Once again it was all-aboard the MS Abel Tasman for the voyage to Tasmania, destination Symmons Plains Raceway. As they occasionally see fit to do, the gods of YouTube have blessed us with not one but two videos of Round 3 of the Shell Australian Touring Car Championship. I've embedded the shorter version, but national treasure Super100MPH has the full live broadcast (including all the support races), if that's your jam and you have a couple of hours to kill. There are even some wonderfully "period" ads featuring Telecom (not yet Telstra) spruiking these new devices that look like a brick with an antenna, which they called "mobile telephones" – one wonders if they ever caught on...
Shell Australian Touring Car Championship: Heat 1
As usual, the logistical challenge of getting to the Apple Isle reduced the grid to the real hard nuts: Dick Johnson Racing, Gibson Motorsport, Glenn Seton Racing and Advantage Racing (i.e. Team Brock) each brought two cars to the round, with Tony Longhurst Racing once again bringing all three of their BMW M3s. Bob Forbes Racing fulfilled their usual function of being the third works Nissan, while Colin Bond also made the trip with his Caltex Sierra. But there was no Holden Racing Team, no Lansvale Smash Repairs, no Larry Perkins and no Terry Finnigan, leaving us rather short of Holdens this time around. That left us with a contracted fourteen-car grid, with the fourteenth and last being local man Stephen Bell in a Mitsubishi Starion.
These one-weekend hopefuls always seem to be my white whale: Stephen Bell was (and still is, as far as I can tell) a motor mechanic based in St Invermay, Tasmania, specialising in classic and high-performance cars. His mount for Symmons Plains was the aforementioned JA Starion owned by Scotty Taylor Racing, and although there are some gaps in the car's providence, it seems to've been a converted Group E Production machine, which first raced in Group A with Brian Sampson in 1985. It's difficult to get a clear view of it in the video, but here's the car in the modern age.
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| Although for Symmons '92 it wore the racing #60 (source). |
It's remarkable that a car from the first year of Group A in Australia would still be entering races in the last, but unfortunately for Bell, it rather illustrated how far we'd come in the last seven years. On Saturday afternoon, John Bowe had qualified on provisional pole with a lap of 55.69 (nice). By contrast Bell, in an '85-vintage Starion that had never been a rocket in Group A trim to begin with, qualified dead last with a time of 1:03.66 – thank you, tides of fortune, for putting him 10th on the grid for Heat 2 and giving us that little tidbit! Understandably, he was due to be lapped in both heats.
So the top six for the Peter Jackson Dash were Bowe, Johnson, Bond, Seton, Seton's sidekick Wayne Park, and Mark Gibbs, the only one not driving a Sierra. As noted above, Bowe had been fastest in actual qualifying, but for the Dash he drew 6th and last: stuck behind the other five, there was little he could do in just three laps, leaving the Dash to be disputed between Dick Johnson and his young nemesis, Glenn Seton. Seton had drawn P1 but couldn't hang on to it, a determined Johnson fighting his way through to the lead and securing pole position for the main event. Dick had every reason to be aggressive today: Dunlop had brought an experimental new tyre compound they called M3 (confusingly), and only DJR were allowed to use them. So first order of business had been earning the cheque for pole, but Johnson had also come away with a rear bumper hanging loose after taking a hit up the bum off the start (which I only realised from this very round had a rolling and not a standing start). That loose bumper had then been dislodged when he tagged Seton while passing for the win: they raced for keeps, these lads...
Andy Raymond: Well, John Bowe: quickest again in pre-qualifying, but you're not starting off position number one?
John Bowe: Well, that's the rules for everybody. If you're in the top six, you draw for position, and in my normal run of luck I drew six. But I've just managed to get back up to 3rd, so it's a fifty-percent step, isn't it?
Raymond: And pole position, in fact, teammate Dick Johnson. You must be very happy with that, Dick?
Dick Johnson: Well, certainly. After the start, I had my left foot on the brake, and it was in second gear, and then the thing all of a sudden got all its horsepower at once, and I thought it was going to do a right turn into the fence there for a minute. But I sort of gathered it up, and got a bit of a hit up the backside down the other end there, which didn't really upset us that much.
The question on everyone's mind was, where were Fred Gibson's Nissans? Skaife and Richards had qualified well down the order, 8th and 10th respectively (although sources differ), and the feeling around the paddock was they just had to be sandbagging. Guest commentator Allan Moffat suggested they'd deliberately avoided the Dash to preserve their tyres – remember that the rules mandated on Saturday you nominated a set of tyres, then you qualified, raced in the Dash (if applicable) and then completed both heats on Sunday on that same set of tyres. That was a big ask for a single set of racing rubber, so Moffat wasn't wrong in thinking tyre life was on everyone's mind when they got to a meeting. Indeed, in qualifying both the Gibson drivers had emerged from the pits, done just a single warm-up lap and then banged in two quick laps before parking again, which seemed to bear the tyre life theory out. But the drivers themselves insisted they were driving absolutely flat-chat, and this was the best they could manage: 8th and 10th were true reflections of the GT-R's current pace over a single lap. Like Sandown, Symmons was a power circuit whose two long stretches gave the Fords entirely too much room to breathe, and the GT-R was still struggling to make any power against the boost restrictions imposed by CAMS. In-car shots over the course of the race would reveal the GT-R drivers were short-shifting, the lusty straight-six refusing to rev the way it had in '91, hinting that maybe the Gibson technicians had begun to retune the beast to suit the new regulations.
Not that the Fords were having it all their own way. Colin Bond had arrived in Tasmania with an updated engine management system, having traced a long-standing overheating problem to a bug in the software. With that fixed he'd shown a new turn of speed, setting quick times in practice and then making the Dash on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, he'd then snapped a conrod in the Dash itself, and his smaller crew of mechanics couldn't replicate DJR's feat at Sandown and replace it in the hour before the first heat started. That left him unable to take his place on the grid for Heat 1.
At the green, the whole pack bolted away and started making lap time... all except poor Stephen Bell, who was immediately left behind. The whole field moved off down to the Hairpin in one giant mass, except his Starion, which was left running to catch up like something from a cartoon. He was barely any quicker than the following medical car.
That the Seton team had apparently done plenty of testing here at Symmons was borne out when Glenn swept into an immediate and commanding lead. The young Ford driver won the opening drag to the hairpin (despite the best efforts of Gibbs in his GIO Nissan), and set off on a dominant race despite the DJR cars crowding his mirrors. It was clear from the early laps however that there was not a lot of sliding going on – everyone had taken the lesson of Sandown to heart, and they were driving very conservatively to preserve their tyres lest they pay the price later in the day. The order in the opening phase was Seton, then Johnson and Bowe stringing along together, followed by Mark Gibbs a little way back, then Peter Brock in the white Commodore, the best of the rest. Skaife and Richards were buried way back in the pack.
On lap 9 we got our first retirement of the race, as Wayne Park headed for the pits and, well, parked. The Seton mechanics lifted the bonnet to see his prospects and immediately started swearing and gesticulating at each other, so it must've looked bad. Park remained in his seat just in case, but the car remained stationary for the rest of the heat, eventually chalking up a DNF. It was cruel luck for the 28-year-old Queenslander, who'd disgraced himself neither with his speed nor with his racecraft in his brief career in a top-tier Sierra, but who'd nevertheless had two engine failures in as many rounds.
By the heat's middle stage, Tony Longhurst of all people had managed to creep up on the back of Jim Richards – a BMW outpacing Godzilla, here at a power circuit? What on earth was going on? Sure enough, Tony got past and began to leave Richo behind, just as Skaife finally made a pass on Brock along the back stretch – Brock's Advantage Racing mechanics revealed to Andy Raymond that Peter was running out of brakes and they were standing by for a pit stop if he needed one. Illustrating the point, at Turn 6 – the left-hander before the start/finish line – Brock had a massive lock-up and overshot the corner, landing in the dirt. He waded through and and rejoined behind Longhurst, who'd nipped through in the meantime, but it was wild to see Brocky of all people making such an error.
On lap 12, John Bowe got a run on Johnson and inverted their positions under brakes for Turn 3, showing once again Bowe was the man to watch in these early rounds of the championship. Unfortunately, only a handful of laps later Bowey was abruptly flung sideways into the Hairpin. What happened, happened off-camera (barely), but it was clear the back end had let go with such savage suddenness it could only be an engine failure. It was unlikely a driver like Bowey had over-revved it on a downshift, so the more likely culprit was that the engine had just had enough. Ever the professional, Bowe trickled the car backwards out of the way, doing his best to get the stricken Sierra off the racing line and out of everyone's way, but he left a horrible snail trail of oil before him as he rolled out of the corner. This was a definitive DNF for Bowey, which would require another engine change if he wanted to participate in Heat 2.
After 25 laps, Glenn Seton took the win roughly 3.7 seconds ahead of Johnson – smaller than the gap could've been, but more than enough to get the job done. 3rd was Mark Skaife, then Tony Longhurst (impressive!), then Richards, who'd taken the place off Mark Gibbs by politely flashing his lights and then waiting for Gibbs move over. Knowing his place, Gibbs had let Richo through, though he'd quietly demonstrated his ability to take the place back again if he'd wanted to – even the most courteous and professional of racing drivers have an ego to protect. It had to be admitted, however, that everyone but Seton had benefited from the demise of Bowe, Brock and Wayne Park earlier in the race.
It had been a worthy first heat for Seton, but the real business of the day was yet to come, as they tyres had not yet begun to reach their limits. In the meantime...
Shell Oils Superbike Championship
Ironically, the first of the support categories – the Shell Oil Superbikes – then had to head out onto a track freshly coated with John Bowe's Shell oil! The Tasmanians had sprinkled some cement dust to soak it up, but avoiding that line through the Hairpin would still be a key part of the day's proceedings. In the meantime, you could just about make a drinking game out of all the tobacco liveries on display this weekend. We'd just finished watching the Winfield Nissans battling with the Peter Jackson Sierras; now the pattern repeated, with the Winfield-backed Honda RC30s set to do battle with the Peter Jackson-sponsored works Yamaha FZR750Rs.
Thankfully, the monotony was broken by a third colour – Kawasaki green. The only reason you can't say both heats were won at a canter by Mat Mladin was because, by his own admission, he always raced at one-hundred-and-ten percent. In both heats Mladin simply streaked away from the rest, leaving Scott Doohan (older brother of Mick) to pitch his Yamaha against Tasmanian rider Malcolm Campbell on the Honda, and James Knight on the second Kawasaki. Both heats were lively affairs when the Kawasakis were better under acceleration but the Hondas were amazing under brakes, but it seemed nobody could live with Mat Mladin this year.
Motorcraft Formula Ford Driver To Europe Series
There were some very familiar names on the Formula Ford grid: John Blanchard (not to be confused with Jonathan Blanchard, the famous abolitionist and namesake of Orlando Bloom), Cameron McConville, Steven Richards (son of Jim), and the son of former HDT mechanic Frank Lowndes was driving a seven-year-old Van Diemen RF85, if you looked somewhere near the back. Craig Lowndes, Cameron McConville, Steven Richards and the rest were competing not just for the prestige of a championship win, but for a new prize organised between Shell and Auto Action magazine, whereby the winner of the Formula Ford series would get a test with Ford's flagship touring car team – Dick Johnson Racing. The race was won (in classic Formula Ford fashion, on the very last lap) by Blanchard in the Palm Air Swift SC92F, after a race-long duel with Michael Dutton in another Swift (again, sponsored by Winfield – bottoms up!). Lowndes, however, had an altercation at the Hairpin and ended up having to do a three-point turn in the dust. Clearly he still had much to learn...
Tooheys Australian Drivers Championship
But if open-wheel racing was what you were here for, this was the main event. Having just hopped out of his GT-R, Mark Skaife had just enough time for a quick drink and a towel-off before starting from pole position for the Formula Brabham race, with a time of 51.41 seconds. There were no problems with his clutch this time – at the green he simply motored off into the distance, aided by his closest competition nudging each other out of the race at the Hairpin. The Skaife Show was briefly interrupted when he came in to serve a stop-go penalty for jumping the start, but such was his dominance that he rejoined virtually side-by-side with Mark Larkham, driving an ex-Eric van der Poele Ralt formerly run in Formula 3000 by Eddie Jordan.
There was some scene incest here, as Skaife's SPA 001, the only purpose-built Formula Holden car in the world, had been penned by Jordan's designer Garry Anderson and built at Lichfield in the U.K. And no disrespect to Skaifey, but it was clearly the better tool for the job. Larko's time in the lead lasted almost exactly half a lap, as Skaife drafted past on the back curve to regain 1st place. From there he was never threatened again, and clinched the second round of the Australian Drivers Championship with apparent ease.
Shell Australian Touring Car Championship: Heat 2
Finally, the programme rounded out with the tourers returning for their second heat, for which there were thirteen lucky starters. After blowing his engine in Heat 1, John Bowe was unable to make the grid – not because the DJR mechanics were unable to fit a new engine in time, but because the spare had already been claimed by Dick, who felt his own donk had been ailing. The team only had one backup, so Bowe was left to warm the bench and keep the pit crew company this time around.
Peter Brock wasn't on the grid either, although he did start the race. He'd incurred a 10-second penalty – most likely for changing his tyres as a precaution after flat-spotting them in Heat 1 – which would mean starting from pit lane, to be released ten seconds after the rest of the field was flagged away. He'd drive his heart out, of course, but those ten seconds would be more than he could make up with a misbehaving brake pedal, Allan Moffat speculating that teammate Neil Crompton had made a good choice of brake pads where Peter had chosen poorly. On the upside, Colin Bond had made the grid this time, having completed his engine change following the morning's Dash For Cash. He was sharing the back of the grid with Wayne Park, whose ride had also been resurrected following his engine dramas in the first heat.
Once again, when the green flag waved Seton got away smartly, with Johnson trailing by only a few car lengths and the rest of the pack getting in each other's way not far behind. But within two laps it was clear Johnson couldn't keep this up, and far from pressuring Seton for the win, he swiftly fell back into the clutches of Mark Skaife. As was now well understood, the GT-R would spring out of the Hairpin like a startled hare, but couldn't maintain the edge beyond a couple of seconds as the shortage of kilowatts enacted its penalty, leaving Johnson ahead for the moment – just.
Smelling blood, Skaife started pushing hard, throwing the car around like a go-kart rather than the big heavy Nissan that it was. After a few laps of frustration he finally claimed the place with a brave out-braking manoeuvre around the outside of the Hairpin, relegating Johnson to 2nd place. That left Seton with a 3-second lead and Johnson with a headache, because behind him was Neil Crompton in the Mobil Commodore, a car running on Bridgestones just like Seton.
Behind Crompton however, was the real man to watch: Colin Bond, who'd not competed in Heat 1 and so had no tyre wear issues to worry about. Bond went very deep into the Hairpin – again, around the outside, the car squirming under hard braking – to run alongside Johnson through the tight left-hander at the end of the circuit. That let Crompton snuggle in behind Johnson on the inside, which should've left Bond high-and-dry on the following straight... except that he ruthlessly barged Crompo out of the way, emerging from behind Dick to take the place! Who was this bloke, and what had he done with the famously affable Colin Bond?!
That Dick was now holding everyone up was borne out a lap later, when Neil gave him a hard shove from behind into the Hairpin – probably not a deliberate bump-n-run, just caught out at how early Johnson was braking. As fragments of white fibreglass and headlight fluttered away, Johnson limped wide and let Neil through for the place, followed through by Wayne Park in the Sierra and Tony Longhurst in the BMW (with Park shortly overpowering Crompton in turn – not finishing Heat 1 was definitely one way to maximise Heat 2).
Bond out-braked Skaife at the end of the backstretch to take 2nd place, and then set off after the race leader. Shortly thereafter Crompton found himself being leaned on by Longhurst, who even flashed his headlights as if he was getting annoyed. But if he thought the Holden driver had resorted to dirty tricks, no-one else saw it: more likely it was just mind games. After several intense laps Tony slipped up the inside of Crompo at the Hairpin, pushing him wide on the way through just to make the point. Crompton had put up a good fight, but the big Holden's tyres were done.
By contrast, Glenn Seton's Bridgestones still seemed to be fine, but he had a charging Bond on his tail and still some laps to go: this could still go either way. Dick Johnson however had to suffer the indignity of first Jim Richards, then a lap later Mark Gibbs and finally Alan Jones all swamped him in a short space of time, dropping him well down the ranks. Those Dunlop M3 tyres weren't able to hold off an actual M3...
By the twentieth and final lap Bond had worn Seton's lead down to 2 seconds, but it wasn't enough. Seton had spent the whole day out front avoiding the tyre-damaging battles, so his Bridgestones had just enough life in them to last the full distance. Seton crossed the finish line with Bond in sight but nevertheless firmly behind, with Skaife a similar distance back in 3rd place. Wayne Park earned some redemption after a shocking couple of rounds by finishing 4th, with 5th place going to Jim Richards after taking some places late in the day – the tyre-saving 4WD system of the Nissan was still paying dividends, even if the margins were much slimmer than last year.
In fact, these days the Nissan boys were basically in the same boat as BMW, praying for short tracks (or rain) where their zip and power-down could make a difference against the brute horsepower of the Fords. The new regulations had hit the Nissans rather hard, hadn't they?
Mark Skaife: Oh they have, but the second race was a good race. At this sort of circuit we knew the cars wouldn't be quite competitive enough, and I think it was a good result for us really.
Added Dick Johnson: "We had a few engine problems, and also the tyres really never really came back on after that first heat so we were in trouble right from the start. Everything passed me, I suppose – everything except a kidney stone!"
Indeed, the second heat had been rather entertaining, with lots of door-to-door action to showcase how the two-heat format could combine with the existing tyre rules to mix up the result. That said, for the second time in two rounds we'd seen a Sierra driver make the weekend all his own, Glenn Seton cleaning up both heats to take a well-deserved round win. That put him third on the championship ladder overall, with 66 points – well within striking distance of Jim Richards on 72, and championship leader Mark Skaife, on 84. But everyone was very aware that the next round would be at Winton, where the Sierras would struggle to build up a full head of steam, and short bursts of acceleration would be the ticket to victory...
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