No cars come out for August

August in 1990 was the deep breath before the plunge, a time when everyone was back at the workshop busy building their new cars for Bathurst. That left almost no-one venturing out on track...

Almost. Here, to tide us over, are three things I couldn't think to put anywhere else. Enjoy.

5 August – Amaroo Super Cars

Here in Godzone, there was Round 3 of the AMSCAR series.

By 1990, it was clear AMSCAR was running out of puff. Shell signing on as sponsor for a fully-televised ATCC had made the national series more practical than ever, and several of the smaller teams around Sydney had given up the Amaroo races to focus all their resources on the ATCC. That reduced the once-proud AMSCAR calendar to just three rounds that year, including the shared ATCC round.

Round 1, the shared ATCC meeting, we've already covered (-ish, YouTube limitations remain a factor). Rounds 2 and 3, the standalone AMSCAR meetings, were each run as a simple pair of 10-lap heats. Heat 1 of Round 2 was won by Alan Jones in the #20 B&H Sierra, with his boss Tony Longhurst 2nd in the #25, making it a Benson & Hedges 1-2 – and it was much the same story in Heat 2. When Jones stayed home for Round 3, however, Longhurst was able to sweep both heats and clinch yet another AMSCAR title (his fourth) by a huge margin, with Bond and Skaife sharing 2nd place.

12 August – Budweiser at the Glen

Over in the asylum, meanwhile, Dick Johnson was making his last-ever NASCAR start, on the very track Marcos Ambrose would later make his own – Watkins Glen.

What with stock cars being V8s and the Glen being a road course, he was arguably on more familiar ground than on America's speedways, but as was now a bit of theme with these trips Stateside, he barely featured in the race at all. According to Racing Reference, he qualified 15th and was eventually classified 27th with "handling", whatever that was. Whether that means he took the chequered flag well down the order, or suffered a DNF and parked it, I have no idea. If the commentators hadn't mentioned him by name, I'd believe you if you said he wasn't even there. Truth be told, it wasn't exactly a classic race either: by some inverse miracle it was both dominated by the lead drivers tearing off into the distance (like all the worst F1 races), yet also broken up by caution periods that turned it into a simulated traffic jam. It was a bit of a snoozefest, in other words, and I'm not surprised that afterwards Dick never bothered to come back. I wonder if Ross Palmer might've done better finding a full-time Cup team and just throwing his money behind them instead – I understand Alan Kulwicki was always looking for sponsors in those days. As it was, the #38 Thunderbird's days in Redkote colours (or "colors") were over, leaving us with this rather awkward, clumsy preview of what Australia would be getting in a few years' time.

Robb Gravett and DJR1 MTRS01

Gravett ended up buying a couple of cars off me for him and a TV presenter called Mike Smith. Gravett ended up winning the 1990 British Touring Car Championship in one of the Sierras. – Dick Johnson, Dick Johnson Racing: 30-Year Anniversary

As it turns out Dick, no, he didn't! But that's not to say Johnson machinery had no hand in the story of Gravett's famous 1990 BTCC title at all, it's just that the reality turns out to be rather more complicated than that (as it always, always does).

Starting grid at Brands Hatch, 1989.

As we already know, to clear space in the workshop in Brisbane (and kick some extra money into the kitty), by 1990 Dick had sold off his first three racing Sierras, chassis numbers DJR1, 2 and 3. DJR3, the most storied of the lot, was still in Australia in a Valvoline livery, racing in the hands of Ray Lintott. DJR1 and DJR2, however, his original cars from 1987, had gone back overseas to be the mechanical portion of a new team built around young up-and-comer Robb Gravett.

In 1987, a then 21-year-old Gravett had done what everyone else did and raced a Rouse-built car while he learned the trade and earned his place at the front of the BTCC grid. But by 1988 he was waking up and realising there was no point buying from Rouse to beat Rouse: he simply wouldn't sell you anything as good as what he was driving today. Looking elsewhere for competitive machinery, Gravett began to hear the world's fastest Sierras weren't built in Buckinghamshire, U.K. or Lyss, Switzerland, but in an overgrown country town in the south of Queensland. Not flinching at the thought of what it would do to his phone bill, Gravett made the call.

Thus, that October Gravett found himself entered in DJR's third car at Bathurst 1988, where troubles during the race meant he never got to drive. It didn't matter: between that and the Silverstone TT earlier in the year, he decided he'd seen enough, and put his money down to buy two Johnson cars to take back to Blighty. He'd been convinced to join British media personality Mike Smith in forming Trakstar Motorsport, and DJR1 became Gravett's own car for 1989, racing as the #21, while DJR2 was rebuilt in RHD and became the #20 of either Smith or Will Hoy, depending on the round.

100 percent the quickest RS500s. They were quicker than the Rouse cars; they were quicker than the Eggenberger cars. Absolutely. That's why we bought two of them.

They looked at them from the ground up and they were so well-built. They used low-compression engines, which we continued running [in 1989] with high boost. So you had to be pretty clever in how you drove them, as with high boost you have a lot of lag. The Rouse cars ran lower boost but higher compression, but Dick's team had a very different approach to running the cars. You had to pre-empt the throttle coming out of the corners to keep the turbo spinning. – Robb Gravett, AMC #77

For the first time, Gravett was a genuine title contender, taking five poles, eight fastest laps and four round wins off the likes of Rouse and the other established stars in a highly-successful breakout season. As usual though, the title went to a driver in the lower classes – a Scottish "cockney sparrow" in a Vauxhall Astra 16v, John Cleland. That's just how things worked in the BTCC.

Brands Hatch, 1989

Or at least, that's how things had always worked. By 1989 the people surrounding the British series had come to an agreement about where to go for the 1990s – 2.0 litres, high-tech, and (most radically) often front-wheel drive, all in a bid to level the playing field and placate manufacturers who wanted to promote their mainstream offerings rather than low-volume, high-performance homologation specials. This meant the 1990 season would be a transitional one, with just two classes rather than the usual three or four – one for the outgoing Group A cars, and one for the incoming "Super Touring" formula. Although they were seconds a lap slower than an RS500, several teams elected to get ahead with an extra year's experience in the new cars, especially BMW and Vauxhall who each entered works teams. That meant the field might've been a little thinner than last year, but a few still elected to enter a Sierra for 1990... and one of those was the #1 ICS car of Andy Rouse. Game on.

Then the question of sponsorship reared its ugly head and threatened to cancel the whole party before it started. When the team's 1989 sponsor pulled up stumps at the last minute, Mike Smith graciously stood down to focus all Trakstar's resources on Gravett, but even Gravett was staring down the barrel of withdrawing from the series entirely, before it could bankrupt him completely. At the last minute, however, a deal was made he committed to run a full programme, in defiance of poverty. The car would spend most of the year in plain white, but who cared? At least he'd be racing.

Source

And here's the complication: that plain white car from 1990 was no longer DJR1. After three years of competition, the Johnson cars were simply worn out, and the team recognised that a new chassis would be needed to beat Rouse. Ergo, the car he raced that year was a re-shell, built by David Cook of Yortech Fabrications, and bearing the chassis number MTRS01.

We built a car from the ground up for 1990, but a lot of it was based on the Dick Johnson cars and the technology that he had, particularly in the chassis. You could say we cloned most of it, but we added a few new bits and pieces into the car.

We also did quite a lot of development on the engines as well. Dick's engines were very strong, but because Australia was such a long way away and, because, by the end of 1989 the engines had a lot of mileage on them it didn't make sense to keep using his engines. We went to Mountune-built engines. Off the back of our success, Mountune then got the Ford contract for the World Rally Championship engines. – Robb Gravett, AMC #77

To borrow from my favourite ex-Top Gear presenter and all-round spirit animal, James May, the resulting car was basically, "Now That's What I Call the Best of the RS500, Vol 1." As well as the 420 kW Mountune engines, the car had the running gear from DJR2 including one of Ron Harrop's 9-inch diffs, but excluding the suspension, which came from Eggenberger. They arguably took a backward step by returning to the Getrag 5-speed gearbox rather than Dick's Holinger 6-speed, though that was justifiable given the distances involved when sourcing replacements (or perhaps the Getrag just suited the Mountune engine very well). And of course, where had Mountune first got their engine-mapping software? From the Bosch 1.2 system pioneered for the Sierra by by DJR. Mountune picking up that system had been a watershed moment for the BTCC, because it was only then that someone finally broke Rouse's monopoly on computer chips. Andy had been very comfortable charging £15,000 for a race-ready engine (or "only" £500 for a new chip), but there hadn't been much anyone could do, because in 1988 Rouse had been the only guy in the U.K. who could build an engine that would hold together for a full race. Once Mountune got their hands on Johnson's software, however, privateers finally had an engine that could do the same, and Rouse's stranglehold was shattered.

Snetterton (?), 1990. (Source.)

All the hard work (and expense, given MTRS01 would have a life of just one season!) was vindicated when the new car was "immediately half a second quicker" than its predecessor. Rouse won the first round at Oulton Park, also won the first one-hour endurance race at Donington Park with David Sears. After that, however, Gravett went on a tear and won the next seven rounds in a row – Thruxton, Silverstone National, Oulton Park (again), Silverstone GP, another one-hour enduro at Brands Hatch Indy (with co-driving from Mike Smith), Snetterton and finally Brands Hatch GP all fell to Gravett, with Rouse only breaking the streak with a win in the final Birmingham Superprix. Gravett took two more victories at Donington and Silverstone, interrupted by another win for Rouse at Thruxton, to finish the year with an incredible eight pole positions, and nine wins from just thirteen starts. And because the 2.0-litre class shared the wins around a bit more, it marked one of the few times the BTCC was won from the highest class. Beating Andy Rouse at his own game, in his own championship no less. Even by proxy, that must’ve felt good.

Which brings us to one of life's little ironies: Andy Rouse never won the BTCC title in the RS500. He'd won it with the XR4 Ti, sure, and the Rover SD1 before that, but the only time the RS500 did take the title was in 1990 – and it was a DJR clone in the hands of Robb Gravett. Checkmate, mate.