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.
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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.
