4 November: Ansett Air Freight Challenge

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.

Source

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...

Bathurst 1990: The Lion Kings

Grice's time in the lead was short-lived, of course. He'd been running hard for 33 laps, so his fuel tank was almost dry. And sure enough, he only completed one more lap before peeling off into pit lane to swap the tyres, brim the tank and put Win Percy back behind the wheel. Percy rejoined with considerable gusto, leaving thick black elevenses on the way out of his pit box, arriving back on track in 6th place. Staying out longer, Mark Skaife returned to the lead in the Skyline, but it had been a startling development nevertheless – how the hell could a Commodore possibly be fast enough to wrest the lead off an all-wheel-drive, twin-turbo rocketship like the GT-R? "It's a pretty simple calculation if you think about it," said HRT engineering chief Wally Storey years later: "1,100kg and 650 horsepower, or 1,350kg and 500 horsepower. That's what you're up against." To explain that, we have to wind the clock all the way back to the start of the year...

Godzilla, meet Mothra
As previously noted, Percy had landed in Australia with nowt but a budget and a list of phone numbers to get the Holden Racing Team off the ground. To his credit, he'd made a point of hiring Australians rather than relying on imported talent from the TWR empire. And the most significant hire was soon-to-be workshop manager and chief engineer, Wally Storey.

Storey had once been a driver himself, and a pretty good one at that – he went close to taking the national Formula Ford title in an Aussie-made Elwyn in 1979. He'd stuck around in Formula Ford as an engineer and fabricator for the next ten years, and by 1989 was able to put Paul Stokell on pole for his debut race at Amaroo Park in that same decade-old Elywn, despite drivers the likes of Russell Ingall and Paul Morris who all had the latest U.K.-made Van Diemens. Clearly Storey knew what he was doing, so no surprise that he was also successfully running his own business, Mawer Engineering, in the Sydney suburb of Greenacre. That same year he also happened to be engineering Neil Crompton's Ralt in Formula Holden, and as one of the embryonic Holden Racing Team's contracted endurance drivers, it was Crompton who suggested him to Win Percy.

Storey and Crompton in a later era (source).

Initially Storey wasn't interested; his family and business were in Sydney, and this would mean moving to Melbourne. But he still ended up part of the auditioning process.

Win had a couple of other blokes lined up for the job, and they were supposed to go out to Winton one day to see how they went. Neil asked me to go down and help Winny assess these blokes. Win wanted to employ Australians and not make it a Pommy team, but he didn't know anyone here.

I went down there, and the thing was popping and banging – the Pommy guys that were there had ordered Shell A not Group A fuel. Once we solved that, the thing still wasn't going that well, and whoever was supposed to come hadn't turned up. Winny said, "Would you like to have a go at this?" And I said, "Well, I do this for a living, so you're going to have to pay me." – Wally Storey, AMC #119

The problem with the car was the same one that had taken Tom Walkinshaw himself out of Bathurst in 1988 – the unequal-length link arms had been binding up at the extremity of the rear suspension travel, placing huge stress on the four-link chassis mounts and beginning to shear them off. Storey had seen it all before when he'd been contracted to sort out the Lansvale team's VL two years earlier.

A couple of the guys Win had there, Dave McDermott and Martyn Bellars, were working on it and said, "It's broken the bolt again." I had a look under the car, and by this stage they'd got rid of the TWR diff and the top trailing arm and put Harrop stuff in, but they hadn't understood how important it was to put the trailing arms in the right place. After they had the rear end fall out at Bathurst with Tom, nobody there still had grasped what happened.

I said to him, "I can fix this but it'll understeer like you won't believe, and we'll then have to do a bit of work to fix that. But it will be easier to drive."

So I put the trailing arms in the right place and that made it faster straight away. Win then said, "Can you fix the understeer?" So I did, and the car was a lot faster by the end of the day, and Winny's saying, "You're the man I need! You really know what you're doing!" I said, "Well, yes, but I cheated – I've already done this on a Commodore; I know what the caster should be, and know where the roll centres should be." – Wally Storey, AMC #119

Storey was just who the embryonic HRT needed, but it still took a prod from his wife, Lyn, to finally convince him to take the job.

I wasn't sure. But Lyn said, "You're good at what you do. You made Formula Fords fast, you made Terry Shiel's and the Lansvale car fast – here's your chance to prove yourself against the best." – Wally Storey, AMC #119

Storey immediately did so. At Symmons Plains he made an important discovery, virtually stumbling upon some magic new brake pads in the team's transporter...

The thing about TWR is that they weren't afraid to throw a lot of money around. When I looked in the drawer of the truck there were about 100 sets of pads, all different types. There were these purple/blue things, and on the box it read Carbon Metallic. I rang Ed Vieusseux [an old Formula Ford colleague now working in CART – I haven't been able to find out which team] and he said, "You should try them, they're fucking unreal! They've got a few problems, but man, they've got bite!"

Winny did about five laps on them at Symmons Plains and came in and said, "Whatever they are, they're the go!" Then we pulled the wheels off and the discs are still glowing red and the paint's turned white, and after that I'm trying to construct as many brake ducts as I can! That was Thursday so we had plenty of time to get it right. It worked a treat. That was an area where we enjoyed a fair advantage over most people for a long time. Even when other people got onto carbon metallic pads, most didn't know how critical it was to blow enough air on the brakes. – Wally Storey, AMC #119

But, with the enduros approaching and contractual obligation to run two cars, the ex-Perkins VL Percy had driven in the ATCC would no longer be enough: the team needed a second car. It's often said they could've built one up from a brand-new VL bodyshell, but I fail to see how that could've happened given production had switched to the VN well over a year ago. No, their only hope was to adopt a secondhand racecar – and wouldn't you know it, they just happened to have one sitting in the workshop already: chassis TWR 023. The car Tom Walkinshaw had put together in the U.K. and then flown to Australia for Bathurst 1988, a car that had lasted all of five laps before tearing out its own rear suspension and slinking away with its tail between its legs. At long last, that car had its chance for Bathurst redemption.

We used Tom's car because TWR had done a lot of work on the seam welding; all we had to do was fix the rear end. The problem wasn't the chassis, it was a lack of understanding of the rear suspension geometry. It was quite a basic car but it had a good cage in it. When they built that car, someone at TWR, Eddie Hinkley I think, grasped the importance of triangulation in the roll cage in terms of stiffening the body shell. TWR had done a bit of work with the Group A Rovers trying to stiffen the bodyshells; doing things like measuring the torsional stiffness with and without the windscreen, so they'd grasped that. At the same time I had been doing a similar thing with triangulated roll cages for the Lansvale car. It had a triangulated welded-in cage and would have been one of the first in Australia. – Wally Storey, AMC #119

[As a side note, although they were a TWR team with a TWR car, it seemed they weren't above adopting Perkins innovations if they proved useful: in-car shot revealed the #16 had a Perkins-style "Leaning Tower of Pisa" switchboard!]

With TWR's sound bodyshell as a starting point, the team could focus on giving it plenty of upgrades. Turns out those wider 11-inch Dunlop tyres that had caused all the problems at Sandown were part of CAMS' attempt to rebalance the rules to give the Holdens a chance. They were too big an advantage to throw away, so Percy had commissioned new 17x11 wheels from Castalloy in South Australia, drawing the design he wanted in the dirt behind the Mallala pits for company head Kevin Drage. The new wheels gave the clearance needed to fit a massive new front brake package – a set of 14-inch AP Racing discs clamped by powerful AP six-piston callipers sourced, if you can believe it, from TWR's Le Mans-winning Jaguar sports car programme. If they could bring a 900kg XJR-12 to a halt from 368km/h, they could probably handle a 1,350kg Commodore trying to pull up from "only" 285 at the Chase! As a bonus, they came with what the Nissan team didn't – water cooling. Between that and the ventilation of the new Castalloy wheels, the heat build-up of carbon metallic pads could be dealt with even over a thousand-kilometre duration.

So, with fancy Jag brakes the #16 could stop, and thanks to Storey's chassis tweaks it could take a corner as well: the only thing left to do was make it go. Engine man Rob Benson had been working all year to find the optimal combination of parts that would give them maximum power while still standing up to six hours of merciless thrashing, and boy, did he outdo himself. "Rob Benson went to great lengths and sourced components from all around the world for maximum lightness and strength in all the moving parts," said Allan Grice in Auto Action #1795. "That's how we got the high revs safely, which meant more power to push the Sierras to destruction."

Because our full-time staff wasn't really that big and we were still learning all the time, that eight weeks just went by in a blur. All of us virtually lived at those premises, me included. We also had to bring the second car on line. It was just absolutely flat-out. I'd go into the workshop of a morning and often I'd be the first in on a normal day. Often the lights would be on and I'd think, "Oh, some idiot has left all the lights on again" but Wally and his guys would be working away and Rob would be in the dyno room and they would have got there before me, or in Rob's case he would have gone through the night. I've never known an engine man more devoted than Rob Benson. My expense for fuel used on the dyno was greater than the entire fuel used by the race car at race meetings! – Win Percy, AMC #119

The fuel bills proved a sound investment. From an early-season spec of around 380 kW, relentless development pushed the total from the fuel-injected 4.9-litre V8 to 410 kW at 7,200rpm and 610 Nm at 5,500, with a torque curve tailored to the contours of Mount Panorama. In fact, a 9,000rpm rev limit had been trialled at certain ATCC rounds in 1990, but the blocks had actually cracked at such huge revs so they had to settle for a lower 8,500rpm limit – still screamingly high for a pushrod V8!

The final element was finding the right co-driver. Neil Crompton was already on the books, but Percy knew he wouldn't be fast enough; Brad Jones had also put his hand up, but he was still a bit green. Better to pair them in the second car and leave them to get on with it. No, Percy knew exactly who he wanted to co-drive his prime car – Allan Grice, a known quantity with whom he'd already shared a works Nissan in the '88 ETCC season, as well as Bathurst campaigns in '87 and '88. Gricey was experienced, knew Bathurst well, had literally thousands of hours in Holdens and was a fighter who could drive flat out all day long – which was, no doubt, exactly what they'd have to do. Given Percy's shoulder injury was still giving him gip, he knew his co-driver would end up with the lion's share of the driving, so that kind of stamina would be a real boon. Only problem was, he was the one driver Tom Walkinshaw would never, ever let into one of his cars...

I phoned Tom one day about who I wanted to drive with me. He told me he wouldn't interfere, you can choose who you like to go with you. So I said that I wanted Allan Grice.

Well, Tom's gone off. "You're not having him," he barked. "Tom, you said..." "You're not having him!" He'd already cut my budget by 40 percent on what he promised me when I agreed to go out and run the team, so I wasn't having this.

They'd had some run-ins when Grice did the ETCC in '86. They'd fallen out and he considered Grice too mouthy for his own good. When Tom had a set against someone, I'm afraid it was really quite strong. – Win Percy, Auto Action #1796

Tom and I never really saw eye to eye. Tom was trying to run his three Bastos Rovers convoy and I kept sticking my nose in and they'd give me a bang and I've give them a bang back, so he never thought that was terribly good... – Allan Grice, Auto Action #1796

Grice was not an obvious choice for the seat. For one thing, he was only a month off turning 48, so he was getting on a bit. For another, he'd been effectively semi-retired since the start of 1989, not having had a full-time ride since that Nissan campaign in Europe, and without a hit in the ATCC since the last of the Roadways Commodores in 1987. "That wasn't the choice," he told Auto Action recently, "but the fact is, if you don't have enough sponsorship and you can't get it, then you are semi-retired, aren't you? It was never my intention to hang up the hat at that stage of the game. That was the end of my regular participation in touring cars, but I was still in demand for Bathurst."

In his favour was that early slash to HRT's budget, which had been a sore point for Percy all season long. "Before we went to Bathurst," Percy remembered, "I had to spend two nights personally stacking the tyre lorry to make sure everything was right and numbered – we just didn't have spare staff! John Lindell, the Holden Motorsport manager, was in overalls and was one of the refuellers for the race weekend!" No, Percy decided, Tom had stuck his nose in quite enough already. On the subject of Grice, he would just have to be told.

He said, "No way, you're not having him." I said that he had told me that the choice of co-driver was mine. He said he didn't care what I said, there was no way I was having Gricey. I said I would be, he said no, and I would be having [BTCC champion] Tim Harvey.

[Grice and I] worked together alright and I decided on him not because I owed him anything, far from it. I decided that if I was going to tackle the Mountain that he was the guy that I wanted. When Tom said no, he'd obviously already decided on Tim Harvey. He'd already changed the budget, he'd already changed a few things and I jolly well wasn't going to have it. I said I wanted Grice.

In the end he slammed the phone down and said, "On your head, be it!" – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Grice was the final piece of the puzzle, that last pinch of spice that brings a recipe to fruition. Wally Storey had co-driven Terry Shiel's Mazda RX-7 at Bathurst in 1983 (a thankyou for fabricating that car's rear suspension – payment in trade rather than in cash), so he wasn't quite a Mountain virgin, but he was nowhere near grognard Grice's level.

[Grice] understood the Bathurst game. He taught me a lot about Bathurst in one race meeting. Things like: in qualifying we were nowhere at one stage and he said, "Don't worry about it, we'll be fine." Because I'm from Formula Ford, where a few tenths is a severe walloping, never mind five seconds! I'm going, "We're nowhere!" And he says, "Don't worry, they won't do those times in the race. This is a really good race car – you've done a really good job, stop worrying." Okay, I'll take your word for it – and he was right.

I'd been there before, and I'd driven in the race, so I'd had a few hits at it. But being there with someone of Grice's level, who's won it before, who's been at the front a lot, you get a lot more information. You're not guessing any more. You might think you've got a good car, but he knows. A bloke like Grice knows what a good car at Bathurst is, and if he says it's a good car then you don't have to worry. If nothing else, it's a psychological thing; the little man at the back of your head is suddenly a lot more comfortable. – Wally Storey, AMC #119

Ergo, Storey was prepared to listen when Grice told them they had to use the carbon metallic brake pads in the race.

I didn't go there committed to carbon metallic pads. I went with two lots of different sorts of pads. In practice we ran both, and it was Grice who was pushing us to run the carbon metallic ones.

With the carbon metallics, you didn't need much pedal pressure, but with the Pagid RS9s you're standing on the pedal that hard that you're just about stretching the wheelbase. So the carbon metallic pads made the drivers' jobs a lot easier; didn't knock them up as much. You've got to keep in mind with drivers, they always want to do it easier.

So I'm nervous about the carbon metallics, but Grice is saying, "We've got to use these things." So I said, "Well, we'll run them, but I've got to ask you not to use them at their maximum all the time." We painted them yellow to look like RS9 pads, so no-one twigged what was going on. – Wally Storey, AMC #119

So that, ladies and gentlemen, was why Grice had been able to pass Skaife's Nissan GT-R for the lead on lap 62: he was driving the fastest, toughest, best-prepared Commodore the world had ever seen. It was now just a question of whether the opposition could get it all in one sock soon enough to stop them. 

The Wheels Fall Off
With Grice out of the way, the gap from Skaife to Johnson, 1st to 2nd, was now 15.3 seconds. With a Nissan stop sure to include some fresh brakes, you could bet they would be sitting still for at least 50 seconds, plus time lost transitioning the lane – they were going to lose some places at their next stop, and with fading front brakes (revealed in a brief in-car interview) Skaife couldn't press on to build a gap the way Richards had. This race wasn't over by a long shot.

All of that provides some real context to the comments Channel Seven got from Gricey after he alighted from the car. With the Fosters helmet off and the Akubra on in its place, he became rather more talkative.

Steve Titmus: Allan Grice, great to see a Holden back out front there?

Allan Grice: Yeah, the car's very strong isn't it?

Titmus: Mate it's looking good. Have you been quietly confident the whole week?

Grice: Yes. We knew we had a very strong car, and we had a strong chance. We didn't know how quickly we could run. We certainly didn't think that 15s would be on in qualifying and 18s on in the race if you'd asked us last Wednesday. But, um... we haven't changed pads yet and it's on its third tank of gas – that's a very good sign, it means that our pad wear is well under control. I was soldiering there a bit, some of the Sierras were burning their rear tyres early in the piece, so we put a harder compound on the rear and then of course a hard compound with a greasy track is a very slide-y proposition. So I had a handful there for a while, but we're back on our chosen race rubber now and it's looking fine.

The talk about pad wear being under control was premature, as we'll see a bit further along, but the way Grice emphasised the word chosen tells me he was on the verge of revealing exactly which tyre that was, and stopped himself in the nick of time – no point giving Fred Gibson that kind of intel. The rest of the interview, mostly concerning the pace of the Sierras and how they were having to back off to preserve their tyres, was cut short by abrupt footage of the #20 B&H Sierra steaming at the side of the road. Smoke was billowing from its side-pipe exhaust and, to a lesser extent, from the bonnet as well; the replay revealed the car had started smoking even as it rounded Hell Corner; this had not been a small engine failure. Its driver (Denny Hulme, by my reckoning) stood forlorn beside it on the grass, resignedly tugging off his gloves, displaying the utter helplessness of a man who'd spun the chamber and just happened to have it come up loaded. With the team's prime car, the #25, having already detonated eleven laps earlier, the challenge from Tony Longhurst Racing was comprehensively over.

John Brady: Frank, to start with two cars, to start so well and have it finish so early must be horribly disappointing?

Frank Gardner: I suppose I've seen it all before over many years, but you never get over the disappointment of the thing. You come here with well-prepared cars but you just get caught out. The day didn't start right, and it never ever corrects itself once you start off on the wrong side of a little bit of technology. We got behind the Pace Car with one car and it ran hot, didn't recover, so that put that one out. So we lost car 25 nice 'n' early. And then this other car of course never made it back to the pits so you don't really know what the problem is with it. That is the end of the day, we can pack up and go home. The only thing we've saved is brake pads and fuel.

Brady: Frank, it just seems to've gone so well for the last two days. Can you put it down to anything, or is it just the luck of the game as it always seems to be?

Gardner: No, we changed engines after practice, we looked at our practice engines to see where there was any warning bells that would've cropped up. And the engines stripped absolutely perfectly, so there was no warning bell to say, "oi, tighten this", or, "do this", or "look here". So we were very happy, looked at our gearboxes, everything was perfect – cars just looked like they were spot-on, because all the specifications are all built the same. So after a reasonably successful run in practice we thought we were in for a successful race, but the car hasn't read the script.

Brady: Frank, you've had your share of success before, I'm sure you'll make up for it again in the future. Thanks a lot.

Gardner: Well, we're not retiring about now.

Knowing what we know today, it was surprising the cars had lasted even this long. 1991 was only twelve weeks away and, come a new calendar on the wall, Tony Longhurst Racing would cease to be a Ford team and return to being a BMW team. The move was likely strategic, timed to take advantage of a new M3 Evo the Bavarians had homologated for their domestic DTM series, and also to position the team for a world after Group A – Gardner would've known all about the newfangled "Super Touring" rulebook in Britain, and getting in with BMW on the ground floor would've been a very wise career move if that was the future. Unfortunately, the price for that was a Sierra programme that was... not so fresh, as chief spanner Campbell Little later explained.

Those cars were always... fragile. I think that's the best word to describe the Sierra. The biggest issue we had with them, always, was the turbocharger, and that they were a little engine that probably wasn't built for the power we were getting out of them.

Looking back, there were a whole lot of things we could have done better with them. In those days controlling drivers wasn't as easy as it is now. We didn't have much in the way of telemetry or data-logging to reference.

There was an arms race going on. And we kept on winding them up. The biggest one to compete against, at Bathurst, were Moffat's cars. He flew Rudi Eggenberger out each year, the bloke who wrote the book on making them go fast.

During those years I remember putting turbos on almost every night and replacing headgaskets every other night. There were all sorts of things you had to keep doing.

By then, knowing the Sierras were coming to the end of their time, with us at least, we were struggling to get parts. We were having to re-engineer and re-manufacture blocks. We did lots of stuff to keep them going. It doesn't sound very professional, but that's often how it works. Then reliability can suffer. – Campbell Little, AMC #119

So ironically, a car that had started from pit lane hadn't been able to limp back there after it all went wrong! But if the yellow cars really were made of spare parts held together with duct tape and hope, then the week-long speed of the Longhurst cars was truly impressive – the speed trap on Conrod revealed the fastest car so far today was Dick Johnson's #17, clocked at 285km/h. Second-fastest was Moffat's #10, at 281; third was Gricey, at 278; and fourth-fastest, before it expired, had been Longhurst's #25, at a verified 276km/h – a lot of speed for a car that could fall apart at any moment!

On lap 72, the Nissan finally pitted from the lead. Skaife jumped out and Richards jumped back in for his second stint. The mechanics gave it fuel, four new tyres and, crucially, four new sets of brake pads, as they were needed both front and rear. That made it a very long stop, the car stationary for 2 minutes and 22 seconds – roughly a leap year in race time. Richo was nothing but patient, of course, eventually rejoining in 10th place, making it a very costly stop. And most worryingly, although it was close, they weren't quite yet at lap 80 – halfway – meaning there was every chance they'd have to do this again before the end.

That put Dick Johnson back into the lead of the race, sick turbo and all, ahead of Dieudonné in 2nd, and Percy in 3rd, although Dieudonné was probably out of sequence and due for a pit stop soon. But even if Dick's car did lunch itself it would only be one more on a growing casualty list. On lap 69, the Callaghan Mobile Concrete Pumping Walky had a spin at Hell Corner and landed on the grass just past the apex, where it apparently stayed ever after as no-one could be bothered moving it. At about the same time, the Sizzler Skyline was finally seen parked – awkwardly, up against the earth bank on the run up to The Cutting, which seemed a tad dangerous. It was only metres from a gap in the fence, but apparently further than the car could go. Tim Grant was later seen jogging back to it, but whatever he'd had in mind came to nothing; their DNF'd car stayed DNF'd.

And then the #40 Peanut Slab Sierra came into the pits to receive some attention from the mechanics, the lack of urgency suggesting all was not well with that car. Co-driver Robb Gravett revealed there'd been a problem with the fuel rail, leaving the car to – no big deal – catch fire! In fact, he was interviewed by Channel Seven while brandishing a spare fuel rail!

John Brady: While everyone else has been talking about the rain, you've been worrying about a fire?

Robb Gravett: Yeah that's right. I'd just changed over with Gianfranco and he just came in the following lap with the car in flames. The fuel rail's broken on the engine. We managed to put the fire out, so we're going to replace the fuel rail and hopefully... It's a shame really, because it's going to cost us a bit of time, but I hope we get it fixed fairly quickly.

Brady: I think most people are amazed you can get it back out there at all?

Gravett: Well, we may try. Fortunately we managed to get it back to the pits and as it came in it just went "Woompf!", up in flames. Fortunately we got it out quickly so I don't think there's any more damage to it at the moment.

Brady: It must be heartbreaking for yourself, you've had such a great year in England, to come out and run into this sort of strife?

Gravett: It's a hell of a long way to come for a problem like this, but you know, it's one of those things. That's motor racing.

By lap 75 Dick still led but Richo was right behind him, now a lap down but returning to his usual trick of moving up through the field at a phenomenal rate. It wasn't inconceivable that by the end of this stint Richo would be back in the lead, making up a whole lap in about an hour! Time would tell, and in the meantime we found out why not even a DJR Sierra was enough to hold him back – thanks to a mechanical failure, Dick was getting no extra grunt from the gruntiest engines ever put in a Sierra.

Mike Raymond: How's the car feel?

Dick Johnson: Well, except for the fact that you can hear the whistle that it's got, it's obviously done a compressor wheel, and it wouldn't pull a sick baby off the family po, actually! [i.e. toilet]

Raymond: You always had a way with words.

Johnson: Gotta have a way with something, we obviously don't have too much of a way with turbo wheels. Jimmy's thing is just so quick out of the corners, it's unbelievable.

In that state Johnson couldn't present much more than a speedbump to Godzilla; by Conrod on that lap, Jimmy was out of the slipstream and past.

Raymond: It's got a bit of grunt, hasn't it?

Johnson: It's got a bit of somethin'!

Johnson eventually gave up and pitted around lap 91, a bit too early for a scheduled stop even though it was just about spot-on if you wanted to make just a single pad change. In the notes I took during the race I speculate that they deliberately short-filled to make a gap knowing they had a brake stop scheduled anyway, but that seems like giving even the Johnson team too much credit. More likely, Dick simply threw in the towel and decided the #18 car was the car to be in today, so he'd better be in the pits ready to take it over when its next stop came up just after lap 100. John Bowe rejoined 3rd, which left Win Percy leading once again.

Dick Johnson: There's still about 70 laps to go, so God only knows what's going to happen. The car's running great except it's lost a lot of power because it's obviously busted some blades off the turbine wheel – which it did last year – but I don't see that stopping the car. It's just going to make it go a little bit slower. All in all I think everything else is fine on the car.

Steve Titmus: How much is it affecting your time?

Johnson: It's probably affecting the times around two seconds a lap, because it's very low boost and we're down quite a few revs down the straight. But other than that I don't think it's going to worry us, at least it's saving the tyres for us.

More casualties: the #32 Hesonne VL was seen going slowly and waving the leaders by – it had broken a camshaft, so its day was over with just 64 laps on the board (while the cars it was being lapped by were on lap 80). And then it was the Seton team's turn for heartache. Drew Price was seen back in the #35 just after they'd been speaking to Dick Johnson, but the car was having troubles. Glenn himself hopped in to see what could be done as the mechanics tried to push-start it, but eventually Seton unbuckled himself and the crew pushed it the other way, guiding it back along the lane to get it into the garage and out of the way. The car that had won Sandown only a month ago had lasted only 78 laps here at Bathurst.

Steve Titmus: Well Glenn, there's a lot of problems with the car, that was a terribly long pit stop, what's gone wrong?

Glenn Seton: It's got a problem with the clutch, the clutch is slipping all up the back straight and down the front straight, so... [shrugs] We don't really know what's wrong with it, but that's the way it goes.

Titmus: Is there any chance that you might still finish the race?

Seton: Uh, well, the way it's looking at the moment going up pit lane I probably won't. The other car, at the time we decided we were going to put George into my car – we've kept George out and put Drew in.

Over in the Moffat pits, meanwhile, Pierre Dieudonné had persuaded the #9 to make it all the way to lap 77 before needing another fuel stop, an impressive distance even if it came at the cost of a little speed. Pierre got out and Gregg Hansford got back in while the car was given fuel and oil, and it seemed like a smooth stop until the pad change took a turn for the worse, the team having trouble getting the pistons out of the way. Hansford rejoined while Moffat swore under his breath, but as fate would have it that was only the start of the Moffat team's woes. On lap 91, Frank Biela returned to the pits with a problem; Niedzwiedz came out with his helmet on but Biela stayed in while the team changed tyres and refuelled. The lack of urgency spoke volumes, especially when the car was propped up on its air jacks for a second time and wooden blocks were inserted so the mechanics could safely clamber underneath. Klaus revealed that Frank had reported a noise from a rear axle, which the team now needed to check. The "noise" turned out to be a loose diff liberated by a cracked housing, a disaster for the team if ever there was one. The ANZ mechanics got to work twirling spanners frantically as they hurried to fit a new diff assembly, but it would be thirty-four minutes before this car would move again. Its race was over.

So let's see, Seton, Moffat, no Longhurst anymore... that  meant the next on the Racing Gods' hit list must've been Dick Johnson. And sure enough, on lap 94 it finally happened. In a classic example of Commentator's Curse, just as Mike Raymond was pointing out the Johnson team still had two cars running strongly and looking good for the latter half of the race, the cameras cut to the #17 pulling into pit lane at the head of a train of thick white oil smoke. That failing turbo had finally cried enough and let go, and the DJR lead car was officially out of the running. Bowe stepped out trying to rub the smoke from his eyes, a difficult proposition with his helmet still on. Dick stepped out in his red team jacket and surveyed it sourly; eventually a mechanic reached in the window and gave the steering wheel a crank, turning it in so they could back it into the garage. Game over. There would be no repeat of that stunning 1989 win, but there was still a chance for the boss to pull a rabbit out of the hat...

John Bowe: That's the way it goes. We had an oil feed that goes to the turbo and feeds oil to the turbo that developed a leak, and it slowly – I thought initially that it had a bad set of tyres on but I did Dunlop an injustice, eventually the oil got out onto the tyres, there was no oil left and it blew the turbo. That's life.

Bruce McAvaney: Okay. Last year you won, but Dick's now able to get into this car that we're looking at at the moment. Jeff Allam and Paul Radisich have done a super job to put it into first place, we believe Dick'll jump in on lap 126 but it will need a change of brake pads, won't it?

Bowe: That's right. That's the beauty of running two competitive cars and two competitive driver combinations. But because the cars are going quicker than they were last year, it's taking its toll on brakes a little and we thought we were going to get through with one pad stop, we're now going to have to make two. But I think it's going to be nice and close at the finish, and with any luck the Dick Johnson Shell team will win.

McAvaney: Is this car set up exactly the same way as 17? Should it be able to carry on and win the race?

Bowe: Absolutely. It's an identical car. The other car, the 17 car, was a new car; this is the car that Dick drove all year in the touring car championship, and it's exactly the same in all respects. So yeah, it's doing a fine job and they've done a great job driving it.

Over in the HRT pits, grimy faces surveyed that development with quiet satisfaction. "A lot of it was the Sierra blokes got carried away trying to race the Nissan, and Dick was always known to crank the boost up,"  remembered Wally Storey years later. "He couldn't help himself." Indeed, given Johnson had built both his cars with his own hands and always intended this car for himself, I'd bet good money the #17 had a boost control hidden somewhere in the cockpit, and the #18 didn't, and that was the sole reason it was still in the race. No reason to give the driver such a tree in their little Garden of Eden, after all...

While Sierras were breaking down left, right and centre, the car everyone had been waiting to expire – the Nissan GT-R – was looking worryingly indestructible. Punditry on how long it would last had frequently only discussed the first hour, but it was still trucking along four hours in, with no signs the car had any weakness beyond its needing new pads every other stop. But on lap 95, when Richards had it back up to 3rd, we at last found the first chink in the samurai's armour. Down Conrod Richards was slowing with a faint wisp of smoke trailing from the rear – nothing like what we'd seen from the DJR car, but it was there all the same, leaving Richo to suffer the humiliation of all the cars he'd just overtaken flashing back past at full tilt. It wasn't until we got a RaceCam shot from inside the car that we realised it was making a sound like a brick in a cement mixer; something major had gone wrong.

Richards headed for pit lane to find out what, and in the process found himself baulking Win Percy, who'd come in for his scheduled stop right behind, and got held up in the pit entrance; to his credit Richo stuck out his hand and tried to move off-line to let him by, but there was nowhere in the narrow pit entrance chicanes he could go. It wasn't until pitlane proper he was able to move over and let Percy by, the Englishman gunning it and kicking it sideways as he boxed around the stricken Nissan. Pulling up in their pit box, Percy got out and Gricey got back in; the car got new tyres, fuel and at last, a change of brake pads. Credit simply has to be given to the hard-working mechanic who actually stuck his head into the front wheel arch while levering the worn pad out – you wouldn't find me sticking my beautiful face that close to a brake rotor still at 800 degrees!

As with so many teams today, the brake pad change delayed the stop significantly – the mechanics were having trouble moving the brake pistons far enough back, since new pads are obviously a lot thicker than worn ones. Making lemonade out of that particular lemon, some of the spare mechanics lifted the bonnet to top up some fluids as well, leading to speculation the Holden was in trouble as well. But of course, it wasn't, apart from those damn brake pads; for the first time today, something went seriously wrong for the Holden Racing Team.

Really, we were done and dusted, because of the pads. Because we didn't get through Sandown we hadn't realised that the carbon metallic pads wear at an accelerating rate. When they're new they might wear out 5 thou a lap, but when they're nearly worn out it might be 25 thou a lap. With long-distance races in those days, everyone who was changing pads would do it at the second stop, or the first at Sandown. Then you would end up with no pads at the end, so you'd be walking wounded brake wise. I didn't want to be walking wounded at the end if I could avoid it. I planned to change at the third stop, so by the end of the race I'll still have pad material, and really good brakes for the finish. So I said to the guys when we got to the second stop, "Have a look at the pads, and if there's plenty of meat still on them we'll leave them for the third stop." When they puled the wheels off and had a look, they weren't even half worn. So, okay, we'll do them at the third stop.

But when we got to the third stop, because we hadn't realised the accelerated wear, they were down to the backing plates. I kept a worn out pad on my desk for a long time afterwards to remind myself of how stupid I was. That should have finished us off. The stop took forever as the guys were bashing away trying to get the backing plates off the pistons and then get the pistons pushed back. It was just bedlam, at no stage had we thought we were going to be at this point. We weren't prepared for it. Like I said, there was a lot of luck. – Wally Storey, AMC #119

But however bad things were for Holden, they were a disaster for Nissan. While the Holden mechanics were working flat-out, the resigned lethargy in the Nissan pits told a very different story; their race was effectively over. But seppuku was not an Australian tradition: when Grice was finally released after a colossal 2 minute, 50 second stop, Godzilla stayed where it was, not to move again for a cataclysmic 25 minutes. Richards casually undid his gloves and climbed out, but ever-faithful, Mark Skaife climbed aboard, strapped himself in and waited, ready to turn Bathurst 1990 into a very public test session.

John Harvey: Jim, just when it seemed you had the knockers proven wrong, something's gone wrong. What is it?

Jim Richards: I'm not sure. I think it's a CV joint, but I'm not dead sure. It's just one of those things, you know? Everything goes well until something breaks.

Harvey: That's always the way. How long will it hold you up?

Richards: I don't know, to be honest. Depends if the boys can fix what damage it's done. It looks like they're getting into it now, so hopefully we can continue.

Harvey: Some feel that earlier it might've been the race, but Mark's hopped in the car so you're keen to get back out?

Richards: Oh yeah, we'll get back out. If we can fix it we'll go back out, whether we lose three or four or five laps, it doesn't matter.

Harvey: Must be awfully disappointing, mate. I know you've got a smile on, but...?

Richards: No, it's not disappointing. We came here to win the race, something unforeseen's happened through no fault of anyone, so no, I'm happy.

Harvey: Certainly you must've been enjoying it out there, because the car was showing plenty on the rest of them?

Richards: Yes, the car was doing it easy, I mean it's just one of those things. We haven't tried it for a thousand kay and obviously that could be a little problem for it. But I don't think so, I think it's just one of those things.

Harvey: The power you showed against Dick Johnson earlier particularly, it must make you feel you've got the car for next year, and probably for the next generation of cars at the moment.

Richards: Yes, I think Nissan have got the car. Technology-wise, it's far ahead of anything at the moment. It'll get faster, but obviously it's still a very heavy car – you've gotta stop it, you've got to push it up the hills and 'round the circuit, so it won't be a one-horse race by any means, but Nissan have sure got a good car.

While all of that was going on, the #18 Shell Sierra of Paul Radisich had come in for a scheduled stop on lap 97 which, to the relief of his team, had been smooth and by the numbers: fuel, tyres, and a handover to Jeff Allam were effected with balletic precision. The car was now on track to get home on four stops, so although Larry Perkins was now in the lead by 17 seconds, that would only last until he too pitted: on aggregate, it was now Allam leading, with Grice chasing some 73 seconds behind. That was a problem, because as the last fifteen minutes had proved, the HRT Commodore was the performance benchmark today: anything faster had broken down, and anything more conservative had been left behind. The hassle was, Allam's DJR Sierra had been level-pegging it, the only Sierra anywhere near the pointy end to have put together a routine run in the first half of the race. With the Holden stationary for almost three minutes, Jeff had been released almost 67 seconds earlier, which including time to negotiate pit lane added up to about half a lap – a major deficit to have to make up. Holden weren't going to get there on pace alone: if they wanted to win this race, they'd need a touch of luck as well.

And wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what they got.

Bet It All On Red
On lap 102 or thereabout, Tomas Mezera was seen standing in the pits with his helmet on, ready to take over Perkins' Commodore. And in he came. It was a normal scheduled pit stop, meaning fuel, tyres and a driver change, but no pad change – with the added complication that they were using old-style five-stud wheels rather than centre-locks, making tyre changes more of a hassle than they needed to be. This was a veteran crew however, so the thing that took the longest was actually the driver change: Tomas didn't have it in gear when he started, and had to wait a moment for traffic in the lane to clear before he could set off. Still, 33 seconds stationary was nothing to sneeze at, and he rejoined 2nd behind Allam.

Far behind all these frontrunners, the Bob Forbes team and their splendid GIO Walkinshaws had been busy doing themselves as proud as any small operation could. That was, until lap 113 when both GIO cars pulled into the pits at the same time. The second car (#21) was the more serious case, stopping with both its boot and bonnet wide open as the mechanics worked to change a battery. A weary-looking Kevin Bartlett confirmed that the alternator wasn't charging properly and hadn't been since about lap 30. So far so good, but then Big Rev Kev, who sounded a bit out of it to be honest, abruptly "dropped to his knees" mid-interview and had to be seen to by the medical people. It would only emerge later that a fault in the GIO Commodore's ventilation system had left the drivers battling around Australia's most demanding circuit with the heater running at full blast. Poor Kevin Bartlett, who'd pedalled everything from Camaros and Maseratis to Formula 5000 monsters up and down this Mountain, ended his final Bathurst not with a chequered flag, but on a drip in the medical centre; later he suffered a heart attack.

After 25 minutes of hard work, the Nissan team got their baby back out on track, and with nothing left to lose Mark Skaife threw caution to the wind, clocking the fastest lap of the race on the his 98th time around – a 2:15.46, an average speed of 165.12km/h. Unfortunately, it turned out he did have something to lose, as shortly thereafter he had to bring the GT-R back to the pits with a misfire – an electrode had "fallen off" one of the sparkplugs and needed changing. That really was all she wrote for the vaunted GT-R – although not even this would sideline it completely, there would be no result for the car today. Just being classified at the finish would count as a win for the team now.

It was a shame, because conditions were starting to take a turn that would favour the Nissan heavily. Although the race had started under a bright clear sky, all day long that sky had been getting greyer, and lower, and more ominous. By this, the fifth hour of the race, the talk had stopped being about "if" it might rain and become speculation about when. Now, at last, on lap 124, a little drizzle was being reported at the top of the Mountain, with more light rain visible moving in from the south-east. This could not have come at a more high-pressure time, because we were getting close to the final round of pit stops – whatever tyres you put on now were going to have to stay on until the finish. So, get your crystal ball and predict the weather – was it going to rain to the end or would it be a brief shower and then dry out again?

Making it more complicated for the Johnson team, there was also a question mark over who was going to take over the car. The roster said Paul Radisich, but he wasn't a star like he would become by the end of the decade: he was still young, and his experience had mostly been in open-wheeler racing – Formula Atlantic, British Formula 3, Formula Super Vee and what was then baldly called the "American Racing Series", what is now Indy Lights. His pivot to touring cars was yet to happen. So he was definitely fast, but arguably not yet a dab hand in a car with a roof. "I don't know the gaps yet so it's a premature comment," said Neil Crompton in the commentary booth, "but if I was a betting man and I had to make my mind up between Gricey and Paul, even though Paul's a good buddy, I'd say Gricey'd be my man."

For that job, Dick Johnson trusted no-one but himself, which was why he'd been careful to cross-enter himself in both his cars. The catch there was that Dick himself might be a bit... generously proportioned, shall we say, compared to the two scheduled drivers (note that the diminutive Bowe had been making use of a seat insert to share the #17). Hedging their bets, by lap 122 both Johnson and Radisich were out in pit lane, both with their helmets on, ready to go. "If it's a bit tight we'll have to stick the little Kiwi back in!" said Dick cheerfully. "No doubt this'll be the most crucial pit stop of the race for the team?" said Steve Titmus, only for Dick to reply, presciently: "As I said at the start of the race, the race is going to be won or lost on pit stops." He was about to be proved right, but not for the reason he thought...

It was Holden who made the first move, Wally Storey bringing Grice in for his final pit stop on lap 129. For the last time today the tyres were changed, the fuel was replenished and windscreen was polished, but there was no movement in the driver's seat; Gricey was staying in for a double stint. Win Percy stood by the windscreen consulting with his co-driver, but he had one of the team's soft baseball caps on, not his helmet; clearly this was planned. Grice would be driving the final 64 laps straight. Percy gave his teammate a quick drink, stood back and sent him on his way. The whole pit stop had taken just 30 seconds.

My times were the same as Allan's and I was pleased, but I had to put my team manager's hat on and not my driver's one. The reality was, for the last stint, knowing it was going to be a hard fight to the very end – and I hated doing it – that Gricey was the stronger of the two of us at that time.

Sadly, I gave him the choice – which I knew damn well he would grab anyway – of staying in the car at the last pitstop and he did the job well. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Win said it was the hardest call as a team manager not to finish the race off. Had I been in his position I probably would have felt the same. But I was in the rhythm of things out there, I was doing it easy and doing the times we needed to do. Putting on the manager's hat, he asked me how I was going and could I do more laps, and I said: "Yeah, no problem." And that's what happened. I was always good at long stints anyway because I could relax. All the way up Mountain Straight and all the way down Conrod, you spend a lot of time there in a straight line, and you should be relaxing then. I had a technique for getting myself to relax on the straights, and it worked. I'd often get out of the car after a decent stint and I'd be fine, and the younger gym jockeys are falling around and lying in ice baths! – Allan Grice, AMC #119

Moments later, DJR made their stop. The #18 got fuel, tyres and brake pads. Jeff Allam made a sharp exit and Dick Johnson stepped gingerly into the cramped confines of his office, with assistance from John Bowe in trying to move the seat back.

It didn't budge. Panicking, Dick thrashed wildly to shift it with his body weight, but it might as well have been set in concrete. That seat was going nowhere today. Cutting his losses, Johnson leapt back out and hustled young Radisich into the seat instead, strapping him in for the run to the flag.

"The bloody seat wouldn't move back!" Johnson wailed to the cameras. "It'd be like sittin' on a bloody mascot and tryin' to drive the bloody thing!" As the old saying goes, constants aren't and variables won't; at Mount Panorama, a fixed seat will break loose and flop around the car (Goss, 1985) while any seat you thoughtfully made adjustable will be as good as welded in place where it is. Despite all that, this being a pad stop they hadn't actually lost much time in the seat debacle, rejoining 2nd on the road – behind only Mezera, who had yet to stop – and, crucially, ahead of Grice. They'd lost nearly 25 seconds to Holden just in the pits, but they still had the best part of a minute up their sleeves. With that kind of time in hand, they didn't even need Radisich to match Grice's times; he could give up a few tenths per lap to preserve the tyres, and he'd still be behind at the flag.

The problem was, they weren't going to have a few tenths per lap, because the shenangigans around the seat had done a marvellous job of distracting from the real critical error in this pit stop – the choice of tyres. DJR team manager Neal Lowe had sent Radisich out on intermediates, which in those days meant hand-grooved slicks, gambling that the rain was going to set in. That was a mistake, because it wasn't.

I'm not a believer in intermediates at Bathurst, because whatever you put on, it's a decision that's going to last a long time. So you're not thinking, "What can I fix now?" it's more, "How long have I got 'til the next stop?"

The weather was looking dodgy but it didn't look like it was going to hang around. I got on the radio and said to Grice, "It's four green slicks at the next stop." And he says, "What?" I said, "Trust me Allan, you've got to trust me." "Okay." At the same time, Neal Lowe was putting on intermediates, which was perfect for the next three laps but the chances of getting 30 laps out of a set of intermediates was next to zero. And this was the last stop – about 30 laps to go, we weren't going to be stopping again.

I don’t know what his decision-making process for doing that was, but I watched them put the intermediates on and I was over the moon. – Wally Storey, AMC #119

Unforced errors from your rivals are always nice, but even so, with a 50-second deficit to make up Gricey would need some assistance – and once again he got it. On lap 134, BAM! The #37 Callaghan Mobile Concrete Pumping Walky failed to make the turn at Forrest's Elbow and clouted the wall with shocking force. The car ploughed into the concrete at frightening speed and, as expected, the concrete won, the car rebounding so hard all four wheels left the ground. The wreckage spun to a halt in several pieces just outside the Elbow, an incredibly dangerous place to be, so for the second time today race control pressed the big red button and deployed the Pace Cars, bunching up the field and giving those who were marginal on fuel just a little bit more breathing space. The irony was palpable: a car owned by a concrete pumping business had been undone by concrete, and the Pace Car had been brought out by a pair of speedway racers!

In the event, Radisich's inters lasted just 7 laps, so in theory the Pace Car should've been DJR's cue to bring him in and redress their tyre gamble. The problem was – shades of 1987 – that sort of thing wasn't actually allowed this year. Chris Lambden's Beaurepaires Skyline headed for the pits under the Pace Car, and then fed straight back out again, having apparently been waved through by mechanics and frowning stewards. Then the #10 ANZ Sierra came in for service, swapped Pierre Dieudonné for Frank Biela, and then was held at the pit exit by orange roadworks safety fencing and a steward with a sign reading, "PACE CAR ON CIRCUIT". In short, Radisich was stuck, locked out of the pits with Grice only metres behind him, knowing he'd have to make a green-flag stop in the near future and let the feisty redhead with the Akubra motor on up the road without him. For Dick Johnson Racing, it had all gone wrong in a hell of a hurry.

But however bad it was for Dick, it was worse for Larry. The Perkins team had pinned everything on staying out as long as possible and stretch every stint to the max, and their gamble came to a head all at once: they'd been due for a pad stop, running on fumes, set for a driver change AND having to guess the weather for their next set of tyres, all before the Pace Car came out. Just to top it off, Tomas lost the radio halfway down Conrod on lap 137 and so didn't come in because he didn't get the call, forcing Larry to lean over the pit wall as he came by and signal him in by hand. Larry and his team had done an amazing job to be running so high at this stage of the race, but like Dick, it all came unstuck at the critical moment.

Sure enough, Mezera pitted next time around, while the Pace Car's lights were still flashing. Perkins buckled up as the mechanics got to work refuelling, changing pads, brake callipers and tyres, topping up the oil, the works. A 52-second stop. By contrast, Radisich in the DJR machine sat still for only a few seconds – just long enough to switch back to slicks – before it was released. Meaning Radisich got away clean, but Perkins was met at the pit exit by the goddamn chain gang. Game over, Larry; their race had been decided by a momentary radio malfunction.

"We screwed up, basically," a stoic Dick Johnson told Steve Titmus. "In the last stop we put an intermediate tyre on, and that's the only reason we had to stop. Otherwise we would've been laughing."

"A big ask for Paul Radisich now out there in the car now?" Titmus asked.

"No," said Johnson flatly. "He's a damn good little steerer, and I'm damn sure he'll get his arse into gear and give him a run for his money." Bruce McAvaney wondered why they hadn't tried to put Bowe in the car, given he was fast, had plenty of experience in the Sierra and, "had a smaller backside than Johnson". Raymond refused to touch that with a barge pole, but we all knew why – because that wouldn't have given Johnson his third Bathurst.

So it was now a straight fight to the finish between Grice and Radisich, an ANZAC Day test between the gritty Australian and the talented but unproven Kiwi. With the Pace Car intervention lasting from lap 134 to 139, the Holden driver was able to save a bit of fuel, but not much: it would be touch-and-go on making the finish. Win Percy admitted as much in a three-way interview with Jeff Allam, a fellow Briton with whom he had a long history.

John Harvey: Win, your car's looking like you could win the race?

Win Percy: Well it depends on this Pom here with the second Dick Johnson car! I mean, although they're behind us on the road now we're behind the same Pace Car. We're a little bit concerned as to whether we can go to the finish on the fuel we've got. It really is going to be the very last lap, so...

I'm not sure why Win would admit that to the man he was trying to beat – the first thing they'd do was get on the radio to Radisich and tell him to gun it, don't let Gricey save any fuel, but with the Pace Car lights out there was no time to ponder that. With a restart in the offing, the whole peloton started weaving from side to side, getting some heat into their tyres to fight off the remaining sprinkles of rain.

Although officially Grice was leading the race, backmarkers meant he was taking the restart in the midst of a pack. Calling upon his NASCAR experience, as soon as they crossed the line he was back on the pace and going for broke, overtaking one of the GIO cars on the run up Mountain Straight, heedless of the raindrops on his windscreen. Howling down Conrod he also dispatched Waldock's Playscape Sierra, the gap to Radisich at the finish line 13.6 seconds. There were five backmarkers between the Kiwi and the Cessnock pastry chef, and although all were good, professional steerers who would move out of the way when it mattered, they would have nowhere to go in the only place you could make up serious time – across the top of the Mountain. Grice had track position and time in hand; this was looking very very doable. As long as the fuel held out...

We were absolutely worried about fuel. People thought we were faking it, but we weren't. Luckily, Gricey didn't have to dip into the reserve tank, which gave us about two laps, and we were alright. – Win Percy, Auto Action #1796

Handily, just ahead of Radisich as they began their second green-flag lap was Brad Jones in the second HRT car. This car had kept the mechanics busy an hour ago when it destroyed a rear centre bearing out of nowhere and started vibrating very badly, losing almost three minutes with an unscheduled pit stop: 5th place was not a true indication of where this car could've been. But finding himself a lap down with the red of Radisich in his mirrors, Brad knew his job would be to make that compact-body VL as wide as the new VN wherever possible... just not in an obvious way, because there would be blue flags. Accepting the mission, Brad moved right on the run up Mountain Straight – just to clear John Goss' Mercedes, you understand, not to break Radisich's tow or anything – and then geeeently moved back to the racing line, taking just long enough to ensure Radisich couldn't take the inside line into one of the best passing opportunities on the track. Right on cue, on the run into Skyline the flaggies showed him that blue ensign, instructing him to move over and let the faster car by, but where was Bradley to go here at the top of the Mountain? But you only get so many blue flags before the marshals get irritable and show you a black one instead, and Brad had already done about all that could be asked of him: when Radisich used the draft down Conrod and got alongside by the first hump, well before there could be any fight at the Chase, Jones sat on his hands and let him go. Thankyou very much, Bradley: the gap to Grice was still substantial.

Radisich didn't give up easily. By lap 145 he'd had pulled back a second on Grice, leaving him 14 seconds behind with 16 laps to go – and Grice was not yet saving fuel, as RaceCam footage of four brutal downshifts at the Chase could testify. Grice was still trying to outrun Radisich, and it wasn't working. This wasn't over yet.

Or at least it wasn't at that stage; two laps later the gap had stabilised, Radisich about 15 seconds behind Grice, with Perkins in 3rd about 52 seconds behind Radisich: the only three still on the lead lap. The body language of the Commodore was still graphic, on the edge of a lose through the first part of the Chase, suspension straining trying to hold it all together. Grice still had a very fine feel for where the car was in regards to the limit, and he was still very brave, and he was still lapping between 19.5's and 19.8's, lap after lap after lap. It really did seem like he could do this forever.

By lap 154, Radisich had shaved the gap down to 12 seconds. By the time Grice was tipping his nose into Griffin's Bend on lap 156, Radisich was about to crest the hump on Mountain Straight – meaning it was close, and getting closer. And the HRT mechanics were standing around in pit lane, with a churn of fuel ready to go, but although Gricey had audibly dropped the revs he was on the radio telling us it wouldn't be necessary. "We've certainly got enough fuel to get home," he said to Percy, who was now cosying up with the commentators, "but Wally just wants to make sure, so I've dropped those revs to seven-two, as you can see, and that'll save us a lot of fuel." 

The press seemed to think it was a bit of a façade but towards the end we were genuinely concerned about fuel. All I'm thinking in the car is: I've just got to conserve fuel, because Wally's telling me me they're very concerned about it and they've got a fuel churn ready for a splash and go.

So I was in economy mode: not doing four down changes through each gear at the end of the straight, and instead braking right up to the back of the corner and then do just one heel-and-toe rather than four – because a heel-and-toe is a fair squirt of fuel into the car. I was doing that for probably the last 15 laps.

I was still flat out in top gear but you'd cut the revs down through the intermediate gears. You also made sure you weren't pumping the throttle and then coming out of it – you were flattening it once; smooth on the power so you didn't break into wheelspin and have to back out, and then have to hit the throttle again. Surprisingly, even cutting the revs through the intermediate gears, you still end up doing the same revs in top gear as you would have anyway! – Allan Grice, AMC #119

By lap 160 the tension was unbearable, and only Gricey seemed able to keep his cheer.

Mike Raymond: Have you got enough gas, Al?

Grice: Yeah, we're looking pretty good Mike. Anyway, it's a bit expensive to buy up here on top of the Mountain!

Raymond: Yes, but the crew looked a little nervous with a churn out, there.

Grice: Everybody's nervous with a lap and a half to go, mate. I've cut the revs back, we've done this number of laps before, today, and I'm actually running less revs as you can see. So, um... I'm sure we'll make it.

Lap 161, the last time around, and Gricey couldn't help himself – he started waving to the Holden fans at the top of the Mountain, meaning he had to go one-handed into the dip at Skyline! Distracted by the crowd he also nearly lost it on the oil dropped by Ray Lintott's Valvoline Sierra, having a little moment out of Forrest's Elbow, but he flicked the wheel instinctively and caught it, carried on – despite a mild heart attack for Win Percy! Braking at the Chase for the final time, Grice told us:

Well it's been an absolute privilege to drive this motor car, I can assure you of that. It has the most brilliant brakes I've ever felt in a touring car. I think the boys have done a superb job to build the winning motor car. … It's the best feeling I've had since 1986, I can tell you.

 

So that was it: Grice crossed the finish line and took the chequered flag, with Paul Radisich nowhere in sight. Allan Grice, driving for the brand-new Holden Racing Team, had won the 1990 Tooheys 1000 at Bathurst. While everyone else had been driving an endurance race, Grice & Percy had been driving a V8 Supercar race – sprinting hard from start to finish, flat-shifting, using all the revs, with a Pace Car right near the end and a touch of concern about fuel. It was a preview of the coming era, and even better, with Perkins & Mezera finishing 3rd and Crompton & Jones bringing it home 5th, there were three Commodores in the top five.

Yes, it was certainly a good day. We knew we were behind the eight ball against all of the turbo cars there. We knew we'd just have to go flat out all day. Wally Storey built the car with that in mind, alongside Rob Benson, and we just hammered it all day. We had the feeling that it was pretty well-known that our rivals had controllable boost – whether it was a cigarette lighter which they flicked to the left or the right – they were running away on boost, and then just winding it back and just sitting there.

We figured if we could make them keep their boost up, they'd have problems, and that it pretty much the way it worked out. – Allan Grice, Speedcafe

Winston Walter Frederick Lawrence Percy, a farm labourer's son from Tolpuddle in Dorset, had taken on the best in Australia and beaten them at their own game. He had every right to crow, but by his own admission he was "physically and mentally tired" from the strain of the job. Never mind the challenge of setting up a new team and winning Bathurst with a crook arm – it had all happened in a strange land on the far side of the world, in the same year his son Matthew had been killed in a road accident.

The night before the race I was having physio and salt baths to try and get it out of me, you know. It was bloody awful. We had the chap who was the physio for the Parramatta footy club, big Joe, who came up to Bathurst and massaged me and stuck me in a red hot bath full of salt. I was in quite a bad state. To be honest with you, after losing my son Matthew in May that year everything caught up with me emotionally and physically. That Bathurst weekend would have been Matthew's 21st birthday as well, so there was just so much on my mind. The year had been very hard. Bathurst was the big carrot and it did mean an awful lot to me. – Win Percy, AMC #119

But he'd done it. More than just winning a race, he'd actually enshrined Holden as Bathurst's most successful marque of the Group A era: the stats as they stood were three wins for Holden, two for Ford, and just one for Jaguar. Nissan currently had none, and although that seemed set to change, that was next year's problem. For now, there was just the business of telling Tom the good news!

Allan Moffat came over after the race and said, "Well, no one has done that before, Winston, and I don't reckon they will do it again." I remember phoning Tom that night to tell him that we had won it. It was as if he had thought I was taking the mickey! He said he would talk to me in the morning and that was pretty much the conversation.

Then he phoned back in the morning. "You really DID win it, didn't you!" he said. It was a bit of a shock. The first fax I had at the workshop when I got back was a congratulatory one from Larry Perkins. It just goes to show you never know people. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

We were at unbackable odds before the race. Nobody thought we could keep up with the Sierras, much less run them into the ground. I'm sure it made Walkinshaw a lot of money. He never thanked me, of course. It certainly didn't change his attitude towards me. In fact, I never heard from him. – Allan Grice, Auto Action #1795

This was a very different win from the previous Holden factory team victories. In those days HDT had arrived the firm favourites and were used to dominating; this was against all odds, with far from the biggest budget in the game. That #16 VL Commodore, TWR 023, would compete in just four race meetings in its life in Australia – Bathurst '88, and then Sandown, Bathurst and the Adelaide Grand Prix in 1990. It had only led 41 of the 161 laps on its way to victory, the only race laps it would ever lead. The car was then returned to HRT's Clayton headquarters, where it was given pride of place in the company's foyer for the next three decades. And rightly so, for it was not only HRT's maiden win, it was in their first-ever Bathurst, and arguably Holden's greatest-ever win. It was only sold to a private collector in 2016, when the HRT deal passed to Triple Eight.

In fact, about the only thing to go wrong all day came on the podium, when Grice couldn't get his champagne bottle open! Ah well, he was a beer man anyway... He and Percy got busy throwing souvenirs to the crowd – hats, broadsheet covers, team jackets, that sort of thing. One of the first to shake Percy's hand at the finish had been none other than Dick Johnson, but sportsmanship isn't viral, it seems. When the DJR team came out on the podium, and Bruce said: "What about a cheer for the Sierras? The Shell team?" all they got were instant boos! There was one very brave Ford fan in the midst of them, standing centre-stage with a Ford flag on a long pole, but he seemed the only Ford fan there today. This crowd was pure Holden, and they hadn't cheered like this since that magic day in 1987 when their king had been crowned for the ninth time. The good news for them was, next year he'd be back in a Holden, and Holden would have a new V8 for him to drive. The Commodore was back, and the future looked brighter than it had only seven hours ago.

And The Lesser Classes

And just for the big fat record: the winners in Class C were Geoff Full & David Ratcliff in an AE86 Toyota Corolla – one of the few times the class wasn't won by the works team. Class B went to Phil Ward in the #51 Monroe Mercedes 190E, co-driven by John Goss in his last-ever Bathurst. Fittingly, Goss bowed out a winner, five years after his second victory with Jaguar, and sixteen years after his first victory in the brutish XA Falcon Hardtop – a lifetime ago. And of course, his co-driver that day had been poor Kevin Bartlett, who ended his final Bathurst in the hospital – a more divergent finale to two great careers could hardly be imagined...