The second round of the 1992 Shell Australian Touring Car Championship continued the theme established in the first – the Nissan GT-Rs struggling against a revitalised Ford Sierra, with interference from Holden and BMW. History records that John Bowe took a clean sweep in the second round here at Sandown, but as usual the books are oversimplifying. Watching the actual races reveals it was neither easy nor inevitable for Bowey, and that even at the Home of Horsepower, simple horsepower wasn't everything.
Off With a Prang: Formula Brabham
The event was boosted by a clutch of support categories (including the Shell Oil Superbike Championship and Group E Production Cars), but the only one on YouTube was the Tooheys Australian Drivers' Championship, aka. Formula Holden, which this year had been renamed Formula Brabham, because... sure, why not? Mark Skaife was the reigning champion in the Winfield SPA 001, but here in Round 1 he seemed to have a problem getting drive off the corners – Neil Crompton in the commentary box mentioned they'd had a couple of aborted starts thanks to drivers stalling on the grid, and it was possible his clutch was running out of plates. That let Ron Searle into the lead for most of the 8-lap race (in the locally-made Shrike), until a desperate send from Drew Price in the Ralt bumped him into the kitty litter for a DNF. The kerfuffle let Skaife into the lead, but his car was still slow and Price blew by him on the front straight to claim the win, despite a damaged front wing from his altercation with Searle. It was rough justice, but this sort of driving was still de rigeur here, at the height of the Senna era.
Bowe Before Him: Heat 1
For the headline event, John Bowe qualified on pole with a time of 1:13.91, then drew second place for the Peter Jackson Dash – no great penalty so far. But then during the Dash itself he suffered a catastrophic engine failure, which dumped him right down the order to 6th place, leaving the team to frantically fit a new engine for the races proper. This they achieved in, "just over an hour", according to the commentators, a remarkable feat from the team's mechanics. One might've expected that team owner Dick Johnson would have a sour face on his side of the garage, but in fact he'd just just won the Dash for himself, bringing in a very welcome cheque and pole position for Heat 1. That rather mitigated his mood.
Would've been nice to be 1-2 on the front row, but that's the way it goes. We had a little bit of a mishap this morning which I think stretched the conrod bolt, but other than that... I think he'll be out in the race and I think he'll do a damn good job from where he is.
So Johnson was sharing the first row of the grid with Glenn Seton, with the second row comprised of Seton's hireling for the second car, Wayne Park, and the Winfield GT-R of Jim Richards. The third row belonged to Mark Skaife and the luckless Bowe, with the fourth split between the GIO Nissan of Mark Gibbs, and the factory Commodore of Tomas Mezera. This was HRT's first outing of the year, and although both Mezera and the team were doubtless a bit rusty – they'd qualified in only 1 minute, 15.01 seconds, more than a second off Bowe's time – it was hard to criticise them when they were still the fastest of the Holden runners.
Case in point, Row 5 was shared between Colin Bond's #8 Caltex Sierra and the #11 Walkinshaw Commodore of Larry Perkins, second-fastest of the Holdens despite a car that didn't quite cut through the air like the streamlined VN. Behind him lined up Peter Brock, bringing the Mobil 05 to his home race, alongside the ever-impressive Tony Longhurst in the Benson & Hedges BMW. Row 7 was the inverse of Row 6, with the sidekicks Neil Crompton and Alan Jones lining up in their secondary VN and M3, respectively, while Row 8 was an all-Holden affair, with Terry Finnigan bringing his Foodtown Commodore for a personal grudge match with Steve Reed in the Lansvale Smash Repairs car.
Row 9 was where we found the third BMW, Paul Morris in the white #22 Sport Evo, an ex-Bigazzi machine used by the Longhurst team as a test car in 1991. It had arrived still fitted with its original carbon fibre bonnet and boot lid, but the team had replaced them with steel items to comply with Australian regs. Even so, all three BMWs were running 20kg lighter this weekend than they had at Eastern Creek, as team manager Frank Gardner (one presumes) had managed to convince CAMS their previous weight penalty was too high. Morris lined up alongside the 3UZ-backed Walkinshaw of privateer Bob Jones, showing Morris perhaps had something to learn when it came to getting the most out of the German pocket rocket.
Last on the grid, with the two-by-two format leaving him the embarrassment of occupying the tenth row all by himself, was youngster Bryan Sala in the #50 Tyrepower Sierra (or at least it looks like it was still in its Tyrepower livery – the car would see a couple of different paint schemes during the course of the year, but this early it's not impossible it was still in its Bathurst '91 colours). That completed the 19-car grid for Sandown – not a wonderful turnout for a national championship round, but we'd seen worse. Much worse.
When the starting man switched the traffic lights green, both Winfield Nissans immediately launched off the start line to assume the lead into Turn 1. So far, so familiar, but their joy was short-lived. From behind, Dick Johnson simply overpowered Skaife to take P2 on the long back straight, and from there started hounding Richards into the kink. Through the twisties Dick niggled and needled for an opening, and got a nice draft on the front straight to pull alongside Richards again by the start of lap 2. Richards forced him to the outside and made the most of the Nissan's water-cooled brakes to pull up on a matchbox, holding Johnson off for the moment, but it was a losing battle. With only about 330 kW to overcome the drag of its wide, ventilated front end, the GT-R just didn't have the top speed to hold off a revitalised Sierra.
Case in point, the man in 3rd place by this point was... John Bowe, who'd made a demon start to leapfrog both Peter Jackson cars of Team Seton to be 4th into the Turn 1. He'd lost out briefly to Seton on the slow wind up to Peters Corner, but had dispatched the youngster on the back straight in much the same fashion as his boss on Skaife. 4th became 3rd when Bowe too got rid of Skaife, breezing past on the front straight like it was nothing. Now fired up and full of attitude, Bowe skipped past the boss over the Turn 6 Rise, becoming the new challenger to Richards in turn. And then he simply out-powered the leading Nissan, rising from 6th to the race lead in just three laps!
From there Bowe was untouchable, pulling out a gap of 5.6 seconds by lap 5, then 7.3 seconds by lap 11. While Bowe rode off into the sunset, un-noted by the commentary team, one of the Seton car began smoking and soon stopped – Wayne Park's engine had expired. Colin Bond’s car also died on lap 15 for reasons unknown, but none of us noticed because we were enraptured by a train of Richards, Johnson, Skaife and Seton all fighting over positions two through five. Johnson soon won out and left the train behind, while best-of-the-rest not too far behind was a highly creditable Tomas Mezera in the HRT Commodore. Rusty? Don't you believe it!
Then, close to half-distance, came one of those slapstick moments that gave Australian racing such a distinct flavour. The broadcast chose to cut to to the RaceCam mounted in the passenger seat of Dick Johnson's car, and Allan Moffat started giving a play-by-play of what he was seeing. And, well...
Allan Moffat: He just slammed her down from sixth down to fifth through the Esses, into fourth...
Dick Johnson: Down to second, I am.
Moffat: Ohhh! [realising Dick could hear him] Sorry, I beg your pardon, you're gonna have to give me a ride here, refresh my memory. Okay, up to third – do it yourself, mate, you can talk your way through, you don't need me!
Johnson: Yeah, really? There's oil everywhere here, pal.
Mike Raymond: Dick, this looks pretty good. Bowey's taken off like a scalded cat.
Johnson: He must have my engine!
Raymond: How much of a problem [do tyres] give you? You two guys are running at a fair pace, Bowey out eight-and-a-half seconds to you, and the two Nissans dropping back a bit. Can you conserve tyres?
Johnson: It's just that the Nissans are so quick out of the slow corners, that they just leave you standing. It takes everything to pick them up on the straight to be able to pass them.
Raymond: Well I notice they're getting a bit closer again, banging on your butt, so I'll let you go. You put the head down.
Johnson: I've got another 20 laps to do after this, buddy!
As did Bowe, actually, but you wouldn't have guessed it from his pace. The #18 Shell Sierra rounded out the final laps and eventually clinched the win with a whopping 9 seconds to spare over Johnson – a 1-2 like the good old days. But, a heat win is not a round win: had Bowe left enough meat on his Dunlops to eke out a result in the second half of the event? Only one way to find out...
Ain't No Gentleman: Heat 2
Two full-bore starts was a big ask for a single set of tyres. At the green, once again both Nissans shot off the line, but where Jim Richards was able to tear past the Shell Sierras on the outside line, Mark Skaife got boxed in and had to abandon the launch, leaving the Johnson cars 2nd and 3rd. That left a fuming Skaife to be swallowed up by the fast-starting Commodores behind him – Mezera, Brock and Reed might not have had the advantage of four-wheel drive, but neither did they have to worry about a sudden lift robbing the engine of boost.
Bowe got his head down and struck out along the back straight, relieving Richards of the lead with another surge of Ford horsepower. Once again Bowe ran off into the distance, building a lead of 2.7 seconds by lap 4, but Johnson was having a rather harder time of it: he had a look at passing Richo under brakes at Dandenong Road, and although the move didn't come off, it set him up for a run back along the front straight to make the DJR Sierras 1st and 2nd. So the order at the start of lap 2 was Bowe, Johnson, Richards, Gibbs in the GIO Nissan, and then Peter Brock in the Mobil Commodore, with Skaife way down in 6th. While Gibbs kept the pressure on Richards, Skaife went looking for a way around Brock, and found one under braking into the Dandenong Road left-hander. Brock shortly lost another place to Tomas Mezera, and then started falling into the clutches of Tony Longhurst in the BMW; he'd made a good start, but with some 22 laps on them, his Bridgestones were pretty much finished.
Then it turned out Mezera might've been a bit short of practice after all. Under pressure from Glenn Seton, he got a bit over-protective of his corner on the way into the Rise, losing the back end under braking and spinning off into the Esses. Unsighted by the Holden, Seton spun in sympathy for him, which turned out to be far more dangerous than Mezera's own spin. Mezera simply halted in the grass off the circuit, but Glenn lost control of the vehicle and rolled backwards across the road, missing being T-boned in the smoke by the barest of margins (by Brock, Crompton and Perkins in turn!).
An ad break followed (nothing changes...), and then we were treated to a really hard-headed battle for 2nd between Richards and Johnson. With the heat more than half over, Johnson finally lost the place in the middle of Peters Corner, as Richo laid claim to the inside line early and Dick simply couldn't get enough drive out of his ageing Dunlops to hold the Nissan at bay forever. They had a bit of a love tap at the apex, but to these old hands that was nothing, and both powered away from the corner cleanly. Johnson reclaimed the place under power, rising back to 2nd by the time they reached the Rise, and Richards of course did nothing to dispute it. But then into Dandenong Road they were once again hard at it, Richards coming alongside under the Dunlop bridge, forcing Johnson to go fast and use up his tyres. A quick criss-cross into Turn 12 caught Johnson by surprise but Richards didn't back off, and once again they hit – this time, hard. Johnson spun off in a cloud of dust with a bit of his front bumper hanging loose, and although he got going again, he'd lost both time and places. But in-car footage revealed this had been no bump 'n' run: Richo's hands were upside-down before the moment of impact, indicating he'd made an ambitious move and lost the tail, unable to pull the car up in time. So, not malicious, but surprisingly desperate and messy, not the sort of thing we'd come to expect from Gentleman Jim.
Johnson pitted for repairs and new tyres, but he was out of contention either way. The team's hopes now rested squarely on the shoulders of Bowe, still in the lead by 4.8 seconds, but now with a pair of Nissans behind him rather than his team leader-slash-tail gunner. Sure enough, a lap later the gap was down to 3.7 seconds, then 2.2...
With two laps to go, Bowe was now visibly tip-toeing through the turns, trying to get 370 kW of Ford grunt to the ground through the overheated canvas of his Dunlops. Behind, Skaife was driving like an animal, throwing his GT-R across the kerbs like a sack of fertiliser: he wanted this win.
One to go, and the tension was real, but the Nissan twins just weren't quite close enough to make a move. Bowe rounded out the 20th and final lap to take another heat win, and so take a clean sweep of the round. He'd done it: John Bowe took overall victory at Sandown. You could make a case that he was bloody lucky they were 20-lap heats and not 21, but lucky wins counted too: he'd had the car for the job and made the most of it twice over. A thoroughly deserved round win.
2nd place in the heat went to Mark Skaife, with Richards 3rd, Mark Gibbs 4th and Peter Brock a fighting 5th, promoted by the misfortunes of Seton, Mezera and Johnson. With two rounds done, Mark Skaife led the championship with 57 points, the reward for winning the first round and finishing 2nd in the other. Jim Richards sat behind him with 51 points, with Bowe, having just kicked sand(own) in everyone's faces, now slotting in third with 44. Peter Brock's 41 points put him barely ahead of Mark Gibbs on 40, while Glenn Seton slipped down to fifth with just 36 points – cursing that the Winfield Triple Challenge hadn't counted for points, no doubt.
Just two rounds into this championship, and we'd already seen three different race winners in three different makes of car, bringing with them close racing, tense finishes, strategic mind games, and a touch of biffo and hurt feelings as a sweetener. At this point you'd have to say the 1992 Shell Australian Touring Car Championship was looking rather promising, except for the disquieting fact that both Nissan drivers were already sitting 1-2 on the points table...
No comments:
Post a Comment