And so the Australian Touring Car Championship wound to its inevitable conclusion. With the question of whether Godzilla could be beaten now answered - yes, barely, if the conditions were absolutely perfect - there were just two more left to answer: which Nissan driver would be the '91 champion? And, were there any remaining weaknesses in the Nissan's game? We found answers to both in the final rounds at Lakeside and Oran Park.
Lakeside Interruption
The return to Lakeside was a round everyone had been looking forward to. It wasn't just a chance to head to Queensland and escape the mid-winter cold, it was a chance to return to everyone's second-favourite Aussie racetrack and, perhaps, have a second bite at the cherry. It wasn't often you got to re-attempt a circuit in a single year, so for those disappointed by their first trip to Lakeside, this was a chance to return with dialled-in setups and have a bit of a mulligan.
Of course, that was only ever going to benefit one team. Lakeside was Tony Longhurst Racing's home track, the place they did all their testing, so even with the Nissans so dominant it had been something of an embarrassment that they'd managed only 3rd back in April. Since then however Tony had run Godzilla into the ground at Amaroo, and he knew that if they kept the pressure on, the GT-Rs could be beaten. The key was to drive the M3 Evo the way the Germans drove them – don't touch the brakes until point-blank range, throw it into the turns like a drift car, rev the engine without mercy on the exit... and, eventually, the Nissans would wear out their tyres and fall by the wayside.
With seventeen names on it, the entry list was healthier than Mallala, but still down on the numbers we'd seen in April. Ten of the Wanneroo eleven had made the trip, with the sole exception being HRT's Win Percy, who'd buggered off to the English Midlands to race a Jaguar instead. He'd accepted an offer to drive one of Tom Walkinshaw's new Jaguar XJR15s in a one-make support category for this year's British Grand Prix, the first Grand Prix to be held on the definitive Silverstone layout. The XJR15 itself was a roadgoing version of TWR's Le Mans-winning Jaguar XJR9 sports car, aimed at playboys with too much money – despite a price tag of £500,000, all fifty were pre-sold before construction began. Percy would later remember, "The XJR-15 was a beautiful, powerful car, but evil to drive", and after testing it, Top Gear's Tiff Needell agreed. This, it seems, was Percy's way of declaring his candidacy for 1992, reminding a British racing scene that hadn't heard from him in 18 months what he could really do. (As a side note, Jim Richards had raced an XJR15 at the Monaco round, which seems to go unnoticed because he didn't have to miss an ATCC round to do it.)
To meet the team's obligations to Holden, the HRT seat at Lakeside was filled by Percy's Bathurst co-driver, Allan Grice. The rest of the grid was made up by the usual brace of Toyota Strollers (our old mate Bob Holden in the FX-GT, and Peter Verheyan making another appearance in the Vernon car), plus the keenest of the Commodore players – privateers Kevin Heffernan and Warren Jonsson in their outdated VLs; Terry Finnigan in the Foodtown VN; and Mark Gibbs, making his final appearance in the GIO Insurance Commodore.
Grice put the factory Commodore on the grid only 10th with a time of 54.40 seconds, one place behind the similar VN of Larry Perkins, and – the part that really must've stung – a whopping eight places behind the 05 of Peter Brock. Yep, that's right: thanks to some ultra-sticky tyres from Bridgestone, some engine tweaks from Perkins, and his own deep well of experience at Lakeside, a circuit that rewarded intimate knowledge of its contours, Peter dug deep and pulled out a time of 53.19 seconds – fast enough to bump one of the Nissans off the front row and claim P2!
If he'd pulled out that time back in April he'd have started from pole, but nothing stands still in this game and the Mobil team weren't the only ones making progress. Gibson Motorsport had spent their practice sessions experimenting with different combinations of harder and softer Yokohama compounds, as well as harder and softer suspension settings, finding the cars were quicker with hard settings despite Lakeside's notorious bumps. This, together with the fact that Mark Skaife had been given the newer and faster car once again, meant the youngster set a scorching time of 52.78 seconds – not only 0.65 of a second faster than Richards' pole time in April, but a full second quicker than his own lap record from the race! It was clear his second pole position was a standout moment in his career, as described by the man himself in his book:
It took a bit of mental effort for the Lakeside pole. Jim said he was going through the left-hand kink flat, and I was lifting a bit so I had to talk myself into it. That was a wild corner. It wasn't just the shape of it; it also had a really big bump and it would pitch the car outside to the right and there were a lot of big crashes on the day. You'd be north of 230km/h in the kink in qualifying.
To get through there flat, we had the driver's side wheels on the inside of the white line along the edge of the track. The whole rest of the car was effectively on the grass flat out, then you'd bounce to the other side, holding your breath the whole time, and try to stop it for the next corner, the Carousel [sic]. That stretch of track was just great; that's exactly what racing is about. You couldn't do a whole race like that, of course, but you still had to use the grass at quite a few spots to get a lap time. – Mark Skaife, Mark Skaife: The Autobiography
There was some controversy, however, when Skaife spun off the track later in the session and blistered his qualifying tyres. The rules, remember, required each driver to mark out a set of tyres on Saturday and then qualify and start the race on them: with Skaife's nominated set (the same compound they'd run in April) now damaged, Gibson asked for permission to junk the blistered tyres and fit a new set of the same compound instead – and the officials stirred up plenty of grumbles by granting it. It was a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation: allowing Skaife to start on a fresh set of tyres was arguably within the spirit of the rules, and sidestepped a potential safety hazard as well, but it also opened a loophole in the rules – what was to stop a canny driver deliberately ruining their tyres in the future so they could ask for the same dispensation? No doubt the Sierra teams were especially bitter, as their excess horsepower made managing the blistering a central concern every time they went out onto the track, but apparently they hadn't thought to try this angle.
Race day dawned warm but not swelteringly hot, with temps around the 20-degree mark. Which was still too hot for what Mark Skaife got busy doing in the pre-race warm-up. With his sticker-new set of soft Yokohamas fitted he had to bed them in, but in the process did an awful lot of laps on them, leaving a question mark over their durability for the race. That would come back to bite him in the only session that mattered...
Off the start the two Nissans of course took off like rockets and left the rest in their wake, their patented 7,800rpm clutch dumps proving effective as ever. Jim got past Brock for 2nd before the first corner, and although Brock managed to tag along with the Nissans through the first lap, but we all knew that couldn't last. By lap 4 Skaife and Richards were 2.36 seconds clear of Brock and gone.
The dice to watch was between the two red cars and the two yellow cars – the Johnson Sierras and Longhurst BMWs boxed each other's ears ferociously. Dick Johnson had been forced to make use of the pit exit tarmac to get around the slow-starting BMW of Alan Jones, mowing some grass to get back to the track but getting the pass done. The organisers did nothing, and no doubt Skaifey raised an eyebrow when he saw the replay later. Either way, the Longhurst cars ratchetted forwards to take 4th and 5th places, then set off after Brocky, whose Bridgestones, predictably, didn't last much more than ten minutes. Tony stormed underneath Brock into the Karrussell and moved up to 3rd place. Left floundering, poor Dick then had an altercation with Allan Grice's HRT Commodore entering the Karrussell: Grice clipped the left-rear of Johnson's car just as it entered the turn and tipped the Shell car into a spin, after which he had steam coming from under the bonnet. When his scheduled pit stop came around, Dick pulled straight through his bay and parked it in the garage instead – Channel Seven commentator Mark Oastler soon revealed the off-track excursion had pushed the fan through the radiator and cooked the engine. Another $30,000 down the drain...
That left Bowe dealing with Glenn Seton, a preview of Ford's hopes for the upcoming era, but he ultimately failed to finish as well, losing the rear on the entry to Hungry Corner and going for a spin. He kept it going for now, but another spin later in the day (at – where else? – the Karrussell!) broke the steering and ended his day for good. A double DNF for the Johnson team at their home race made it a pretty miserable weekend all-round.
By lap 12, the GT-Rs were 7 seconds clear of Longhurst's BMW M3, but with nothing now holding them up, the BMW drivers started pushing and chipping away at the leaders. Skaife had the first 25 laps all to himself, but by mid-race the Nissans were slowing, their lap times down to the high-53s or low-54s, the gap shrinking to 3.81 seconds. That forced Skaife and Richards to drive their GT-Rs harder than planned, which finally pushed them over the cliff: next time around Skaife could only manage a 54.42, whereas Longhurst was mechanically punching out 53.5s. Nissan's soft-Yokohama/hard-suspension combo had proven quick but destructive, and with his tyres blistering Skaife virtually moved over and let his teammate Richards through for the lead. Right behind him of course was Tony Longhurst, and for a few corners it looked like Skaife was ready to fight him, with the yellow BMW right alongside as they went up and over the hill at the end of the circuit... but no, Skaife ran up the white flag and headed for the pits instead, where the team swiftly changed all four wheels. He rejoined down in 6th place.
Richards now led the race, but it was short-lived, as his tyres too were dying. Longhurst went around the outside of him into Hungry Corner and, with spectacular courage, was able to brake late enough to take the place! Conceding, Richards also headed for pit lane for new tyres, taking service and rejoining 11th.
From there they went on a charge, Skaife claiming a new lap record 53.16, but then on lap 45 he slowed again reporting a throttle problem to the pits – it would later turn out he had a misfire thanks to a fouled plug. He was still doing reasonable lap times, but as a courtesy he waved Richards through rather than hold him up, a move which effectively decided the championship. "Best of the rest" was Glenn Seton’s Peter Jackson Sierra, but even he proved unable to hold off the Nissan twins, who came through to be 3rd and 4th by the time the clock ran out.
The rest was all BMW, as Longhurst charged away to take an 11-second win over teammate Alan Jones. Asked about the difference between April and July, Frank Gardner told the cameras soberly, "About four hundred test laps," before adding, "We were very lucky though." A wise outlook, assuming we're using Seneca's definition of luck: "When preparation meets opportunity." They'd certainly done the preparation – four hundred test laps with tyres costing two grand a set couldn't have been cheap – but having done it, they were in place when the opportunity came. Victory was the reward.
"Just over the moon," said a beaming Tony Longhurst on the rostrum. "Very big day for me in more ways than one!" He wasn't joking: at 5:30 on race morning, his wife Karen had given birth to a baby girl! It wasn't often a win in a national-level championship was only the second-best thing to happen to you that day, but man, he must've slept that night!
So surely that set up a championship-decider at Oran Park on 11 August, yeah? No, actually, it did not. The championship table now read Richards 137, Skaife 122, and that meant Gentleman Jim had wrapped it all up at Lakeside. The ATCC in this era operated under a drop-score system, so even if you competed in all nine rounds, only your best eight results counted towards your end-of-season total. For Skaife, the result on the chopping block was the 4th place he'd just picked up at Lakeside, which would trim 12 points from his total. So even if he won the final round while Richards DNF'd, that would only effect an 8-point swing, which wasn't enough to close the gap. Skaife had effectively given up the title when he'd waved Richards through after copping that fouled plug, a sporting gesture worthy of Peter Collins or Stirling Moss – one that enshrined Gentleman Jim Richards as a four-time Australian Touring Car Champion. In return, Jim put the rumours of a move to Holden to bed by re-signing with Gibson Motorsport for another two years, conditional upon Fred being able to secure sponsorship.
That such a win and DNF is exactly what ended up happening didn't just rub salt into the wound, but the lemon and tequila as well...
Oran Park Finale
How times change. A year ago we'd come into the Oran Park round with four drivers in the title hunt and beheld as the GT-R took its first local race win. This year the fortunes had inverted, as the title was already sewn up but the GT-R showed its first real sign of mechanical trouble.
Once again we had a fairly modest nineteen-car grid on the outskirts of Sydney, packed out by privateers like Steve Reed in the Lansvale Smash Repairs Commodore. There was the usual assortment of Corollas in the small class, and also the Bob Forbes team's Mark Gibbs, who'd swapped the GIO Commodore for a customer GT-R (more on them to come). But this weekend no-one had an answer to the sheer speed of Mark Skaife, who headed every practice session before taking his third pole in a row with a time of 1:10.60 – and that despite problems with ze car.
Gibson's third GT-R was being badly affected with a "pig-routing" exit to one of Oran Park's off-camber turns, the shock absorber rebound getting the blame. Fred made a note to return here to experiment with suspension settings before Bathurst, but for now there was nothing that could be done. Jim was a little slower with 3rd place on the grid, a 1:10.81 the best he could manage after similar handling problems to Skaife – at one stage the car scraped a wall after it jumped sideways. The upshot was that Peter Brock had once again qualified on the front row, having set an astonishing time of 1:10.78 – his Bridgestones might have only been good for qualifying, but he didn't half make the most of it!
Despite another explosive start from Skaife, they all lunged into the first turn together, forming an orderly queue through the Dunlop bridge loop. Briefly, at least: by the end of the first lap Skaife was nearly three seconds clear of John Bowe in the Shell Sierra, aided by the fact Bowe was in a huge battle between Bowe, Richards and Brock for silver. By lap 15, Skaife was a comfortable 8.46 seconds in the clear – job done.
However, while Skaife was once again running away with the race, it was beginning to dawn on us there might be something wrong with Richards' car today – he was as quick as ever coming out of the turns, but seemed short on top-end speed, which was especially noticeable steaming down Oran Park's long front straight. Both Brock and Bowe had an edge down the straight and seemed able to nose up on him there, with Bowe especially able to capitalise because his lightweight Sierra could go much deeper on the brakes at Winfield Corner. With a fresh Perkins-tuned V8 under the bonnet and the VN's slippery aero, Brocky was likewise pulling out some storming speed down the straight – but since it weighed almost as much as the GT-R, the Commodore's gains tended to be wiped out again as they transitioned to the brake pedal. Nevertheless, the duel between the old Bathurst teammates was hard-fought, clean and supremely enjoyable, even if it did point to something being wrong with the GT-R today.
Sadly, Bowe's return to form in running 2nd proved distressingly brief. The Shell Sierra was busy developing a misfire that was only getting worse as time went on, and soon both Brock and Richards were past it leaving it falling into the clutches of Glenn Seton. When the car finally gave up the ghost it was almost a mercy, and a resigned Bowe stepped out from behind the wheel and started removing his fireproof gloves. It had not been a classic season for Bowey.
Shortly thereafter Jim finally passed Brock for 2nd place, but not long after that the case of the Weirdly Slow Nissan was abruptly solved, as the cameras cut to show Richards parked on the entry to the South Circuit with smoke wafting from under the bonnet, the engine having expired, leaving oil everywhere. For the first time all year, a GT-R had failed to finish a championship round, bringing a remarkable streak to an inglorious end. Richards alighted and started removing his gloves, no doubt relieved that he'd already clinched the championship, while in the pits Fred Gibson was stone-faced but clearly not pleased. There was a silver lining, however:
Before I left the U.K. Howard [Marsden] said, "Your brief is to help the team win Bathurst," as Nissan wanted to be the first Japanese manufacturer to win Bathurst. So, everything we did during that year [1991] was to try componentry for 1,000km or more. We put an engine in Jim's car and left it in there to see how far it would go.
At Oran Park, the final round, Jimmy blew an engine up and that engine had done 2,600km. It had broken a big end bolt so we knew that was the weak link. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
That's right: Nissan's entire Australian Touring Car Championship up to this point had been nothing but a very public test session for Bathurst, and that car had just done two-and-a-half Bathurst distances without a rebuild. And, by the by, taken five 2nd's, two 3rd's and a win in a process! Nissan was surely on the brink of making history at the Mountain this year.
So what of the rest? Win Percy's elopement to the U.K. had apparently left him out of practice, as he had an "off" early in the race that damaging his left-front tyre in the kitty litter outside Winfield Corner. That required a quick visit to the pits for a replacement, which dropped him behind Dick Johnson – a move that had severe consequences for poor Dick. In a rush to make up the lost time, Percy crunched the back of the remaining Shell Sierra and tossed its rear hatch clear into the sky, baulking Mark Gibbs in the pretty (and expensive) new GIO Nissan in the process! All three of them carried on, but Percy had to finish with bent panels that spoiled his aero, while Johnson had to maintain his composure despite the roaring draft from the back of his car was now being completely open to the elements!
Brocky meanwhile was struggling for pace, his Bridgestones once again having been more glory than substance. In his yellow BMW Alan Jones managed to get past, but Tony Longhurst wasn't so lucky: although he might have been dreaming of a third win here on the twists and turns of Oran Park, a deflating left-front tyre late in the race forced a pit stop, dropping Tony behind Alan for the chequered flag – but only just behind, as they zipped across the line together for a formation 2-3 finish.
But nobody had an answer for Mark Skaife this day, who'd put in another flawless performance to take the victory by 23 seconds. It was the final flourish of an astonishing season for Gibson Motorsport, as the Australian Motor Racing Yearbook noted in their review of 1991:
In touring car racing at least, four-wheel-drive has been so successful that it has almost rendered traditional rear-wheel-drive obsolete.
There really isn't a single track in Australia which doesn't suit the GT-R. It may be a little awkward through high-speed corners and it may be too technical for most minds to fathom, but with a strong level of staffing and budget that allowed all the necessary homework to be done, the four-wheel-drive Nissans were virtually unstoppable in 1991.
GT-Rs in the hands of Jim Richards (who won his fourth ATCC) and Mark Skaife destroyed their opposition. Check the statistics: from seven wins out of a possible nine, the GT-Rs finished 1-2 in six of them. Not once did a GT-R driver not stand on the podium during the 1991 Shell Australian Touring Car Championship. Of the 425 laps which made up the nine rounds, 337 of them were led by Nissans. Richards was leader for 229 laps.
They'd also scored an incredible 269 points out of a theoretical maximum of 280, which remained a niggling point for Skaifey ever after. "I actually finished the season with more points than Jim," he sighed in his recent autobiography, "but the crazy system at the time said you had to drop your worst score, which was a fourth place for me but Jim had a DNF at Oran Park – so he won the title while I won the round."
There was some consolation in winning his first CAMS Gold Star on the side, however. Weirdly, all seven rounds of this year's Formula Holden series had been held at the new Eastern Creek Raceway, but that'd suited Skaife just fine – he won six of them in his Spa 003, and finished the only other race 2nd, once again coming agonisingly close to perfection.
In 1990 I had started the Australian Drivers' Championship, which Fred thought would help my overall driving and testing ability. ... Fred always had the feeling that driving open-wheel cars improved your skill set – and he was absolutely right. When you drive purpose-built race cars, you can tune more things to your liking and you get to a stage where you demand more of the car. As I developed greater technical skills, we were able to be more critical of the touring car, which helped its development. It made me feel like the touring car was a taxi; guys like Ross Holder and Andrew Bartley hated it when I'd get back in the touring car and complain about all its faults. ...I won a couple of rounds in my first season, but I dominated 1991, winning all but the first round, which Mark Larkham won. I felt like I was driving really well, and Fred was right about what I was learning. I was spending so much time in cars – whether it was the open-wheeler or the GT-R for tyre testing or whatever – that I was really making up for missing those early years with Fred. – Mark Skaife, Mark Skaife: The Autobiography
Third in the ATCC was claimed by Tony Longhurst, with BMW's comeback underlined by teammate Alan Jones finishing fourth (thanks to consecutive 2nds in the final two rounds). Brock finished sixth in the championship, while Perkins ended up eleventh. Percy finished the series in eighth place, his best result that 4th at Mallala, which was sadly the best finish for any Commodore in 1991. It was a rough year to be a Holden fan.
The 1991 championship wasn't particularly good. We had a failure at Symmons Plains with a cam follower. We failed at Wanneroo with a fan belt. It wasn't particularly wonderful that year. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary
Yet even Percy finished up one place ahead of five-time ATCC champion Dick Johnson, who'd endured a miserable series in his Sierra, his best finish a 4th back in the opening round at Sandown. It was a remarkable downturn that the once-mighty RS500 had gone winless this year, but against the incredible speed of the GT-R they just couldn't keep any rubber on their tyres. Behind the scenes, outrage was growing, and it wouldn't take very much longer for it to find an outlet.
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