shrank to a heart-stopping 1.2 seconds as Larry got badly held up by Peter Brock, who apparently didn't believe in blue flags (although to be fair, nobody knew better than Brock the dangers of getting off-line...). Then Bowe got held up in turn, restoring some of the gap, but not all – by lap 110 it was still only 1.4 seconds. And by this stage, the Perkins team were admitting Commodore was walking wounded.
Charles Stewart: There is a problem with the car, isn't there?
Tomas Mezera: There's a little problem with the alternator. We have the red light on all the time and we bit worried we could run out of electricity in a car. We keep switching the oil gearbox pump and the diff pump then leaving it oil to warm up to 160 degrees, then flip the pumps on again for a couple of laps to cool it down and keep repeating it. Try to save some electricity.
Stewart: So there's a very fine line between maintaining the electrical system, and seizing a diff and gearbox, is that right?
Mezera: That's right. You don't wanna run it too hot, but you still need the electricity to have the engine running strongly, otherway it could develop a misfire in the top end.
Stewart: So Tomas how are the nerves, sitting here watching all this happen, for you?
Mezera: Well... I'd rather be out there. But I'm pretty confident in Larry, if he will not have many problems then he... I don't think he would let John by. Should keep his place there.
That was interesting, because earlier on Larry had actively denied there was anything wrong with his alternator. After his first stop Charles Stewart had asked, "You were saying earlier the alternator light's on, is that a problem?" Larry had replied, "Nah, we've got one diode's dropped out, but we've got plenty of charge here so it's not a problem." So either Larry was playing mind games, or the problem had got a lot worse in the hour-and-a-half since then.
So although he had the measure of Bowe, Perkins really couldn't afford to hang around, as demonstrated on lap 113 when he drove straight between two Corollas between Turns 3 and 4. These were the blue AE86 of Peter Verheyan and the red FX-GT of David Sala, who were deep in their own private battle at the time, but thankfully both used their mirrors enough to see Larry coming and put up no resistance as he came barging through. Even so, by the approach to the Turn 10-Turn 11 complex, the gap to Bowe was down to just one second. This was not the time to get held up by Mike Twigden's BMW 323i, but that happened only a lap later as well, so by the time they crossed the finish line to start lap 115 the gap was under a second. Larry's rear tyres were starting to get very threadbare, evidenced by the rear of the car now hanging very loose through those turns, and he was likely overheating by inches as well. The car only had to hang on for ten more laps, but there was no guarantee it could make it that far.
On lap 116 Larry got a wheel in the dirt through the outside of Turn 1, showing all and sundry he was milking this car for all it was worth, determined to at least go down fighting. By grabbing the traffic by the ears Larry pulled the gap back out to 3 seconds in two laps, but a big wobble in the middle of Turn 1 (again) revealed that his tyres were pretty close to finished. Even so he wasn't backing off, with a 3.2-second gap with five laps to go. And then Murray Walker stuck his nose in and tempted fate:
...And I'm wondering in the back of my mind, all the time, just a little suspiciously, Win, whether John Bowe, at the appropriate moment, can reach out and on a neck-or-nothing basis, turn a turbo screw or a turbo control, wind up the boost, risk blowing the engine but in so doing close on and perhaps pass Larry Perkins in the very closing stages?
He just had to say it...
In truth, the DJR counterattack was already finished. The car was losing time and had been for several laps now, with Larry's lead out to 4.2 seconds with just three to the flag. What happened next was just the final cherry on top. On lap 124 – just one from the finish – the TV feed suddenly showed the red #17 Sierra spinning violently off the track and falling utterly still in a cloud of dust. At first it just looked like a spin, but then we saw the replay: into Turn 10, still in the acceleration zone, Bowe was already sideways and blowing white smoke. And then whoosh, out came a huge jet of flame, like the U.S. Marines hitting the beach on Iwo Jima. This wasn't a simple driver error, this was an engine failure of the most catastrophic kind.
"Well that is rotten, cruel, bitter luck for John Bowe," said Murray Walker, and for once it was an understatement: Bowe and Johnson had thoroughly deserved to win. But they hadn't deserved it quite as much as the man now reeling off the final lap and taking the chequered flag to clinch an absolutely magnificent victory, Larry Perkins. On the podium, sporting the widest ear-to-ear grin you'd ever seen, Larry thanked his team, the race organisers and most of all his three sponsors – Castrol, Dunlop and Holden. "None of them claim to be a major sponsor," he said, referring to the fact that "Perkins Engineering" was still the biggst logo on his doors, "but I'll tell you, to me they're extremely major."
What had happened to Seton and Bond in that last stint is difficult to determine, because the broadcast almost forgot they existed. Around lap 100 they'd mentioned that Bond had dropped 30 seconds but was now charging back, which sounds an awful lot like a pit stop was made somewhere in that memory hole between laps 88 and 96, but they'd also mentioned he was falling away again by lap 108. Intuiting with what we have, it feels like Bondy recognised the Yokohamas for the handicap they were, made peace with it and drove within his limits to reach the flag. If that was the case, there was still a consolation prize for the team. The Australian Endurance Championship handed out points to the top ten finishers at Sandown, Bathurst and Eastern Creek on a 20-15-12-10-8-6-4-3-2-1 basis. With a win at Sandown and a 2nd here at Eastern Creek, that meant Glenn Seton had earned himself 35 points, annointing him as the Australian Endurance Champion for 1990. If George Fury had put his ego aside and shared the car with Glenn just one last time, they would've been joint champions, making this the third and final time Fury missed on a major touring car title. But then, to certain minds, defeat is more bearable than shared glory: two heads can't wear one crown, after all.
Addendum
Although he'd been in the commentary box in Adelaide, Allan Moffat and his team were nowhere to be seen at Eastern Creek. The reason was that the following day – Armistice Day – he was in the land of our old enemy, on the slopes of Mount Fuji to once again contest the InterTEC 500. He and Klaus Niedwiedz had won this race last year, but Moffat was now retired, so driving duties were passed down to Niedzwiedz and Gregg Hansford instead. Their car was the #9 ANZ Sierra, the same car which had won in 1989, but it came up short in 1990. They only finished 3rd behind – what else? – a pair of GT-Rs, one of them the legendary Calsonic machine of Kazuyoshi Hoshino and Toshio Suzuki. A changing of the guard if ever there was one.
Three weeks later, on 2 December, Australia's Nissan team fronted up in Wellington for the other Nissan 500. Once again Richards took pole with a lap of 1:29.09, but once again Godzilla folded in the main event, bowing out with another head gasket failure. Peter Brock and co-driver Miedecke did their part for the Australian contingent by finishing 2nd, behind only the winner Emanuele Pirro and Johnny Cecotto in the new BMW M3 Evo. Despite a mediocre 6th-place finish, Tony Longhurst must have been all smiles afterward – that car was his new ride for 1991.
As a consolation prize, Brock and Miedecke went on to win the second half of the Nissan Mobil series at Pukekohe Park, after the Nissan again failed to finish, this time with a broken turbo. It was the last time Peter ever drove a Sierra, so it was nice to round out the era with a win, especially one that wrapped up the series as a whole (whatever that was worth). 1991 was just around the corner, and when it came Peter would be back in a Holden – a new Holden – and the world would be back to normal. It was just a question of how hot those new Longhurst BMWs would be, and whether Gibson Motorsport could sort out the remaining weak links in their high-tech GT-R.
As they all knocked off for the Christmas break at the end of 1990, they couldn't have realised that things would have to get much, much worse before they could get any better...
