Usually the F1 support meeting on the streets of Adelaide was a bit of light-hearted fun, a chance to unwind after Bathurst and bask in the reflected glory of the Formula 1 superstars.
This year however, the mood was not so relaxed. Not just because this wasn't the grand finale for the year – that was to come next week in Sydney – and not just because the 1990 Australian Grand Prix just happened to be the 500th World Championship race ever held, so it was a bit of an occasion, with even the Grand Old Master Fangio in attendance. No, it was because this was the first Grand Prix to be held since Ayrton Senna sensationally won the championship by deliberately causing a crash at Suzuka.
Ayrton had arrived in Japan already in a tiff thanks to the memory of Prost refusing to let him through at this race in 1989, ending both their races at the chicane. That tiff became a fit of rage when, despite promises from officialdom, pole position was kept on the wrong side of the circuit, the dirty side, where dust and other crud would keep the polesitter from making a quick getaway. Since Ayrton was the master qualifier, it wasn't hard to predict who would be starting from that grid spot – nor who would be getting the benefit of P2. And given FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre and title rival Alain Prost were both French, it activated Ayrton's persecution complex and he began to sense a conspiracy.
So – and let's not dress this up – Ayrton threw a tantrum. A tantrum at awesome speed in front of millions of people in breathtakingly expensive racecars, but a tantrum all the same. When the race began, as predicted, Prost made a better start in his Ferrari; in his McLaren-Honda, Senna was forced to tuck in behind. Swooping into the frightening, downhill first turn, Prost lifted and turned in, preparing to take the corner; Senna did neither. Instead, he pointed his car at the inside wedge where Prost's Ferrari was about to be, held it flat and waited for the impact. It swiftly came. Ayrton's front wheel climbed over Prost's right-rear and the cars quickly began shedding pieces of carbon fibre, culminating in the Ferrari's rear wing popping off mid-corner. Both cars skittered into the sand trap at more than 200km/h, where they mercifully came to rest before they could clout the Armco. It had been a remarkably dangerous thing to do but, as the dust settled, the key detail was that now neither man could finish the race. Prost had needed to win to keep his championship hopes alive, so that made Ayrton Senna the 1990 World Champion on the spot.
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Understandably, then, that was still all anyone could talk about when F1 rolled into sleepy little Adelaide for the World Championship curtain-closer. It was here in Australia that Jackie Stewart cornered Senna for a 90-minute interview and famously, with his usual waffling circumlocution, asked Senna what the actual bloody fuck he'd thought he was doing. Equally true to his character, Ayrton protested his innocence, reminded everyone that he'd won lots of poles and races, and departed vowing never to speak to Jackie ever again. Mutterings about how Prost was allowed to stay up as late as he wanted and that as soon as he graduated he was totally out of here were rumoured, but unconfirmed.
With that going on, the touring car sideshow was kind of neither here nor there. But they'd shown up, and they were ready to do their thing between the wicked walls of Adelaide. Game on.
Skaife's First Headlines
Kind of a shame, then, that the Big Moment of the weekend had already come and gone, in a practice session before any of the races had even been held. Having spent another month in testing and development, Gibson Motorsport arrived in Adelaide with their second GT-R at last sorted and ready to go. For the first time all year, they could hit the track as a proper two-car outfit, with both Jim Richards and Mark Skaife mounted in GT-Rs. As the senior driver, Richards got the newer car, GT-R 002, while Skaife was palmed off with 001, the car which had given Richards the championship at Oran Park, and then done the race at Bathurst after that sneaky door swap.
Unfortunately, on just his second lap out of the pits, Skaife banged the kerb at Turn 9 a touch too hard and provoked a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the shiny new GT-R. The car launched off the kerb and was still tipping over when it slammed into the wall at undiminished speed, rebounding and skidding down the track upside-down. When it finally came to a halt everything went quiet, then a small fire started and, so they say... the crowd started cheering. Young Skaifey was none too popular back then, it seems.
As we went out of the pits for practice, I went out first and I'd done probably about half a lap and Fred Gibson came on the radio and said, "Mark's had a crash." I said, "Oh God, we've only just started!" It was on the first lap, damn near. And he said to me, "Can you just have a look when you come 'round next time to see how much the car is damaged?"
And, just to go back a fraction, when I first joined Nissan Motorsport the mechanics had this crazy idea that if you flat-spotted a tyre, or actually got a dent on your car, you had to give them a slab of beer. So as I was driving around the Adelaide track, Fred said to me, "Just check how many slabs Skaifey owes the boys." I said, "Yeah, no problem." So I drove around and came to where the accident was, and I drove past and Fred said, "How many slabs is it?" I said, "Freddo, it's a small bottle shop!" – Jim Richards
Exactly what it was like in the car I don't know, as I haven't picked up Skaife's new book yet, but it seems the impact had been so severe the concrete barrier had to be replaced before running could resume the next day. More immediately, the car's bodywork had so badly deformed that Skaife was unable to open the door to get out. With a fire burning, that was no small concern, but when help eventually did arrive he was extracted safely, emerging from the wreckage shaken but mostly okay. The only long-term damage was done to his vision in one eye, which never fully recovered – something he kept very quiet about while he was still an active driver.
The car was less lucky: "I made sure that it was cut up and crushed," Fred Gibson told V8 Sleuth, a wise move when ghoulish souvenirs were popular even in those pre-internet days. But it does mean GT-R 001 is the only Nissan race car from the Group A era that no longer exists today.
Thalgo Trophy
On a more positive note, there were also the reprobates from Formula Holden. Somewhat amusingly, the race – which was also the final round of the Australian Drivers' Championship – was sponsored by Thalgo Australia, a cosmetics concern based in Macquarie Park who also sponsored a young Mark Larkham (feel free to remind him of that next time you see him). Anyway, here we had a championship-decider with two drivers still in the hunt: Simon Kane in the latest Ralt, who'd taken six of eight poles this year, and Mark Poole in the Aussie-made Shrike, basically an extracurricular built by engineering students at TAFE. The race winner ended up being none other than Neil Crompton, but thanks to a hard-won 2nd place for one title contender (and a shockingly-timed mechanical failure for the other), the title went to Kane, who thus took the CAMS Gold Star for 1990.
He graduated to a very disappointing season in International Formula 3000 which, given good drivers frequently got lost in bad cars in that category, may or may not have been his fault. Believe it or not, his day job was as a Channel Nine sound technician, which he still does to this day.
Ansett Air Freight Challenge – Race 1
The touring car support races attracted a strong 23-car grid – not the deluge of entries we'd seen in 1989 by any means, but nothing to sniff at either. Dick Johnson and Tony Longhurst brought their usual two-car entries, and Gibson Motorsport had intended to race two cars, as noted above. Peter Brock had brought just a single car for himself as Andrew Miedecke continued to wind down his involvement, and Colin Bond and Glenn Seton both followed his example. Win Percy, still riding high after that stunning Bathurst win, brought along the sole competitive Holden. Direct from Bathurst came lesser entries like Peter Gazzard in the Peter Jackson Search for a Champion Walky, and '89 class winners John Cotter and Peter Doulman, down to drive separate BMW M3s. It was also the last-ever appearance of Lawrie Nelson's embattled Ford Mustang, as he finally got sick of throwing his money on such a bonfire. "We'd just had enough of the car," said Lawrie years later. "It wasn't getting us anywhere, we were just throwing good money after bad." It would be the final start for a Mustang in Australian touring cars until 2019.
Race 1, a 15-lap affair held on the Saturday afternoon, showed a lot of promise early on but ended up finishing oh-so predictably. Jim Richards and Peter Brock both bogged down when the lights went green, but both DJR teammates made absolute demon starts and shot straight up between them to assume the lead at the first corner, John Bowe ahead of Dick Johnson. Win Percy thought that looked good and tried to follow, but Brock and Richards closed ranks and squeezed him out. Tony Longhurst meanwhile had nothing to lose and, with the boost turned right up, put some of that prodigious squirt to use overtaking Percy and Richards to be 4th within three corners. Unfortunately by lap 2 the electrics were playing up and he was forced to drop out: the winner of both races last year wouldn't be repeating his feat this year. He managed to get going again late in the race, but cocked it up with a spin at Dequetteville Hairpin.
The DJR teammates, meanwhile, traded places to give Dick the race lead and Bowe went to work to hold Peter Brock back while Dick made a run for it, with Win Percy a rather more distant 4th but closing the distance fast. Into the Hairpin, Percy ruthlessly squeezed out Brocky, really putting those carbon metallic pads to work, and although Peter didn't give an inch and forced them to go door-to-door through 12 and 13, there was no resisting Winston today. By the end of lap 2 Johnson was leading from Bowe and Percy.
And then along came Jim Richards. After that bad start with, so Moffat speculated, a gear selection issue, Godzilla had sorted itself out and was now having no problems at all. Into Turn 4 at the East Terrace, Richo smoothly relieved Brock of 4th place, then eased up on Percy through most of the next lap. Not waiting to be next on the menu, Percy repeated his Brock pass on John Bowe and managed to make it stick, despite raising some dust and feathers, but they never actually touched. The works Holden was now 2nd outright.
Speed trap figures made it clear that the GT-R's advantage was power-down, not top speed, posting speeds on the Brabham straight that were easily the slowest of the frontrunning cars, around 214km/h to the 230+ of the Sierras. But through the left-right-left complex of 90-degree turns that made up the first half of the lap... oh my God. Richo passed Bowe at Turn 6 with such ease that it prompted speculation that Bowe must have a problem, but no, the Nissan was just that much better at putting its power down. As if to underline that point, Peter Brock came in too hot at Turn 4 and had a spin, which effectively put him out of the race. He would drop out two laps later with an under-bonnet fire, the Sierra unable to take enough boost to make up the gap.
Richards passed Percy during an ad break (thanks, Channel Nine) which left only Dick Johnson still to deal with. Lap 6 saw Richards inch up, then suddenly haul Dick in and pass him down Brabham Straight, well before the braking zone. If I had to guess, I'd say the warmth of Adelaide was simply playing havoc with under-bonnet temps; it was only 30 degrees today, not the furnace we'd had the last two years, but probably still warmer than a Sierra would've liked: once the intercooler got too hot, no more power.
Rubbing in salt, Win Percy had caught a slipstream and was close enough to apply the brakes one more time, so he also passed Dick into the Hairpin, making it three-from-three at that corner. If it hadn't been for Richards and Godzilla, he'd have been leading the race now. But that was lap 6; by lap 7, Percy was in the pits with a blown engine – perhaps because HRT had been trialling that 9,000rpm limit one last time.
Either way, that was all she wrote: Richo, driving smooth and precise as was his wont, reeled off the remaining 8 laps and sailed home to an easy victory. Bowe, apparently having more self-control with the boost dial than the boss, kept in touch and circulated to a 2nd-place finish, with Glenn Seton coming home 3rd.
Ansett Air Freight Challenge – Race 2
The second race on Sunday morning was not, despite what the commentators told us, a reverse-grid race: although the GP weekend would remain the place to try out gimmicks, that was one they didn't sully the teams with. Instead, starting positions for Race 2 were taken from the finishing positions in Race 1 – meaning Richards would be starting from pole, and those who DNF'd on Saturday, such as Win Percy, would have to start right at the back. It was also only 10 laps, so they weren't going to have much time to rectify that, either.
This time there were no mistakes as Richards got off the line like a rocket and leapt into an immediate lead. John Bowe did his best to dispute it with him, taking a bold outside line coming onto Jones Straight, but there was nothing he could do; he gave the Skyline a nice love tap at the apex and damaged his own car badly enough to have to pit, leaving Glenn Seton to take over P2, with Dick Johnson following behind.
The HRT mechanics, meanwhile, had changed engines overnight, so Win Percy was off like a scalded cat. He found a gap between the pack and pit wall and pushed the nose of that V8 Commodore past virtually all the smaller-class cars in one hit. By the end of the first lap, Percy had risen from 21st to 6th – in one lap! Another lap and he'd disposed of Tony Longhurst, who soon parked it with electrical gremlins, to rise to 5th. Another lap after that and, driving like a madman, he very nearly replicated Skaife's massive accident at Turn 9, tripping over the ripple strip at such speed that the car was briefly airborne, only to keep it off the wall thanks to some inspired wheel-work from Percy himself. Percy kept going, apparently none the worse for the experience!
Then out of nowhere, the Nissan went off-song, and Richards fell back into the clutches of Seton, then Johnson, then as the Channel Nine broadcast came back from an ad break, Percy as well. The Nissan had proven as fast as ever, but once again just couldn't keep it up, crippled this time by simple overheating.
Since Colin Bond had already binned it during the ad break, that left Glenn Seton to inherit the lead just as he'd inherited 2nd. Dick Johnson shadowed but never quite got in touch with the younger Ford hero, leaving him to fling that blue Sierra between the walls of Adelaide and bring it home to a well-deserved win. It might have been the shortest, least important race of the year, and it might have been by surviving more than driving, but a win is a win: Glenn Seton had proved he could win a sprint race as well as an enduro. In a perfect result for his sponsor, he also took the chequered flag just as he came up to lap Peter Gazzard in the Search for a Champion Commodore – both Peter Jackson cars crossing the line in formation.
For that matter, Win Percy had redeemed himself by charging from 21st and last to 3rd place in just six laps... though after Bathurst, it wasn't like anybody needed convincing the Aussie V8 was a winner. It was the final time TWR 023 ever raced in anger, and a fitting send-off for a truly legendary motor car.
LV Foster's Australian Grand Prix
And speaking of legends: later that day, the 1990 Australian Grand Prix was won neither by Ayrton Senna nor by Alain Prost, but instead by the man who'd also won in Japan – Nelson Piquet, driving the #20 Benetton-Ford. It wasn't quite the last victory of the Brazilian triple-champ's career, but he was definitely closer to the end than the beginning, and everyone knew it. The question of what Benetton might accomplish if they could find someone younger and hungrier to put in that seat would have to wait until 1991 for an answer...
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