It could only end in tears. The 1992 season had gone ahead in the knowledge that Group A would shortly be history, and that gave each event on the calendar a slight "stations of the cross" vibe – a drumbeat on the road to inevitable doom. Now at last we arrived at the Hill of the Skull, ready to receive the final nails, and beheld the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R looming over it all with a cold smile and nail gun in hand.
But this was to be a chaotic weekend, and not all would go according to the executioner's plan...
Best Foot Ford
I've said before that an underlying theme of 1992 was the rebirth of Ford as a performance brand. In Australia, that mostly came in the form of the new Falcon XR8, the first V8 to come out of Ford Australia in ten long years. Representing it on the track were the two '93-spec EB Falcons of Glenn Seton and Dick Johnson, which got a grand reveal on pit straight, driving through a big banner to a rapturous reception from the crowd.
No cars at Bathurst got more attention this year, not even the opposing VP Commodores of Peter Brock and the Holden Racing Team (after all, a V8 Commodore wasn't exactly humdrum, but it was hardly new). In the event Seton and co-driver Alan Jones managed a 2:15.53 in qualifying, which put them a provisional 6th on the grid and into the Tooheys Top Ten shootout – a splendid result for a car only one race old, and one that was still roughly a hundred kilogrammes over the minimum weight. Chassis GSR1 was still the team's only Falcon, however, meaning backup had to come in form of a Sierra, the #35 entrusted to Seton's ATCC teammate, Wayne Park, and the Tasmanian dairy farmer, David "Skippy" Parsons.
I co-drove at the enduros with Wayne Park, who was doing ATCC rounds. The bloody things [Sierras] were a big handful. Both Glenn and I chipped our right elbows. They used to lock the rear brakes, we'd grab a handful of lock and blacked my elbow on the foamless cross-members [of the rollcage]. I still have a floating bit of bone in my elbow. – Skippy Parsons, Australian Muscle Car #89
Their great rivals would of course be the Ford powerhouse team Dick Johnson Racing, and if Dick's own EB Falcon was only a display car this weekend, he made up for it by entering two Shell Sierras instead. The #17 was of course the prime car, to be driven by Johnson and Bowe themselves, so they'd stuck to chassis DJR5, the same car they'd driven to victory in 1989. The #18, chassis DJR6, had been put in the hands of Terry Shiel and the new Sports Sedan champion Greg Crick, who'd brought some sponsorship from Tourism Tasmania (hence the new windscreen stickers). With cross-entry no longer allowed, however, Dick had almost no incentive to put any time or effort into the #18 car. Shiel was disappointed to find that after a promising start to the week, the team detuned the engine to ensure it would finish, and then basically forgot about it.
The car was fantastic on the Thursday, we were as quick as anything there. I really thought we could do well. But for some reason I couldn't get back to that time again. It sounds like sour grapes, but I think they decided to run a conservative boost, because both Dick and I had engine problems on Wednesday. I think they decided to focus on Dick's car. What upset me was that they never told me. In qualifying I really pushed hard but couldn't beat my Thursday time. I couldn't work it out. After the race, one of the mechanics did admit it was detuned for the race. – Terry Shiel, AMC #131
So on Friday, where Bowe qualified for the Tooheys Top Ten with a 2:14.56 – good enough for 3rd outright – Shiel was way down in 17th, beaten by six whole seconds. It was hard to take, especially for a man who didn't exactly have time on his side. As a curiosity, also on the team that weekend was the winner of the Motorcraft Formula Ford Driver to Europe series, who'd thereby won the promised test session with DJR at Lakeside. His name was Cameron McConville, and Johnson had been sufficiently impressed to make him the team's reserve driver for the weekend.
Then there was Allan Moffat. He still had Cenovis Vitamins money behind him, and they'd been sufficiently pleased with his results in 1991 to hand over a better budget this year, which was duly spent adding a pair of aces to the deck – Rudi Eggenberger was back, and with him he'd brought his star driver, Klaus Niedzwiedz. One of Rudi's Swiss mechanics had been
in the country for the last two months, tightening all the bolts and upgrading the cars with the latest trick parts (most notably 6-speed Holinger gearboxes), so even if they'd been under a sheet since Bathurst last year, they were now tweaked and primped and ready to race.
Niedzwiedz of course nominated the #10 (chassis EGMO 7/89) as his steed and the amiable and fast Gregg Hansford as his co-driver. Charlie O'Brien was to partner Gary Brabham in the sister #9. The old gang that made the Sierra fly in 1988 were back together, and they set about the task at hand.
For 1992, there was only one choice. Rudi had to come back – and he had to bring Klaus with him. Ka-ching. The cash register rang out again. There was money only for Rudi and Klaus, not the others.
Gregg Hansford had gone with another team the previous year but I enticed him back with promises of the second seat alongside Klaus.
Charlie [O'Brien] and Gary Brabham would take the second car. At the time, you entered a second car not as an equal contender but almost as a Plan B, a spare if anything went wrong with the lead vehicle. Our second car wasn't going to get much attention. Charlie was concerned that, "Gary hadn't learned a lot in the past twelve months," and they spent the weekend being frustrated with each other. It was to be Gary's last drive at Bathurst.
Klaus was, as usual, magnificent. He didn't get pole, but he put a car that had not turned a wheel for a year onto 3rd place on the grid behind one of the all-conquering Nissans and the works Holden Commodore. This was to be the last year of the Sierra. In 1993 the Great race would become an all V8 affair – Commodore versus Falcon – with a smattering of BMWs under licence in the transition period and, of course, the small classes still included.
In one respect I couldn't wait to get back into a V8 assault on Bathurst, even if only as a team owner. On the other hand this was my last chance to turn my Sierra into a winner. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain
In fact, Klaus pulled out a 2:14.98 in qualifying, which did put him into the Shootout, but 4th on roll rather than 3rd. But the car ahead of them was Johnson's, and as I've pointed out before, Allan would say almost anything rather than give credit to the man who undercut his relationship with Ford...
Colin Bond was also driving a #8 Caltex Sierra with long-service professional, John Smith. This was chassis CXT2, a shell that had been sitting around in Bond's workshop for several years and only now been built up into a racecar (why? Probably to clear shelves. Bondy would be racing Corollas in '93, so his Sierra inventory was about to become useless clutter). CXT1 was handed over for Peter Hopwood and Terry Bosnjak to race as the #7, while Kevin Waldock was again sharing his yellow #28 Ampol Sierra (chassis MM6) with Brett Peters. In addition, Bryan Sala was back in his #50 Sierra (one of the former Longhurst cars), with co-driving from Kevin Weeks.
The really intriguing entry, however, was the #36 of Sydney prestige car dealer Ken Mathews. In truth, Mathews was probably just a ring-in to ensure there was some real driving experience in the group: the actual team was Rod Jones Racing, a speedway outfit based in Tasmania, whose owner Rod was the second driver on the entry list. The car itself was new to Australia, chassis ARE KAL 0988 – meaning Andy Rouse Engineering, Kaliber sponsorship, chassis #9 built in 1988. In other words, this was the sister to the Mobil car Peter Brock had raced in 1989, and this was to be its only race in Australia. The real key to the operation was the third driver listed on the rear window, British businessman Mike Newton, who was funding it all via a rather classy Dedicated Micros livery. "Micros" in this context meant microcomputers, and the "DVST" across the flank referred to Digital Video Storage and Transmission, which was pretty far-sighted given this was thirteen years before the founding of YouTube. Newton would later have a decent career at Le Mans, stretching from 2003 to 2011, so Bathurst '92 must have been one of his very first tastes of the racing game.
Body Made Wrong
Of the BMW entries, the Gulson family (father Ray and son Graham) were back once again in their old, slow, but reliable 635 CSi, which this year they were sharing with New Zealand's Graham Beck. They had sponsorship from electronics company NEC, and they'd qualified surprisingly well considering the age of the car: 2:28.24 for 33rd place was nothing to sniff at for a "mere" 3.5-litre, especially when there were V8s behind it.
But prime on the BMW roster were of course the yellow Benson & Hedges machines of Tony Longhurst Racing. Team manager Frank Gardner had split his aces this time, pairing Longhurst in the #25 with Venezuelan BMW star, Johnny Cecotto. The car was a brand-new machine built up from a new shell supplied by BMW Motorsport, which made it probably the last E30 M3 racecar ever built. But it was also possibly the fastest: Tony actually made the top-ten shootout on merit (unlike Brock in 1988...), and it took only a tiny sliver away from his achievement when you realise it had been done with a tow from Larry Perkins...
The best car I ever drove was the M3 at Bathurst with Johnny Cecotto. I did a 2:15.9 or something, got into the Top 10 Shootout in a four-cylinder car. It was revving to 10-something and if you missed two gear changes it would blow up. They sent out the factory driver and I beat him by nearly a second in qualifying. – Tony Longhurst, AMC #82
The #20 on the other hand had been entrusted to the darling of Sandown, Paul Morris, with seasoning to come from the wisdom and experience of 1967 Formula 1 World Champion, Denny Hulme. Denny, once known as "the Bear", was now 56 years old and since retiring from Grand Prix racing eighteen years earlier, he'd slipped into the quiet life in his native New Zealand – except of course for the odd bout of touring car racing. Bathurst was his favourite race, so of course he was going to be here.
Backing up the Longhurst team were Peter Doulman & John Cotter with their #52 Impala Kitchens M3, but it was a bitterly expensive weekend for the M3 Motorsports pair. Impala Kitchens' money had been spent on a new 2.5-litre engine to allow the car to run on the faster DTM homologation Longhurst had pioneered. In fact, the engine had surely come from Longhurst workshop – next year their M3s would be running with 2.0-litre engines, so there was a need to clear shelves before the year closed. The parts-bin nature of the exercise, combined with Doulman's relative inexperience with such a trick bit of kit, might explain why they had the misfortune to put a rod through the side of the block after qualifying on Friday. Their only spare was an old 2.3, with homologation papers dating back to 1987, so the car's only appearance as a 2.5 never even made it to the race start. Small wonder they were twelve-and-a-half seconds and twenty-six places behind Longhurst after qualifying.
Australia's Own
As usual, there were about as many Holdens as there were all the other brands put together, and they ran the gamut from factory-backed potential winners to grid-fillers with big dreams.
At the sharp end, once again HRT had brought along their new '93-spec VP Commodores. At the wheel of the #16 was the new Member for Broadwater, the Honourable Allan Grice, MP. Broadwater was a new Queensland parliament electorate located on the northern end of the Gold Coast, created in the 1991 redistribution: Grice had been elected to the seat as a member of the rural centre-right National Party, and gave his reasons for doing so in a neat little interview with Liz Hayes for the official opening of the newly-completed Sydney Harbour Tunnel.
For the record, the car he was driving was HRT's original VN display car, hence the weird combination of VP wings and Dencar roll cage with a normal road-car interior. As a pilot-build car, it's a genuine factory SS Group A (hence the Holden, not Chevy, V8 roar), and yet it's not numbered among the 300 production units: it's a car with a unique provenance, a genuine HRT Commodore that was never a racecar. Anyway, if you can't see the video, the relevant bit is transcribed below:
Liz Hayes: Allan, I have to ask, what's a nice racing car driver like you doing wanting to be a politician?
Grice: Well, I'm not a politician. But really, just "anger", I think is the word. I've got 7- and 10-year-old daughters and a 2-year-old son, and the way our country's been going for the last eight years, I don't know where they're going to grow up. So, I got all angry, got all wound up, got all involved and I'm standing for a conservative seat for the National Party of Queensland.
Ours being the post-Trump, post-Brexit era, we know now what that kind of talk really means, but that was probably inevitable. As Jean-Pierre Sarti told us, to do something as dangerous as motor racing requires a certain absence of imagination, and a conservative, almost by definition, lacks imagination (and therefore empathy). But you don't have to agree with a man's politics to admire his driving, and there can be no doubt that was still formidable – especially paired with his old dance partner, Win Percy.
I think I drove three times for HRT at Bathurst and finished with a win, a 2nd and class win. The latter was when the regulations changed and Win and I ran the new car and won the 5.0-litre V8 category in the last of the Group A races.
I was the opposition spokesperson for police and corrective services, so I was pretty full on with that. – Allan Grice, AMC: Muscle Racers Vol.2
The other two VPs on the entry list were the second HRT car (the #15 of Tomas Mezera and Brad Jones), and the brand-new #05 Mobil car of Peter Brock. Looking very nice in its crisp white Mobil livery, 05 would be shared with German ring-in Manuel Reuter, an up-and-coming DTM driver who'd won that year's Interserie Division I. The other Advantage Racing entry, #55, remained in VN spec for Brock's Sandown co-driver Troy Dunstan and former teammate Andrew Miedecke – which was a bit of cheek for a man who owned a Ford dealership. If both cars had been prepared to the same level it might've been a valuable opportunity to see how the VN stacked up against the VP, but this was Advantage Racing: all the resources were focused on 05. That meant Peter made it into the shootout, 9th with a 2:15.98, but the 2.28-second gap back to Miedecke probably told us very little.
Other VNs were entered by the Lansvale team (#3 Dulux Commodore, Steve Reed & Trevor Ashby) and Terry Finnigan (#27 Foodtown Commodore, co-driven by Garry Rogers), but perhaps the most notable was Graham Moore. With Bob Forbes Racing focusing on their GT-R, their old Raider Motorsport-built VN (chassis variously designated as either RF04, or Dencar 1) was available for hire. The offer had been taken up by Moore, who leased the car for Bathurst and painted it up in his usual Strathfield Car Radios livery, bearing the racing number 42.
As co-driver, however, Moore dropped a bombshell – it was the Wollongong Whiz, our former World Motorcycle champion Wayne Gardner. Gardner had seen enough injuries on Grand Prix bikes that quitting and getting his kicks from the safe confines of a roll cage had started to sound pretty good. Thanks to his international contacts, Gardner had tested the #20 Jägermeister BMW with the Linder team, then raced it in a DTM event at the Nürburgring on 20 September. After Bathurst, he was due to return to Germany for the series finale at Hockenheim on 11 October, but he kept his feet on the ground: Gardner admitted that he was a rookie, and he was here to learn, and there would be plenty of learning to do – the power of a 5.0-litre Holden V8 would hardly faze a man who'd mastered the two-stroke Grand Prix bikes of the era, but the floppy VN chassis, sending spooky, inconsistent signals to the driver, must've felt a world away from the user-friendly M3.
Behind those were the usual landslide of Walkinshaw VLs, many of which had been on blocks since last year. Bob Jones carried over his association with the Captain, Peter Janson,
in the Ampol Max 3 Oil car they'd run at Sandown. Daryl Hendrick and
John Blanchard came back for another go in the #26 Gemspares Walky,
while former "search for a star" winner Peter Gazzard also returned with rookie Stuart McColl in the #44 (sponsored, since Gazzard was from
Mount Gambier, by the Scott's trucking concern).
For reasons he can no longer remember, Bill O'Brien had elected to put his mechanicals from PE 003 into Brian Callaghan's VL bodyshell to create a yellow Everlast Battery Service Walky. The team was completed by Barry Graham, whom O'Brien got to do the engine in return for a steer (Graham had flown in for the occasiona direct from Charlotte, North Carolina, where he and Richard Petty owned the Nastrak driving school). And our old friend John Trimbole bailed out of his #22 Daily Planet Walkinshaw when it caught fire in practice, so quickly in fact that he actually abandoned ship while it was still moving... and before switching off the fuel pump, meaning the car burned virtually to the ground! Failing to take the start, he instead joined teammates Andrew Harris and Gary Cooke in the team's second car.
As a rule though, these guys were nowhere, the fastest of them qualifying
almost ten seconds behind the frontrunners. In stark contrast, all three of the new VP Commodores had made the shootout, so it was no small irony that the fastest Holden of them all was yet another Walkinshaw, chassis PE 010, the Bob Jane T-Marts-sponsored #11 of Larry Perkins and Steve Harrington. With that Sandown win in their back pocket the team had a spring in their step, but even so they were shockingly fast for what was supposed to be a superseded model – 2:14.08 and 2nd in regular qualifying was a truly stunning effort, only a quarter of a second off provisional pole. The car had proved so fast the scrutineers had chosen to
take a closer look at it, just to ensure it was legal, but no: all was
above-board and given a clean bill of health. Larry really was just that good.
House of the Rising Sun
One must mention the John Bourke/Keith Carling R&R Racing Toyota Supra (the ex-Garry Willmington car; John Smith still owned the former works Toyota team car), which would probably find itself locked in an epic battle with the Grant family and their #6 Sizzler HR31 Skyline.
But of course, everyone had to take a step back when the three Nissan GT-Rs came past. Out of a drive with Brock, Neil Crompton had made the most of that by securing a drive in the second Gibson car instead. That had probably come about thanks to his new association with Bob Forbes Racing: despite success in both production and touring cars, their regular driver Mark Gibbs had decided to call time on his motor racing career to focus his energies on Mark Gibbs Panel House, his auto smash repair and parts business. That meant there was a seat open with Forbes for 1993, and seeing a young driver who deserved a chance, Bob had given it Crompo. That gave him a foot in the door at Nissan, so when Gibson Motorsport called up needing a driver, Crompton found himself in the right place at the right time. While Gibbs would race the #4 GIO machine with his established partner Rohan Onslow, Crompton would be paired with super-Swede Anders Olofsson in the #2 of Gibson Motorsport themselves. That was a juicy combination, as not only was Anders fast and experienced – two things you always wanted – he'd won the 1991 Spa 24-Hour race in a NISMO Europe GT-R, so clearly he knew how to babysit Godzilla over a distance.
But of course, everyone knew the grid peaked with the #1 Winfield GT-R of Mark Skaife and Jim Richards. Not only was Skaife the new Australian Touring Car Champion, he was the man who'd done all the team's test and development work in the last three years: no-one in the country knew the GT-R better. His car would be the focus of Gibson's efforts this weekend, and his co-driver was, if anything, even more experienced than Olofsson. The combination of Skaifey and Richo with the full might of Gibson Motorsport behind them would take some beating.
Even so, they weren't invincible. Despite Fred Gibson's best efforts, the Winfield and GIO Skylines would be racing with the full 1,500kg homologation weight they'd been burdened with since Lakeside, as no amount of badgering, bribery, threats or tears had managed to get the ballast removed. Fred had argued it was now getting beyond a parity question, as those bespoke hollow Castalloy wheels were starting to crack under the strain, making it a clear safety issue. He took CAMS to the High Court in Canberra, and even boycotted the Sandown 500, all to no avail. The ballast remained in place, meaning Godzilla would tackle its final Bathurst with a kerb weight on par with a NASCAR stock car – or, if you prefer, a modern V8 Supercar with a full 44-gallon drum on board.
We finished up being 1,600kg. I was dark about that because it's dangerous when you start putting another 150-200kg of weight in the car. So what we did is put it low down in the car – we filled the rear cross-member up with lead pellets. – Fred Gibson
But because this team never stopped, all that extra weight didn't end up penalising the GT-R's speed all that much. The story of Gibson Motorsport this year had been their slow-but-inevitable recovery from the inconvenience of boost control valves, forced upon them by CAMS to limit their engine power. The development curve had been plain for those with eyes to see: slow at Eastern Creek, really slow at Symmons Plains, but then back on it by Winton, and by the time they got to Wanneroo, Fred Gibson was quietly turning the wick down as he tried to square the circle of winning the championship without incurring further penalties – once bitten twice shy, as they say.
It all pointed to a development programme to re-tune the RB26 engine to work with the 1.3-bar boost limit, especially when you considered the bizarre lack of revs they'd displayed in Tasmania. Of course, today we don't have to guess, as team technical head Alan Heaphy has revealed what was going on in a fantastic interview recorded at Sydney Motorsport Park during the 2016 World Time Attack weekend.
When we had the boost restriction put on us, back to 1.3 instead of 1.8, the guys had to get their thinking hat on and say, "Right, how can we get our power back?" And they did. They individually tuned each cylinder so it got maximum performance out of each cylinder, and then combined with all six doing everything they're supposed to be doing, we went from about 570 horsepower back to 640, 645. – Alan Heaphy
As ricer fans will know, a limiting factor on the RB26 was the factory crank angle sensor, which sensed the position of the crankshaft so the management system knew when to do important stuff like fire the spark plugs. Nissan's 360-degree optical sensor was pretty good in roadgoing applications, but it was mounted on the front of the exhaust cam, not to the crankshaft itself. Once you started getting up to serious power outputs at high rpm (which you would, because you owned a GT-R), timing belt deflection meant the cam position might not truly represent the position of the crank anymore. Even when the sensor was new, there was a significant amount of "jitter" in the signal; when the sensor was old and its bearings dried out, and you ran lots of upgraded parts, the jitter became absolutely horrendous. The only way to get stable spark timing was to fit a new trigger wheel that mounted directly on the crankshaft, rather than relying on the cam drive.
 |
| R32 unit on the right. (source) |
So it will come as no surprise to learn that Gibson Motorsport had long since junked the factory crank angle sensor in favour of an aftermarket trigger, which they used to feed the ECU with engine rpm readings. They then used a modified cam angle sensor simply to tell the ECU which cycle the engine was currently on, or which cylinder was currently firing, and it was this that allowed them to take things to the next level and start the real fine-tuning.
The guys data-logged the crankshaft rotation based on a sensor that picked up the teeth of the flywheel, and then made up a package that then sensed the pressure transducers on the spark plugs. So the combination of putting that information together, they were able to then create a system where they could tune the engine to maximum cylinder pressure at 250rpm increments on each cylinder. And that in itself... I mean, it was a lot more complicated than that, but they finally got around to where they had each cylinder doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing. And they picked up 90-odd horsepower again. Brilliant people, they just did a marvellous job. – Alan Heaphy
Tooheys Top Ten
The top ten shootout for pole was always one of the most anticipated bits of television all year: just the ten fastest cars in the country with an empty track and nowhere to hide, a single death-or-glory lap for the honour of starting first (and a giant novelty cheque, of course). First to make the attempt was Allan Grice, and sadly his lap started messy, as he got the big Commodore up onto the ripple strips exiting Hell Corner and put two wheels through the dust. The ripple strip broke the VP's fancy new fibreglass splitter, throwing away all front end downforce, so his run was compromised from the start. The understeer from the lack of front-end grip forced Gricey to provoke the tail to make up for it, with visible results at the grate, and especially exiting the Chase. His final time was a 2:16.215, which was surely going to tumble down the order as subsequent times came in. "Just one bad corner," said Grice ruefully, "and then I lost some downforce from the front, which means that it understeered for the rest of the lap. But all things considered, that's what we've got."
Next in the queue was Peter Brock, but his lap doesn't seem to be available online. A great pity. It would've been fascinating to see what he could do with a more planted version of the car in which he'd been so spectacular in 1991, but such is life. His time was a 2:16.459, about a quarter of a second slower than Grice with a broken splitter, which must have needled a bit. "A very poor time," said Brocky. "Ahh, tyres a bit cold. Need a few more laps, I think, to get them warm. But, oh well, that's the way it goes."
Third to make an attempt was Mark Gibbs in the GIO car. No heroics from the third of the Nissans, just a steady lap of 2:16.168 – a little bit quicker than Gricey, but nearly a second and a half slower than this time last year. "Just happy to be here" said a resigned Gibbs – all the restrictions put on the GT-R meant any speed at all was a pleasant surprise. "We've got a problem with a pop-off valve – the thing that CAMS supplied to us is popping its head off. Was good as gold yesterday... so yeah, we're happy I s'pose."
Next up Mezera, but once again the footage doesn't seem to be out there. He cut a 2:16.028 that went straight to the top, hinting at what the broken splitter had cost Gricey.
Next was Glenn Seton. Seton's decision to run the Falcon rather than the Sierra even after the problems of Sandown wasn't as hard to understand as the commentators thought. They weren't likely to win with either Ford, so quite apart from the priceless seat time and track testing ahead of 1993, well, there was a more basic consideration: it was cheaper. The British series had long since shifted to the 2.0-litre formula, so the parts supply they used to rely on just wasn't there anymore. If you were going to blow an engine chasing Godzilla, it might as well be a big, simple V8 that was easy to replace! Seton worked the wheel constantly but the overall lap was smooth, with the result a stunning 2:14.971. He'd leapfrogged the 15's altogether! It set the Ford fans in the grandstands alight, and Seton was no less delighted: "I'm rapt. It's a credit to the whole team. It's taken a long while [to get the car right], but we're there now."
Next was Longhurst, but he completed the trifecta of laps lost down the memory hole. Without Perkins to give him a draft the BMW was slowest so far, but it was intended to wear them down over the distance, not blitz them over a single lap. "Oh mate, I got a good tow from Larry yesterday. But I'm rapt, that's a good lap from me."
As a former polesitter, Klaus Niedzwiedz should in theory have been a lap worth watching. From the outside it looked undramatic, but the time at the end was a bit of a shock – only a a 2:16.943, slower even than the BMW! A bitter Niedzwiedz reported that his foot had slipped off the throttle pedal twice over (they'd been moved to give his co-driver Gregg Hansford a bit more clearance for his bigger feet, which caught Klaus out). Some high-grip sandpaper on the surfaces would help tomorrow, but Saturday was now already lost.
But however much it hurt, it was about to get an awful lot worse. The harsh truth was that Eggenberger wasn't really the Sierra Whisperer anymore; these days he raced Opels, so the team that was really at the cutting edge of Sierra development was just down the pit lane, behind the big Shell signs. Like most teams, Dick Johnson Racing had shelves to clear and nothing to lose from blowing an engine, so they'd put together a special grenade engine good for a claimed 465 kW (and they'd had the Stone Brothers massaging the handling all year). But surprisingly, given John Bowe was typically faster these days, Dick elected to take the lap himself this year. Perhaps he didn't trust anyone else to judge what the engine was capable of, or perhaps he was just feeling some big Dick energy today, but either way the result bore him out. Dick showed the red Sierra absolutely no mercy: climbing over the kerbs exiting Hell Corner, getting it sideways through Griffin's, driving with real attitude from one end of the Mountain to the other. When they clicked the stopwatch at the end, once again the time had suddenly leapfrogged ahead, as Johnson went more than two seconds quicker than Seton to record a 2:12.898! That not only rocketed him to the top of the timesheets, it was faster than Niedzwiedz's erstwhile Sierra record in 1990, and barely two-tenths slower than Skaife's pole time last year. "The greyer the hairs I think the faster we go!" said a delighted Dick. "The car feels good, I feel good... must be all those three kilometres I swim every morning."
Next up? Larry Perkins, in the most tweaked VL Walkinshaw in the country. If this car went faster than the works team's VPs, then that would be a major embarrassment for Holden. Knowing that, Larry was absolutely breathtaking, the car hanging on by its fingernails in the middle of every corner. There were puffs of tyre smoke as he danced on the brakes – a slight wandering under braking for the Chase showed he was really pushing it. His final time? A 2:14.431, splitting Johnson and Seton to be 2nd overall. "That's as good as I could do," said Perkins philosophically. "She's pretty new under the bonnet, don't worry!"
And last of all, who else but Skaife? Godzilla in its blood-red Winfield war paint was sure to demolish all the rest over the course of a lap at the Mountain. This was what everyone expected, and Skaife's driving was of course beautiful to behold, controlled aggression all the way. The split time at the top however was one second off Johnson, leading to speculation we were about to see a Sierra on pole after all. When the time came in, it was only a 2:14.546 – not only slower than Johnson, it was slower even than Perkins! The extra weight and the pop-off valves had really dented Godzilla's bite over a single lap.
So the $15,000 for pole position went to Dick Johnson, who would be taking starter's orders alongside Larry Perkins. Mark Skaife would have to rely on his fast-starting 4WD system to get him ahead of them before the first corner, while behind, Mark Gibbs would have to play tail-gunner against the slew of Commodores and Sierras starting behind. Godzilla would not be starting its final Bathurst from 1st place, that much we now knew; Sunday would have to tell whether or not it would finish there...
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