Adelaide: A for Effort

And so everyone headed to Adelaide for local motorsport's de facto Christmas party, the Australian Grand Prix weekend. As was now tradition it would be a weekend of controversy, hurt feelings and shattered carbon fibre, but for once the tourers were able to keep their noses clean. This time it would be Formula 1 that wore all the bruises.

Rise of the Machines
The talk around the water cooler in Adelaide (after they chiselled the quartz off it, at least) was all about World Champion-elect Nigel Mansell, and his imminent defection to IndyCar for 1993.

The seeds of this seismic announcement had been planted before the Formula 1 season even began. If the Nissan GT-R had a kindred spirit anywhere in the world, it was the Williams FW14B – another showcase of cutting-edge automotive technology, and if possible, even more dominant. Among the onboard toys were traction control (albeit a simple system, "one line of code" to cut cylinders and reduce torque, according to one team insider), a semi-automatic gearbox activated by paddle shifters (bog-standard today, but a real advantage at a time when most cars still had manual H-pattern shifters), and the real party piece, a computer-controlled active suspension system. Instead of dangling the car from springs and shock absorbers, the FW14B rode on a series of hydraulic rams that responded to the forces acting on the car, rather like a skier's legs on a rough slope. Instead of scraping the ground at the start of a fuel run then rising as the fuel burned off (to say nothing of pitching and rolling as the driver braked hard for a corner, rolled through the apex and then accelerated away again), the hydraulics would prop the car up to keep the aero package flying straight and level at all times, maximising the available downforce.

The idea had first been tried by Lotus back in 1987, but computers in '87 weren't really capable of reacting quickly enough to make the idea work, and the aero on the Lotus 99T hadn't been too special anyway. Their driver Ayrton Senna had won the two slowest races of the year, on the bumpy, slippery streets of Monaco and Detroit, but failed to really stand out anywhere faster. Fast-forward to 1992, however, and computers were getting faster and cheaper (home PCs had advanced from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1). And since the aerodynamics at Williams were being handled by future Red Bull star designer Adrian Newey, there was a lot of downforce to maintain, so the active suspension system on the FW14B was worth seconds a lap.

As a result, 1992 saw Nigel Mansell dominate in F1 as completely as Richards and Skaife had in Australia, secure in the knowledge that as long as his car held together, victory was all but certain.

But trouble was brewing for Mansell, and the root of it lay just behind his shoulders. Power for the Williams came from a 3.5-litre V10 capable of some 550 kW by season's end, more power than anything else on the grid, even the Honda V12 aboard the rival McLarens. It was called the Renault RS4, and Renault, being French, were very keen for the next World Champion to be a Frenchman, not a rosbif. Team boss Frank Williams had to bow to Renault's stipulation to that three-time World Champion Alain Prost be one of his drivers for the 1993 season, a contract that was signed off before the 1992 season even began. Nigel was not informed, and so had won the 1992 championship blissfully unaware that he would not have the team all to himself to defend his title in 1993. Instead, he had his eye on finally making some real money that year: he and his wife Rosanne had got into motorsport by mortgaging their house, after all, and what was the point of being World Champion if you couldn't raise your fee?

Not this time. Despite their engineering prowess, Williams was not an especially wealthy team, and out of a budget of only £32.5 million some £6 million had been spent paying Mansell. The contract with Prost had added another $10 million to the wage bill, so Frank simply didn't have the money to pay Prost and Mansell and still build a car worthy of succeeding the FW14B.

Then, throwing fuel on the fire, Ayrton Senna stepped in and publicly offered to drive for Williams for free. It would've been a tempting offer for the penny-pinching Frank, but it was never on: keen to avoid a repeat of his experience at McLaren, Prost had been careful to insert a "no Senna" clause in his contract. Although he didn't know it yet, if Mansell wanted to race a Williams in 1993, he'd have to accept Alain Prost as his teammate – and take a pay cut.

Mansell's personality had always been an iron-and-clay mix of bullish self-confidence and paranoid persecution complex, and both sides were triggered when the expected '93 contract failed to arrive. Nowadays we know the delay was because Frank was trying to find enough sponsorship to pay for his two superstars, but Mansell was still upset. Like most men who found success, he was now surrounded by sycophants who flattered his ego and egged him on, and he was very miffed at apparently being third choice.

The bottom line was that Nigel was annoyed that Frank had signed Prost. The only way he was going to stay was if he got twice the amount of money Prost was getting. I don't think Nigel was in the mood to spend three months negotiating. He was World Champion; he was king of the castle and wanted an instant response from Frank. He wasn't going to get it because Frank never gave in that quickly. He wasn't being mean. He was trying to do the best job for himself and his company. There were a lot of people around who were fanning the flames. To me, it was simple: Nigel wanted the money and Frank was either going to pay it or he wasn't. – Peter Windsor, Williams: In Their Own Words

In the end, Frank did give in. On the morning of the Italian Grand Prix, Mansell held an impromptu press conference to declare his intentions for 1993, and just as it was beginning, a runner from Williams' commercial department came sprinting over to say, "Stop this, we agree to everything." But it was too late. Nigel turned his back on Williams and began reading his prepared statement: he would retire from Formula 1 at the end of the year and seek opportunities elsewhere, perhaps in the CART series in the U.S.

By the next round, in Portugal, it was all official: Prost would be driving for Williams in 1993, while McLaren, unable to come to terms with Senna (who wanted to remain a free agent in case a seat opened up at Williams), signed the reigning CART champion, Michael Andretti. That had opened up a seat with Andretti's team, Newman/Haas Racing, one of the power teams of CART, and it was into that seat that Nigel slotted – for a $5 million fee. That was less than he would've earned at Williams, even alongside Prost, but Paul Newman and Carl Haas were enthusiastic about having him in their team, and that made all the difference. Even better, former F1 stars Emerson Fittipaldi and Mario Andretti had offered to help Nigel come to grips with the unfamiliar oval tracks.

That's very refreshing. It shows you the difference between Formula 1 and IndyCars. I can honestly say that, in my whole Formula 1 career, in 12 years, other than the late great Gilles Villeneuve and Colin Chapman, I've had no assistance at all. – Nigel Mansell

In the meantime, he'd won the Portuguese Grand Prix to take a record-equalling ninth victory for the season, then gifted the Japanese Grand Prix to teammate Riccardo Patrese as thanks for his support this year. That just left Adelaide, set to be his final F1 race and a chance to set a new record of ten victories in a single season.

Watching it now, knowing how all this turned out, it's remarkable that so few people believed Nigel was really going to America. In an interview, Barry Sheene even makes a bet with Nigel that his next race would be the South African Grand Prix at Kyalami, not the CART race at Surfers Paradise, which comes across as pure F1 hauteur: CART wasn't a real series, therefore Nigel couldn't really be going to it. But in the video above it's F1 that fails to deliver the goods: the latter half of the video is taken up by the second qualifying session, which – since the track was much slower than it had been for the first session on Friday – was an utter waste of time, not altering the grid at all.

So the unexpected highlight is the Yamaha Superkart Trophy Race, which started just after midday on Saturday. Superkarts might have looked like a Fisher Price My First Open-Wheeler, with their silly bodywork and toy rear wing, but they were capable of speeds of up to 230km/h on the Brabham Straight, which... Well, if Yours Truly had ever gone that fast on the open road – purely hypothetically, you understand – one imagines it would've been pretty damn alarming. Doing that sort of speed an inch and a half off the ground, with no protection around you, between the concrete walls of a street circuit, must be quite an experience. And as for the racing... well, remember that "greatest F1 pass ever", when Schumacher and Häkkinen split around Ricardo Zonta at Spa in 2000? Imagine that, but literally at the finish line. 

Clarks Shoes Group A Finale: Race 1
As usual, state money behind the Grand Prix drew a sizeable entry list for the supporting touring car race, including teams from as far off as Perth (Alf Barbagallo) and Brisbane (Dick Johnson). Johnson in particular had reason to be there, having just finished bolting together a brand-new Falcon – chassis DJR EB2. No $300,000 mistake this time: EB2 would be racing for the championship in 1993, but the team only had time for a handful of laps at Lakeside before they loaded it into the transporter to bring it to Adelaide for what would effectively be a very public shakedown.

That wasn't ideal, but when they arrived in Adelaide it got worse. All '93-spec cars were supposed to be homologated by 1 September, with the configuration then frozen and no further changes possible until the next round of parity adjustments (probably between the end of the '93 ATCC and Sandown). Even at this late stage, however, the rules were still a bit vague, and the Holden Racing Team noticed that further development of both the Johnson and Glenn Seton Falcons had in fact taken place (specifically, around the rear bumper and aero package). On Friday night the spearhead Holden team lodged an official protest, which was upheld, the officials deleting both Seton and Johnson's qualifying times and sending them to the back of the grid.

The insult that paired with this injury came in the form of Paul Morris' new BMW 325i. Body-wise it was the current E36-model BMW, which had succeeded the E30 in the showrooms in 1990, all quite straightforward and correct. British fans will probably notice its turquoise base paint and be reminded of Vic Lee Motorsport's Listerine BMWs, as seen in that year's BTCC series. And they would be right: this was indeed the sister to the BMW 318is pair that featured in that phenomenal last-round championship-decider at Silverstone (go and watch it again, you know you want to). Morris was apparently driving what had been Ray Bellm's ride for the first nine rounds, which I can't find a chassis number for but which I'll hazard a guess was VLM E36-003, following on from the 001 and 002 of Steve Soper and Tim Harvey, respectively (or not. BMW supplied three chassis to the team, but it's known the plates were swapped around, so it's now impossible to be sure which car was which).

Where things got complicated was the engine. FIA Class II touring cars (better known as Super Touring) were supposed to be capped at 2.0 litres, and in Britain the 318is had run a race engine based on the road car's 1.9-litre inline-four. In Adelaide, however, the car was presented as a 325i, which not only meant a 2.5-litre engine above the Super Touring limit, but one that should've been the road car's M50 straight-six. Instead, this one came fitted with a four-cylinder S14, taken straight from one of the Longhurst team's old M3s. So if "the Hybrid BMW", as it became known, was supposed to be a Super Touring car, then it had an illegally large engine; if it was supposed to be a Group A car, then it wasn't even slightly homologated, with Alan Jones calling it, "the only E36 M3 in the world with a four-cylinder engine". To let this thing race unmolested while penalising Seton and Johnson for paperwork infringement, the organisers must've been taking... well, let's just leave it there, shall we? Whatever the reason, the car raced this weekend and then vanished into the mists of history: the other two Vic Lee BMWs have since been restored for Historics racing, but the fate of the Bellm/Morris car seems to be a complete mystery.

[As a side note, Lawrie Nelson also brought along his #29 Capri Components Mustang for one last dance, which gave it the unique distinction of competing in both the first and last Group A races in Australia, eight years apart!]

With one of the Gibson team's GT-Rs still in the repair shop, Mark Skaife was relegated to commentary duties, alongside Channel Nine's Darrell Eastlake. It was all up to Gentleman Jim Richards to bring home a last pair of wins for Nissan. From pole he blitzed them off the line, although he would be unable to completely shake John Bowe's Sierra, while Seton drove a very aggressive race to rise from dead last to harass Peter Brock's Mobil Commodore inside the top ten. It was all looking pretty good for Seton to get a good result, until he made a mistake at Turn 13 and planted the nose of the Falcon deep into the tyre barrier lying outside the corner. That was the end of chassis GSR1, which was damaged beyond repair instead of racing into glory in 1993. Instead, the incident triggered a Safety Car, which was pretty astonishing for a short 20-lap sprint (and ironically, said Safety Car was another V8 Falcon!).

The Safety Car meant that, by the restart, HRT's drivers Tomas Mezera and Brad Jones were lying 5th and 6th, respectively. Allan Grice had returned to his seat in the Queensland parliament, while Win Percy had returned to the U.K. (where, among other things, he'd adjudicate on that Silverstone crash between Steve "The Man's An Animal" Soper and John "I'm Going For 1st" Cleland). With one seat at HRT already filled, that left Jones and Mezera racing each other for the other, which almost ended in disaster. Roaring down Dequetteville Straight, they split around Tony Longhurst and found themselves locked in a chicken run into the Hairpin. Inevitably, both outbraked themselves and ended up in a mess, Mezera overshooting and landing in the run-off area, and Jones spinning. And all by itself, that moment basically secured Mezera's employment status for the next twelve months: "We had a shootout as to who they were going to sign for next year," he said. "I out-qualified Bradley and then we both spun into the hairpin side-by-side! I recovered a little bit quicker and I got him, and I ended up getting the job."

Longhurst and Perkins then staged a rematch of their Sandown fight, which ultimately went Tony's way after Larry's Holden started trailing a thin wisp of white smoke – by its origin, probably busted a diff seal.

Despite concerns about tyre life on this warm November day, all three frontrunners crossed the finish line virtually line astern, Richards ahead of Bowe and Longhurst, with Perkins managing to hang on for 4th. Mezera completed the top five, meaning he'd be starting 5th for tomorrow's final 10-lap sprint. It had been a surprisingly eventful race for a mere support category, and an expensive one for some, but that was nothing compared to what the morrow would bring. In the meantime...

Winfield Trophy
At 4:50pm, the touring cars were followed by the Winfield Trophy for Formula Brabham, Australia's premier open-wheel series. Mark Skaife might not have had a ride for the Group A race, but that didn't mean he wasn't driving this weekend: he had a new Lola T91-50 to play with, a superseded Formula 3000 car that was nevertheless the most up-to-date open-wheel racecar in the country (or would be, once the F1 circus left). Like Godzilla, it wore the blood-red of the Winfield tobacco brand and the #1 of the reigning Australian Drivers Champion. He started from pole, but used too many revs getting off the line and so just sat there spinning up his tyres while everyone else made a break. Mark Larkham (driving the #2 Mitre 10 Reynard 90D) led through the first few turns before he got wide coming onto Hutt Street and fishtailed the rear. Chasing hard, Skaife had to throw out the anchors to avoid running into him, allowing 1990 series champion Simon Kane in the #5 Personal Ralt RT21 to capitalise and take the lead. Kane only led for a few laps before Skaife came back and nailed him into Foster's hairpin, but for a man who hadn't spent much time at the wheel this year, and who was driving a badly outdated car, it was a very impressive performance.

Skaife ultimately won the race, with Kane an excellent 2nd and Larko a chastened 3rd. The day then concluded with the L.C.I. Autocolour Dulux Formula Ford race at 5:40pm, which sadly doesn't seem to be on YouTube.

Sunday

The tranquility of Sunday in the City of Churches was shattered at 9:30am, when Formula 1 returned to the track for their morning warm-up session. FOM won't let me embed it, but you can watch the Eurosport broadcast here

Clarks Shoes Group A Finale: Race 2
And so we end back where we started. Ten years ago – god, has it really been that long? – the subject of my first post covered this very race, which was flagged away at 10:35am on Grand Prix Sunday. It might've only been ten laps, but two drivers in particular were determined to make them count.

Starting from 5th, Tomas Mezera managed to get his HRT Commodore ahead of Larry Perkins, but in the cooler, more overcast conditions of Sunday it was soon very clear his was the slower Holden today. And from there it was on for young and old.

After several laps of rubbing, Larry sent it into Wakefield Corner without even licking the stamp, catching Tomas completely by surprise. That put Larry up to 3rd place, but there was no chance of catching Bowe and Richards, running nose-to-tail as they had through yesterday's race. Then late in the race Peter Brock had a horror shunt, breaking something in his steering as he came over the kerbs at the Senna Chicane and hammering into the opposite wall. Far too much stuff broke on Advantage Racing machines, but thankfully he emerged just fine. The race, once again, went to Richards, with Bowey shadowing him, but this time it was Perkins who rounded out the podium.

Telecom MobileNet Holden Nova Celebrity Race
At 11:30, after some filler, came some light entertainment in the form of the traditional celebrity race.

The Holdens they were driving were no such thing: they were badge-engineered E90 Corolla hatchbacks, rekerjiggered as the Holden Nova under the ongoing Button Plan. The drivers today included cricketing legend Max Walker; music legend John Farnham; meme legend Daryl Braithwaite, Olympic gold medallist Kieren Perkins (before the Thorpedo was the Superfish); and Sue-Ellen Underwood, Penthouse Australia's Pet of the Year. Inevitably, though, these amateur races usually end up being dominated by the one or two people who actually know what they're doing, who this year were Tasmanian Holden dealer Kim McInerney, and a certain Bobby Zagame. The only person by that name I've been able to Google up looks like an exotic supercar dealer, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was the same person. Clearly he's found a way to monetise his passion, which... good for him, must be nice.

Fosters Australian Grand Prix
And so, at 2:00pm, they finally gave us what we came for: the main event. It was over depressingly quickly – not because of the weather this time, but because the two drivers everyone had come to see crashed out on lap 19.

(Once again F1 copyright shenanigans won't let me embed the video. But you can watch it on YouTube here.)

When Glen Dix waved the Australian flag, Mansell made a good start but was unable to pull away from Senna, who came in match-fit and ready for a fight. He made his first passing attempt into Dequetteville Hairpin on lap 8 – unsuccessfully, as the way the McLaren wobbled showed he'd left his braking crazy late. While Ayrton gathered the car up, Mansell slipped back through and put him back where he started, but that was only his first attempt: it would not be the last.

Nigel managed to build a gap through the next few laps, but that all went away when he caught up to the first of the backmarkers – Nicola Larini in the actively-suspended Ferrari, who'd been forced to start from the back of the grid. He held up Nigel's Williams long enough for Senna's McLaren to catch back up, meaning the Brazilian was just inches behind him as they negotiated the fast right-hander just before the pit entrance. And it was here they collided.

From the camera angle provided, I have no idea whose fault it was. Had Senna, the ultra-aggressive driver who was forever causing accidents, caused one more? Or had Nigel had brake-tested him in an unwise attempt to unnerve and create some breathing space? Both stories are plausible, and of course, both parties blamed the other.

People have said I was crazy to try and overtake there – but I wasn't even thinking of it. I never expected him to brake at that point. – Ayrton Senna

Senna has no business on the track. He has a screw loose in his head. All I know is that someone hit me at about 40-50mph up the back as I was turning into the corner. I thought I'd do it honourably and go and see the Stewards. They're totally gutless. They said it was a sporting incident. – Nigel Mansell

With the two megastars out of the way, the race lead was left to the other Williams of Riccardo Patrese, but he was soon coming under immense pressure from Senna's faithful friend and teammate, Gerhard Berger. Patrese switched the Williams' traction control system back on and, because it made the car easier to drive, started to pull away. But it was still a new technology, and because it worked by cutting cylinders, one that put a question mark over the engine's reliability. So on lap 51 – agonisingly, when he was nearly 20 seconds ahead – Patrese coasted to a halt with an engine failure.

That left Berger free to score his second victory of the year, and the fifth for McLaren in a season well below the team's usual stellar expectations. Joining him on the podium were the Benetton teammates, Michael Schumacher and Martin Brundle. The Englishman had successfully rebuilt his reputation, but he'd also been overshadowed by his mercurial German teammate, who'd enjoyed a brilliant first full season in Formula 1. Here at season's end, Schumacher had enough points in the bank to pip Senna for third place – and had already taken the first of a record number of wins at Spa-Francorchamps.

There were no teary goodbyes between Senna and Mansell. "I would have liked to have said farewell to him with a handshake after so many years together in Formula 1" said Senna – and being Senna, he probably meant it. But Mansell was still furious about the shunt, which had robbed him of the chance to take a record tenth victory in a single season, and he left the Adelaide circuit – and Formula 1 – without saying goodbye to anyone. He had his own destiny to follow, and although full of glory, he would never meet Senna again.

The End
And so the end came for Group A touring cars in Australia – with, appropriately, all the attention focused elsewhere. In the grandstands all eyes were on the Formula 1 superstars, while in the garages the teams were already thinking about the final pair of Group A races in the region, which were still to come at Wellington and Pukekohe. No-one much was in a mood to pour libations, so the moment came and went without any acknowledgement, the cars simply crated up and sent on their way once again.

GTR4 in Thailand, 1993.

The lives awaiting them in 1993 and beyond were many and varied. Many would race on into the new era: practically all the VN Commodores, for example, would be upgraded to winged VP status to become the seed crystal of V8 Supercars, backed by a solid lineup of VL Walkinshaws. Similarly, Bob Tweedie's Intercity Business Sierra – an ex-Glenn Seton machine still dressed in Peter Jackson blue – would race on as a Super Touring car well into the mid-'90s. Others, like the Nissans of Gibson Motorsport, found buyers overseas: the GT-R that had won Bathurst in 1991 went to Thai businessman Prutiral Ratanakul Serireongrith, which he raced in regional events including the FIA-sanctioned South East Asian Touring Car Championship. Others became instant museum pieces: DJR5, the Sierra Dick Johnson had driven to victory at Bathurst in 1989, was taken back to the team's workshop at Acacia Ridge and proudly displayed in original, unrestored condition for the next thirteen years. And a few were unsentimentally chopped and modified to become Sports Sedans, arguably the cruellest fate for a potentially historic machine.

But in the end, was it really that bad? Group A might have been expensive, unbalanced and, by its final seasons, outdated, but it also showed the world that Australia could hold its own. We faced the world head-on and, if we came off battered and bruised sometimes, it was because we couldn't match the budgets of Europe or Japan, not their teams. When it came to innovation, racecraft and driving talent, Australia bowed to no-one, and it was that hard-won credibility that would carry us into the new era. V8 Supercars started here.

The Bitter End: Bathurst '92, Pt.3

The best moment was Jim's reaction when we won the race. I saw Richo up there calling them a pack of arseholes, and I thought, "Good on you Richo, tell them all to get stuffed." – Fred Gibson

The dark clouds were more than just overhead by the time the Great Race of '92 was over, and they were already gathering as the race approached half-distance. The Nissan continued to lead, and that upset more than a few of the punters on the hill, whose hopes were all riding with the other red car following far behind, slipping and sliding awkwardly as it sought some traction for its 600hp land mine of an engine. For Dick Johnson, John Bowe and the #17 Shell Sierra, what they really needed now was a dry track, some good strategy calls, and a miracle, but so far there was no sign any of that was coming their way...

Dented Panels, Pride
The second half of the Tooheys 1000 started as it meant to go on, with an accident. On lap 71, Trevor Ashby got very slightly off-line at Forrest's Elbow – easy to do – and locked up under braking, planting the Lansvale Smash Repairs Commodore into the tyre barrier. Thanks to extra stops to deal with niggling mechanical problems they were only on their 66th lap, but it was still a pity: the privateer kings at least deserved a finish. The team famously didn't have to worry about panel damage, but in this case the right-front corner had been completely caved in, so it looked like they'd have to shell out for new suspension components. That triggered the third Pace Car intervention of the day – it was unthinkable to leave the car there for someone else to run into.

Channel Nine used the Pace Car intervention to interview Wayne Gardner, who explained why the Strathfield Car Radios VN had also stopped.

Bruce McAvaney: You guys are renowned for your bravery, for your daredevil-ness on bikes. Did you fear for your life during this race?

Wayne Gardner: No I wasn't fearing for my life, but I was fearing I might, with no vision, run into another car or put it into a wall or something and ruin the team's chances, because we do want to finish this race. But unfortunately, during that session, I was having trouble seeing. I could feel a vibration coming, and when Graeme got in the car, the tailshaft just dropped out of it so I knew it was on its way.

McAvaney: Brocky said it's the worst conditions he's ever seen. What about you, with your experience? You've ridden in every different country in the world, is this the worst you've ever experienced as a racer?

Gardner: No, I've been in similar conditions in Germany once, in the rain at Hockenheim, and that was not fun. But motorcycles don't create as much spray as this. A car drags up a lot of water off the road and you can't see a thing.

The lack of visibility remained everyone's number one concern, with Colin Bond echoing Gardner's sentiment a couple of laps later: "I don't mind driving in the rain, although I must admit these conditions were appalling. Visibility's the biggest problem, that's what everyone was talking about. Nobody minds the weather, if it's raining and slipping and sliding, but when you can't see the car in front of you, that's the biggest problem. And that's what most of the people are complaining about."

The good news was the sun was finally coming out and it was starting to warm up, although it remained oppressively humid. Larry Perkins was in the pits having fresh brake pads and a new alternator installed in his Bob Jane T-Marts Walky – no glory today for the car that had won Sandown – but a couple of laps later Troy Dunstan pitted in the Mobil VN to take on a new set of Bridgestones that were more suited to the drying track. The puddles of standing water that had crisscrossed the circuit were now almost completely gone, and the racing line was clearing, though one would struggle to call it a dry line just yet. Nevertheless, the Pace Car turned off the yellow lights on lap 77 and prepared to return the Mountain to proper racing.

On lap 78, the #1 Nissan resumed leading under the first sunshine of the day, but for everyone else the problems continued. With supremely poor timing, Greg Crick pitted the #18 Shell Sierra to hand it back to Terry Shiel just as the race rotated back to green. It looked like the Johnson team were about to make the car their guinea pig for "intermediate" tyres (which in those days still meant hand-grooved slicks), but the tyres never went on the car. Instead, an engine problem delayed the stop as the team fiddled around under the bonnet, and when it eventually fired an eternity later, it rejoined on the same full-wet Dunlops it had come in on.

Meanwhile, Moffat's #10 Cenovis car had returned to the pits for a long stop – it emerged the diff had failed yet again. Mark Oastler said it was one of the Johnson-developed 9-inch diffs, which would make it the second time in two races one of those had failed. Moffat spoke to Oastler later, saying:

Well, I won't say we haven't been here before, but this time I'm sure it's not actually the crown wheel and pinion burned out. It appears, by the oil that's come up on the back, that we've lost the oil seal. We run these things in with tender loving care, this unit went in on Saturday afternoon for the last session. We had no reason to suspect it. You have to try your best, you do your best, but sometimes you start chasing the technology. I think next time I'm here I'll have about ten oil seals on the diff!

So by lap 79, Dick Johnson was still running 2nd but had Anders Olofsson closing in fast. As the track dried out Dick got faster relative to the GT-Rs, but the track wasn't there yet, so although Dick stretched the Sierra's legs down Conrod, Anders gobbled him back up under braking into Murray's. When they crossed the finish line to start lap 80, the Nissan team were back in a 1-2. Johnson didn't give up and grimly raced Anders into Hell Corner, but there was no living with Godzilla on a day like this. Dick readied for a send into Griffin's, but Anders closed the door in his face, ensuring the GT-R would have the lead over the top of the Mountain where it could make the most of its 4WD grip.

At half-distance – lap 81 – they finally checked the split times: Olofsson was running 14.3 seconds behind Skaife, meaning Johnson was only 14.7 seconds off the race lead – a miniscule gap when you were racing a GT-R. Longhurst in his BMW was 27.5 seconds behind the leader, while the GIO car was now a lap down. In fact the GIO car was about to hit some bother – the Dedicated Micros Sierra of Ken Mathews looped under brakes into the Elbow and collected the GIO car in the process, hard enough for the lightweight Sierra to rebound halfway across the track. Half-a-ton heavier, the GT-R merely suffered a deformed right-front wheel arch, which had been pushed into its Dunlop tyre. The smoke plume as it ran down Conrod was unbelievable, and Mark Gibbs actually pulled right over and stopped before the Chase on the thought that his car was on fire, but the flaggies inspected it and told him it was fine, keep going. Gibbs jumped back in and headed back to the pits via the grass, keeping off the track in another nice display of courtesy to the other competitors. The team sprang into action to change tyres and tape up the loose bodywork, but a nasty black oil leak meant the oil coolers at the front of the car must have been given a jostling.

On lap 82, Tony Longhurst pitted to switch to slicks – there was no substitute for being on the right tyre – followed by Olofsson, who came in for tyres and fuel but stayed behind the wheel for another stretch. And then the #17 Sierra came in for a stop, Dick Johnson dismounting to put Bowe back on the job, while tyres, fuel, brake pads and an oil top-up were carried out. Given the amount of work done, a 34-second stop was very impressive, but it still dropped them back behind a short-stopping #2 Nissan. The game of leapfrog went on...

A lap later Mark Skaife also came in for a scheduled stop, and Skaife also stayed in for another stint. A rapid 24-second stop meaning he rejoined without losing the lead, though with the GIO car undergoing repairs in the box ahead of them, the mechanics had to manually push him backwards for a moment to give enough clearance to box around. But by now, at long last, it was more or less back to dry running. It was nice to see the sun.

After that round of scheduled stops, only the top four were still on the lead lap. Skaife held 1st place comfortably, with teammate Olofsson 26.3 seconds behind. After their more involved pit stop, Bowe was 37.3 seconds off Skaife, while Longhurst was almost 57 seconds behind. Thanks to the GIO Nissan's incident, 5th place now belonged to Win Percy in the HRT Commodore, and once again Percy wasn't hanging around. The track had now reached that tough stage with a bone-dry racing line but plenty of moisture off-line – which was where you needed to go if you wanted to pass someone. With HRT muscle at his disposal, Percy wisely elected to do most of his passing in a straight line – which wasn't difficult to do, given most of his targets were class cars.

The rival Falcon, however, wasn't having such a fine day. After several visits to the pits to cure mechanical ailments, Alan Jones finally brought the blue Seton Falcon in to cure a misfire. A lap later the car was put away for good, and it was down to Mark Oastler to ask Jonesy why.

Jones: Oh, I think it was only a fuel pump. Going down Conrod it just misfired as I changed up into a higher gear. So rather than risk another lap, I pulled in while I was close to the entrance. And they've checked it and it looks like the fuel pump's gone on the thing.

Oastler: That's a bit of bad luck. Despite the fact that it’s only a new car, it was always only going to be a niggling problem that'd stop it here, wasn't it?

Jones: Doesn't matter how big they are. If they stop you, they're big!

That meant the only other '93-spec car still having a clear run was the #15 HRT Commodore of Tomas Mezera and Brad Jones, and soon their race also went to Hell (in a depressingly literal way). A few drivers always got a bit too ambitious braking for Hell Corner – Kevin Waldock had overshot in the rain and been forced to the escape road, for one – and on lap 94 it was Bradley's turn. In the middle of the corner, just when everything was at maximum lateral load, the tail of the Commodore abruptly stepped out and the car climbed halfway across the ripple strip, where it found itself unceremoniously beached. Agonising moments dragged by as Bradley implored the flaggies to push him back, but in the end that only made it worse: backing it over the ripple strip, the front spoiler got caught and was all but torn off, meaning he'd have to tour a whole lap and then pit to fit a replacement. Until now Jones had been running in 6th place, so it was a heartbreaking way to spoil a promising run.

The HRT mechanics were out in pit lane with a new spoiler and four new tyres ready to go before he even got to McPhillamy Park, but the spoiler's mounting points had been damaged in the incident, so when he finally made it to the lane they had to employ plenty of tape to make it all snug. Brad was ready to to rejoin, but instead he got pushed back – back a long way, right out of the way, in fact. It emerged that the accident started because he'd broken a universal joint that forced him to avoid second gear: the team couldn't fix that quickly, and now Percy was on his inlap, so there was no choice but to push poor Bradley out of the way and make him sit and watch while they gave Win service. No point penalising a car that was still in with a chance to fix one that wasn't, but even so, Brad's distraught face said it all.

It's not meant to be our year. The car's jumping out of second gear, so I've been using third most places. I got pretty close behind Tony, went back to second just by habit and jumped out about halfway round the corner. Just one of those things, I guess. Just... that's what happens.

That team were on edge though was given away when Percy's stop also went wrong. Winnie alighted to make room for Allan Grice, and the car was fed fuel and tyres, but then the car was dropped before the right-rear wheel was properly bolted on, forcing them to re-attach the air hose and lift it back up so the rattle gun could finish its job. A slow stop, then, but not quite a disaster, and Grice rejoined still in 5th.

It was now lap 98 and the track was the driest it had been since that first hour, before the rain came, which could only mean one thing: John Bowe was moving like lightning. Sprinting hard in the Shell Sierra, the Tasmanian had absolutely gobbled up the 9-second gap to Anders Olofssen and then managed to pass him, regaining 2nd place. He was still 25 seconds behind Mark Skaife, who was a fair bit quicker than Olofssen, but a lap later Gregg Hansford brought the #10 Cenovis Sierra back to the Moffat pit box to fix a rear oil cooler. Word was that the Winfield Nissan had bumped him and broken it loose, so it seemed Skaife had been told to respond to Bowe's speed and was now pushing hard – hard enough to make mistakes.

By the centenary lap, Skaife's new burst of speed was telling, as Bowe found himself 28.4 seconds behind and losing time in dribs and drabs... but that wasn't necessarily a cue to give up. Just forcing the Gibson team to run above their preferred pace was a victory of sorts, and there were still sixty laps to go before the finish – plenty of time for a mechanical failure or an unforced error. And sometimes this kind of speed was just a bluff, a Jedi mind trick to convince the other bloke he could never catch you, when in reality he absolutely could. So the truism from karting on up was: always apply pressure, you never knew. And in any case, Bowe was still making time hand-over-fist from Olofsson, who was now 18.1 seconds behind and falling away – the DJR team might as well have a buffer zone heading into the final rounds of pit stops. Tony Longhurst remained the only other car on the lead lap, a minute and 26.8 seconds behind Skaife, so it was still a question of these cars and no others. Grice was best of the rest, nearly two laps down, but that car had just made a pit stop so he might've been in better shape than he looked.

For many, however, the price of speed was too high. Peter Brock returned to the pits to have a new tailshaft fitted (for the second time today), and a few laps later the #70 Enzed Corolla stopped at the top of the Mountain, and its driver (one of the Bates twins) had to work under the bonnet for several minutes to get it going again. He ultimately rejoined, but he had a hell of a time getting slick racing tyres to work on the wet grass before he made it to the track's edge again.

But no-one had such an abrupt end to their race as the BMW pair of John Cotter and Peter Doulman. On lap 101, the Impala Kitchens M3 blew an engine and parked at the side of the road not far from the pit exit, trailing huge amounts of smoke. Doulman & Cotter had only eked 80 laps out of their 2.3-litre backup engine, and in the end it had followed yesterday's 2.5-litre DTM engine in venting to the atmosphere, but then again they'd been (somewhat unfairly) lumped in with the big cars anyway. Another class win was out of the question when the class itself had disappeared, and it's questionable whether they could've been as quick as Longhurst and Cecotto... but it's possible to imagine, in an alternative universe, that their 2.5-litre had worked, and they'd been able to pair up with Tony and Johnny and been available to draft each other up and down the Mountain and lift the pace of both cars. Something to think about.

Red Versus Red
Live in-car telemetry – quite an innovation for 1992! – revealed Bowe was racing the #17 Shell Sierra with up to 3.0-bar of boost feeding to the 2.0-litre Cosworth engine, which might've been "only one click" less than what Johnson had used on his shootout lap the day before, but it was effectively what George Fury had qualified with only eight years earlier. Mark Skaife responded to Bowe's charge by pulling out another 4 seconds in the #1 Winfield GT-R, but he was having to go to the ragged edge to do it – he briefly locked a wheel on the run into Murray's.

It was uncharacteristically messy of Skaife, but then again, it was an uncharacteristic day. The Gibson team were soon preparing for driver and brake changes on both their cars, and in the previous hour what Garry Wilkinson had called, "dirty black-green clouds" had threatened, then moved away again, leaving more blue sky overhead. As we approached the business end of the day, mechanics, like the cars they serviced, got less and less fresh and more prone to breakdown as the day wore on. Lap 114 saw the #2 Nissan pit on schedule, Olofsson completing a double stint to hand the car back to Neil Crompton even as the car was given new brake pads. The necessary length of the stop meant Longhurst moved into 3rd place, and Bowe got an extra 40 seconds free of charge – he was driving the only car with even a prayer of challenging for the win now. The Shell Sierra was 34.4 seconds behind the leading Winfield Nissan, compared to 2:06.2 for Longhurst and 2:14.7 for Crompton – that Sierra had really been stretching its legs!

Lap 114 was also when Mark Skaife set the fastest lap of the race, a 2:16. 47.... and then he dived into the pits and handed the #1 GT-R back over to Jim Richards, the final driver change for that car. Dick Johnson watched the stop on his pit TV set – helmet already on, poker-faced – before he slipped on his trademark sunglasses and headed out into the lane to wait for his ride. Skaife's stop had allowed Bowe into the lead, for the first time since lap 1, but of course he was about to make a stop as well.

So car #17 led lap 117, while their rivals encountered their first glitch of the day – sadly for DJR, one that was pesky rather than catastrophic. While he was waiting to be released, Richo had pointed to something in the cockpit of the Nissan, but it was too minor for the team to address it and they were on a time budget. Well, having completed his outlap and resumed racing, we found out what it was – it turned out one of the onboard fire extinguishers had spontaneously discharged and covered the lens of the onboard Channel Nine RaceCam! The g-forces as he circuclated were sufficient to pull some of the foam off the camera, however, where it splashed onto Richo's shoulder, enough of a distraction to prompt the normally-impassive Richards to look mildly annoyed!

Meanwhile Bowe was headed for pit lane, undoing his belts even as he negotiated the left-right-left of the pit entrance. While he alighted from the car, the team's mechanics refuelled and had a quick look at the brake pads, making the decision to change them right there and then. While Dick Johnson strapped himself in, a fresh set of Dunlop slicks were thrown on and the windscreen was given a final polish, and then the car was dropped and sent on its way. Dick rejoined virtually side-by-side with Tony Longhurst, which was a bad sign for Tony when he would shortly also be making his final stop of the day. Overall the #17's pit stop had taken 1 minute and 41 seconds, long enough that Richards had inherited the lead again while the car was stationary, meaning the Gibson team'd had the unexpected advantage of a heavier car with higher brake wear: they'd known all along that they'd need a pad change, so they hadn't had to waste time inspecting them and making a decision! The chase resumed with the DJR Sierra back in 2nd place, but the unexpected speed of the Johnson car was having an effect, as Richards wasn't showing his Nissan much mercy – he was driving it absolutely flat out.

Five laps later Longhurst's final stop came due, and he pulled in for fuel, tyres and a handover to Johnny Cecotto, who'd take the wheel for the run to the flag. With no pad changes needed on the flyweight BMW it was a brisk 47-second stop, although an unusual part of proceedings came when they quickly checked the tape holding the front end together, a legacy of that crash in the morning warm-up! Although Cecotto rejoined still in 4th place, he lost a lap as Gentleman Jim roared past him just as he exited pit lane, which was the death knell of the BMW squad's hopes today: even if Cecotto was now in for the duration, neither Johnson nor Richards were likely to lose more than two minutes in their final splash-n-dash fuel stops, so all hope of victory was likely lost. Pace Car periods and extra stops for wet-weather tyres might've corrupted the strategy, but could they really have won a dry race had it stayed green all the way? Maybe, but we'll never know for sure. From what we'd seen, the ultimate endurance of the M3 Evo just wasn't enough here at the Mountain.

The Gathering Storm
While Richards and Johnson continued to chase each other up and down the Mountain, events were conspiring to bring the race to a sudden and disastrous end. By lap 129, chopper shots showed another line of low, dark clouds approaching, there were reports of a sprinkle of rain from the top of the Mountain... then a few more spots started appearing in pit lane. But none of that was the worrying part: the worrying part was the weather report from Orange, who got Bathurst's weather an hour ahead. And Orange was now reporting that they were under a hail storm. When Allan Grice completed his stint and pitted to hand the 5th-placed HRT Commodore back to Win Percy, the team gave it new tyres and an ultra-short fill of only 24 seconds, probably looking to build a gap on light fuel while the track was still dry. When the sister car that had been so heartbreaking for Brad Jones came in for a scheduled stop five laps later, the commentators were surprised when it was sent back out on yet another set of slicks rather than intermediates or full wets. "No, chains," quipped Mike Raymond. "There's hail in it."

The Dick Johnson team had access to the same weather data as the commentators, so they all knew it was now or never: reel in the Nissan before the weather arrived, or be forever damned. And amazingly, Johnson was making inroads – one of his best laps was a 2:17.72, and that sort of pace netted him a 4-second gain one lap, only a 1-second gain the next, and so on, numbers that hinted traffic had something to do with it. With 58 seconds to find in only half as many laps, it was going to be a very tall order even for this team, but Bowe for one believed they had the tool for the job:

The car is the most perfect car I've ever driven in a long-distance race, there’s nothing wrong with it at all. And I hope it just keeps going that way and, well, I'd hate to wish Freddie Gibson's team any ill will, but if something happened to it I wouldn't be sorry!

By lap 137, Johnson was 58.46 seconds behind Richards and driving with a controlled fury; Neil Crompton in the other works Nissan was a further 46.1 seconds in arrears, and therefore mostly out of the picture. Cecotto in the BMW was a lap down, but these cars still had a pit stop between them and lap 161, whereas the BMW didn't. There might not have been any on-track dices happening, but the strategy game was red hot.

By lap 140 however it was getting very dark, and forbiddingly green, and the helicopter footage genuinely showed a wall of water approaching, a storm band the weather people said was very intense, but very narrow. Lap 142 was interrupted by the rumble of thunder, and then various cars starrted flicking their wipers back on, and some of the Channel Nine cameras had droplets on the lens. Out in pit lane, all the teams were out in their pit boxes waiting with full wet tyres ready. "If this storm breaks," warned Garry Wilkinson, "all Hell will break loose." He wasn't wrong.

Clouds Burst
Neil Crompton pitted at the end of 144, and was left in the car rather than the more experienced Olofsson as, yes, full wet tyres were fitted. He was to be the sacrificial guinea pig to determine the exact moment to switch Richards to wets. Whatever hopes Dick Johnson had entertained for the end of the race were now dashed, as the sky virtually exploded overhead. 

This was worse even than the microburst that had wreaked such havoc in 1987: this time there was no wind driving it, just sudden, dense, drenching rain. "I remember when it rained," recalled Andrew Miedecke later, in Issue 130 of Australian Muscle Car: "At the top of Mountain Straight doing 240km/h there was just a wall of water. I took my feet off everything, kept my fingertips on the wheel and tried to keep it straight. It was aquaplaning and I couldn't see. Eventually I slowed enough to get around the corner."

There was no question of staying out, so into the pits they came: Miedecke, Waldock, Brock, Niedzwiedz, Gibbs – and Johnson.

The rain began belting down. A trickle at first, it became a deluge, water bucketing from the sky. The track threatened to become a river.

John Bowe and I had run the perfect Bathurst race. Packing a Sierra now past its use-by date, and vastly inferior to the Nissan that had been supposedly impossible to beat, we'd made up for its weaknesses with pinpoint driving and precise strategy. We'd made the right calls at the right time.

"I'm coming in," I yelled over the two-way, on lap 143, 18 laps shy of the end. "This is going to turn to shit. Get out the wets, and let's win this thing."

I slipped, slid and aquaplaned into the pits, a ferocious storm unloading and unleashing all of God's might. The heavens didn't just open, they collapsed, sending a tsunami of water onto Australia's most famous and brutal track.

I wasn't taking a chance. John Bowe was due to drive the final stint, but the chaos meant we had to be in and out. After a lightning stop pushed out by my crew, I powered up the Mountain and passed many cars, which were useless and utterly dangerous on slicks. We were in 2nd place, chasing Jim Richards and Mark Skaife, who'd overtaken us on lap 2, but we refused to give up the fight. – Dick Johnson, The Autobiography

But the first car to leave pit lane was actually the Pace Car, and we were didn't have to wait long to find out why. We only saw it for a split second, but it looked an awful lot like the dark outline of a GT-R, except the left-front wheel was at the wrong angle. A few seconds later we got the first clear television image, and realised it was true: there, centre-shot, was the Richards Nissan with a broken wheel, limping slowly over the top of the Mountain at about 10km/h. Caught out on slicks on a soaking wet track, he'd hit the bank just out of The Cutting and snapped his left-front suspension. His race was over.

Richo, heading down the Mountain in the storm, radioed in and said, "FG, I've just gone off up top, I've just touched the wall." To which I replied: "You've touched the wall have you, Richo? I'm looking at the TV now and I can tell you, you've ripped the front corner right off it!"

"We'll be right, I'll get it back and we'll put a new wheel on it," he fired back.

"Richo, the whole wheel's hanging off it!: I said again.

He and Skaife were dirty; they thought we should have brought them in a lap earlier for wets. – Fred Gibson, AMC: Muscle Racers Vol.1

At the same time, we were shown the #76 Corolla off the track and on its side, with rescue personnel already in attendance. The driver climbed out passenger's door like a submarine hatch and limped away, in obvious pain from one leg, but resolutely standing on his own two feet.

But that was nothing compared to the mess at the exit of Forrest's Elbow. It started with Brian Callaghan's Everlast Commodore and Terry Shiel's second DJR Sierra coming together on the exit, with both cars protruding onto the track to create an impromptu chicane. The Enzed Corolla and Andrew Harris in the Daily Planet Commodore then arrived on the scene too fast to avoid a collision, clouting the wall and sliding down it to strike the Everlast Walky with frightening force and spin it around like a top (though Callaghan jumped out of the Everlast car immediately after and vaulted the wall quicksmart). The area already looked like a wrecker's yard, but then, of course, along came the wounded Nissan. Even Richo's much-reduced speed was too fast for the conditions, and with slick tyres and 1,600 kilos behind it, once the GT-R started sliding there was no getting it back. With ugly certainty, the Nissan oversteered into the outside wall and, unable to stop or steer, drifted beneath the Everlast machine and straight into the side of the Daily Planet Commodore, where it finally came to a halt with a meaty thump. And that was where it stayed, the vaunted Nissan GT-R all twisted metal and gently hissing steam through the pelting rain.

Cautious but still powerful on the rain-friendly tyres, I floored my way towards Forrest's Elbow, only backing off when I saw the yellow flags. I came through the bend and saw a mess of cars – Corollas, a Commodore and the number-one Winfield Nissan that I'd been chasing – all smashed and slammed against a concrete wall. I kept on, now in the lead.

Bathurst 1992 was going to be mine. – Dick Johnson, The Autobiography

When Scott Bargwanna in the class-leading Mercantile Mutual Corolla piled in as well, it only put the full stop on a sentence that was already complete.

With that the race was red-flagged: Race Control of course had a bank of monitors to watch all cameras at once, and in their little room, they'd seen all these incidents occur within a matter of seconds, virtually all at once. There was no question it was time to bring the curtain down. The storm had lasted less than 5 minutes.

And so, heartbreakingly, Dick Johnson crossed the finish line and greeted the flag on the impression that he'd won or something.

He didn't complete another lap after that, and neither did anyone else. From Hell Corner, the whole pack was directed by race marshals through the back gate on Mountain Straight, effectively sending the whole field directly to parc fermé: they needed the track clear for the rescue vehicles. John Brady meanwhile took a camera crew to confront the race's general manager, Ivan Stibbard, to confirm that the race had been stopped.

John Brady: Red flag? It is all-over red-rover?

Ivan Stibbard: All over, yes, unfortunately. As you can see now, the weather's clearing up, but too late, it's all over. So we've declared it, and the timekeepers are now working out the final result.

Brady: Not afraid that you may have called it a little early?

Stibbard: No, not if you saw what was happening there with some of those cars. It was a bit dangerous. Unfortunately, some of them don't heed the caution flags, and you only need one or two to do that and that's what caused that problem.

Brady: Okay, the $64 question: who is the winner?

Stibbard: I would say car #1. The race has got to be declared at the last full lap before the flag went out, and he was still leading at that stage.

Brady: How close was he to the next full lap at the time?

Stibbard: Uh, not sure, not sure 'til we get the timekeepers on that. But he had a full lap up on the other cars, so that should be okay.

Jim Richards meanwhile had managed to hitch a lift back to the pits, where Mark Williams chased him down and eventually managed to corner him, getting his side of the story into the broadcast:

Williams: Jim, what happened up there?

Richards: I just came around the corner and had no grip whatsoever, going about two mile an hour, and it hit the bank just out of The Cutting. So I just put it in low gear and just went very very slowly around the track at about one mile an hour. Came out of the Forrest's Elbow and the car just – as if it accelerated without me putting my foot on the accelerator! – it just went out of control down where the other cars were and hit them. And then the little Corolla did the same thing behind me.

Williams: The conditions out there – I guess they were worse than this morning, 'cos there's probably a lot more oil down?

To that, Jim just shrugged:

Richards: Well, the conditions was "wet", and we were on slick tyres. That's where the problem was.

Williams: Well, Ivan Stibbard has just awarded the race to the #1 car, you must be very pleased with that even after the crash?

And at that, Gentleman Jim's face fell: he genuinely looked shocked. 

"Fantastic!" he exclaimed. "I can't believe it!" And that was when the whole team came over to congratulate him, the whole Gibson outfit shouting at him, "Jimmy, we won! We won Jimmy!" They all thought they'd thrown this one away... and therein lay the problem. Everyone else thought they had, too.

I can clearly remember walking down to the podium and thinking, "We've won this," because I don't ever read the rules. Dick thought we'd won as well, and the crowd thought we'd won. We thought to ourselves, "Isn't this good?" and then somebody said, "You've come 2nd," and we went, "What?!" – John Bowe

"I can't see how the Nissan's won the race," echoed Tony Longhurst, "The rules state quite clearly that the cars must get back to parc fermé. Now, it's stuck out on the circuit. So as far as I understand the rules, the car's not finished." "So you're saying we're going to hear more about this in the protest room?" pressed the Channel Nine crew. "Oh I don't think we'll protest," said Tony quickly, having learned from his Sandown outburst. "But the organisers make up the rules, and it says the cars must make it back to parc fermé. Well their car is not in parc fermé. I don't think the Nissan's [won], I think Dick's won the race."

But Doug Mulray, of all people, chimed in to correct him:

Actually, that's not right, what Tony's saying. I think he's incorrect. Nigel, one of our aficionados, just pointed out to me that Emerson Fittipaldi actually won the British Grand Prix, in 1975 I think it was, while his car was a smoking wreck beside the track. So there are precedents for today's result.

And unfortunately, Nigel was right. If the race was red-flagged after 75 percent of the scheduled distance, the ARDC could call time on the event and declare a result. And in the event of a red flag ending proceedings, the results were backdated by one lap, if for no other reason than so the timekeepers were working from their last complete set of data. And one lap before the red flag, the #1 Winfield Nissan R32 GT-R of Jim Richards and Mark Skaife had not been a smoking wreck, it had been leading the race. Officially, then – on a technicality, maybe, but officially – they had won after all. But that didn't mean anyone in the crowd knew or cared about that. As far as they were concerned, they'd seen their hero Dick Johnson crossing the finish line to chalk up the win with nary a GT-R in sight. They were all asking the same question as Johnson himself: "How could we be beaten by a car that's in the wall?!"

Crompton Wasn't Wrong
In his autobiography, The Best Seat In the House, Neil Crompton called this chapter, "A Bitter Podium", which really summed it up. The boos started before the Gibson Nissan team finished making their way to the presentation area, where a sea of people brandishing Ford flags had assembled under the podium. The atmosphere was strange, with the post-thunderstorm humidity shortening tempers, and tilt trays still everywhere gathering up the casualties. Yellow flashing lights overlapped the familiar afternoon shadows, but without the usual intense battle to decide the race. Instead, peace.

Not often mentioned is that the red flag had equally robbed Geoff Full of a major achievement. He'd won Class C here in 1990 (driving an AE86 with David Ratcliff), then Division 3 (as it became) in a similar car with Paul Morris in 1991. In 1992 he was sharing Peter Verheyan's green AE86 and had a chance of taking a hat-trick (each with a different co-driver!), until the rains came and cut it all short.

I was leading the class in 1992 and the two Team Toyota cars crashed. I had wets on my car already and then they stopped the race. So I should have won three in a row... – Geoff Full, Auto Action: The Great Race

So instead the winners of Class B were the Bargwanna cousins, Jason and Scott. It was Jason who accepted the honours, as Scott remained with the car up at Forrest's Elbow. "Just keep talking and ignore this noise," was Wilko's advice, and Bargs followed it, dutifully thanking John Smith for letting them have the car, as well as a handful of sponsors, before retreating before things could get really ugly.

3rd place outright went to the #2 Nissan of Olofsson and Crompton: Anders defiantly whooped and celebrated into the teeth of the booing, but Crompton looked very uncomfortable. When the chanting switched to, "We want Dick! We want Dick!", Anders seemed genuinely pleased that the fans had such passion for their heroes. He had that tourist attitude that he was immune because whatever happened, he wasn't really involved. Crompton, on the other hand...

Anders was a typical Swede. A cool, calm and experienced racer who had been to Bathurst a few times before, he handled the mob's booing and jeering far better than I did. I was furious. After all, every driver in that race had put their life on the line in horrendous conditions, and here we were copping abuse for it. ...

Whatever colours you wear or team you support, a chant of, "you're a bunch of c-bombs" isn't acceptable under any circumstances. It was disgraceful, so I expressed my thoughts via my extended middle finger – and I meant it. – Neil Crompton, The Best Seat in the House

When they emerged to collect the 2nd place trophy, Johnson and Bowe got a huge cheer, of course. Dick Johnson was clearly gutted but put on a brave face: "Well Wilko, I don't know where the hell we are, I really don't. It's just one of those races, it's been up and down all day. … After I passed Jim up the hill I thought we've gotta be number one, surely. But obviously you can be beaten by a crashed car. … I can't understand the red flag, but that's the officials' decision and I'll just have to go by it, won't I?" Bowe meanwhile thanked the team, pointing out: "It's the best racecar I've ever driven It didn't miss a beat all day. If we came 2nd, well, we came 2nd. But in my mind we won."

And then out came the winners, and the crowd actually started throwing things, chanting, "Buuull-shit! Buuull-shit!" Skaife looked on edge, and later it emerged he had some beer cans of his own sequestered away in his race suit, ready to throw some back, until his wiser teammate told him to put them away. The formalities were completed, and the trophy was handed over, but Richo was clearly furious in his own quiet way.

"I'd now like to thank Nissan, Winfield, our major sponsors, Yokohama, Shell, and Freddy and the boys for giving us a great car," he said. "We'll be back next year in a different kind of car and we'll probably win that one too, and that won't worry us one bit." "Well, if you don't like the reception Jim," said Garry Wilkinson, in a last-ditch attempt at detente, "you can always give them a bath in champagne?" Richards leaned forward and spat into the microphone, deliberately and venomously: "I wouldn't bother." And then Gentleman Jim – who'd always been such a lovely, affable, mild-mannered sort of bloke – lost his cool and delivered the monologue from which he'd never escape:

I'm just really stunned for words, I can't believe the reception. I thought Australian race fans had a lot more to go than this, this is bloody disgraceful. I'll keep racing, but I'll tell you what, this is going to remain with me for a long time. You're a pack of arseholes.

It was a shocking outburst by imperturbable standards of Jim Richards, but consider the emotional rollercoaster of the last fifteen minutes. From leading the race, he'd then endured the the adrenaline of the sudden rain, then the heart-stopping jolt of the crash and then, worst of all, the crushing disappointment of what he had no reason to assume was anything other than a DNF. Richards confirmed he hadn't known the race had been red-flagged until he got back to the pits: "I was expecting to get a punch in the mouth and some abuse." Instead, he'd been told he'd won. And now this was the reception?

And of course, behind it all was the sharp, fresh grief of losing his friend, Denny Hulme. New Zealand is a very small country, after all (there are more Berliners today than there were Kiwis in 1992), and the motor racing fraternity of such a place is necessarily tight-knit. Fred Gibson says he held off telling Richards about Denny until just before the podium, but I for one am sure he knew before then. He was in the car when Denny hit the wall, meaning he drove past the wreck several times while behind the Pace Car; he also wasn't in the car when the official announcement was made later on, during that third Pace Car intervention, so he could have heard it with his own ears. And on lap 104, the cameras briefly showed Richards watching the live telecast with Tom Smith from Shell: he had sunglasses on, which wasn't a usual part of his look, suggesting he was hiding his eyes. No, I think he knew about Denny, and he'd driven that final stint while supressing his grief. No doubt he'd intended to make the win a tribute to his lost mate with some fine words on the podium... only now, he'd never get the chance.

A Question of Legacy
Blogging great Fred Clark has said, "You can't know what the story means until you know how the story ends." But the interplay between how something concludes and what conclusions we draw from it works both ways, and this race, with this finish, was now the de facto ending of the Group A story in Australia. How much of the bitterness at this period of our sport is merely the pall cast by this one race? If the ARDC had held their nerve and let Dick Johnson cross the line just one more time, making the 1992 Tooheys 1000 a heroic, against-all-odds victory for the Aussie battler like Sandown before it, would the era still be recalled with such vitriol?

"That's what the abuse was about," said John Bowe in later years. "Japanese car, Dick being a hero to the people, and they really wanted Dick to win." Yes, let's not pretend, some of it was down to basic Australian racism: as I've said before, in 1992 the Pacific War was still in living memory, so although animosity to Japan and all things Japanese might not have been right or justifiable, it didn't exactly come out of nowhere either. And to that we must add the nature of the GT-R itself, which was basically a legalised cheat: its designers had quite deliberately exploited every loophole in the rulebook, and more than that, it was the latest in a line of cars that many felt shouldn't have been racing in touring cars in the first place. Like Moffat's Mazda RX-7 before it, many felt the Nissan was a sports car rather than a touring car, and indeed today the modern GT-R is happily racing in GT3 alongside the Ferraris and Porsches it competes with in the marketplace. The Nissan GT-R, the Mazda RX-7 and the Jaguar XJ-S all illustrate the sportscar argument; the fact that everyone hated the Mazda and Nissan, but loved the Jag, illustrate the racism argument.

Overall, then, our behaviour that day was simply acceptable. Thirty years on, there's much more interest what a magnificent achievement the Nissan really was, which makes us much more willing to accept that yes, we let ourselves down. Skaife and Richards deserved better; Fred Gibson and his entire team, the best in the country, deserved better. And Nissan deserved better. Today, there aren't many left who'd argue with that, and that is a very positive sign for our country.

Rain, Rain, Go Away: Bathurst '92, Pt.2

Before the race kicked off, there a certain amount of talk about the older drivers stepping aside to make room for young blood. They weren't without a point: Peter Brock and Colin Bond had been doing this since the 1960s; Allan Grice and Dick Johnson hadn't been far behind, showing up in the early 1970s. But all the same, there were two ironies to that sentiment. Firstly, a quarter of the field in '92 were Great Race rookies, which might've been the highest ratio since the race was inaugurated in 1960. But secondly, and more importantly, Mark Skaife was already a champion; Glenn Seton would soon follow; Cameron McConville was busy warming the bench over at DJR, and though he wasn't here this weekend, Russell Ingall had already made his Great Race debut with the Bob Forbes team. The next generation was already here, but first they'd have to earn their spurs racing against the Old Guard.

The Best-Laid Plans
As the broadcast opened, the talk among the commentators was all about the weather. In rural NSW there are really only two seasons – Winter, and Summer – and some years it can flip from one to the other in just two weeks. The first Sunday in October often straddled that boundary, resulting in volatile and unpredictable weather, and 1992 was a prime example. As the day dawned it was unusually cool, just 8 degrees Celcius, with a high of 18 expected and a 30 percent chance of showers. I have no idea why the prediction was so low; even the commentators said it looked more like one hundred, and light rain was falling even before the race start.

So in true Bathurst style, plans started going awry even before the race began. From 7:30 to 8:00am they held the traditional morning warm-up, and it was during this session that ex-motorcycle and Formula 1 pilot turned BMW star, Johnny Cecotto, got baulked by a backmarker on the dive into Forrest's Elbow. Forced to throw out the anchors, Cecotto put the Benson & Hedges M3 into a spin that rammed its nose into the rock wall on the outside, damaging the team's newest and fastest car barely two hours before its big day. 

The car was bundled off to the TAFE garage for emergency repairs, but it was anyone's guess whether it would be ready in time to make the start – at the very least it was likely to lose that hard-won 9th place starting position. Cecotto was at least willing to discuss what had happened with Channel Nine pit reporter, John Brady.

Cecotto: Well I was in a slow lap coming into the pits and a very slow car, a little car on the left side of the road moved completely to the right immediately, without seeing me. He let past a car in front of me and I was coming, he blocked me completely. I braked hard not to hit him and I was close to hit him. I try to spin, but by spinning I hit the wall.

Brady: The damage is pretty severe. The TAFE guys down here [are] trying to straighten up a chassis rail?

Cecotto: Well the front is quite bad. I hope they can fix it.

The incident also collected Wayne Gardner, who drove over some of Cecotto's discarded fibreglass and cut the right front tyre, not realising it until he arrived at the bottom of the Chase with no grip for braking! Thankfully the kitty litter was waiting to receive the Strathfield Car Radios VN without damage, but it had been a harsh initiation for the Bathurst rookie.

While the TAFE mechanics worked, pit straight moved on to the usual pre-race extravaganza, which started with the Bridgestone Holden Precision Driving Team, who dazzled the early arrivals by balancing their Commodores on two wheels, ramping over the top of each other, and other stunts of that nature. From there we moved on to the traditional $10,000 pit stop competition, which opened with an intra-BMW duel between the mechanics of Tony Longhurst and those of Peter Doulman, which went the way of the B&H lads. The second semi-final between Allan Grice for HRT and the Caltex crew of Colin Bond was won by the Holden boys, setting up a finale between Longhurst and Grice. The tension proved too much for Frank Gardner's people, who couldn't get a wheel nut on fast enough to beat their HRT rivals, leaving Grice free to cross the finish line and claim the ten grand for Holden. He might've only driven for the team three times, but he hadn't half been worth it to them.

When it was time to sing Advance Australia Fair, the honour went to a silver-haired man with a warm smile by the name of Col Joye. He was introduced simply as "Rock Legend", meaning you were already supposed to know who he was, so of course yours truly here had to look him up. Turns out that, together with his band the Joy Boys, he'd been the first rock artist to have a number one hit Australia-wide, thanks to the 1959 single, "Oh Yeah, Uh Huh" (not making that up). More recently, in 1990 he'd made the news after having a fall while using a chainsaw to prune a tree for his neighbour. Thankfully the chainsaw didn't feature in his injuries, which were bad enough all on their own: he fell six metres onto the brick pavement below, hitting his head and entering a coma, as well as sustaining serious lower back injuries. Just being alive today was a big deal.

As the final bars of the national anthem echoed around the grandstands, there came the traditional call for the drivers to start their engines, and in short order 20,000 horsepower roared into life to shake the pavement. Snarling straight-sixes and belting four-cylinders – both with and without the whistle of a turbo – joined in chorus with the baritone rumble of the V8s, a celebration of the Age of Oil. With the V8s set to take over next year, we would not hear its like again.

As the forty-six starters set off on their parade lap, winding side-to-side and making little lunges to warm both tyres and brakes, speculation in the commentary box turned to the strategy game. The Sierras were expected to make their first stops around lap 32, making for a five- or six-stint race, depending on how things developed. The Nissans and Commodores probably wouldn't go much further, but the yellow BMWs were banking on making their first stops around lap 66, aiming to get to the finish in just three stints. Six hours and a thousand kilometres from now, someone would be King of the Mountain for 1992, but who? Would Longhurst pull a rabbit out of the hat with the BMW's unique combination of speed and efficiency? Would it be Johnson, who'd found something extra in his last year with the Ford Sierra? Would the new breed of V8 touring cars prove faster over the distance and hand a surprise win to Seton or Grice? Or would Fred Gibson's Nissans overcome everything the governing body had thrown at them and emerge triumphant anyway, making a double Bathurst champion of the 25-year-old Skaife?

Oh, who were we kidding, it was going to be Godzilla, wasn't it? The only question was by how much...

So It Begins
As they lined up for the start, two-by-two, the weather was already closing in grey and overcast. Despite the warnings however, there was no sense we were about to embark on a grand folly, so when the ten-second horn sounded, forty-six drivers selected first gear and held the clutch, and their breath. Forty-six engines strained at the redline, filling the air with heat haze, and at last, the starter raised the Australian flag and then swiftly flung it downwards. The Great Race of 1992 had begun; fate had decreed that it would have no end.

As usual the GT-Rs shot off the line like an electric shock, but starting behind the front row there was nowhere for them to go, and Skaife remained firmly behind Dick Johnson as the pack snaked its way up Mountain Straight for the first time, still a wondrous sight to see – all colour and intensity and startling speed. The order as they crested the top of the Mountain was the red cars of Johnson, Skaife and Mark Gibbs, followed by the first HRT Commodore of Tomas Mezera, then the blue-and-yellow Walkinshaw Commodore of Larry Perkins, with the white Cenovis Sierra of Klaus Niedzwiedz chasing their tail. 

Johnson pushed hard in his Shell Sierra but couldn't make a break on Godzilla. Skaife closed up across the top of the Mountain and stayed with the little Ford down Conrod, so either Johnson had turned down the boost to make the finish, or Skaife was racing with more power than advertised today (or both). Johnson flashed across the finish line to lead the first lap of the day, but for Mark Skaife it was clear the chase was on, and he was intent on running Johnson down. It took two laps: down under braking into Murray's at the end of the second lap, there was a criss-cross, and then Skaife got a nose up the inside of Johnson and pounded on his expensive water-cooled brake system, emerging onto Pit Straight having relieved the people's hero of the race lead. It was no desperate send, just a businesslike rearrangement of the race order, a move that said simply, "Things will be thus". So already we knew who would be disputing this race today, if there would be any sort of dispute at all: barring pit stops, no other car would lead the Tooheys 1000 today.

While all that had been going on, however, the King of the Mountain had been sitting stock still! Peter Brock had waited for the green with characteristic intensity, popped the clutch on his #05 Mobil VP Commodore and... hadn't moved an inch! Instead of making a sharp getaway, the Holden had instead snapped a tailshaft, leaving it unable to go anywhere under its own power. As the rest of the field headed up the Mountain, Peter had to get a push from the mechanics to get him out of danger before they all came back again!

The marshals managed to get the car back in the pits for repairs, and of course a pitlane reporter was there with a microphone to find out what had happened quick-smart. 

John Brady: Peter, a far from perfect start. You just let the clutch out and crunch?

Peter Brock: Yeah, it's broken a tailshaft. It's a brand new tailshaft put in this morning, which was purely precautionary. And I can say in twelve years racing Commodores, I've never broken one. So it's a rather interesting situation. I'll just thank all the drivers that came up behind me there, gave me enough berth, because boy oh boy, I was looking in that mirror for a while, I can tell you!

He wasn't the only one having trouble. On lap 4, Kevin Waldock brought his #28 Ampol Sierra in for a long stay in the pits; he'd broken a universal joint on the start, and the rigmarole of fitting a new one cost the team four laps. We know this because one of the pit crew that day was John Hewson, then-leader of the Liberal Party and therefore the federal Opposition Leader. It was Hewson who launched the famous "Fightback!" economic policy that featured a GST at its centre – which Good News Week's Paul McDermott later mocked as "Backdown!" when it was withdrawn – a package that would later be taken up by John Howard. He would lead the Liberal Party to defeat in this election cycle, subsequently being ousted as party leader in favour of Alexander Downer and then quitting politics entirely. A fairly bland man according to the memories of those I asked, but still: could you imagine Peter Dutton handling spare tyres for a nobody team at Bathurst? No way, a former policeman like him would be itching to hand out speeding tickets!

Then on lap 8, Colin Bond also came in for an unscheduled stop. His mount was the #8, the brand-new car built just for this race, so to have engine problems this early in the day was more than a little heartbreaking. The mechanics soon began unscrewing the spark plugs so it didn't look like it was going to be a quick fix, but the real culprit turned out to be plummeting oil pressure, which wasn't going to be fixed at all. The team eventually pushed it into the back of the garage and left it there, giving the #8 Caltex Sierra – chassis CXT2 – the dubious distinction of being the least-raced Group A Sierra in history.

These things are never self-contained, however, and on the following lap Mark Gibbs in the GIO GT-R was seen to be using his windscreen wiper – even though it wasn't yet raining. Word from the pits bubbled through that he'd copped a spray of oil from somewhere, and it didn't take a Rachel Riley to put two and two together and conclude it had probably come from Bond. Either way, he was now having trouble seeing and Gibbs rather generously chose to pull over before the Dipper and let Perkins, Mezera, Seton and even Anders Olofsson in the other Nissan flash by – no point holding them up. As he rounded Murray's Corner he took a line down the start/finish straight that took him very close to the pit wall, allowing the Bob Forbes team to throw a bucket of suds over his windscreen. That idea might ring a few bells for long-time fans, but no disaster came of it this time: the windscreen got a wash it badly needed, and the only negative outcome was that a puce-faced official came and told the Bob Forbes Racing crew not to try that stunt again, thankyou very much! In the end, Gibbs pitted on lap 13 to have his windscreen cleaned properly, so the team chose to change the front tyres while they were at it. After a 30-second stop, he was back out on track and no harm done.

Truth was, as the first hour ticked away the pace settled down and everyone found their spaces, as they always did. On lap 20, a businesslike Fred Gibson told the cameras: "The whole thing is what we thought would happen – the pace dropped off very quickly and we're all doing 17's and 18's now. … It's going according to plan so far." From out on track, a comfortably 2nd-placed Dick Johnson likewise told the commentary team: "Car's pretty good. Just sort of cruising at about the pace we want to go. I would've liked to've tried to put a bit more pressure on the Nissan, but that's one of them things. Actually I might give [ARDC boss] John Large a call shortly and see if they want to put another hundred kilos on them at the next stop!"

So if anyone was the mover and shaker in the early laps, it was Win Percy, who passed Larry Perkins on lap 12 and then dispatched Klaus Niedzwiedz in short order as well. After shadowing the German for a lap and a half, Percy pointed his Commodore to the outside on the entry to the Chase, and then bravely held it flat. He arrived in the heaviest braking zone in the country alongside Niedzwiedz completely by surprise, and thus was able to relieve Eggenberger's star driver of 3rd place before he even had the chance to fight back. That left only Dick ahead of him, still in 2nd, with Skaife now far off in the distance (he had a 14-second gap on lap 16).

In truth though, this was not an unusual phenomenon in endurance racing. In the early stages of a long race, the heavy-hitters would all be running with reduced revs, a bit less boost, babysitting the tyres and brakes and whatnot, their focus firmly on the serious business of making it to the end with a package strong enough to take the win. In this environment, those aggressive enough – foolish enough, even – to run absolutely flat-chat could look a lot faster than they actually were. Case in point, Percy, who was driving a new car with no real prospect of winning, in what was really a very public test session for the Holden Racing Team. There was nothing to be learned if nothing on the car broke, so he might as well drive it flat-out and see what happened – he was already lapping in the 2:18 bracket, and pulled out an impressive 2:17.3 on lap 18. Of course, it might have been entirely personal, too – after spending their careers with rival European powerhouses like Eggenberger and TWR, Percy and Niedzwiedz had a long history, and it would've felt pretty good to put one over his old rival. It's not like there'd been many chances to pass an Eggenberger Sierra back when he'd driven a HR31 Skyline, after all... 

The spray on his windscreen however revealed that the promised weather had started to arrive: Channel Nine's chopper cam showed rain approaching from the north-west, and the commentators confirmed light rain had started falling outside their windows. For the legion of Dick Johnson fans parked around the circuit, that was disheartening news. Rain is supposed to be the great equaliser, a chance for great drivers to overcome mediocre cars and get the results their talent deserves. That wouldn't happen today: with their much-despised four-wheel-drive systems, rain would only put the GT-Rs on another level, elevating them from, "more competitive than they really should be", to, "forget it, go home". Right now Skaife was nearly 20 seconds ahead of Johnson, with Johnson a stable 20 seconds ahead of Win Percy. The only hope we had for a competitive race today was if it stayed bone-dry and gave our Dick plenty of traction to make the most of his turbo-boosted rocketship.

But no, the official weather report said to expect heavy rain within the hour, so teams got busy preparing wet-weather tyres for the expected flurry of pit stops. The exception of course was Gibson Motorsport, because, as John Brady told us:

The Nissans are really taking their time over it, because they can stay out without going to the intermediates for a lot longer than anybody else. And if it happens to go wet and go dry, they won't even have to stop and that will just make this a cake walk for them, if the cars stay in one piece.

Persistently Raining
By the time Brady finished that piece to camera, on lap 23, the rain had already started coming down, so at the end of that lap Klaus Niedzwiedz became the first to dive into the pits for wets and a fresh load of fuel. It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out, but it wasn't: as the stop dragged on, Rudi Eggenberger himself jumped into the cockpit to plug in his laptop and check the telemetry, while the mechanics got busy removing the left-front tyre – the one they'd just bolted on, mind – in an attempt to cure... something. The steering rack was loose, so it was soon revealed poor Klaus had broken a tie rod end. The car sat there for at least two-and-a-half minutes while they swapped in a new one, dropping a lap.

While he sat there, Dick Johnson became the next to blink, pitting the #17 and climbing out to put John Bowe behind the wheel instead. The tyres were changed and the fuel topped up in a routine stop for DJR, but for whatever reason, Win Percy instead stayed out on slicks, losing buckets of time in the process. Maybe he needed to hit a certain lap to trigger their strategy, maybe he was banking on a Pace Car intervention to give them a free pit stop, or maybe the team was busy using Brad Jones as a guinea pig for the conditions, changing from slicks to intermediates to full wets in the space of about five minutes, leaving no time to pit their prime car. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to pan out: Percy finally pitted to hand over to Allan Grice on lap 26, coincidentally at the same time as Graham Moore, who handed the Strathfield Car Radios VN over to Wayne Gardner – for his first-ever race stint, at Bathurst, in the wet! 

There were so many tyre stops it was absolute chaos in the pits, and to top it all off, the TV images showed there was a loose rock lying on the track just before The Cutting – which hadn't actually been dug out when anyone crashed, but no-one knew that at the time. Since it was technically off the racing line, it would remain in that spot for a number of hours yet.

The real winner amidst the confusion was Anders Olofsson, who rose from 6th place to 2nd in the #2 Winfield GT-R, simply by staying out when everyone else was pitting. Fred in fact confirmed that there was no intention to pit early even now it was raining – they had 4WD, so they were fine! It emerged Gibson's attitude wasn't bravado, but was purely practical – they were nearing a scheduled stop anyway, and they weren't losing any time, so why not stay out? Skaife ultimately peeled off and brought it into the pits at the end of his 30th lap: wet-weather tyres went on, and they gave it a full load of fuel while the best wet-weather driver in the country strapped himself into the hot seat. After 34 seconds, the car was dropped and Jim Richards was released for his first stint of the day – still in 1st place.

Two laps later it was Olofsson's turn, again on their planned pit window anyway. In a 30-second stop the car was turned over to Neil Crompton, who rejoined in 3rd, prompting John Brady to breathlessly exclaim: "Thirty seconds to get the driver in, change the tyres, on schedule anyway – they don't even know it's raining!" In fact they did know it was raining, because after a couple of laps the stopwatch started sending readings, and it seemed Jim Richards was only doing 2:41s on his rain tyres – 8 seconds slower than Skaife had been on a wet track on slicks, and nearly 24 seconds slower than they'd been going in the dry. But hey, it was the same for everyone. Although the rain was real it was still relatively thin and misty, with a dry line remaining on Mountain Straight or anywhere else the grade levelled out. 

Indeed the thin, misty nature of the rain was part of the problem. Brock had pitted on lap 27 to take on a set of Bridgestone wets, and in the meantime started a trend by having the mechanics wipe the inside of his windscreen, just to remove the layer of condensation that had built up. The sudden drop in temperature when the rain came (to say nothing of the wind chill factor at 290km/h!) meant the steamy interior of a racecar could become chronically foggy, and it would prove a bit of an epidemic today. When Glenn Seton pitted for his scheduled stop on lap 34, he had a mechanic wind down the the passenger-side window to let some condensation out so the windscreen didn't fog so much. Wayne Gardner’s solution a moment later was even more extreme: he had the crew tape a brand-new length of ducting into the car to blow fresh air straight at the screen. In short, windscreen fogging was a real problem today, and it would only be worse if your equipment was malfunctioning. Allan Grice pitted early after just a handful of laps to have his windscreen cleaned, and it ended up being a very long stop, nearly two-and-a-half minutes stationary. It emerged the wiper was playing up, sliding off the edge of the screen, and they couldn't get the spanner in behind the bonnet to tighten whatever needed to be tightened!

Still, it could be worse: Bryan Sala had given his #50 Queensland Plastics Sierra a striking orange-and-yellow livery this year, like they'd sprayed the car with white undercoat and then thrown a couple of buckets of highlighter ink over the top. It was the right scheme for the conditions, but it couldn't help when, on lap 34, Sala hit the wall on the steep climb leading up to The Cutting. A quick read of the situation would tell you that – shades of 1980! – he'd run over the rock and written off his Ford on the unforgiving walls of the Mountain. But in this case your intuition would be wrong: he had a crumpled right-front corner, which was the wrong side to have dislodged the rock, and the replays later showed he'd simply lost the tail in the middle of Griffin's Bend, slid wide and overcorrected into the opposite wall. Sala thus became the second official retirement of the Great Race, and however terminal things were for his car, at least the driver emerged unhurt. The same could be said for the third retirement of the race, the #40 Garry Willmington Performance Walkinshaw, which detonated its engine on lap 29.

For the fourth retirement of the day, however, you could not say that.

How We Lost Hulme
On lap 35, with the race just past the one-hour mark, the broadcast abruptly cut to show a yellow BMW parked up against the wall on the right-hand side of Conrod Straight, just before the kink into the Chase. It was the #20.

The second of the Benson & Hedges BMWs had started from 18th on the grid, embarking on its first stint with 1967 F1 champion Denny Hulme at the wheel. Denny had pitted on lap 25 to be the team guinea pig for wet-weather tyres, rejoining still at the wheel for another stint – one that he would never finish. By lap 33 the rain was getting heavier and Denny radioed the pits on the way through Forrest's Elbow, complaining he couldn't see. Thinking it was due to the rain, the team did nothing. But this was more than just rain: Denny had suffered a heart attack on Conrod Straight, at more than 270km/h.

The replay showed the BMW had got a wheel off the track and clouted the wall on the left-hand side, which either broke its suspension or punctured its tyres, as it left its driver unable to prevent it hobbling back across the track, where it came to rest up against the wall on the right-hand side. Denny's last act as a mortal man was to bring the car to a relatively controlled stop: when the marshals and medical car reached the scene, they found him collapsed over the wheel, and understandably they pushed the panic button to call for a proper ambulance. That automatically triggered the first Pace Car intervention of the race, on lap 36.

Ironically the Pace Car was yet another GT-R, a Black Pearl example with Victorian rego EPX-118, and it was driven today by Graeme Bailey, the Chickadee proprietor who'd co-driven to that stunning privateer victory with Allan Grice back in 1986. He didn't wait to pick up race leader Richards, immediately backing the field up into a queue of subdued revs and hesitent drivers, leading them slowly around and around the Mountain. The whole grid – Jim Richards among them – was forced to drive slowly past the accident site over and over again, getting a good look as one of those old Ford F150-based ambulances pulled up, did its grim work and then drove away with Denny in the back.

In hushed tones the commentary team struggled to understand how such a minor accident could require such massive medical intervention. There was speculation about spinal injuries, as Doug Mulray had noted they'd put a neck brace on him and pointed to the lack of lateral neck support in the cars those days, suggesting maybe he'd suffered some sort of whiplash when he hit the wall. It would take a couple of hours for the truth to come out: not until he'd been extracted and driven straight to Bathurst Hospital (no stop at the circuit medical centre) that the doctors confirmed it had been a heart attack. A life in racing had come to its bittersweet end: New Zealand Gold Star champion for 1961; Can-Am sports car champion in 1968 and 1970; and of course, Formula 1 World Champion in 1967, driving for our own Jack Brabham. He'd also done the rather unlauded job of carrying the McLaren team through its darkest years, bridging the gap between the death of founder Bruce McLaren in testing at Goodwood, and its takeover (and emergence to championship contention) under Teddy Mayer. Denny Hulme had survived the most dangerous era of motor racing worldwide, so it was with horrible irony that he'd become the first World Champion ever to die of natural causes* – and it had still come at the wheel of a racing car.

Haere rā, mate.

Haven't the Foggiest
Somewhat appropriately, the line of cars behind the black GT-R rather resembled a funeral procession, but in touring cars as in Formula 1 the race always goes on: Denny would not have wished it otherwise. The scoreboard showed Jim Richards leading, John Bowe chasing, Neil Crompton in 3rd, Johnny Cecotto 4th and a very concerned Tony Longhurst on standby to take over, even as he wondered what on earth had happened to his teammate. Allan Grice was in 5th and a lap down after that long stop to fix the truculent wiper, so the Pace Car intervention had actually been quite fortunate for him. 

As it had for the Gemspares team, for that matter. On lap 30, the #26 Gemspares Walky had parked at one of the driveways on Mountain Straight, its driver alighting for a brisk jog back to the pits. In a repeat of Sandown, however, the Pace Car period allowed them to get a tow back to the garage, where the car was repaired and able to rejoin. At the accident site, meanwhile, the rescue crew packed up and waited for the field to file by before getting the recovery vehicle to tow the now-useless BMW away.

The question now was how long the Pace Car should stay out. The rain didn't seem to be getting any heavier, but the clouds were getting lower and lower, and conditions were taking a turn for the worse... or briefly so, at least. In the ten minutes or so it took the Pace Car to peel off a handful of laps, the low cloud band that had been making visibility so difficult departed again and the race brightened, even if it didn't dry out. That was enough for Race Control, who turned the lights out on the Pace Car on lap 42, indicating they were about to go back to green.

There was another memorable quote from Jean-Pierre Sarti during Grand Prix, and that was when he said, "Whenever I see something really horrible, I put my foot down, hard – because I know everyone else will be lifting his." A quarter-century on we saw that champions still drove like that, because when they waved the green at the start of lap 43, Jim Richards flattened it and simply sprinted off into the distance. Never mind showcasing the advantage of 4WD in the wet, Richards had just seen one of his oldest friends carried away in an ambulance, and for all he knew the cause had been a racing accident, something that could also befall him. For any sensible person that would be an excuse to take it easy for a while, but these were a different breed: Richards put his foot down and pulled out a couple of hundred metres before Hell Corner alone. By the time the rest were back to racing speed, he had vanished up Mountain Straight, disappearing into his own spray. Remarkable.

For the rest, it wasn't such smooth sailing. A lap after the green, Steve Harrington crawled into pit lane with an electrical problem, as the Perkins team went to work on the battery in the boot. Then on lap 50, Brad Jones brought in the #15 HRT Commodore with a blown fuse, and – no luck at all if not for bad luck! – it was the fuse for the windscreen wiper. But the worst for this kind of problem was Charlie O'Brien in the #9 Cenovis Sierra, who came in for yet another pit stop right behind Jones, this time so the Moffat mechanics could pop the rear hatch (where the battery was located) and spray some hydrophobic agent on the leads. Basically, the humdidity was so high today that water was condensing on the wires and shorting out the electrics. Asked about his troubles, Moffat was only too happy to run his mouth for the cameras:

Allan Moffat: Well the very first one, all throughout practice Charlie never locked up one brake, then three laps into the race he got a flat spot [that] cost him his tyres, so that set him back rather nastily. Klaus burned up a set of rain tyres. Charlie stayed out for a long time on dry tyres trying to out-guess the weather, finally had to succumb to the wet tyres. And has just come in – prematurely as far as the fuel is concerned, because every time we stop, we fill it up with the juice – and complaining about a misfire. There's so much water on the track, we may have got something into our motronics. We've changed the spark plugs, splashed our CRC 5-56 all over everything in the engine bay, and tried to – keep laughing mate, it's a great product!

From their warm, dry perch in the commentary box, the broadcast team were indeed having a laugh, but it was appreciation for Moffat's gamesmanship rather than mockery. "He's always looked after his sponsors, Mr Moffat!" said Doug Mulray, unfortunately drowning out what Allan said in the meantime.

Moffat: Klaus is doing a great job, a bit too aggressive for my liking, from what I can see of him coming onto pit straight. But he's a professional driver and their orders are to bring them home alive.

Mike Raymond: Yes I was going to say, it's early days yet, but can you remember a topsy-turvy 1,000 like this?

Moffat: Well, only when I was behind the wheel myself, Mike. Peter Brock and I had a hell of an up-and-down in 1972 and the track got the better of me and Peter went on to win in his XU-1. But no, in the last ten, fifteen years we haven't seen anything as nasty as this.

It was worth pointing out the team's #10 car was now two laps down on the leaders, so if Klaus was being aggressive it was for a reason. The #9 meanwhile was just touring, the misfire still not cured, co-driver Gary Brabham (ironically in his Nissan-branded IMSA race suit) back to the pits a lap later but was immediately told to keep going, as Klaus was inbound and they didn't want to stack. Looking further afield, it was noted that Mark Gibbs suddenly had the passenger-side door of his GIO Nissan stoved in, having been caught up in in a messy three-way accident that crumpled Wayne Park's right-front corner and John Bowe's left-rear. "Well, there was a wall of spray," was Bowe's recollection later, "and as I got there it was Gibbsy. I jinked left and missed him, thank god, and as I did someone hit me up the backside. I don't even know who it was." Both Fords came in to have their respective teams strip the broken bits away and tape down whatever was left, but Gibbs elected to carry on, promoting Johnny Cecotto in the lone Longhurst BMW from 4th to 3rd. Only Cecotto and Niedzwiedz were currently racing – the rest were just trying to survive.

Even the King of the Mountain wasn't finding it a very comfortable throne today. Peter Brock might have mastered these conditions in 1972, but twenty years on was another day and, on lap 53, he was seen in a tangle with Allan Grice at Forrest's Elbow. Worse, in his haste to rejoin Grice misjudged how far he needed to reverse out, meaning he tore Brock's fibreglass front splitter off on the way past. And just to punctuate the incident, Klaus Niedzwiedz arrived on the scene at full noise in a deliberate drift – he was not intimidated by the Mountain, even in the wet, and was still milking that Sierra hard!

Peter initially continued without pitting, apparently unaware the front bumper was about to part company with the car. You could hardly blame him if he couldn't see that, however, as it was unlikely he could see anything through an opaque, completely fogged-up windscreen. Two laps later Brock was given the inevitable mechanical black flag, although he claimed not to see it himself – he pitted because his pit crew called him in on the radio. While the mechanics reattached the splitter, they also gave 05 a fresh load of fuel and a driver change, meaning Manuel Reuter now hopped in for his first stint on the Mountain.

Now out of the car, however, Peter was able to explain to Richard Hay what had happened.

Brock: I think that Allan Grice... I should have a word to him, he might be elected to parliament but he's not elected the most popular driver on the racing track, I can tell you. There was a train of cars with I think Brad Jones at the front, Larry Perkins and myself, all trying to get by Brad Jones. And Grice came along and tapped me going into the corner. Spun me around. And then to make matters worse – to add insult to injury – he put it in first gear and ground my spoiler off!

Hay: It's been a pretty awful weekend for you so far, conditions aren't helping either?

Brock: No, but I've been in those situations. You drive with some grey matter.

Reuter rejoined roughly a lap down, while Brock went off to discuss the incident with HRT manager Wally Storey; no shouting match, but clearly angry and with a stern finger in Storey's chest. Not something you often saw from the even-tempered Brock, and doubly amusing given he'd be driving for this team within 18 months...

Meanwhile, the sky was darkening again as the fog returned. At this moment, only Richards, Crompton, Cecotto and Bowe were still on the lead lap – a solid effort for Cecotto, and an absolutely Homeric feat for Johnson and Bowe, who had the worst possible car for the conditions. Sure, in its final year the RS500 had become a tad more driveable: CAMS imposing a 7,500rpm rev limit had handily removed one variable from their tuning problem, leaving them free to maximise torque across that rev range; and of course, the Stone Brothers had come on board to get the cars handling properly. Even so, in conditions like this they were a nightmare – not even the Stones had the stones to tame an engine that added 300 kW between 4,000 and 5,000rpm!

Basically, it was dreadful. The whole car was hugely under-tyred for the amount of power it had, so every time it got on boost the whole thing would just burst into wheelspin. So what you had to do was drive it so that as it touched boost you instantly changed gears. And because it'd break traction the instant it hit boost, the fact that it didn't have much power off-boost was a godsend. ...

Inside the car, because the thing had an absolutely massive turbo, the floor of the car used to get massively hot. In fact, it used to get so hot I actually burnt my foot several times on the floor.

And because of the heat, when it rained it caused huge problems. When water leaked into the car the whole cabin would steam up. The windscreen in particular went instantly foggy. So at Bathurst I remember having to go up Mountain Straight, loosen off my belts and use a hanky that I'd jammed between my legs to wipe a little hole in the windscreen. I'd have to do that every lap. It's about the only time in my career that I've thought, "What am I doing here?!" – John Bowe, AMC #77

That thought probably didn't go away when, on lap 58, we had the accident everyone had been dreading. The worst kind of shunt to have at Bathurst was always to rear-end a slower car on Conrod, where speeds were at their highest and the walls were close and eager to claim you. With half a dozen Corollas on track, and visibility compromised by spray and deepening fog, everyone had this one at the back of their mind, but thankfully this worst-case scenario didn't quite come to pass. Instead, the #7 Caltex Sierra of Bosnjak – which was four laps down on the leaders – had unexpectedly caught up to the #29 Marathon Foods Walkinshaw, which was nine laps behind the leaders – and rammed it from behind. The big Holden was further down the order even than some of the 1,600cc cars, but given this was a privateer entry, it was entirely possible they didn't have any wet-weather tyres and were having to tip-toe around on slicks. Either way, Bosnjak simply hadn't seen the black rear end of the Walky in its own spray, and so hadn't realised there was a car in front of him until it was too late. At the last second he tried to jink, but there was no time left and he ploughed into the back of the Commodore at close to top speed, and from there they both pinballed into the walls. Both cars were now scrap, but to everyone's immense relief, both drivers emerged completely unharmed.

So the Pace Car was deployed again, which gave the race a bit of intrigue at last – the leading Nissan was due for a pit stop, so they team would have to get it done lightning-quick if they wanted to feed back out before the Pace Car closed pit lane and they lost a lap. Sure, the #1 was fast enough that there was every chance they could get that lost lap back... but did they really want to have to push it that hard, in these conditions?

As it developed, all three leaders pitted on lap 60 – Richards, Crompton and Cecotto. Crompo climbed out to hand the #2 Nissan back to Olofsson, Richards returned the #1 to Mark Skaife, while Longhurst took over the #25 for his sole stint behind the wheel today. As with everyone else, the Longhurst team spent a good long while in the pits seeing to windscreen, and the time taken proved crucial, as the #18 Shell Sierra came in while he was sitting still and – because the #17 was in the pits already taking service – it had to stack, just sitting there blocking the pit lane! Tony managed to box around it with a three-point turn, but it delayed his run not insignificantly, and it couldn't have helped his blood pressure much.

In truth, the steamed-up windscreens were getting beyond a joke, with Glenn Seton admitting he'd actually been looking out the side window of his Falcon to see where the white lines were – which the commentators summed up as, "Motor racing by Braille." From pit lane, John Brady gave us a quick rundown of the teams' solutions:

The common problem here is keeping the windscreens clean and un-demisted [sic], there's been some amazing tricks tried. The Glenn Seton Ford's been using Coca-Cola on the premise that the water might at least stick to the sticky surface and drip, whereas Brocky earlier was using half-cut apples on the inside in the hope he'd get it slippery and the fog wouldn't stick.

The apple was weird enough that it required an explanation, so Brock was confronted by another Channel Nine pit reporter, Bruce McAvaney:

My father told me a story about an old T-Model or something he had, with an apple, so I thought I'll try the apple. Then we went back to the high-tech stuff, and the only thing that worked with me was I got one of those windshield cleaning devices you see down the service station, and stuck it down there beside the seat. I dragged it out and sloshed the windscreen coming down Conrod Straight.

That reminded Yours Truly here of Bathurst only a couple of years ago, when Jamie Whincup was storming down Conrod in the rain while busy cleaning his windscreen with a squeegee... and then taking his other hand off the wheel to shift up. I don't know why that little moment isn't on YouTube, because it really needs to be, but in that case Triple Eight had been careful to magnetise the squeegee so it wouldn't rattle around the cockpit, and cleared the whole device with the officials before the race even began. On that note, McAvaney immediately spotted the problem with what Peter had done, asking: "I wonder if that's legal or illegal, Brocky..." But Peter, being Peter, cheerfully replied, "It'll be illegal! But I'll tell you what, I watched that bloke in the Sierra bash into the Commodore and I thought, 'Illegal or not illegal, at least I can see!'"

Bowe meanwhile had come in for a scheduled stop under the Pace Car, meaning he was also available for an interview while Dick headed back out to keep circulating. So while the leaders slowly completed their 62nd lap – it was once more getting very dark out there – Bowe reminisced to Brady on the stint he'd just finished, during which it had rained so heavily that his wiper had utterly demolished the "Tasmania Holiday Isle" sticker on the windscreen!

John Brady: One bloke very happy to be out of the rain, John Bowe. How was it out there?

John Bowe: It's a hell of a way to make a living, isn't it? It's atrocious. Honestly, in all my years of motor racing, it's the worst conditions I've ever seen.

Brady: Even as a Tasmanian?

Bowe: Even as a Tasmanian. We don't get rain that heavy down there.

Brady: The demisting problem, everyone's having troubles seeing out of the cars. Obviously the altitude up and down the Mountain's just making it a nightmare, as well as the heat?

Bowe: Well, y'know, I guess we didn't see the rain coming before the race, and the inside of the screen misted up really badly, and you just couldn't see. I got my hanky out of my pocket at one stage and gave it a wipe, but it's not the answer. Now we've demisted it and put the other window down it might be a little better, anyway. You drive into a wall of spray, and that's why there's all these accidents. You just can't see.

By lap 63 the rain was really belting down, so heavy that Tomas Mezera's wiper actually broke loose from its mounting trying to clear it. The Mountain was now completely invisible, sequestered behind a wall of grey cloud. Surely it was time to discuss a red flag? Nope, instead the rain thinned again over the following lap, and although the track was still soaked, visibility cleared significantly. Race director Tim Schenken explained his reasoning to John Brady:

Tim Schenken: We've just had a weather report from Orange, where the weather is coming from, and the advice is this weather passed through half an hour ago and it is lifting as you can see when you look out now, it's much lighter. We're going to keep the Pace Car out until the circuit's what we would call raceable – it'll still be very wet, but of course we've still got a lot of streams running across the road. And once that is cleared up we'll restart the race.

John Brady: The fog as well must have been a worry, made you pull the Pace Car out in the first place?

Schenken: Yes. It's very important that the flag points can see from one to the other, and in those conditions when that visibility isn't there, then we put the Pace Car out.

Brady: How bad does it have to get before you think about calling it off?

Schenken: Well the Pace Car can go as slowly as you like. I don't want to stop the race, and I don't want to call the race off. So we will just live with the Pace Car, and worry about the weather while that car's out. Once the weather starts to lift, we'll be out.

By lap 66 the rain had basically stopped, so visibility was no longer really a problem, but there was still a huge amount of standing water on the track, especially down at the bottom around Hell Corner. The crowd on the hill were shouting that the Pace Car should bugger off, so to speed things along track staff dressed in Dryzabones, Akubras and gumboots (they are wonderful, they are swell...) came out to dig drainage ditches and help clear the water.

The river at Hell Corner. Would that make it the Styx, then?

And indeed, by the start of the next lap, the lights were out on the Pace Car to indicate that the race was ready to resume. On lap 68 the field was led across the start line once more, ironically, by one of the 1,600cc Toyotas – class cars and lapped traffic had all got bunched up behind the Pace Car like driftwood. But we were finally back to green, and as the race resumed some late-braking from Manuel Reuter got 05 into Hell Corner ahead of the slower traffic – he was way down in 34th, so even in these conditions there was little to lose and much to be gained by taking risks. 

Leading the actual race however was still Mark Skaife aboard the #1 GT-R. On lap 69 he broke free of the pack and within a lap was again circulating like a metronome; the body language of the car didn't even look all that different in the wet. There wasn't much chase from Olofsson in the sister car, and while Dick Johnson on the other hand was chasing hard, the turbo Sierra just couldn't find the traction to be any real threat. Longhurst was still in with a chance, but the #25 BMW had dropped down to 4th in the process of putting him in the car, while 5th was the faithful Gibbs/Onslow pairing aboard the GIO Godzilla. These were the only cars still on the lead lap.

They were battered, they were bruised, they were tired and, although they would never admit it, they were more than likely a little bit scared. But with only 70 laps completed, they were barely halfway home. To be concluded...

*To confirm: Farina and Hawthorn had both died in road accidents; Ascari had been killed testing a sports car at Monza; Clark and Rindt had both died in racing incidents; and Graham Hill lost his life in a plane crash in 1975. All the rest were still alive.