Or would he?
In fact, it was a curiously passive Jim Richards that fronted up for the 1992 championship decider at Oran Park Raceway. Even commentator Allan Moffat said as much, reporting that Richards had told him bluntly, "it's Skaife's championship", which was very strange. We knew he was a long way behind in points, but could he really be intending not even to fight for it? Only one way to find out...
Still a Prison Colony...
Richards sat at the head of a queue of seventeen other cars, among them those of Stuart McColl (#44 Kart Mania Walky) and John English (#22 Marathon Foods Walky).
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| Seen here on the warm-up lap. |
But arguably the most interesting addition to the grid was Andrew Harris, who'd last been seen in the series way back in 1984, when he'd famously run an ex-Peter Brock VH Commodore as part of the two-car Kmart team. His sponsor today was a bit less blue-chip, however: the team was owned by John Trimbole, and if that name rings a bell, it's because he was the son of the same Robert Trimbole whose story formed a major part of Channel Nine's Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities. The car (yet another VL Walkinshaw, this one ex-Garry Rogers) was at least dressed in the livery of a legitimate business, with a rather attractive red-and-black colour scheme advertising Daily Planet, Trimbole's licensed brothel in Elsternwick, Melbourne. The Daily Planet Racing team was due to stick around until the turn of the Millennium, although within a couple of years John would list his name as Trimble, presumably to distance himself from his infamous father.
Qualifying saw John Bowe head the field with a 1:09.97 – the only driver to break into the 1:10's. Skaife was only four-hundredths slower, while Richards was a full two-tenths slower than the aggressive youngsters at the sharp end. Tony Longhurst officially qualified 4th with a 1:10.59, earning him a place in the Dash, and in fact drew 1st place for the Dash on Sunday morning. Off the start, however, his BMW took a savage hit from the GIO Nissan of Mark Gibbs that punted him off the track entirely: he was lucky not to sideswipe a marshals post mid-slide and end the day in hospital. In the event all he did was flat-spot all four tyres, which necessitated changing them ahead of the actual races, which incurred the inevitable penalty: he would start 18th and last, and only after a ten-second delay. That was rough justice when it wasn't really his fault, and his rival for third place in the championship – John Bowe – not only went on to win the Dash, but earned a $29,000 cheque for his trouble!
At the off, true to his word, Jim Richards didn't fight Skaife at all, and in fact spent the greater part of the race fending off the excitable Mark Gibbs. Since all three Nissans were prepared side-by-side in the same workshop, and Gibbs had always been less comfortable in the GT-R than the two works drivers in extracting the maximum, that almost hinted that Richo's car had been hobbled in some way...
Meanwhile, although he wouldn't have seen it with his own eyes, starting all the way at the back as he was, Tony Longhurst would've broken into a huge grin when Bowe made a terrible start and quickly tumbled down the order. That grin would've become a full Cheshire Cat when Bowe ran too hard through the final turn on lap 3 and clipped the concrete wall lining the pits, deforming a wheel arch and leaving it to rub on the tyre. His championship hopes in tatters, Bowe was forced to return to his pit box so a mechanic could literally hammer the bodywork back off the tyre, costing him track position and, almost certainly, third place in the championship. Yes, Longhurst would've smiled had he the breathing space, but by this stage he was too busy overcoming his 10-second start-line penalty to rise to 10th place outright.
In the end, Skaife cruised to the victory with Richards 0.73 seconds behind, putting one hand on the trophy he'd been chasing all year. Gibbs brought his GT-R home 3rd, with Alan Jones 4th and Glenn Seton 5th, although he had to hold off Tony Longhurst for the final 2.6 kilometres to keep it. In the event, Seton and Longhurst skated out of the last turn side-by-side, but the extra squirt of the Sierra told and Seton kept his 5th place, just.
The final championship race held to Group A rules began with Jodi Russell* singing Advance Australia Fair, which gave the moment a sense of occasion most fans probably thought it didn't deserve. A rather processional ended with a Nissan formation finish, with Skaife rightfully taking the crown with 234 points, after a nine-race campaign. Both crowns, in fact: the same meeting hosted the final round of the Australian Drivers Championship for Formula Holden, and Skaife clinched that one in his Winfield Spa 003 as well. With three wins and two 2nds out of five starts, he became the first (and so far, only) driver to win the Australian Touring Car Championship and Australian Drivers' Championship in the same year.
The final round for the 1992 season was at Oran Park, and I needed to win in both the open-wheeler and the touring car to win both championships. At that time no-one had ever won both titles, so to win both on the same day in the same year was pretty big. – Mark Skaife, Mark Skaife: The Autobiography
With Bowe stumbling at the last, Longhurst took a well-deserved third place with 184 points, 9 clear of his Ford rival. If the new two-heat ATCC format had been intended to mix up the results, however, it had failed almost completely: eight of the nine rounds had been swept by the same driver in both heats, with only a miraculous win at Amaroo by (who else?) Peter Brock preventing a complete whitewash. But I doubt that was really a big concern to the organisers at the time. Group A was already running the washing up water and putting chairs up on tables, so the 1992 season was effectively a dry run for 1993, a chance for the touring car people to test their new race format and optimise its TV-friendliness, a process that would be ongoing until... oh, what year is it now?
The really strange thing was there had been absolutely no resistance from Richo, and there might've been a couple of reasons for that. One explanation is that Richards knew he was far enough behind that he'd have to rely on his young teammate suffering a DNF, and for drivers of a certain mindset that kind of victory is no victory at all. In that situation it wouldn't matter whether he was a tenth of a second behind or ten seconds ahead, Skaife would either drop out or he wouldn't, so why not just relax and enjoy the ride? The other possibility – and one I have to stress is just a vibe, with zero facts to back it up – is that, although Fred Gibson always denied employing team orders, he had sat his drivers down before the weekend and told them that Skaife was to win the championship. It would be better for the team and the sport to have a fresh young face carrying the #1 into the new era, so Freddo held court and worked out an arrangement between his two drivers regarding who would win what and how. The only evidence for that is what happened at the next race, nearly two months later, in the final AMSCAR round...
Whoopsy Daisy
The third (and last) AMSCAR meeting for the year was held two whole months later, on 23 August. The event produced the usual short grid of Sydney regulars who all engaged in the expected (and rather exciting) intense pack race. But the crucial moment came in the opening seconds, when Skaife, starting from pole, fluffed the start.
Yep, as the race got underway, Richards shot off into the distance and Skaife was swallowed up by the pack, finding his momentum only just ahead of Rohan Onslow in the Bob Forbes Racing VN Commodore (which this weekend was in a new silver livery, courtesy of new sponsor Chicago Pneumatic). What on earth had gone wrong? Are you seriously going to tell me that Mark Skaife, the reigning Australian champion twice over, in a car famous for blitzing it off the line, where the procedure for doing so was literally just to engage first, redline the engine and drop the clutch... somehow got that wrong? This was something he'd never done before and, as far as I know, he only ever did it once again... in the second heat, later that same day! It might be all inference and no evidence, but I'm calling it: Skaife did that on purpose. The deal Gibson had surely brokered was that Skaife would win the ATCC, and as a consolation prize, Richards would get AMSCAR.
Longhurst did what he could, but in the end Gibson Motorsport won their first AMSCAR title, and Richards his third (having previously won it in 1985 and '87, back in his BMW days). With an even 100 points, he just edged out Skaife with 97, with Colin Bond well behind on 42, and former AMSCAR master Longhurst only on 40. It was a rather low-key event for the final pure Group A race to be held in Australia, as the next one would be a triple-treat with three rulebooks. And after that would come the big one, the final Bathurst to be run by Group A cars, and only the racing gods knew how that was going to turn out...
* As far as I can tell, Jodi Russell was the wife of Graham Russell, member of radio soft-rockers Air Supply, but I'm not really familiar with their work.
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