25 February: Running in the '90s

So the 1980s were over. The decade of cocaine, Wall Street traders in suspenders and turbo monsters had finally ended, and in its place came a new decade that would give us political correctness, Silverchair, a second crossing for Sydney harbour, the Recession We Had To Have, and a mass shooting that would transform us into the go-to example for gun control across the entire world. In due time it would also give us 5.0-litre V8s, but in the opening weeks of 1990 all that was in the future; the start of the 90's looked an awful lot like the end of the 80's.

Unable to afford to run his own team any more, Andrew Miedecke sold his Oxo Sierras and took a deal to drive for Peter Brock's outfit instead. 1990 would be his final year in the series.

The funny thing is that if you asked the average racing fan to summarise the 1990 season, they'd probably mutter something to the tune of, "...start of Godzilla domination..." and leave it at that. But in fact, in the early races of 1990 that car hadn't even arrived, and when it did it was far from dominant, almost crippled by the teething troubles inevitable in such a high-tech machine. In reality, 1990 was a cracking season that saw four different ATCC winners in three different cars, producing an intense arm-wrestle for the championship and, later in the year, an against-all-odds victory at Bathurst for one of the great underdogs...

1990 was in fact one of the great forgotten seasons of Australian racing, and it deserves a closer look.

Kick-Off at Amaroo
Dick Johnson Racing emerged from the 80's as the powerhouse of Australian racing. From the incident with the rock at the start of the decade, Dick had come out with two Bathursts, five championships, a solid relationship with a major sponsor in Shell and undisputed status as the Ford Hero. The team could be forgiven for entering the new decade with a spring in their step, and the expectation that Dick was about to clinch an unprecedented sixth championship that would at last break the record set by Big Pete Geoghegan in the 1960s. But this was the 1990s, and things were to change quickly.

Qualifying at Amaroo Park was disturbed by rain that dried up towards the end of the session, which shuffled the grid to a startling degree. Defending champ Johnson found himself starting from a lowly 13th, only 0.18 seconds faster than John Faulkner in one of Toyota Team Australia's Corolla FX-GTs! Happily though, John Bowe had timed his run exactly right and managed to secure 2nd place on the grid, beaten only by Alan Jones in the second of the Bensen & Hedges team Sierras. 52.14 seconds to get around the tight 1.9km Sydney autodrome – in the wet! – was quite an achievement in a car that delivered its power like a light switch. At last home from his overseas tour for good, Jonesy was a deserving polesitter.

I haven't been able to find the full race on YouTube, but there is this highlights reel, which isn't ideal but it's better than nothing.

At the start, Bowe and Jones virtually cancelled each other out. Determined to beat each other off the line, both former open-wheel aces gave it too much throttle and bogged down with limitless wheelspin. From 4th on the grid, just behind them, Jim Richards made a start that was both clean and aggressive and simply drove around the outside of them up Bitupave Hill, taking the lead. He would not be headed again.

It was here that the rule changes for 1990 started to make themselves felt. To try and balance the obvious performance gap between the Sierra RS500s and everything else on the track, the sport's rulemakers had adjusted the turbo parity formula. The old x1.4 engine capacity multiplier clearly wasn't enough, so they'd raised it... to x1.8.

Multiplying by 2 or 3 would've been more realistic, but there we were: the effect on track was to lift the minimum weight of the Sierras from 1,100kg to 1,185, a small but significant difference for a machine that was already very marginal on its tyres. With the ATCC having switched to a TV-friendly single 50-minute race format, championship race distances had increased from as little as 80km to as much as 150, making tyre life a real priority – in a sport when planned pit stops in sprint races were still uncommon.

That was music to the ears of the lads over at Gibson Motorsport. Although this race had been planned as the debut of the new Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R, delays just getting it running had forced them to dust off their older HR31s for a third season on the front lines, and the new weight limits could've been tailor-made for the little Japanese coupé. In all the time they'd been racing it, Gibson had never got the GTS-R under 1,180kg, so an extra 5kg of ballast to meet their new limit of 1,185 wasn't going to change a damn thing. Add in that their driver was New Zealand's Jim Richards, master of his machinery in all conditions and a man known for being remarkably gentle on tyres and brakes, and the factory Nissan team was in with a serious chance this year.

Gibson also got into the customer-car business, Chris Lambden upgrading from his ex-Brock VL Commodore to a GTS-R Skyline. The Nissan wasn't cheap, but given you got full technical support from the works team including fully prepared and maintained engines, you arguably got a lot for your money.

Richards knew it, and made the most of it by wresting the race lead away from the Sierras on lap 1. Bowe didn't let him get away, running him ragged in the early phase of the race, but by half-distance he was running out of rear tyres and clipped the pit wall with the rear quarter panel, and was lucky to get away without a puncture or other damage. Bowe was never really in the hunt after that, and eventually had to settle for 2nd place, 8.2 seconds behind Richo. 3rd went to the boss, Dick Johnson, who did well to claw his way past ten other cars around the bogan Monaco of Amaroo – but even that was a bit lucky, as second Nissan team driver Mark Skaife had been in the hunt for that spot car until an engine management bug had sidelined him on lap 7. 4th went to Tony Longhurst in the lead Benson & Hedges Sierra, which was a solid result but not really enough on the track where he and his mentor Frank Gardner did all their testing. About the only consolation was that it gave him a nice 8-point head start for this year's AMSCAR series (of which this race was a round, doubling as the ATCC season-opener), but given he'd ultimately win it 80 points to Colin Bond's 49, even that didn't really matter much.

Jonesy meanwhile just couldn't find the pace he'd had in qualifying and finished a lowly 8th – behind the two Mobil Sierras of Peter Brock and Andrew Miedecke, and the ANZ Sierra of Gregg Hansford, but ahead of Colin Bond in the Caltex Sierra, another driver who'd been caught out by the weather in qualifying. Glenn Seton meanwhile had crashed his Peter Jackson Sierra in practice and had to take the start in his second car, but a poor tyre choice led to a mid-race pit stop for a fresh set of Yokohamas that dialled him out of contention. But the prize for weird moment of the race came when Larry Perkins was shown a mechanical black flag for – of all things – making too much noise in his #11 Walkinshaw Commodore! Sydney's urban sprawl was well out of hand by this time and, like a gigantic amoeba, the suburbs were closing around the iconic Amaroo Park circuit. For some reason, homeowners that had known there was a racetrack nearby when they signed the mortgage papers were given priority over a local business that had been in operation for decades, so noise limits were serious business for the embattled Amaroo owners. The track would sadly see its final race before the decade was out.

I'll keep saying it: if Laguna Seca goes under, we're bulldozing Augusta. You've been warned.

The Lion Cub
It only appears in the video above for a few seconds, but the car at the heart of the real story of the 1989/90 off season comes at the 3:54 mark. That car was the #16 Walkinshaw Commodore driven by Britain's Win Percy, and it represented the maiden outing of an all-new entity – the Holden Racing Team. HRT was here.

Source

Yes, there'd been a Holden Racing Team since 1988, but that wasn't the Holden Racing Team. The real thing had been delayed for two years while Tom Walkinshaw busied himself setting up Holden Special Vehicles, a much bigger and more important arm of the Holden company than a piddling racing team. But by 1990 HSV was established and washing its own face, and it was finally time to put a Holden works team on the grid. Their first instinct was to offer the job to the man who'd already been doing it for two years, Larry Perkins.

After '88, [HSV boss John] Crennan and Walkinshaw made an offer that meant I would have to forget about Perkins Engineering and come totally under their wing to become the race side of HRT. But, at the end of the day, we didn't do a deal, which was probably the best thing, as I'm an independent sort of a guy and, as Walkinshaw is a similar type of person, we arguably might not have gotten on too well.

So, after two years of contractually running as HRT, I bowed out and concentrated on my own business and its further development. – Larry Perkins, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Nothing daunted, Tom instead founded a whole new branch of TWR to run one of his Walkinshaw Commodores (with Holden factory support) as HRT. Since he was busy being the head of the company back in Britain, however, he needed someone on the ground in Australia doing the actual legwork of putting the team together. That someone would be his loyal deputy, Win Percy, who he'd have to convince to move from the U.K. to Melbourne to take the job. Tom made the call to his old Jaguar and Rover teammate just as he was about to board a plane back to the colonies.

One day Tom phoned me at home and I was a day away from going to New Zealand to do Wellington and Pukekohe for Fred Gibson and the Nissan works team. He offered me a deal to run the works Holden team for the next year. I said that Larry was quite capable of running it and that I didn’t fit. I said to Tom to let Larry get on with it because he had the workshops and the staff and he was difficult for me to work with and that I didn’t think he would take to me. So I said, “No thank you,” to Tom.

But Tom wanted to be more in charge. The one thing he did say was “I won’t interfere with you,” and he kept emphasising that. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Walkinshaw met Percy at Heathrow and talked him around. Perkins was no longer involved; it would all be Percy’s show as manager and lead driver. Walkinshaw got his man.

He wrote on a piece of paper all of the details and the numbers and I said I would need to phone my wife Rosemary from Heathrow Airport and if she would agree to come with me, then I’d probably like to give it a go and that’s what we did! – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Percy thought the deal was only for one year; he didn’t want to drop out of the European scene for too long and be forgotten, so he rode off thinking it would only be a twelve-month jaunt. Getting HRT off the ground was a huge job, and Percy landed in Australia with little more than a list of names and phone numbers and a short 49-day deadline to the first round on 25 February. He brought over compatriot engineer Ken Page and they built the team from the ground up, leasing an empty factory in outer suburban Ferntree Gully and pulling together a talented and dedicated team under workshop manager and chief engineer Walley Storey, and former TWR engine-builder Rob Benson.

I came out on the 7th of January with Ken Page, one of Tom’s long-term employees, and he stayed with me until Amaroo. But I got to 278 Ferntree Gully Road where there was supposed to be workshops, cars and lots of spares and there was nothing! There was one old body shell that the axle tore out of of the rear of at Bathurst in 1988, and Larry had been allowed to keep some things from stock, use them and supposedly put them back...

So I phoned Rob Benson, who was working in America and tempted him to come over as my engine man. I explained what I was up to and, as we always had a good relationship with the Rovers and Jaguars, he came back to Melbourne.

The other guy I had got to know through Neil Crompton was Walley Storey. I phoned Walley and asked him to come to work with me as I could do with an engineer/workshop manager. He said he had his own business in Sydney and it was an engineering company. It was a leased premises but he owned all of the equipment so I asked him for a price for him and his equipment. We literally agreed on the phone and transported his stuff down.

So I had an engineer, a basic tool shop, an engine man and then I found Martyn Bellars who used to work for TWR and was a very good mechanic. I’d met Dave McDermott and I got him to come and work and that’s how we started. We built a car up for the first race at Amaroo. Australia closes down in January so it really was a scramble, but we made it. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

They made the surprising decision to opt for a Zytek engine management system instead of the locally-designed Motec. The team also slowly replaced Perkins Engineering parts with TWR-spec equipment on the VL. But the challenges never abated.

Typical Tom, I had only been there ten days and I had a fax from him while I was scrambling around trying to build a car and a team. He knocked 40% off the budget that we’d shook hands on in December! I had to go to Telecom MobileNet, Castrol, Parkroyal Hotels and Holden and I had to secure the budget that had been proposed anyway. For some reason it had been shaved quite dramatically. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

It was touch-and-go whether the team would have a car ready in time for Amaroo, but they did: from handshake deal to a race-ready car in under fifty days! Unfortunately the car remained a Commodore, and Amaroo Park remained Amaroo Park, tight and winding and with no length of straight to put massive horsepower to work. No Holden, no matter how much factory support was behind it, was going to be fast here, and Percy put in a qualifying lap of only 54.52 seconds – putting him back in the 16th starting place. In the race he might've thought about putting the big V8's linear power delivery to work once the turbos started lunching their tyres, but Amaroo punished the weight of the Holden even more severely than the newer, heavier breed of Sierra: Percy ultimately finished 14th, having been forced to make a pit stop for fresh tyres.

Source

Just finishing a debut race without mechanical dramas might have counted as an achievement to some, but this was a crew of hard-bitten professionals, and they knew what racing was about. "Racing compares one product with another," said Tom Walkinshaw. "For me that means winning; there’s no point in going racing to be beaten. We've got a chance to win some races with the new car, to show that Holden is as good as anything in the race." In fact, it was already clear that the Walky would need a lot more assistance to start winning sprint races like this, and in time Tom's voice would be one of a cacophony calling for the end of Group A.