Sojourn in the South
After his victory at Phillip Island, Dick Johnson hopped on a plane to the U.S. for his latest NASCAR cameo. This time the event was the TranSouth 500 at Darlington – not the prestigious Southern 500, but a high-profile race nevertheless. Sadly (and perhaps inevitably), the Lady in Black proved too tough for Johnson to tame, qualifying only 39th out of the grid of forty. He described that as, "Reasonable, in those sort of conditions. I only had thirty laps on the track before the start of the race, because of bad weather." But then in the race, he picked up the Darlington Stripe he'd been hoping to avoid, ending his day in the wall. He was registered in 34th place, which wasn't exactly glamorous.
There was an upside, however. This was one of the races filmed for Tom Cruise vehicle Days Of Thunder, and because Dick got a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance in the final edit, the studio ended up flinging him some extra beer money.
After the release of the movie a year later I ended up getting a cheque in the mail. I had no idea why and I'm looking at this cheque going, "What the hell is this?" It was about $2,000 or something. And then I rang a few people and someone said yes, you got the cheque because you had so many seconds of footage in Days Of Thunder.Memory mightn't serve there, Dick. I'd be very surprised if they got any footage of him at Charlotte, six weeks later, because he crashed in the Winston Open (a shootout race for drivers not eligible for the All-Star Race). Then he failed to qualify for the bigtime Coca-Cola 600 the following weekend, because the prime car was still in the shop and he had to rely on the backup. But they definitely used footage from Darlington: in the movie, at the final restart, Cole Trickle in the #46 City Lumina (actually a Hendrick car handled by R&D driver Greg Sacks) passes Johnson on the way to taking his maiden victory. It would be interesting to know exactly how much Dick was paid for how many seconds of film – the per-frame wage would be quite something, I imagine.
So there I was in the No.38 Redkote Thunderbird in this movie and the footage they used was from Charlotte from memory. – Dick Johnson, Dick Johnson Racing: 30-Year Anniversary
 |
| Amazingly, Dick's crew chief was none other than Ray Evernham, who would later be the voice in Jeff Gordon's ear through his early period of dominance. (Source) |
Ironically, the real race was won by the inspiration for Rowdy Burns – the Intimidator himself, Dale Earnhardt. You can watch the full thing here, if you have three and a half hours to kill.
Johnson said of his time in NASCAR, "It was an amazing experience but at the same time it was quite taxing." It was also possibly the reason he was never destined to break Big Pete Geoghegan's record of five Australian Touring Car Championships. In such a close-run season you could point to nearly anything being the deciding factor, but there seems little doubt the distraction of this different kind of racing (not to mention the jet lag from flying there and back, and simply the time not spent working on the cars in Brisbane), took his eye off the ball at a crucial moment. And it was at this point in the championship that Jim Richards started to really apply the blowtorch.
Technically Challenged
Gibson Motorsport had never ceased developing the Skyline. While it would be a stretch to say the HR31 was a completely different car to the one first encountered in 1988, every single part of it had since been made a little bit better, as Alan Heaphy could attest. In the late 1980s, Heaphy had been running Nissan's European campaign from the U.K, but pulling double-duty with trips Down Under to work with Gibson on development of the GTS-R. Eventually he joined Gibson full-time, and never hesitated in reckoning the Australian cars were better than the factory ones racing in Europe, as all those little improvements added up to a big difference.
"Fred's team had a better ability to 'massage' bits than what we did in Europe," Heaphy said. "They finished up with about 465hp – they had better fuel than we did in Europe – we got about 430hp. They homologated the 5-speed Holinger gearbox; we had a Nissan box, which was dreadful." A switch from Dunlop tyres to a full factory deal with Yokohama in 1989 was part of the package as well, but the rabbit hole went even deeper than that. Gibson went as far as to make his own front suspension strut assemblies, finding the originals weren't tough enough to stand up to the strain of racing.
We virtually did all the homologation for the DR30 Skyline because we wanted to design and use our own parts right from the start. So when the HR31 came along, we just carried across things that we'd developed for the DR30 like uprights, suspension arms etc.It says a lot about the skill of lead driver Jim Richards that he was able to be far more generous about it. "The Skyline was like a bigger, more powerful BMW M3," he said. "It was two-wheel drive, it had another 130 horsepower, a 5-speed gearbox, independent suspension and it was fantastic to drive. You could drive the wheels off it all day."
All the Nissan race cars since the Bluebirds had independent rear suspension but that was their downfall because they were all pretty bad independent race cars. The thing that made the biggest difference was when radial race tyres came in during the DR30 days.
They really suited the rear suspension because what a radial tyre needs to work properly is a lot of static negative camber. It made a huge difference to the back of the car because the independent suspension had lots of negative camber in it, so we learned a lot from that and ended up running something like five degrees of negative on the front as well to make the radial work there too.
We transferred all of that suspension knowledge to the HR31 but it was still not a great handling car. It was a very difficult car to get the handling right, but we just chipped away at it. – Fred Gibson, Mark Oastler's Nissan Skyline HR31 GTS-R: The unsung hero of Nissan's first ATCC victory, Shannons Club
 |
| Richards at a test early in 1989. (Source) |
But the car wasn't without a crippling flaw: power. Even with 465hp on tap, it was still giving away a hundred horses to the average Sierra, and even more to the really god-tier ones. Heaphy blamed that on the turbocharger itself, which couldn't get enough flow through to challenge an RS500 on top-end power.
It had a big Garrett turbocharger, which was one of its biggest Achilles heels; it had a big compressor housing but a small exhaust which limited the engine.Fred had little choice but to work with what he had.
You can stuff as much [air] in as you like on the intake side, but if you can't feed it out the back it doesn't go anywhere. And if you can't get it out you can't get it in, simple as that. Fred tried to get it changed but by that stage the GT-R was on the drawing board. – Alan Heaphy
The engine was completely different to the DR30, though, so it was a whole new engine programme. Then we also had to convert our Electromotive [engine management] system that we put on the four cylinder DR30 with the Americans to the six cylinder HR31 Skylines here, so that was difficult to do as well. – Fred Gibson, Mark Oastler's Nissan Skyline HR31 GTS-R: The unsung hero of Nissan's first ATCC victory, Shannons ClubIt would also be a mistake to imagine just because there was less of it, the power delivery was any more user-friendly than an RS500. In 2013 none other than John Bowe tested a refurbished Skyline for Unique Cars magazine, and even this veteran of the DJR Sierras and works Volvos came away shocked at the lag.
That straight six is only two litres but it runs terrific amounts of boost so dealing with the turbo lag is a technique in itself. When it comes on, it comes on! You're always battling exit oversteer and wheelspin. I know the turbo is not as big as the Sierras that we were racing at the time and I was expecting this to be more pleasant to drive with less turbo lag. You have to get on the throttle early before a corner then across the apex, back out of the throttle. It's a backward way of driving compared to a naturally aspirated car with its instant throttle response.Again, it's a testament to Jim Richards that he made it all look so easy. Elsewhere in the article, Bowe lets it drop that, by the end of a race at Amaroo Park, his Sierra had so little tyre left that it would wheelspin all the way up Bitupave Hill – even in top gear! The Skyline wouldn't have had it much easier, and yet Richards had hooked through those turns as smooth as buttered glass. Such was the man's ability that the opposition's only hope was to pray for some wide, open spaces where they could wind up the boost and try to outrun him.
But the most impressive thing is that sound. A straight six has a real howl about it; sounds awesome! – John Bowe, 1988 Nissan Skyline GTS Group A Review, Unique Cars
But today we were at Winton.
Family-Friendly Entertainment
It was interesting to see from the video below what other series were on the bill at this meeting. Winton's ATCC round was also Round 4 of the Australian Formula Ford Championship, billed as the "Motorcraft Driver to Europe Series", a series which (spoiler alert) would ultimately be won by a young tearaway named Russell Ingall. One to watch.
Formula Holden was also back for Round 2 of the Australian Drivers’ Championship, and again several of the pro drivers were having to climb out of their open-wheelers, get their heads together and jump back into touring cars straight after. Amazing to think that only twenty years earlier this sort of thing had been the norm, which goes to show why Jackie Stewart can still lecture young drivers on mind management today (although in Jackie's day the cars weren't quite so physical to drive, and setting them up wasn't the arduous process it was to become in the digital age).
The final support act was Round 4 of the Australian Production Car Championship. This category was experiencing a bit of a renaissance thanks to CAMS banning turbo cars of the kind that had been dominant since 1984. This left imports like the Mazda RX-7 and Mitsubishi Starion out in the cold, re-framing the series for the naturally-aspirated six-cylinder Falcons and Commodores Australians were actually driving in those days. It was this kind of racing that had made the legend of Bathurst in the first place, so the following year would see history come full circle when the category would give us the inaugural Bathurst 12 Hour. Although they look slow and lumbering compared to proper racecars, it's worth noting the new-gen EA Falcons and VN Commodores were actually faster than classics like the original GT-HO and Monaro, despite being no lighter and having half the horsepower. And they say there's no such thing as progress...
But the focus of the meeting was once more on the stars of the Shell Ultra Touring Car Series, and their focus was once again on the tyres. The commentators mentioned that it was unseasonably hot for April, and the sky in the video looks overcast. In other words, they probably had one of those violent Victorian storm fronts moving in, making both the air and the tarmac hot and greasy. As a result – this sort of thing happens in a tyre war – the Dunlop runners were in deep, deep trouble. Dick Johnson and teammate John Bowe had actually sorted through five different compounds chasing the grip, but had eventually qualified only 8th and 9th respectively, unable to get their tyres to switch on and stick to the road. They were beaten by Larry Perkins and Win Percy, who put the rival Walkies 7th and 6th, also respectively – yes, pinch yourself, the fastest Sierras in the world had been out-qualified by two naturally-aspirated V8s! Larry's time of 1:02.93 was only a hundredth of a second faster than Dick's, but that was enough for the stopwatch to measure, so it was enough to matter.
The winners of the weather lottery, however, were the Yokohama runners at the front – Glenn Seton (1:02.77), Mark Skaife (1:02.70) and Tony Longhurst (1:02.62) had all done solid jobs, but the real star of qualifying had been Alan Jones, who'd grabbed his yellow Sierra by the scruff of the neck and manhandled it around in a mere 1:02.33, nearly a third of a second (or if you prefer, exactly one blink) faster than his teammate in the same car. That was a mighty effort, worthy of song, but even that hadn't been enough to secure pole. Instead, Gentleman Jim Richards had been the only driver to break into the 1:01's, coaxing his Skyline around in 1:01.97 to take the prime starting position for himself. Some days there was just no dealing with the master.
The talk of qualifying however was a protest (and subsequent screaming match) involving Colin Bond, who after qualifying 10th with a 1:03.24, found himself victim of a protest by Allan Moffat. The rules this year (as described by Neil Crompton in the broadcast, at least) required each driver to nominate two sets of tyres – eight total – of identical construction, compound and brand on Saturday morning. Those tyres then had to carry them through both sessions of qualifying and then the race on Sunday. This was how CAMS were enforcing the ban on special qualifying tyres, and it shows the kinds of resources the giants were throwing at the series – if Johnson really had been able to choose from five different compounds, that was potentially forty tyres per car Dunlop had brought to the event.
Bond, however, had apparently nominated four tyres of one (unspecified) brand, and then four from his sponsor, Toyo. Even though uncertainties in the wording had led to some creative interpretations among the teams, this was apparently against the rules and, having seen his driver Gregg Hansford qualify one place behind Bond, Moffat had every reason to make a strategic protest. What he probably hadn't expected was for Bond – one of the most affable, easygoing people you'd ever meet in pit lane – to explode in his face as a result. A few pointed out that it might've been a bit much to expect a smaller company like Toyo to provide eight tyres per car the way Dunlop and Yokohama could, and others whispered that there was still bad blood between Moffat and Bond thanks to a prizemoney dispute dating back to their iconic 1-2 at Bathurst in '77.
Whatever the truth, Bond filed an appeal but had to suffer his time being struck off for a "tyre restriction infringement", leaving him to start from the back of the grid. It was going to be a long day at the office in the Caltex Sierra.
Light 'Em Up
So there they sat at the front of the grid: white cars and yellow cars, B&H Sierras versus factory Nissans. When the green flag flew Tony Longhurst was again slow off the line, leaving him beaten into the first turn by Skaife and immediately under threat from Johnson and Seton. But once again Alan Jones had made a demon start, surging off after Jim Richards, who'd made one that was quietly efficient to take an early lead. Together they zoomed out of Turn 1 with a slight but handy gap over the rest.
While Kevin Waldock went for a wild ride through the grass and dirt after badly overcooking it on cold tyres, Win Percy was seen hustling his Walky into 4th between Skaife and Longhurst, a sterling performance in the obese Holden. But at the front it was Richards leading the way with Jones chasing hard, the two of them already pulling a significant gap on the rest of the field.
But Jonesy had banked on a fight, and he brought it from minute one. Down the back straight between 7 and 8, Jones had a look up the inside but Richards gave him a gentle nose shave to turn him off the idea. Undeterred, Jones soon pushed Richards into a mistake, goading him into running wide coming out of the Esses onto the start/finish straight. Front tyres sliding in that heart-sinking way, Richards came within a whisker of wearing the tyre bundle sitting on the exit of the turn, but without losing his cool he kept it together and drove through the understeer like the champ he was, staying on the track when so many of us would've ended up in the dust. Nevertheless, the moment gave Jones the opening he was looking for, and he zipped right to pull alongside down the front straight, then dived under him into the first turn. The race was a minute old, and already we’d seen the move of the race!
Even better, with Skaife acting as the cork in the bottle behind them, all these two grand masters had to worry about was each other.
Win Percy did his best to harry Skaife, and although it was a futile gesture just being this competitive was a delightful surprise for the Holden fans. Crompo mused that the team did do a lot of their testing at Winton, after all – the local circuit, when you were based in Victoria – and also that Win had chosen a softer rubber compound than Perkins and perhaps the turbo cars around him. Not necessarily a "glory over substance" move either, given that passing wasn't always easy at Winton, and you tended to race where you qualified.
Six minutes in, and Richards was beginning to creep back up on the bumper of Jones. Seven minutes, and he was close enough to make the move. Chasing Jonesy into Turn 6, or Penrite Corner as it was known that day, Richards lifted his foot off the brake a fraction of a second early and coasted to the apex, sneaking beneath Jones just as he was turning in. Too experienced to dispute that right now, Jones tamely followed him through the rest of the Turn 6/7 complex, but his frustration was clear when he got into a wide tank-slapper on the exit of 7. Too much right foot too soon, Jonesy – not even an F1 World Champion could keep the tail of a Sierra in line once the turbo spooled up. As they threaded between the backmarkers that were already making a nuisance of themselves, it was clear Richards was not going to be a pushover today: that was the last pass for the lead the race would see.
That said, Jones still had a 3-second gap back to Skaife, who'd done an awful lot of laps here lately between racing his Formula Holden and Skyline GTS-R, and testing the new GT-R. With ten minutes gone, however, the youngster had been able to eke out a bit of a gap over Percy and go from defender to attacker, inching up on Jonesy instead. Into the first turn Skaife got a nose inside, but he was a bit too aggressive and gave Jones a nudge, which saw the yellow car lose all momentum and skate off the track through the dust. Jonesy rejoined still alongside, but Skaife now had the inside line into Turn 2, so the move was as good as done.
Clearly neither Nissan driver was taking prisoners today, but only one was a true master of the craft. The other was still an apprentice, as demonstrated by what happened next. With the pass only just done, Skaife slowed through the run up to Penrite, letting Jones back past without a fight – then Percy and Longhurst as well for good measure. Karma for the love tap? No, just the result, cause and effect. Skaife headed straight back to the pits, where the mechanics removed the front wheels and peered into the space behind them, trying to spot the problem. At first they couldn't, so the wheels were reattached and Skaife sent back out, rejoining 21st, but only a lap or two later he was back in, and this time it was terminal. The coming-together with Jones had damaged something critical, and the car simply couldn't go any further. Skaife climbed out and removed his earplugs to start discussing it with the mechanics, eyes neither angry nor apologetic. He'd had the Formula Holden race all sewn up until his gearbox packed it in, so this was definitely a bitter weekend for young Skaifey.
On his tour back to the pits however Skaife had momentarily baulked Win Percy, a moment Tony Longhurst had taken like an invitation on an embossed card. Through 6 and 7 Tony all but climbed into the car with Percy, and then out of Turn 8, he dropped the hammer and furiously powered alongside and then past. Job done. Sure, a small biff with Percy into Turn 6 had left his front bumper a tiny bit askew, but that was all part of the fun in this game. The big black-and-white Walky was starting to go off the boil, leaving Gibson Motorsport 1st thanks to Richo, but Tony Longhurst Racing 2nd and 3rd, ahead of a factory car.
With 28 minutes gone, Seton – rear bumper rather flapping in the breeze after a first-lap altercation with another car – was held up for a while by Ray Lintott in the #12 Valvoline Sierra. Fun fact: this car was apparently DJR3, the Johnson car that had won the 1988 ATCC and then gone to the U.K. to pulverise Rouse and Eggenberger at Silverstone. Again, it goes to show how much development was going on that the fastest Sierra in the world... wasn't, anymore. Even better, behind Seton in 5th were Johnson himself, then Bowe, Perkins and then, gloriously, Colin Bond in 9th. After starting dead last, he'd fought tooth-and-nail back to the leading pack on one of the most crowded circuits of the year. And well behind him was Peter Brock, who wasn’t featuring in this race at all: clearly his Bridgestones weren't very happy today. After thriving in the chill of Tasmania, it seemed the muggy heat of Winton was not to their liking – a worrying sign when the next round would be Lakeside in Queensland.
Then, apparently, an ad break kicked in, and while the viewers were being exhorted to buy Shell unleaded Win Percy stopped dead in the middle of the track. We were told (rather than shown) that HRT engine-builder Rob Benson had sprinted out to have a look, opening the passenger door to inspect something. They got it going again momentarily, but like Skaife it was a false dawn, as the car retired soon after with an electrical fault. It was a tough blow to the Holden fans who'd got excited at the thought of their baby in with a shot at the podium, but such was motorsport some days.
Dick Johnson meanwhile was finding his Dunlops were holding up rather well: they'd had no grip at the start of the race, and they still had most of it left.
Neil Crompton: How are the tyres holding up, Dick?As if to punctuate his point, the onboard RaceCam showed Dick understeer clumsily out of Turn 8 onto the back straight, then apply an armfull of opposite lock as the rear stepped out under power. Did you prefer understeer or oversteer? Didn't matter, this car had both!
Dick Johnson: Actually pretty good. It's hard to forget grip when you haven't got any to start with. It's a funny surface here, it's a very low friction surface and it's very hard to get tyres to operate.
Chief commentator Mike Raymond also knew how to extract one of the classic Johnson-isms:
Raymond: What is the definition of Winton, Dick?But however bad things were for Dick, it was smooth sailing compared to Murray Carter. For the second time in two races, poor Murray's beautiful blue President Ford Sierra had caught fire, and this time it wasn't a discrete bit of under-bonnet flame. This time the whole car was completely hidden by its own smoke, going up like a Blue Mountains bushfire. Murray had no choice but to park it on the grass at the top of the track, inside the double loop the locals inevitably called The Tits (would that make Carter's parking spot The Cleavage, then?). With the car obscured but the driver okay, there really wasn't much to say, except to console the poor bastard. Even in a sport as tough as motor racing, it was a bad day when you had to watch your expensive investment literally go up in smoke for the second time in as many races.
Johnson: Winton? It's like running a marathon around your clothesline!
At the front though, with 45 out of the 50 minutes done, Jim Richards had a 6.6-second gap over Longhurst in 2nd. This race wasn't just landed, it was scaled and gutted and ready for the table. But that didn't mean it was all over. At forty-nine minutes and thirty seconds – just 30 seconds from the end! – Bond and Perkins chose this moment to have a silly incident. Bondy tried for a wild send up the inside of Perkins' privateer Walky at the Esses, and overcooked it completely, locking up all four wheels in a heart-stopping slide. There was nothing he could do but shut his eyes and wait to land in the sand trap. Braking even harder to try and avoid him, Perkins also locked up and momentarily had the rear try and overtake the front, but he gathered it up and tiptoed through the Esses with only two wheels still on the track. Bond rather sheepishly rejoined back behind Larry, neither having gained anything (or lost anything) from the encounter. Clearly, after driving through five-eighths of the grid, there was still a lot of adrenaline in that Caltex Sierra's cockpit.
But of course, Richards took the flag, with Gregg Hansford just in front of him – meaning he'd lapped everybody up to 11th place. Alan Jones' early showboating hadn't meant much in the end, as he crossed the finish line in 3rd place behind Tony Longhurst, having submissively moved over to let his team owner through at the halfway mark. Crompo explained this aberrant behaviour from the normally fighty Jones, pointing out that Tony held the most important thing of all in motor racing: the chequebook. Jones sensibly let the man who paid him bank the points. After that the finish was as they'd run, with Glenn Seton 4th, Johnson and Bowe 5th & 6th, and Perkins 7th ahead of a chastened but uncreased Bond.
Winton had been a dominant victory for Jim Richards. Although Johnson still sat at the top of the championship table, with 60 points, Richo had now moved himself up to second with 56. It was officially game on for the championship, which was looking more and more like it would be an arm-wrestle between these two all-time greats. Bowe had dropped back to third, with 48 points, while 2nd in the race had now pushed Tony Longhurst up to fourth in the championship, with 27. Fifth still belonged to Peter Brock with 25 points, most of them from Symmons Plains.
So with four rounds complete we now had the fabulous tarmac of Lakeside to look forward to – Dick Johnson's home race, but one he'd have to face with serious question marks over the performance of his Dunlops in hot weather. And between now and then, we'd also have Colin Bond's appeal, which would surely bring the tyre restrictions to a head and force some sort of clarification from the officials. Four down, four to go: there was still everything to race for.
No comments:
Post a Comment