24 June: Way Out West

So once again it was time to head into the sunset and make seemingly-endless pilgrimage to Perth, home of Wanneroo Park and the traditional Western Australian leg of the ATCC. On a drive that long a man has time to really think, which is why you might find yourself asking questions like, "Why did Stirling's colonists name their state capital after a hamlet in Scotland? After all, the only thing they have in common is far too many English people..." (Yeah, every reader from the Wajuk nation just rolled their eyes, and they're right. I promise, once this corona bullshit is finally over I'm totally coming to visit your beautiful city, never mind the cost. Turns out You really do OLO.)

Right car, wrong race. As the broadcast shows, by Wanneroo Peter was off these BBS wheels and using DJR wheels instead. Oh, the irony. (Source)

By this stage there were only four drivers still in contention for the championship – Brock, Bond, Johnson and Richards. For everyone else, whom the title had already passed by, Wanneroo was better understood as advance prep for the other big touring car crown in the country, Bathurst in October. To that end, both the Glenn Seton and Tony Longhurst teams had brought extra cars to give prospective co-drivers some seat time. In Seton's case, that meant handing the battle-tested #30 Sierra to erstwhile Toyota driver Drew Price, so he could familiarise himself with its brutal on/off power delivery, while Glenn himself took the wheel of the #35 to ensure it was fully dialled in for the big day.

A for effort, to be sure, but nobody was on Tony Longhurst's level this weekend: his outfit had gone to the trouble of bringing three whole cars, which is an impressive feat of logistics now, let alone thirty years ago. For a Queensland-based team to bring three complete chassis, plus spare parts, spare engines, oil and lubricants, drag the whole lot all the way across the Nullarbor and then ask the mechanics to take on an extra fifty percent workload... well, it said a lot about how important the endurance season really was. You can test until you're blue in the face, after all, but there's nothing like actual competition to reveal how steep is the mountain to climb. The lucky beneficiary in this case was Neville Crichton, the Kiwi who'd raced with Tony back in their JPS Team BMW days, who for this weekend would have the #62 on his doors.

Please enjoy these awesome snaps I found on Flickr. Most of them are from a practice session rather than the race, but they look so much nicer than my scabby screengrabs. (Source)

Their presence helped keep grid numbers healthy, because for some reason we didn't see the usual influx of local drivers out for a hit on their home track. The ATCC round was supposed to be a chance for WA's state-championship stars to test their mettle against the national-championship regulars, but this year the black swan would be represented by just a single entry – the self-financed #96 Walkinshaw of Alf Barbagallo, after whom the circuit would later be named. Traditionally the racing number 96 (and the paaank colour scheme that went with it) belonged to Tim Slako, who'd raced both a Rover and a Commodore in that livery, with Barbagallo's backing. They'd actually raced as a team last year, Slako in the #96 and Alf himself in a matching #77, both under the Barbagallo Motorsport banner (although being the peak of the Sierra era neither had really made a dent, finishing 10th and 11th respectively). Since then, however, it seemed the team had gone through some downsizing: Slako was MIA for reasons unknown, while Barbagallo had divested himself of at least one of his cars, leaving him with just the #96 (it's believed the #77 ended up as landfill in a tip somewhere, though whether that happened after its racing career, or because of it, remains unclear).

That was all she wrote for local drivers, because neither of the others made the race. Geoff Herbert tried to qualify in Slako's old Rover (now in red and wearing the racing #40), but fell outside the 115% rule and had to sit out the rest of the day (although he does seem to've raced it in the supporting Sports Sedan events, finishing 10th and 8th – the car's final race starts ever). Even more intriguingly, someone named John Farrell fronted up in a Lancia Delta HF Integrale, but withdrew it for reasons unknown. Another turbocharged, 4WD road-rocket would've provided a nice point of comparison to the Nissan GT-R, but alas, it wasn't to be.

Master Shredder

The Wanneroo round of the championship wasn't exactly a bad race, but it was definitely more "high tension" than what you'd call "action-packed". It was the logical outcome of time and place: the time being 1990, when every race was won by the last man standing with a little bit of tread left their tyres; and the place... well, that was Wanneroo Park, the most notorious tyre-shredder on the calendar. There was just something in the tarmac itself, a little extra grit and sharpness to the surface that combined with the three or four long constant-radius corners to eat tyres alive. With this being the penultimate round of the championship and chances to score rapidly diminishing, nobody could afford to take chances. For the Big Four, the only thing that mattered was finishing ahead of each other.

With Win Percy returning to HRT, Neil Crompton was back in a red blazer and seated alongside Mike Raymond and a returning Allan Moffat for an all-star commentary lineup. It was Moffat who revealed that championship leader Johnson had been given the choice of two Dunlop tyre compounds, Medium or Hard, and deliberately opted for the Hards to be sure of finishing (while Crompton wryly noted he'd told Seven News they were so hard they produced sparks!). Peter Brock surely asked for the same from Bridgestone, while with his trick Toyo/Dunlop arrangement, Colin Bond was probably quietly confident (assuming he'd been allowed to try it again).

[As an aside, it's only occurred to me since clicking Publish on the last entry that the magic combination might've been putting Dunlop rears on the front, and his usual Toyos on the rear. That would explain why no-one else was able to copy his homework, and why Moffat threw such a tantrum when he found out.]

But if anyone should've been feeling confident, it was Jim Richards: as well as benchmark tyres from Yokohama, this was the weekend he finally stepped into the GT-R. When it came to massaging your rubber, nothing was going to beat four-wheel drive grip, right? Well, yes and no. Dividing the burden of 550 Nm between four wheels instead of two would be an advantage, sure, but it was an advantage he'd sorely need, because the GT-R was damned heavy. Worse, it really does seem like Richo had never driven the car before this weekend: all the testing and development up to now had been done by his junior teammate, Mark Skaife. It wasn't the best way to chase a championship, and it reeks of last-minute decision, but it seems the extra pace of the GT-R was more than he could resist. The venerable HR31 just wasn't going to cut it anymore, and finishing outside the points was as bad as a DNF when there was a championship on the line.

Cut It Short

Given the sheer distance the eastern-based teams had to travel for this round, it almost seemed the Westralians were taking the piss that this race would be five minutes shorter – just 45 minutes, rather than the usual 50! Once again Tony Longhurst was starting from pole, having stopped the clocks at 58.61 seconds for the 2.4km circuit in practice. It was his third pole of the year and – an impressive stat in such illustrious company – he'd only been bumped from the front row twice all year. P3 was the lowest he'd started in any race in the 1990 ATCC. True, some of that was trading substance for glory by going for softer tyres and suffering late in the races, but given how often he'd hit trouble during those races it probably wasn't a bad trade. Start up front, get your sponsors on the TV, and keep the money hose flowing while you do the hard work of switching brands again next year: a poor race strategy, but a sensible business one.

The only sore point was that he had to share the front row with Peter Brock, who'd banged in an identical lap time to his teammate Alan Jones – 58.88 seconds. If Jonesy had only tried a bit harder, they could've had a juicy front-row lockout! As it was, the Benson & Hedges cars were starting line astern, with Richards in the GT-R starting from 4th, first of outside the 58's with a 59.43.

There they sat on the starting grid, preparing for the off, revving the engines to breaking point and... mysteriously, for the longest time nothing happened. The timestamp in the video has them champing at the bit from 1:12 until 1:25, an inordinately long wait for the go-code. Jonesy decided he couldn't wait that long and had a bit of a creep 1:23, which would earn him the inevitable "One Minute Penalty #20" sign for jumping the start. Tony Longhurst's team truly was cursed that year.

Finally, the starter let them go, and with a chirp of tyre smoke the cars launched into action. In the GT-R, Richards showed what kind of start Skaife would've pulled off at Mallala had he not gotten boxed in, bolting off the line like a scalded cat. He leapfrogged the jump-starting Jones and a slow-off-the-line Longhurst to arrive at the first turn right behind Brock.

Through the long left-hander at Turn 4 Brock led Richards, Jones and Longhurst, but the entry onto the mid-sized back straight was the Turn 5 kink, and Richards got that slightly wrong, not quite trusting his car enough to throw it around yet. Slow onto the straight meant slow along the straight, so he found himself slipstreamed and then passed into Turn 6 by a niggly Tony Longhurst. Up ahead though, Peter Brock had made a brilliant start to lead the pack comfortably; he would not be headed again today.

As early as lap 3 word was trickling through that Jones would be penalised for jumping the start, which Moffat didn't really agree with:

[The officials] didn't make the best of starts, either. They held the red light on for a half a day, and I certainly wouldn't be reprimanding Alan Jones on that one, it was a very long red light and I wouldn't be giving the starter a pat on the back at the moment... It's very hard to keep your foot on the clutch wearing out $10,000 clutches.

"They can sort that out later," replied Mike Raymond, before adding, "They gave a '10 seconds to go' signal that seemed to go for 30."

Wanneroo was of course where Allan Moffat had won his greatest-ever touring car victory, his Mazda RX-7 beating Peter Brock's VH Commodore in the 1983 race courtesy of a lightning-fast planned pit stop. With that memory at the back of his mind, Moffat seemed to catch a slight case of Old Fart In A Rocking Chair Syndrome, adding a touch of warmth to a race that was to go long stretches without real drama. As a retired elder statesman of the game he was entitled to a certain amount of rambling, and it surely meant something that most of it was directed at his most cherished rival.

I think Brocky's got a slightly more calculating race here. He's not leaping out in front like he did in Mallala. He's very conscious of the fact that he didn't get all the way home last weekend, or two weekends ago. I would be saying, from what we're looking at, he's definitely just being a little bit more cautious, he doesn't mind anybody in his rearview mirror anyway.

In the early laps, however, Brock wasn't yet pulling away, meaning he had to keep Tony Longhurst in mind while deciding where to place his car.

Longhurst is actually getting dangerously close, and by 'danger' I mean the slipstream factor blocking the cool air going into his radiator. These turbocharged cars run at enormous temperatures, and he's in danger, if he got much closer than that, of starting to fry his engine. So every now and then you see him pull out to the right or the left when he gets super close to Brocky's back bumper-bar, it's just to keep the fresh air going into the car.

Though the top four remained the same – Brock, Longhurst, Jones, Richards – by lap 9 Glenn Seton was starting to catch up to Richo in the GT-R. Behind him was a brief gap, following which we had the DJR twins, Johnson ahead of Bowe. Inside the GT-R, however, something amazing was happening. In-car shots revealed Richards' hands were visibly unsettled with the wheel, turning in, backing off, then turning in again, unsure of what he had to do. This was not the smoothly decisive driver we thought we knew: this was a man who even had to apply opposite lock coming out of Turn 6 – how often did you see Jim Richards actually have to react to a car?! The commentators mentioned that the team had been playing with the onboard computers, so in a sense he was learning how to aim with with a gun that still didn't shoot straight, but the more basic truth was the one Mike Raymond articulated: "Keeping in mind that Mark Skaife has done all the development work in the car, Jim only stepped into the vehicle yesterday..."

That meant, ladies and gentlemen, the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R was the unicorn, the philosopher's stone and the northwest passage all rolled into one, the thing no-one had thought existed – a car that unsettled Jim Richards! It seemed like all his decades of experience were running against him as he encountered the same feeling Peter McKay had described in his road test for Wheels – you could give the car quite a bit more of a caning than you realised at first, as the computer-controlled 4WD system would activate the front wheels whenever the back let go to literally pull you out of trouble. All fine in theory, but it meant finding the limit in a GT-R was a process of arriving in a given corner with your brain screaming that you were going too fast, only for the computer to step in and go, "Beep boop, no it isn't."

It was like skydiving with a parachute that only grew straps to hold you when you were seconds from the ground. No wonder Richards was unnerved. Like Mansell and the Williams FW14B that would be around the same era, this was a car that responded to a rough, wring-its-neck driving style of the kind Skaifey was making his own. Richo's gently-does-it approach would need some time to adjust.

By lap 12 we started seeing what would be the story of the race, with Brock building a handy 1.2-second cushion over Longhurst. Tony's early-race showboating was once again over, as only four laps later the gap was out to 5 seconds, signalling that his tyres had cried uncle. As the leaders were lapping Alf Barbagallo, Moffat was moved to say:

Any time you give Peter Brock five seconds you’re asking for trouble, because he'll just be nursing his car now. He'll have that little bit of time up his sleeve to do exactly what he has to, to save his tyres and take care of the rest of the car, [which] he'll be doing extremely well... He's extremely happy with his vehicle, didn’t get on the front row for nothing. It ran well in qualifying, he's got it where he wants, he’s got fresh air in front of him, no-one to bother him on every lap, no traffic whatsoever, and he's really capitalising on his advantage and that’s what professional racing is all about.

In just a single lap, Peter's margin grew an astonishing 2.5 seconds, stretching from 5 seconds on lap 16 to 7.5 by lap 17. Longhurst’s tyres were absolutely history, so with nothing else going on, the commentators got on the phone to talk to Dick Johnson.

Raymond: How's it going, Dick?

Johnson: Oh not too bad, mate. Had a bit of a problem early in the race trying to get the tyres warm, but now we've got 'em a bit warm, hopefully the others will start to come back to us.

Raymond: It looks that way from up here.

Johnson: I've also got a twisted rear halfshaft, which is vibrating like... well, I won't tell you what, but it's having a good ol' shake. And I've had it before, but I don't think there'll be a problem. Just gotta try and get in front of Godzilla there.

Crompton: Dick, with twenty minutes down in this race, are you comfortable about your tyre choice?

Johnson: Well, at the moment, but we'll just see how the other guys fare too.

In other words, he was having a lot of problems with ze car, and it was very difficult. But before we shake our heads too much about Racing Driver’s Excuses, bear in mind he’d just done a complete lap – including braking smoothly at the downhill end of the backstretch – while holding a conversation. A unique breed of driver, your Aussie touring car star.

By lap 20 Brock had an 8.5 second lead over Longhurst, and was looking invincible – assuming his tyres lasted, of course. Everyone seemed to be waiting for them to go off like they had at Mallala before making their move. Well, almost everyone: one who wasn't planning to wait was Glenn Seton, who pulled a move on Jim Richards down the back straight, drafting him up the hill when Richards pulled out to lap the John Faulkner's Corolla FX-GT, and then staying on the inside when Richards moved back left to re-take the racing line. The momentary speed differential of having a two cars to draft versus not having any was all Seton needed, and he moved up from 5th to 4th, smoothly and smartly. Richards didn't fight him: the only car that mattered was Johnson's, and that was still behind him. It was probably worth nothing, though, that the GT-R had shown itself to be much faster under acceleration, at the beginning of the straight, but in the latter half the Sierra still held a slight speed advantage, and its lighter weight meant it had an edge under braking – not a small consideration with 161 tours of Conrod in the car's future.

In true Channel Seven fashion, the move of Johnson over Richards took place during an ad break: the replay revealed it was a carbon copy of Seton's move, without the added distraction of a backmarker Corolla. Johnson took the inside line into the 90-degree final turn and out-braked Richards, but the canny Richards immediately went for the criss-cross and stormed alongside Johnson for the run down pit straight. Once again, however, the GT-R's advantage under power only lasted until the Sierra's rear tyres gripped up, as in the second half of the straight Johnson was able to pull clear and take the racing line into Turn 1.

Johnson was rapt, but his time in heaven was short-lived. Just two laps later, on lap 28, he had something go majorly wrong into the very same final corner, and crashed badly.

The cameras missed the moment of truth, but the dust he kicked up as he bounced through the grass and clear across the track told half the story; the other half was told by the missing right-front wheel. For a moment Johnson sat in the kitty litter near the pit entrance, spinning his rear wheels in frustration, but eventually he accepted the reality and started undoing his belts. At least he didn't have a long walk back to the pits. We later learned what had actually happened was a brake disc exploded and done a mischief on the rest of the wheel on its way out. Maybe that explained the loose gold wheel at Mallala: Johnson had a failure so intense it had actually catapulted a broken part back in time! Said Neil Crompton:

That started a long way back up that straight... but I can tell you for the best part I reckon of three hundred metres that car was doing 140, 150km/h with a great sheet of sparks coming off it. Johnson went through one spin, was lucky not to be collected by other traffic, and has deposited a major amount of dirt and garbage onto the entry to the pit straight. Unbelievable.

Some said this was a sign that the Sierra was being pushed beyond its limits to keep up with the high-tech new Nissan, but I disagree. The ultra-hard tyres Johnson had fitted for this race just wouldn't – couldn't – apply that much stress to the car. More likely there was a faulty part in the mix that had looked fine and passed all the checks – just bad luck, in other words – or (and I know this is going to risk the friendship), maybe the DJR workshop was just a tad overworked this week. The weekend after Mallala, Dick had flown back to the U.S. to take part in another NASCAR race, the Miller Genuine Draft 500 at Pocono, leaving very little time to return to Australia, get the cars prepped and shipped across to Perth in time for this race the following weekend. Dick's crew might've been experienced and highly professional, but it was also very small, and not having the boss around to twirl an extra spanner might have made all the difference. Am I saying his NASCAR cameos were the straw that broke the camel's back, keeping Johnson from ever claiming that record sixth championship? No, I'm not saying that, I can't know that for sure. But I can't say for sure that it didn't, either.

Or maybe it was just a world record case of Commentator’s Curse? Early in the broadcast, Moffat had mentioned how, "The Shell cars are prepared immaculately, and I can't recall when either car's ever failed in a race..." Words like that were on a level with, "Yep, she's unsinkable alright!" and would explain this disaster all on their own. But if Moffat truly was spreading that particular contagion, one would have to wonder why it hadn't affected Peter Brock, of whom he'd spent vast amounts of airtime praising the performance. Brock was still running away with this race, to such a startling degree that the commentators were starting to wonder if there was some sort of trick.

Crompton: Last lap of Peter was a 62.2. He's covered 31 laps. Prompts the question, Allan, that such is the performance of Peter in this car and tyre combination at the moment, I wonder whether or not it's a softer tyre and he might contemplate a stop? I do remember a friend of mine at one stage stopping here...

Moffat [audibly smiling]: I don't remember any of that, no, I don't. We had the fastest stop of our life in our Peter Stuvyesant RX-7. People just couldn't believe it. I doubt whether that's the case, I really don't. I think they've got their chassis working extremely well, Peter works hard on the car personally – by that I mean behind the wheel. He’s a great manager, he gets a lot out of his team, and I believe they’ve just come up with a combination that has served them extremely well here.

Crompton: Certainly has, that gap is massive...

Moffat: A lot of people just think we get in the cars and drive them, Neil. You know yourself that's the perfection that you chase that gives you performance. All the little things that make the car go better, and if you have a team that will back you and help you, dedicated mechanics, then you can get phenomenal results from any given racecar. It's only a piece of metal on four tyres.

14.5 seconds was Peter's lead by the time they finished that conversation. Moffat spoke the truth when he said: "That's annihilation, not just performance."

Further back, John Bowe put a move on Richards in yet another out-braking manoeuvre at the final turn. Like Johnson, it led to a side-by-side chicken run down the front straight, and once again it was settled in the red car's favour. Although Richards still had a nose up the inside as they tipped into Turn 1, both drivers were too wise to trade paint. A lap later the Nissan driver was able to take the place back when Bowe got fractionally held up while lapping Chris Lambden's Beaurepaires HR31. Was Lambden under orders from Fred Gibson? Can't prove that either, but also can't rule it out...

With the race heading into its final stages, the casualty rate started spiking. Lap 35 saw Tony Longhurst slow dramatically on pit straight, waving like crazy to his pit crew. That same lap he was seen heading into Turn 6 with smoke from the rear of his car – apparently from the rear wheels, but it was hard to be sure. At the end of the lap he peeled off and headed for the pits, where the mechanics lifted the bonnet, looking for a serious problem. Channel Seven's man in pit lane, David Christison, did his best impression of Charles Wooley at the front:

Mike, they changed all the tyres, [but] they're having trouble getting the temperature right, the operating temperature right by the looks of things. They're now going underneath the car so things are not looking good for Tony Longhurst at the moment. Incidentally, Dick Johnson, diplomatically, doesn't feel like talking just at this very moment. Longhurst has now cut the engine, so I'd say that's the race.

Most of that was incidental: you always changed tyres in a stop, just for the hell of it, and the temps getting out of control was a function of suddenly being stationary and depriving the radiator of airflow. Interviewing Tony a few laps (and one ad break) later, when his race was definitively over, Christison managed to get this out of him:

Christensen: Tony, an early exit, what happened?

Longhurst: It looks like the front seal in the callipers has let go, and it's just letting the fluid go straight out onto the disc as if when you're bleeding the brakes. It's just spraying it out everywhere.

Christensen: You've tried one more lap, just no good?

Longhurst: Yes, the boys thought they might have been able to fix it, but there's no solution. That's it for the day for us.

Christensen: Jones is going alright?

Longhurst: Yeah, he's just come in for a pit stop – I don't know why, his tyres look like they could've done a few more laps. But, uh, that's the way it goes.

So another bout of rotten luck for the Longhurst team – Tony DNFing, Jonesy copping a one-minute penalty and, with the finish line virtually in sight, chickening out on his tyres. It would later emerge that he wanted fastest lap honours, and he eventually got them with a lap of 59.61 seconds... but there were no points for that, and in the process he'd cost Tony another $1,800 set of tyres. He could be a strange one sometimes, could Jonesy...

In the meantime, Gerald Kay's Jagparts Walky was slowing down the back straight, Kay holding an arm aloft to warn the other drivers to stay away. He too eventually peeled off, and parked the Commodore behind the marshals' stand at the top of the hill, knowing it would be protected by their tyre barrier (and anyone still in the race would be protected from him). Exactly what had caused the DNF doesn't seemed to be recorded: anyone know?

With five minutes to go, Brock now had a 20+ second margin over the now 2nd-placed Seton. It had been very nearly a year since Peter Brock's last ATCC win, in the 1989 season finale at Oran Park, so this one would be very welcome if it came. It was just a question of whether his Bridgestones would act like Bridgestones and die at the literal last minute...

They didn't. As they approached the finish line together, Peter backed off a little to give Alf Barbagallo a chance to pull away – no point having him in the glory shot, spoiling the view of his own sponsors as he crossed the line, now was there? Brocky finished the lap to register victory in Round 7 of the Australian Touring Car Championship, his first win in almost exactly eleven months. In 2nd place, a massive 18 seconds behind, was Glenn Seton – meaning, at the very least that #35 car was looking very sorted and match-fit. Completing the podium was Colin Bond, his trick tyre setup (if he was indeed using it again) coming up short this time, getting him home 6.6 seconds behind Seton, and a massive 24.72 seconds behind Brock. Richards stroked the GT-R home to 4th, while Win Percy made a grand comeback to finish 5th, once again the first of the Holdens.

So wait, how had Brock made his rubber last the distance at tyre-hungry Wanneroo, when they'd fallen so short at Mallala? Tougher compound? Nope, likely they were the same as he'd used in SA. Development tyres? Dream on, it had only been a fortnight. Suspension tune? Couldn't hurt, but even with Peter Perfect's impressive mechanical sympathy, that wouldn't be able to make such a dramatic difference. The real secret, we'd find out years later from mechanic John Heckrath, was that Peter finished the race with a cooked turbo, the resulting lack of boost having saved the tyres! Allan Moffat, take notes, because apparently Commentator's Curse can be a cyclical thing: praise a driver hard enough, and the spell can loop back around so that the mechanical failure actually benefits them!

Source

As for the championship... with another 10 points in his account for Wanneroo, Richards now sat on 86 points gross, but under the "best seven of eight" rule, he'd likely drop the 4 points he'd picked up at Symmons Plains, leaving him on a net 82 – 3 points ahead of Johnson’s static 79, instead of 3 points behind. Brock's win gave him 20 points and a last minute sniff at the championship, if still behind Bond, whose extra 12 points put him on 74. There was but a single round left, and glory awaited whoever could make one final push to the summit.