The Long Haul: Bathurst '88

If last year's Bathurst 1000 had been messy, the 1988 version made no promises to be any easier. The Australian Racing Drivers' Club, longtime organisers of the event, had been broken by the strain of last year's World Championship round, while James Hardie Industries, the money behind them for nearly two decades, had pulled up stumps and simply walked away. If that wasn't enough, a blizzard of protests and counter-protests over the legality of some of the most high-profile entries threatened to reduce actual motor racing to a sideshow. Yet, in the end a Great Race was held, and in the final accounting the winner was popular and well-deserved...

Money, Money, Money
The problems in 1988 traced back to the outcome of the James Hardie 1000 the previous year. Bringing a back road in rural NSW up to world standards was far from cheap, and the worth of the investment hung on the World Touring Car Championship returning each year for the foreseeable future. And as we now know, the 1987 WTCC had been a one-off. Without it, a lot of numbers in some very important columns stopped adding up, and a yawning financial abyss opened beneath the people responsible for the Great Race.

It was an event that almost didn't happen. The massive infrastructure improvements the Australian Racing Drivers' Club had been forced to make to accommodate the WTCC the year before had bankrupted the club, forcing CAMS and telecaster Channel Seven to institute a bail out.

The worst casualty was long-time sponsor and supporter James Hardie Industries. Here was a sponsor as excellent as ANZ. For every dollar you saw of their money, they invested another three quietly behind the scenes. But people who didn't understand that had arrogantly demanded Hardie stump up with heaps more sponsorship dollars and the company, quietly outraged, declined. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

So, no money to hold a race, and no sanctioning body to arrange it: all that was left was the track itself – still technically a public road, and therefore owned by the Bathurst City Council – and a tradition stretching back nearly thirty years. But tradition can have a momentum all its own, and it was unthinkable that there would be no Bathurst 1000 in 1988, the year white Australia was celebrating its bicentennial. If they could find a new sugar daddy to stump up the cash, the race would surely go ahead somehow.

The new sponsor was brewer Tooheys and they introduced a new sharpness to naming rights investment. Woe betide anyone who brought, and especially tried to sell, an opposition product on site. Perhaps a bit naïvely, and not completely understanding the ramifications of my actions, I'd accepted a personal endorsement from rival Fosters that involved me always wearing their cap. It could have been worth a lot of money on the victory dais but it proved just another distraction and one that didn't go down well with the new sponsors. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Via Logopedia

With effectively Australia's national brewer on board, the rest soon came together. The impoverished ARDC had no choice but to kick the race upstairs to CAMS, the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport, the highest motorsport authority in the land. But CAMS was a member club of the FIA, which placed the race in the hands of the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile, or FISA, the semi-independent sporting branch of the FIA. Its president Jean-Marie Balestre had been a Nazi collaborator in WWII, and he'd seemingly learned his leadership techniques around this time – FISA ran Formula 1, the World Rally Championship and the World Sportscar Championship with military precision, but with no small amount of corruption, officious snobbery and bullying. With the loss of the WTCC, FISA wanted something major for the Asia-Pacific area, and the Bathurst classic was the jewel of the region. Thus Bathurst, Wellington, Macau and Fuji were bundled into FISA's new Asia-Pacific Touring Car Championship.

Now on paper it sounds like a bitchin' championship: the best of New Zealand, Japan, Australia and SE Asia going head-to-head at Mount Panorama, on the steep banking of the Thunderdome, on the tight streets of Wellington, the slopes of Mount Fuji and that absurd layout that winds around the casinos of Macau. Unfortunately Macau quickly pulled out, and it wasn't long before Calder followed them out the door. Everyone was sick of dealing with FISA, and Bob Jane now had his Thunderdome and firmly believed NASCAR was the future of Australian racing, so there was no reason to pretend to care about touring cars. It would’ve been nice to see what that combined road-course/Thunderdome layout was like in the dry, but Janey had spoken, so no dice.

A replacement was found in the Promo Touring Car 500 at Pukekohe Park, but in the end the Asia-Pacific Championship consisted of just four rounds – Bathurst, Wellington, Pukekohe and Fuji. Even that was overly ambitious, as the expense of travelling such vast distances was beyond the pockets of most teams, even if they could be bothered. And most couldn't: Andrew Miedecke was the only Australian to even attempt all four rounds, with the bigger fish mostly staying in their own local ponds, and the title ended up in the hands of New Zealand's Trevor Crowe, which is a mystery in itself. Even Frank de Jong of Touringcarracing.net had to admit, "In the end we had a champion, though today nobody seems to know how he got the title..."

The Clutch
That left the Australians to get through a Great Race administered by FISA. A glance at the 48-car field revealed the Euro invasion of '87 was back, with almost all the top Sierras – the cars most likely to win the race – featuring at least one imported driver. Andrew Miedecke was due to share his #6 Blast Dynamics Sierra (MM4) with Britain’s Steve Soper, while the other (MM3) due to be handled by longtime Miedecke collaborator Andrew Bagnall, with help from the Belgian Pierre Dieudonné – meaning Miedecke had managed to entice two of Rudi Eggenberger's four drivers to join him.

A digitised explosives consulting firm? Could there be a more perfect sponsor for a Sierra?

Taking it a step further, one of the new Sierras on the grid, the silver #21 of Team CMS Sweden, featured two Europeans and a Kiwi. Apparently the 1988 Bathurst annual lists this car as another Rouse kit-car, one which had made its debut at the Silverstone TT and then done the Nogaro round of the ETCC before being shipped to Bathurst. Two of the team's drivers were Swedes – Ulf Granberg (whom Wikipedia lists as a train driver, believe it or not), and Christer Simonssen – with the third being New Zealand's Ian "Inky" Tulloch, although the windscreen stripe implied it was Simonssen and Tulloch who were the prime drivers, with Granberg there as a spare. I'm guessing Tulloch had just bought the car for the upcoming New Zealand championship and was on hand to offer some expertise and ensure they kept his investment off the walls.

It was a similar Euro/NZ mix that made up the #45 Sierra, an ex-Wolf Racing car owned by the indefatigable Mark Petch, whose driver Robbie Francevic (1986 Australian Touring Car Champion with Volvo) was having yet another crack at Bathurst with help from Wolf driver (and 1985 Bathurst-winner) Armin Hahne. This is one of the more fondly-remembered cars on the grid because of its sponsor, Whittakers Peanut Slab, the chocolate for those who wanted something more decadent than a Werther's Original.

Even Gibson Motorsport got in on the act, wrangling Allan Grice's Spa 24-Hour hireling Anders Olofsson to share the #15 Nissan Skyline with Glenn Seton (with the #30 reserved for George Fury and Mark Skaife). About the only thing missing was BMW's famed works team Schnitzer Motorsport, who'd entered two cars but then declined to make the trip, leaving it to the local works team of Peter Brock instead. He kept the driver lineup he'd used at Sandown, pairing himself with Jim Richards in the lead car and palming off the other on Skippy Parsons and Neil Crompton, but an innovation apparently used only in this race was a special 6-speed gearbox supplied by Prodrive. The usual Getrag unit only had five speeds, but the long charge down Conrod just begged for a ratio all its own, and British rally squad Prodrive (who'd only got into touring cars when Frank Sytner asked if they'd mind building him an M3 to do the BTCC) had apparently got such a gearbox homologated.

They did get backup from New Zealand, however: John Sax Racing was arguably the leading BMW team in East Bondi, and their driver Trevor Crowe had often seemed to find his way into ex-JPS team machinery at a time when that operation was at its peak. Crowe was down to drive the #53 Cardinal BMW, with co-driving to come from Australia's "Captain" Peter Janson – no commentary box for him this weekend!

I'll go out on a limb and assume it was Janson who brought the Bundy sponsorship.

The backup #54 meanwhile was shared between John Sorenson and Kayne Scott, two regulars of the NZ series, though how they would go was anyone's guess. An intriguing single-car effort also came in the form of the #55 Bill Bryce Racing M3, also of New Zealand. Its drivers were listed as young British star Paul Radisich, former JPS engine man Ludwig Finauer and former Formula Ford wannabe and future V8 Supercars engineer Wally Storey, but he was probably only there as a spare. HamptonDowns.com lists their car as, "the ex Petch ex CeeBiEmme car [sic]," by which they presumably mean the one Petch entered for Francevic here last year. The only other entry in Class 2 was the #51 Mercedes 190E of Phil Ward & David Clement, another leftover from last year – a car whose day would come, but not yet.

I'd argue it looked better in last year's black and gold, even if it was too similar to the JPS BMWs.

Going some way toward balancing all these imports was the return of our Gricey: Allan Grice was home from his European holiday and he'd brought Win Percy back with him, the pair entered in a #2 Walkinshaw Commodore built by Les Small's Roadways operation and dressed in the attractive blue-and-white of insurance giant FAI. (Since my last post I’ve found a list of Roadways chassis numbers: this was apparently a new car known as RWGPA8, which presumably means Roadways, Group A, car 8.)

Another notable entry, albeit for very modern reasons, was the #33 Commodore of Garry Rogers. In 2017, the Walkinshaw outfit that also owns HSV lost its official status as the Holden Racing Team and went looking for a new partner, finding one in American IndyCar team Andretti Autosport. The result was the new Walkinshaw-Andretti United, the crew now trying to get the Camaro approved for 2020 (meaning Andretti are now associated with Honda in IndyCars, GM in Australia and BMW in Formula E. They're a complicated family). Well, in 1988 Garry Rogers united with John Andretti (nephew of Mario) in a Walkinshaw Commodore, albeit one that was apparently unsponsored. This privateer effort was never going to be a real factor in the race, but John would still go on to find Australia a happy hunting ground, taking his first and only CART win at Surfers Paradise in 1991.

A bit bare of sponsorship there, guys.

Also on the grid was a certain Bob Forbes, the former driver returning to Bathurst as a team owner.

I'd been out of it for seven years and I must have been getting itchy feet. Initially I thought, I just want to do it, because I want to get back involved – but not as a driver. So I got two experienced guys, and it went well. – Bob Forbes, AMC #96

The "experienced guys" turned out to be his old Bathurst co-driver Kevin Bartlett, and former HDT lieutenant John Harvey (presumably moonlighting from his day job at HSV). The car was PE 007, a Perkins-sourced Walky, which they ultimately brought home in 14th.

Other Commodores included Walkinshaws like the Yellow Pages #3 of Peter McLeod & Jim Keogh; the #23 Beaurepaires car of Chris Lambden & Kerry Bailey; and the #36 Everlast Batteries car of Bill O'Brien and his Mr Moneybags, prestige car dealer Ray Lintott. But these were restricted to the well-financed privateers only. The true weekend warriors, those like the Lusty brothers Graham & John, or the Lansvale Smash Repairs team of Trevor Ashby & Steve Reed were left with the standard VL – or even, as in the case of the #24 Jagparts entry of Geoff Munday & Gerald Kay, with the outdated VK.

Or the Sunliner entry of Tony Hunter & Steve Harrington.

But the elite special forces of the Holden army were always going to be the works cars of the HSV team, who this year had to contend with a unique level of intra-team rivalry. This year there were three cars on the trailer – the #10 of Larry Perkins & Denny Hulme, the #20 of Tom Walkinshaw & Jeff Allam, and the #40, which was listed as belonging to Perkins & Walkinshaw, but was only there as a spare car. The beef was between Larry's #10 and Uncle Tom's #20, locked in what Mark Oastler described as, "an Ashes-style rivalry between TWR and Perkins." Although they looked identical, these two cars had been built by different teams in different workshops on opposite sides of the world: Tom's car bore the chassis number TWR 023, and had been put together in Oxfordshire in the U.K. and airfreighted to Australia; Larry’s was PE 005, the car that had finished 2nd at Sandown, and had been built in Melbourne. Although ostensibly competing in the same team, they were the bitterest of rivals, mechanics on one side of the garage not talking to the ones on the other. Only time would tell whether this would push them to greater heights or bring it all to a tearful end.

In truth though, you had to be in a Sierra to win this year: nothing else could live with the absurd power of a turbo-boosted RS500. "The torque was through the roof," said Dick Johnson to Australian Muscle Car #77. "Those things used to go up the hill at Mount Panorama just as fast as they came down it." A new addition to their ranks was the #14 Netcomm Sierra of former Ford stalwarts Murray Carter & Steve Masterton: the old Skyline having finally been put out to pasture, Murray had followed the herd and bought an RS500, which he remembered as a good car, "if you had a bottomless wallet."

Or hadn't spent the budget on some very period graphics.

Ahead of them with rather more development time were the two Caltex team cars: Colin Bond had already won this year's single-track AMSCAR championship with his ex-Miedecke MM1, which was to race as the #44 in the hands of John Giddings & Bruce Stewart. His prize new car however, CXT1, was to race as the #4 in the hands of Bondy himself and our 1980 F1 World Champion, Alan Jones.

And of course, there were the ones everyone was watching, the red Shell Sierras of Dick Johnson. Bathurst was the only mountain left to climb in a triumphant year for DJR, and leaving nothing to chance, this time they'd brought along three cars. Besides the #17 for Johnson and his lieutenant John Bowe (chassis DJR4, the one Dick had limped across the line on the starter motor at Sandown), they retained the pairing of Alf Costanzo & John Smith in the #18 (chassis DJR1), while DJR3 was finally back in Australia and was entered to race as the #28 in the hands of New Zealander Neville Crichton and British series regular Robb Gravett. It's possible Gravett had been impressed by Dick's pace at Silverstone and casually asked what he planned to do with the car after, though I wouldn't be surprised if he'd been in touch with Dick even before he left Australia – Dick probably needed a garage in the U.K. to work from, and Gravett was doubtless looking for a way to break Andy Rouse's monopoly on customer Sierras in Britain. Apart from Rouse, who charged a small fortune for cars and parts, the only other option was Rudi Eggenberger, who charged a large fortune and didn’t do customer cars anyway. Someone who'd got to the heart of the Sierra and could do the job cheaper than Rouse was a very attractive proposition to a British racing driver circa 1988; that such a machine might also be faster than a Rouse kit-car was just gravy.

Then there was the #9 ANZ Sierra of Allan Moffat, still riding high after his Sandown win. His partnership with Gregg Hansford was carried over for this event, but given this was the big one Moffat had a secret weapon – an extra brain, and a third driver.

One amazing outcome of my trip to Switzerland was that I persuaded Rudi Eggenberger to return to Australia. Not only that, he agreed to bring half of his 1987 winning-driver combination – Klaus Niedzwiedz – with him, along with some pretty decent mechanics. Klaus also performed the role of interpreter. Although his English is pretty good, Rudi had built a wall around himself for this return, and for all intents and purposes the only way to communicate with him was in German. The CAMS officials were well advised to steer clear.

Rudi turned up with a laptop computer. Compared to what we see today it was, pardon the pun, rudimentary. But for the time it was eye-opening. Rudi and his computer were seldom separated, even when he was speaking to Klaus who, it was pretty obvious, was to be the lead driver in my team...

Klaus and Rudi were obviously a close team. When you're setting a car up for a race, you don’t want a multitude of development drivers. The fewer inputs, the better. Klaus was on a wavelength with Rudi that I could never achieve and they worked together to bring our times down and build us a race package. Gregg and I watched, truthfully a bit in awe. My respect for Klaus grew by the session, and that led to an association that would last for years. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Remember that since January, all Australians had got to see either Dick Johnson winning the race by miles, or else Dick Johnson not bothering to show up. With the Silverstone campaign fresh in everyone's minds, there was a lot of speculation about whether there was a car anywhere in the world that could beat a Dick Johnson Sierra in a straight fight – but if there was one, then it just had to be the Eggenberger-built ANZ car that had cost its owner six figures. If there was going to be a race on Sunday, it would surely be between these two giants; everyone else would be fighting over 3rd place.

Nobody gave the Benson & Hedges Sierra of Tony Longhurst and Tomas Mezera a second glance.

Qualifying
By the time official qualifying was over on Friday, Sierras had locked out eight of the top ten grid spots for Sunday – Perkins in the #10 HSV Commodore was the first non-Sierra in 8th, with Fury's Skyline the only other interloper in 9th. Even within the Sierra ranks there was a sharp divide between the haves and have-nots, Johnson laying down an unbeatable 2:16.46 to secure pole position for himself, the only driver to break into the 2:16s. Bowe in the meantime was sent out to qualify the #28, which he duly put on the grid 2nd with a 2:17.52 (Dick had been careful to cross-enter himself and Bowe in all three cars, and as DJR3 was a newer, more developed car, it made sense to have a full-timer like Bowe qualify it). Fourth-fastest was Niedzwiedz in the ANZ Eggenberger Sierra, with a 2:18.02, but ahead of him with a 2:17.96 was Tony Longhurst in the banana-yellow #25, showing a turn of speed no-one had expected from this car.

Qualy was where the HR31 was all thumbs, developed before Ford moved the goal posts for turbo engines.

Two of the next three qualifiers were in Miedecke cars, Colin Bond splitting Miedecke's own #6 from that of teammate Pierre Dieudonné, but poor old Larry Perkins had only managed to drag his Walkinshaw around in 2:22.48, a whopping six seconds off Johnson's pace at the very track the Commodore had been built for. Even if they could count on the reliability of the Holden V8 – which wasn’t a given, what with all the changes it had undergone – that was a hell of a gap to make up.

Most intriguingly, however, two of the three wholly European-built Sierras on the grid – the silver #21 of Team CMS Sweden, and the #45 Peanut Slab car of Mark Petch Motorsport – had only qualified at roughly Commodore pace, Simonssen stopping the clocks with a 2:22.20, Francevic even slower with a 2:22.62. That raised certain eyebrows over in the HSV pits.

You See the Powerful Got Nervous...
On the Friday afternoon immediately after the close of official qualifying, the paddock was suddenly thrown into an uproar. Tom Walkinshaw made a visit to the FISA office and handed over a big wad of paperwork, lodging a formal protest against the five all-Australian Sierras entered in the race – the #25 of Tony Longhurst, the #4 of Colin Bond, and the #17, #18 and #28 of Dick Johnson. No cars with a European connection were protested, only the five built right here in Australia, as Tom felt they were unduly fast (he deliberately ignored the #9 Moffat car in this equation).

The protest itself covered seventeen points and mainly involved turbos, engine management systems, rear suspension and panels, but the meat of it was that Tom had chosen to interpret the turbo as a part of the exhaust system, which couldn't be modified – exhausts were free only after the first join, and the turbo clearly anteceded that. He told the TV cameras:

It should've been sorted out on Tuesday and Wednesday scrutineering when they went through. We asked them to do it of their own accord, uh... They all can't be right! We only want to know which one's right. There's about seven different versions out there, and six of them are wrong.

It was a fairly specious way of looking at things, as the rules clearly implied the turbo was a part of the intake system, not the exhaust. The "seven different versions out there" were because Group A's philosophy about getting air in basically required all dimensions to remain stock, but left the actual components free. You could fit any turbo you liked – Garrett, Holset, whatever – as long as it was no bigger than the one in the homologation papers. Tom surely knew this, but the rulebook didn’t explicitly state that the turbo was not a part of the exhaust system, and that gave him the thin end of the wedge he was looking for.

The feeling among the Aussies, even those driving other cars, was that the protest had little substance and was mainly intended to disrupt race preparations for Tom's rivals. All five of the listed Sierras would now require an overnight tear-down in the TAFE bay in front of the FISA scrutineers, which in turn would leave the teams in a mad rush to put them back together again in time for the Tooheys Top Ten on Saturday. DJR had the worst of it, as they had to put Humpty Dumpty back together again three times, despite the #18 qualifying behind Perkins, in 12th. Worse, the turbos themselves were then impounded as FISA decided their eligibility could only be decided in their offices in Paris. At the press conference Johnson snarled that Walkinshaw would, "Protest against the cut in his bagpipes if he could," and that, "All he wants to do is win and he doesn't care how he does it." That said, it should be noted that Perkins was in total support of the protest, as all through that year's ATCC he'd been vehement that the Sierras were running illegally and that CAMS needed to enforce the rules.

Yes, although often forgotten about, this car was protested too.

DJR team manager Neal Lowe decided to fight fire with fire. He filed a protest of his own targeting all three of the HSV Commodores, including the #40 that was never intended to race, and in fact had never even hit the track in qualifying. Calling on his intimate knowledge of the Commodore from his time with the Holden Dealer Team, Lowe focused on the front air dam, the size of the rear spoilers on the factory cars, and in particular on the steering racks. Lowe contested that the production VL (including the new Walky) was designed only for variable-ratio manual and power steering, while all three HSV cars ran the VK's constant-ratio manual steering. The VL's cross-member also had different mounting points than the VK to take the appropriate variable steering racks, and Lowe alleged that to make the VL accept a VK steering rack, an adapter plate had to be attached with the correct mounting holes. The question was: had the adapter plate been homologated for the Walky to use? This too could only be sorted out in Paris.

While the stewards combing through the mess, however, Walkinshaw's protest was already having knock-on effects: there was a good handful of local battlers who were facing exclusion from the start on the basis of falling outside the (FISA-mandated) "110% rule," that to qualify for the race you had to set a lap time within 110% of the pole. With Johnson having set a 2:16.46, that left the cutoff at just 2:30.10, and multiple race stalwarts – including the Gulsons' BMW 635 CSi, and the Commodores of Chris Clearihan, Ray Ellis, Tony Kavich and Alf Grant – had fallen afoul of it. They had no choice but to throw themselves on the officials' mercy and point out that with the provisional polesitter under an eligibility cloud, there might be some grey area around the benchmark time. Ultimately, none of these competitors were allowed to start, however, even though there was ample room on what was then a 60-car grid.

It was a schemozzle, but overall I'm not sure why they were surprised. The strategic protest was an established weapon in the Bathurst arsenal, and had been a favourite of Harry Firth back when he'd been the head of HDT – Moffat's preparations in 1974, for example, had been compromised by a fifteen-point protest from the Grey Fox (although the car had other issues that year too). The only thing that was unexpected, really, was the timing – the teams had been turning laps here since Wednesday, and Tom had chosen to submit a protest only now? Firth had at least delivered his protests during practice, depriving his rivals of track time but leaving space for it all to be settled before the crowds arrived on Saturday. By the time the serious business of the stopwatch began, all cars were usually sorted and above-board. In this sense the real victims of Tom's shenanigans weren't the teams, but the fans, who wouldn’t be able to trust what they were seeing with their own eyes. Before it even started, the race was to be contested in a courtroom, not on the track.

Tooheys Dozen
The protest of these five Sierras took the wind out of their sails just as we came to the traditional top-ten shootout for pole. None of them got back to the speed they'd shown before being dismantled, but that was okay because – and get used to hearing this – under FISA things had to be done differently, so the shootout would be for prize money only. Since being introduced in 1978, Hardie's Heroes had become an institution at Bathurst and one of the highlights of the weekend. Although James Hardie Industries had departed, both Tooheys and Channel Seven were keen for it to continue, the former because it was one more chance to get their name out there, the latter because it was some of the most-watched pieces of television all year.

But FISA wouldn't budge on the notion of Bathurst being a championship round, and as such they couldn't allow procedures to differ. So the Tooheys Top Ten would go ahead – soon modified to the Tooheys Dozen, the officials using their discretionary powers to promote crowd favourites Allan Grice and Peter Brock – but it would be strictly for cash, with the cars gridding up tomorrow in the order they’d qualified on Friday.

In the end (2:42 to 5:30 in the video below) it was virtually a pointless exercise, as only one car – the silver Team CMS Sweden Sierra driven by Ulf Granberg – actually managed to improve on their Friday time. Grice provided some interest by starting his run from the escape road at the bottom of Conrod, the theory being that its wider radius would allow him a higher speed across the start/finish line than if he'd taken the second-gear Murrays as normal. And the addition of Peter Brock in a Class 2 car was a borderline farce, crowd pandering at its most blatant, but after last year it was unthinkable that the King of the Mountain wouldn't be allowed to mount his throne. The deafening cheers as he completed his hotlap in the tiny M3 showed it had been the right decision.

Grice also failed to improve his grid position, but at the car looked good at least.

But the star on the day was shootout winner Klaus Niedzwiedz, who blew away even the high-boost Johnson cars in a breathtaking display of bravado and car control.

Klaus was on it from the start, setting the fastest time in the opening session. By qualifying, he'd slipped to 4th but then came the Saturday afternoon lap dash, which traditionally decided pole but this year would only be for show and the promise of a healthy $15,000 prize purse. With only the money to gain and everything else to lose, Klaus let rip and blew the field away.

Watching on the monitors, I found it heart-stopping stuff.

If he got it wrong, we were sunk. Into the downhill wheel-lifting Dipper, where I am always so super cautious, he took an aggressive first gear and missed it. For a split second, it could have been wall-time, but he got the gear and blasted home 1st.

He had shocked me by taking first gear there. I eased through in second, maintaining pace but not putting the car under so much stress.

When he was on a flyer, Klaus was so physical in the car that he taped up his hands under his gloves to ensure strong grip on wheel and gear shift. This was motor racing at the top European level and, as much as I wanted to believe we were on the same page, we weren't.

On Saturday night after the lap dash, we pulled out the practice motor and installed the race motor. It was F1 stuff being played out on a country road just over the Blue Mountains. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

It's interesting that Moffat's book mentions $15,000 up for grabs, while the TV broadcast mentions $40,000. I have no idea if he'd mentally converted it to U.S. dollars or if he was just remembering it wrong, but if I had to guess I'd say the $15k was Moffat's own share as the team owner, and with the passage of thirty years he's mistaken that for the whole amount. If anyone has a better idea I'm all ears.

Also interesting is Allan's insistence that we weren't "on the same page" as the top European teams, when only weeks earlier Dick had laid down some pretty convincing evidence that we were. But as fellow Ford heroes the rivalry between this pair was always quietly bitter, so Moffat would probably have signed his entire team over to HSV before he’d give Johnson any credit. More than anything else, I think that comment reveals that Moffat the man was tiring, finding it hard to get the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube and maintain his place among the young lions – he alone knew that his career only had 12 months left to run.

The Race

Despite the best efforts of the commentators, the race start – a rolling start, for the first and last time – was a complete fizzle. The European teams had been unable to talk the ARDC into starting the race this way last year, but this year they had it, giving the tall-geared European-built cars with their fragile drivelines a little extra cushion.

For the first time in my Bathurst career – and Bathurst was my life – I would not face the starter. That had to be Klaus. In fact we considered letting him double stint, going as long and hard as he could to create a gap. There was no thought of not winning.

It was the first time the Bathurst 1000 featured a flying start. If the Sierras had an Achilles' heel, it was their drive train, and officials had succumbed to pressure not to impose an axle-breaking standing start – although it was sold to all as a safety precaution, referencing my wild ride up the wall in the Mazda those few years before. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Whatever their intentions, it proved an anti-climax. Down Conrod they marched like Noah's Ark, two by two, but as they filed into Murray's Corner they took the racing line and sheared off. Polesitter Dick Johnson crossed the start line and the organisers released the balloons as usual, but the feeling of pre-launch tension, built up and then released, was just not there. Johnson convincingly led the field into Hell Corner and the 47-car pack was very strung out as it headed up Mountain Straight for the first time, the first four Sierras of Johnson, Niedzwiedz, Bowe and Bond already streets ahead of the next few cars.

No crush at the first corner, just a mild feeling of, "Well, that began..."

In truth, however, the standing start was hardly needed to bring on mechanical issues. The casualty rate in the opening laps was truly staggering, losing six cars before lap 20 – four of them major players. Poor Glenn Seton started the race with the world's worst case of deja vu: as soon as he'd put his foot down in the #15 Skyline the car had apparently got stuck in gear, triggering yet another gearbox failure in a car already plagued by them (half the Nissan's ETCC races had ended with gearbox failures). If you needed proof the standard Nissan gearbox was scrap metal, look no further than Bathurst '88: the team had to get something better homologated, and soon.

Another view of the race start, with a clear view of some unique cars.

But with the failure at Sandown and several more in Europe, our souls had been prepared for such a thing from the Nissan. It was a far greater shock when Tom Walkinshaw's HSV Commodore came trickling into pit lane with a tyre scraping on the bodywork on only the fifth lap! This car might've been built in the U.K., but it was still part of the works Holden team so it was carrying the hopes of about half the crowd on the hill, and reliability was supposed to be the ace up the Commodore's sleeve. But no, ten minutes of actual competition at the Mountain was all it had taken to break it. In a panic the pit crews fitted new tyres – and dropped the car off the jacks before the left-rear was bolted on, forcing them to lift it again to finish the job – and Tom was sent back out, but this was not a mere tyre problem: the rear suspension had completely collapsed. Wally Storey, who worked on this car in other, happier days, revealed that the unequal-length link arms had been binding up at the extremity of the rear suspension travel, placing huge stress on the four-link chassis mounts and beginning to shear them off. The imminent failure had dropped the ride height low enough to start rubbing the tyres, triggering that trip to the pits; unfortunately, when they dropped the #20 off the jacks and Tom axle-tramped it back out into the lane, the camel's back was finally broken. The mounts were ripped right out of the chassis. "He’s going to be lucky to make it around the track..." gasped Neil Crompton; "He won't," interrupted Garry Wilkinson. "He won't, the tyre's shredding, look at it!" They were right: the TWR Commodore crawled apologetically up Mountain Straight, puffing huge amounts of choking white tyre smoke, before the tyre finally popped in the middle of Griffin's Bend and Tom parked it by the escape road in the fence. His race was over with barely 30 kilometres out of the 1,000 completed.

And it had looked so good in free practice.

A lap later, the silver Swedish Sierra was also out with a blown turbo, followed on lap 7 by the Yellow Pages Commodore, whose electrics had let it down. Then on lap 9 Andrew Bagnall's Miedecke Sierra blew a head gasket. Fearing another Aussie favourite might be about to jump onto the DNF list, the commentary team then had a chat with Allan Grice – as last year, the in-car pictures showed the diff and gearbox temperatures in the FAI Commodore were off the scale. Last year both had been brand-new parts with very tight clearances, so they were bound to run hot until they got some miles on them and loosened up, but this year Gricey had other explanations.

Crompton: Gricey what’s happening out there, does the temperature bother you?

Grice: No, we knew it was going to run like that, it’s been doing it all week. The problem is this beautiful aerodynamics package has slowed the car down down the straight [sic], taken air from under the car therefore we can’t get air to the gearbox cooler. That’s why it’s running so hot.

Crompton: Is it going to be able to run for six-and-a-half hours at those temperatures, Allan?

Grice: Yeah, Les [Small, the car’s builder] seems to think so, and he’d have a better idea than you or I, I guess, so...

So Grice was okay (despite going in a tad deep at The Chase and leaving the road, then nearly collecting Perkins as he rejoined), he was still in the race and running hard. One who wasn't was George Fury, whose #30 Skyline threw a water pump belt on lap 17 and promptly cooked the engine, signing off almost certainly on the shittiest weekend Gibson Motorsport ever had at the Mountain.

When we went from the DR30 Skylines to the HR31 Skylines we had two cars and were late getting ready for Bathurst. We had a marketing director at Nissan who was very strong on you’ve got to win races, you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that.

Circumstances meant that both cars were out within 10 laps of the start. Glenn blew his gearbox off the line and the other one flicked its fan belt off and overheated; so we were packing up and heading home in the first 20 laps. That wasn't a good weekend at all and all the marketing guy was worried about was what he was going to tell the board on Monday morning. I told him that all you need to tell them is we didn't win the race! – Fred Gibson, Speedcafe

None of which produced the wail of anguish that came with the next major retirement, however. If the HSV team had been carrying half of Australia's hopes, then Dick Johnson was almost certainly burdened with the other half. Knowing that, Dick had entered three full cars with three different strategies – one with high boost, one with medium boost and one with low. Cleverly, Dick had then cross-entered himself and John Bowe in all three cars: his game plan was to run the three cars at different speeds and take over whichever was best-placed in the final stages.

As the newest and most developed of his cars, the #17 was almost certainly the team hare – and given its performance at Sandown, where it had almost run down the winning Moffat car after an early pit stop to fix a silly electrical issue, it wasn't beyond the realms of possibility that it could run flat-out all day. But the vagaries of the racing gods can undo the most carefully-laid plans: on lap 20, while building on a comfortable lead, it burst a tyre halfway down Conrod and was pitched into a lurid, high-speed spin that zoomed almost to the top of the first hump. Gingerly, Dick waited for the pack to rush past before limping back onto the road, headed for the pits for fresh rubber. But like Tom before him, his problems went far beyond the tyres.

So here's me going backwards doing 280 kays and the thing is spinning down the straight. What had happened, it blew a tyre and then it grabbed hold of the mudguard and it just locked everything up. It wasn’t until I got back to the pits and they got it back out again that I felt these horrendous vibrations so we had to retire the thing.

When we got it back home in Brisbane and had a look at it, it had twisted the crankshaft and twisted the tailshaft and the main shaft to the gearbox was all screwed. – Dick Johnson, Dick Johnson Racing: 30-Year Anniversary

Dick ultimately retired the car on lap 22, the same lap we also lost Murray Carter, whose #14 Netcomm Sierra snapped a driveshaft. Rubbing in salt, four laps later DJR was reduced to a single-car operation when Bowe brought #28 in with a blown engine. This was DJR3, Dick's championship-winning and Silverstone car, which had probably been the medium-boost car, with just too many miles on the clock to go any further. All that was left was the #18, the oldest of the three Shell Sierras, probably running an engine map that was ultra-conservative with absolutely no surprises – the unkind might say, it was de-tuned junk. Having had former Toyota leading man John Smith start the car, Johnson and Bowe took it over for the rest of the day, leaving Neville Crichton and Alf Costanzo to enjoy the Shell hospitality tent instead. And it's arguable they still could've won, had it not been for yet another mishap when Johnson climbed in for his stint – a broken starter motor delayed the car for 6 minutes. Was it the same one they'd used to get across the line at Sandown? I have no idea, but if so it was a cruel irony – the same part that gave them a miracle 3rd-place at Sandown also ensured they were only 2nd at Bathurst!

The end of a hard day for the Queenslander.

John Andretti crashed his Commodore at Reid Park on lap 37, bringing out the pace car, but that was the only incident for about an hour. The next major casualty didn't come until lap 65, when the 10th-placed Bill O'Brien brought in his Everlast Batteries Walky for fuel and tyres and put his gentleman co-driver Ray Lintott in for his first stint. Unfortunately, Lintott's outlap lasted about 30 seconds, as he stuffed it into the wall at Griffin's – a rookie mistake, pure and simple.

The deal was that whoever smashes it pays the bill. Unfortunately in the race poor old Ray crashed it heavily at Griffin's Bend. We had done a brake pad change and bolted on new tyres. He didn't pump the pedal and couldn't stop. He was so distraught that he relinquished his half share, which helped me pay for the repair. – Bill O’Brien, AMC #98

Brock meanwhile had got stuck behind the Commodore of John Harvey, the two old teammates having a fair old dice which at one point saw the Mobil M3 take a trip across the sand trap at Skyline. When Terry Finnigan's #19 Trojan Walky punctured a tyre on lap 84, depositing the carcass on Conrod, an unsighted Brock barrelled straight into it. This smashed the oil cooler and sent the #56 Mobil BMW to the pits for repairs. He told the pitlane cameras:

Well, someone lost a wheel or a tyre coming down Conrod Straight, and I was just sitting behind some traffic there. The bloke in front just dodged out and, lo and behold, here's a tyre sitting on the road in front of me, and I'm doing about 250 kilometres per hour! And I went straight over it – it happened in a split second, and it's knocked out the oil cooler. So the guys'll try and bypass it I guess, and we'll just get out there and see what happens.

Sadly, what happened was an overheating engine: Neil Crompton, pulling double-duty as both a driver and a commentator that day, was put in as a seat-filler, but by lap 89 the car was dead. In the meantime, Jim Richards had been put into the #57, with Brock scheduled to get in at the next stop, but this car too was overheating and would eventually retire on lap 68. Lap 27, meanwhile, had seen fellow Class 2 entry Phil Ward lose the rear end of his Mercedes at Skyline, going for a single roll in the sand trap. Footage on the day showed poor Phil on his hands and knees, trying to dig his car out by hand. Ultimately, the Crowe/Janson M3 emerged the strongest remaining Class 2 car, working its way into the top ten as the afternoon rolled on.

The camera in the headlight also gave some fabulous on-track footage.

Hahne, Mezera, Hulme, and Bond scrapped for the minor placings, a gaggle that was reduced when the Miedecke/Soper Sierra dropped out with a split bore on lap 102, followed by Hahne's Peanut Slab Sierra a lap later with overheating ("Brittle car, that," jibed Wilkinson). Walkinshaw insisted on a stint in the surviving Aussie-built Perkins/Hulme car when it was in contention for a top three placing – still aiming for the history books, it seems – and as the team owner, he got his wish. Tom hopped into car #10 for a stint.

So all of that left Niedzwiedz out in front, in splendid isolation, the car running as neat and swift as Swiss public transport. Longhurst had dropped a lap after making two trips to the pits to cure a sticking throttle, so today the ANZ Sierra had no peer. Niedzwiedz had blitzed the opening stint, made easier by the problems for Longhurst and Johnson, then handed it over to Moffat for his stint – as it turned out, his final one ever. "I didn’t know it then," wrote Allan in Climbing The Mountain: "They were to be my last race laps at Bathurst."

1969 to 1988: Not a bad innings, mate.

Klaus then got back in and added another lap to their lead before giving it back to regular team driver Gregg Hansford. By the closing stages, about 30 laps from the chequered flag, the ANZ car had a three lap lead – not three seconds, three laps.

Initially I'd planned to take the last stint myself, to see the chequered flag and claim my fifth Bathurst crown. But it didn't feel right. Something was gnawing at me. It surprised me when I asked Klaus if he would be prepared to take a third stint, with Gregg and I having only one each. If it worked out, I would win my fifth Bathurst having covered just 29 laps, a long way from my solo victories back in 1970 and 1971. But it would still be a win. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

When Garry Willmington’s #50 Leeson Civil Engineering Walky stopped at Skyline with a shredded left-rear tyre, race control decided this warranted a pace car to pick up all the dead cars. The pace car stayed out for 12 interminable laps, with the field bunched up behind, their tyre and engine temps dropping, and dropping, and dropping...

This was looking so good, and yet I had a premonition.

The use of pace cars is quite different now from the way it was then. Back then, you’d have "clearing" interruptions to the race so broken-down cars and debris could be collected from the track at random periods with the field bunched behind the pace car.

They pulled one on Gregg and he fell into line, third in the queue behind lapped cars. You want the safety car to go as fast as it can so you can manage your temperatures, both tyre and engine. In a turbocharged car like the Sierra, temperature is critical. You need to gap the car in front to give yourself free air. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

We were behind the pace car with Gregg Hansford driving and Rudi had brought out a sophisticated telemetry system that showed us the 12 most important functions. As the laps kept dribbling along, driving me crazy, I kept glancing over at the computer and saw the temperatures going down. Rudi gave me the Swiss salute, which we would call the wave-off, and said, "It will be fine." That was the most significant bad management decision of my life because I should have said they were too low. – Allan Moffat, AMC #77

Eventually the yellow flags cleared and the pace car peeled off. The race rotated back to green, and everyone put their foot down. Blasting up Mountain Straight, Longhurst passed Hansford to go from three laps down to only two, but the end was nigh for the ANZ car. "Apparently it got vapour lock," said Moffat to the cameras that day, a phenomenon less familiar today than it was 30 years ago: suddenly back at maximum attack, under-bonnet temps shot up so rapidly that the water in the coolant pipes boiled away, leaving the engine sucking on air instead of nice, cooling fluid. "Running cold behind the pace car, Rudi feels that it got very cold and then as Gregg accelerated perhaps a little bit too quickly, who's to say, it developed a vapour lock and it just overheated instantly. Gregg said he came to the end of the straight and it had a flutter and that was it."

Moffat was aghast. He was too polite to come out and say it, but Gregg wasn't the most experienced driver in the field, so it was possible he didn't realise how carefully you had to manage the temperatures on the restart. Moffat the old master had managed it perfectly after the Andretti pace car period, but it seems no-one had told Gregg exactly what he had to do. Nevertheless, with two laps in hand there was still every chance they could fix the car and get it back out for the run to the flag, they just needed Rudi to work his magic. If anyone could get it running again, it was Eggenberger himself.

He couldn't. With no cars to drive Peter Brock was spending the afternoon in the commentary box, and when he saw the live feed he spotted it in one: "That looks very much like a cylinder head gasket to me." He was right.

Rudi had the bonnet up, then he had the spark plugs out, but nothing will re-start a car when its head gasket has blown.

Tony Longhurst flashed by in the winning car – a Sierra – while we were still working in front of the pits, before we pushed the car away.

In hindsight, we all knew Gregg could have managed the safety-car period better. But we had radio contact and maybe Rudi could have offered better advice. Maybe I should have listened to my premonition, but I didn't want to talk across Rudi. Or maybe pigs could have flown that day.

I couldn't help thinking: what if I'd been in the car? What if the main thing I'd brought to the team that day had been twenty years of experience at the Mountain? Because at Bathurst you're not racing 60 other cars or whatever the field size is, you're fighting the Mountain. That's your only task – to take on the Mountain and beat it. And nothing beats it like experience. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Bathurst 1988 would go down in history as the one that got away for Allan Moffat Racing: they'd virtually had one hand on the trophy. They could've brought the car in, brought it up to temperature in the pits and sent it on its way still with a full lap in hand over Longhurst & Mezera. But they didn't. The long faces in the ANZ pits and hospitality tent said it all.

Tony Longhurst inherited the lead, ahead of Walkinshaw, Bowe, Bond, and Janson. The HSV Commodore soon retired, though, when it suddenly lost oil pressure. At the end of Walkinshaw's stint the car came in for a scheduled stop, Perkins got back in for the run to the flag, and then found himself the duck at the wheel when the car retired 24 laps from home with a broken engine rocker and oil pump drive. There were suspicions that the Scot had deliberately buzzed the engine to ensure the Aussie car didn't show up its imported rival. Nobody takes them very seriously, but it showed how poisonous perceptions of Holden's "intercontinental" team had become! It was little wonder that, immediately after the race, Tom Walkinshaw made the shock announcement that he was retiring from driving.

He never did manage a Bathurst win, as a driver at least...

That left the B&H Sierra in a league of its own. Tomas Mezera hopped in for the final stint, narrowly avoiding the black-and-orange Lusty Walky when it spun at the final corner: Mezera wisely took to the escape road and stayed right out of its way until it sorted itself out. Apart from that momentary fright, he drove it smoothly to the chequered flag, he and Longhurst deservedly celebrating their first Bathurst triumph by over a lap – total race time, 7 hours, 2 minutes and 10.28 seconds.

The car looked as good after seven hours at the limit as it had in the pre-race warm-up.

It would've been easy to dismiss Tony Longhurst as a rich kid playing with toys, but like Peter Revson before him, he was a serious racing driver. His father might've made a lot of money building speedboats – and then Dreamworld on the Gold Coast – but Tony never had any help from daddy's chequebook (well, except $10,000 to put the Dreamworld logo on the Camaro he'd shared with Mike Burgmann in 1983). He'd spent several years as the apprentice at JPS Team BMW, where despite his youth, the former water-skiing champion had been wise enough to park his ego, listen and learn: team boss Frank Gardner was not the sort to be soft on his pupils. Now, five years in, all his listening and learning had paid off. Unfancied against Eggenberger from Europe and DJR from home, Longhurst and Mezera had taken the first pukka Bathurst win by a turbocharged car, and the first for a non-V8 since Bob Holden & Rauno Aaltonen in a Mini Cooper S in 1966.

We had haemorrhaged early in the year. We kept blowing engines up. The rule was you had to use pump fuel and Dick Johnson had the best fuel. For Bathurst, Frank put his foot down with [engine builder] Ivan Tighe and we had a conservative package. But when we got to Bathurst and put in the same Shell fuel as Dick, the car was a weapon. We had 550 or 590 horsepower. My weakness was I wasn't a good test driver, but we had tested at Lakeside and worked well. It was a pig at Sandown, but worked well at Lakeside.

In the second portion of the 1988 race we could just cruise and collect. – Tony Longhurst, AMC #82

Again a reference to Dick Johnson using special fuel – which might answer my question about Sandown '87, at least. Dick had actually used three cars to finish 2nd, but it was hardly satisfying; 3rd went to Colin Bond and Alan Jones in the #4 Caltex Sierra, making a Sierra 1-2-3. The highest finisher in Class 2 was the 4th-placed Trevor Crowe/Peter Janson M3, whose fastest race lap (set by Crowe) was 12.6 seconds slower than Longhurst's fastest lap (2:19.06). The first Holden to finish was the 6th-placed Walky of Brian Callaghan & Barry Graham, which was actually a major face-saver for Holden as the cars that finished 7th and 8th were outdated VK's.

The surprise of the race was actually the 9th-placed car. With so many faster cars in front of them, no one expected to see a Class 3 (Up to 1,600cc) car finish in the top ten, but that is exactly what happened, and in spite of multiple Class 1 and 2 cars being denied classification after failing to complete enough laps. After sprinting all day in their works Corolla, John Faulkner and Drew Price outlasted many of the more fancied teams and scored themselves a top-ten finish. This was a great achievement after starting 41st with a time 22.38 seconds slower than Johnson's pole time, while also delivering a quiet message to John Smith, who’d forsaken the Toyota team for Johnson's outfit.

The older AE86 Sprinter again showed its superiority as a track-car over the FWD hatches.

But the fans were still switching off, unmoved by the sight of cars that weren’t even for sale in Australia battling for Australian motorsport’s greatest prize.

After the Battle, the Counting
Which just left the question of the protests to sort out. During the race, Tom Walkinshaw had stepped in and, on live TV, withdrawn his protest on any car that should happen to win the race, "...in the interests of the sport." In other words, he'd suspended his complaint on the winning car so the result would be known immediately, instead of after months in the courtrooms as had happened last year. This was seen by many as a slap in the face after the mayhem it had created in the preceding days, so if it was meant as a conciliatory gesture it backfired somewhat.

Paul Gover's been at it that long? Well there you go.

He really should've known better. The DJR cars were ultimately cleared and Bond was excluded a month after the race following a FISA hearing in Japan. An angry Bond appealed to CAMS and was reinstated to 3rd place after proving not only was his car legal, but that the stewards had erred in procedure by not allowing him to put his case forward at the time of the protest.

The whole thing was then reduced to a farce when, for an encore, Bond also showed that Tom Walkinshaw hadn't actually had the authority to lodge a protest in the first place. To lodge a protest you had to be a team entrant, and the entrant for the HSV cars at Bathurst in 1988 happened to be Perkins Engineering, not TWR. Although he supported the protest, Perkins had not given Tom the necessary paperwork on the day, and the FISA stewards had stuffed up by not checking for the entrant's licence. After all the rigmarole, the five Aussie Sierras were left with no legalities to answer for after all. Rubbing in salt, the counter-protest against the HSV team's steering racks was upheld, although since neither car had finished, no penalty was enacted.

The whole thing was hateful, but nobody went to bed that night with a head full of troubles like Allan Moffat.

That night [ANZ boss] Will Bailey walked up to Rudi. This was a bollocking that we knew had to come. How could Will face his board, some of whom, to put it mildly, weren't as supportive of the motor racing idea as him? He could he, personally, handle this crushing, avoidable, loss?

"Next year," he said to Rudi, "bring two cars."

Will had picked it in one. Our fault had been that we'd bet it all on the black. We had the resources, the ability and the will to win, but we had spread it all too thin. We had left ourselves with no contingency. And Will, at the time of our greatest despair, was giving us a chance to redress it. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Enzed Endgame: Sandown '88

The 1987 Sandown 500 had been run under a shadow, the prospect of the private enthusiasts who owned their own cars and competed mainly for the fun of it being pushed off the entry lists by the arrival of the big works teams from Europe – teams here to contest the World Touring Car Championship at Bathurst and Calder Park.

A year on, the WTCC was as dead as Communism, but the privateers were still here, padding out the Sandown grid to a total of 34 entries. If you're counting at home, that's seven more than showed up for the race in 2018, although it's true that in today's world some of those entries would be back in the supporting Super2 or SuperUte series. That said, at least none of the teams in 1988 were running stupid retro liveries – Supercars is already a retro series, for chrissakes, what do they need retro liveries for?

Anyway, in 1988 the race was backed by Larry Perkins' old sponsor, Enzed Fluid Connectors, for the first and only time. If the 1987 Sandown enduro had had an "end of an era" vibe about it, the 1988 edition didn't yet feel like a rebirth – but still, it would be the last time the race would be held on the longer 3.878km "Grand Prix" version of the circuit, with its tight, twisting infield that bypassed the fast and dangerous Esses. It was a sign the racing establishment in Australia was about ready to start facing facts, accept that some things weren't working and begin the pruning.

People Who Race, and Serious Racers
The entry list for the 1988 Enzed 500 was basically a who's who of those serious about their preparations for Bathurst, although not all of them could necessarily back it up. There was the works Nissan team, Gibson Motorsport, with a pair of Skyline GTS-Rs for Glenn Seton/Anders Olofsson (#15), and George Fury/Mark Skaife (#30). Behind them were a couple of privateers in older DR30s, such as the #14 Netcomm car of old hands Murray Carter & Steve Masterton (although they failed to qualify), and the yellow #42 Hella car of Matt Wacker & Larry Kogge. There was even a a non-turbo #88 Gazelle (or S14 S12 Silvia, if you prefer), which had been farmed out to Bryan Sala and Ross Burbidge (fun fact: Burbidge had been one of the first to race a Mazda RX-7 at Bathurst, way back in 1979, when they were only a class car and not the outright contender Moffat made them into).

Of the BMWs, in stark contrast to the situation in Europe, there were only three. Two were works cars, the #05 Mobil M3 of Peter Brock, and the backup #7 for Neil Crompton and David "Skippy" Parsons. Brock was once again giving the aspiring youngster Crompo a chance to shine on the big stage, pairing him with a fast and safe pair of hands in Skippy Parsons – although, as with last year, their main qualification was probably still that they came cheap. And Brock had almost certainly kept the team's best stuff for himself, choosing as co-driver the man with whom he'd won two Bathursts back-to-back in 1978 and '79, "Gentleman" Jim Richards. I'd love to know whether they went with Brock's Schnitzer setup or Richo's softer, more forgiving Frank Gardner settings, but honestly, as far as I can tell it's a coin toss – whether Brock would listen to what you were trying to tell him or stubbornly do things his own way depended on which day it was, and Richo was probably too easygoing to force the issue.

(The third BMW on the grid was the #87 Sommariva Concrete 635 CSi, which was actually Richo's ATCC-winning car from 1985. It was now owned and driven by Joe Sommariva, with co-driving duties from Darrel Belsky.)

Toyota Team Australia had sent along three cars to contest Class C, a single AE86 Sprinter coupé and two front-wheel drive FX-GT hatchbacks. They were backed up by the privateer AE86 of Bryan Bate Motors, and of course, Bob Holden's long-serving AE86 hatch. The only possible threat to a Toyota victory in the tiddler class was the #86 Gemspares Isuzu Gemini ZZ of Daryl Hendrick & John White, and it wasn't much of a threat at that.

Of the new Walkinshaw Commodores, there were plenty. No fewer than nine players had upgraded to the new bodykit and fuel-injected V8, spearheaded by the two works cars of Holden Special Vehicles. The #10 of team leader Larry Perkins (and co-driver, 1967 F1 World Champion Denny Hulme) was a new car, PE 005, built especially for the 1988 endurance season; the #11, shared by TWR regular Jeff Allam and 1985 Bathurst-winner Armin Hahne, was Larry's ATCC car (PE 004) upgraded to Walkinshaw spec.

Besides the works cars, two other Walkies on the grid were Perkins-built. The first was the powder-blue Everlast entry of Bill O'Brien, who was still racing PE 003, the very first customer car Perkins had ever built. "I needed two of those injected engines plus gearboxes and other trick parts," O'Brien told Australian Muscle Car #98, "and I soon worked out that I had spent over half a million in less than a year!" To help pay the bills, O'Brien accepted an offer from wealthy prestige car dealer Ray Lintott to buy a half-share of the car for Bathurst, bedding down their partnership in the crucible of Sandown.

The other Perkins car belonged to Tony Noske, owner-driver of the Kalari Transport outfit. He'd upgraded to a brand-new car, chassis PE 006, having sold off PE 001 to fund the transfer. PE 001, you'll recall, had started life as Perkins' 1987 ATCC car in Enzed colours; after racing it through the 1988 sprint season, Noske had advertised it in Auto Action as a bare shell, eventually selling it to a Melbourne wrecker who turned it back into a road car! It seems the wrecker had a written-off VK "Blue Meanie" in his possession, which he gutted of the running gear and installed into PE 001, turning it into a road-going VK Group A replica. The line between high-performance road car and racing car was reeeal fuzzy back then.

There was also the Beaurepaires Walky of Chris Lambden, which was actually HDT 16 – yes, the car in which Peter Brock had won his last Bathurst. Peter was too broke to put it on a museum plinth, so it had been sold off to fund his BMW campaign. Also present was the well-remembered Peter McLeod Yellow Pages car, which was actually nearing the end of its racing life. It had started out as a rental car bought at auction (yes, really), and McLeod had raced it as a VK in 1985, a VK Group A in '86, a VL in '87 and now a VL Walkinshaw in '88 – the car had changed its panels like socks. At least both these cars looked the goods, both Lambden's Bearepaires and  McLeod's Yellow Pages liveries looking absolutely sumptuous.

McLeod's Yellow Pages Walky, pictured here at Bathurst.

And of course, there were the Ford Sierras. Twelve months ago this race had seen the RS500's Aussie debut, where it had shown promising speed but precious little endurance. Only four had shown up for the race, and none had made the finish (two hadn't even made the start!). But twelve months had passed between that day and this: now most of the kinks were ironed out, it was the only game in town.

The Ford spearhead was of course the #17 of Dick Johnson & John Bowe, back from humiliating the Europeans and driving a brand-new car built for the enduros (DJR4; chassis DJR3 was still on the boat back from England). The #18, which had been entrusted to open-wheel star Alf Costanzo and former Toyota leading man John Smith, was actually DJR1, Dick's right-hand drive car from 1987, which had started life as an ordinary RS Cosworth. Backing them up, Tony Longhurst had put an attractive yellow Benson & Hedges livery on TLR1 to replace the Freeport colours he'd worn in the ATCC, while Colin Bond had brought along two cars. He'd planned to share his new car, CXT1, with 1980 F1 World Champion and sometime Alfa Romeo teammate Alan Jones, but once again the new car proved troublesome and it split a cylinder bore in practice. It couldn't make the start, which left the Miedecke-built rent-a-car (MM1) to former Miedecke team drivers John Giddings and Bruce Stewart, who'd have to fly the flag for Caltex alone. Andrew Miedecke himself would be driving MM3, the Sierra built to replace the one Don Smith had destroyed in practice here last year, now dressed in a minimal #8 Gulliver's Travels livery; he'd be taking relief from old partner Andrew Bagnall. Miedecke Motorsport's status as the Ford "B-team" was rapidly eroding, however, with all these other Sierra runners starting to get results.

Then there was Allan Moffat and his #9 ANZ entry.

Cloud #9
One of the most fascinating aspects of the 1988 season was how Moffat had done the impossible and wrangled a customer car out of Rudi Eggenberger, head of Eggenberger Motorsport, Ford of Europe's official factory team. Exactly how he did it is a matter of conjecture, but it probably boiled down to two things. Firstly, his international contacts: the Ford Motor Company had long been in the habit of rotating executives through Australia and the rest of the world to give them a nice broad experience base before bringing them back to Detroit, so it's likely some of Rudi's paymasters in Cologne had known Moffat when he was part of the Ford works team in Australia in the 1970s, and applied some pressure on his behalf. The other factor was that in the last couple of years Moffat had struck up a firm friendship with Will Bailey, boss of the ANZ bank, who'd become Allan Moffat Racing's main sponsor. That had given him unusually deep pockets – which were needed, because the car was rumoured to have cost $300,000.

Having now read Moffat's book, Climbing The Mountain, I think we can put a few of the rumours to bed. The price tag above seems to be accurate, but for that money it seems he got a new car built especially to race in Australia, not a refurbished Texaco car, which is why it didn't show up until the Wanneroo round of the ATCC.

It took a lot of persuasion. Undoubtedly, Rudi was somewhat peeved with Australia. And he didn’t build customer cars anyway. His job was to work with Ford to win championships. But I wore him down and he agreed to make me a car. From start to finish it was only a couple of months but it was a long-enough delay that I missed the first three rounds of the 1988 ATCC. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

That might explain another mystery about the car, that nobody seems to know its chassis number. Eggenberger ended up having two different systems for numbering his cars, either a five-digit number for his own cars (the #1 ETCC car from 1988, for example, was chassis 99269), or "EGMO x/xx" for customer cars. Here the EGMO stood for "Eggenberger Motorsport," with the first X standing for a sequential number, and the others for the year. So the second Moffat ANZ car that would come along in a year or so would be EGMO 7/89, meaning the seventh car built in 1989.

The first Moffat car, however, is a complete mystery, with no chassis number recorded anywhere I can find. It's possible that, as the very first customer car he ever built, Rudi simply hadn't yet decided what his customer numbering system would be. It's tempting to unofficially dub it EGMO 1/88, but even that's slightly up in the air, as one rumour suggests Eggenberger also built a car for a Japanese team that year, which might've come before Moffat's, though I haven't found out who the team allegedly was. Either way, AMR-005 seems like another possibility (AMRs 001 to 004 were the Peter Stuyvesant Mazdas), but that seems unfair to Rudi. In the end, we'll probably have to stick to convention: each of the ANZ Sierras only ever raced with a single number on the doors, so this one's usually just referred to as the #9.

In the ATCC, however, the #9 had proved less than Moffat had hoped for, as demonstrated by the outcome of the Adelaide round – a race where Moffat was not only beaten by the Dick Johnson winning machines, but lapped.

I'd been hugely impressed with the progressive power of the Sierra, loved the way it pointed, but couldn't understand why in qualifying I was 1.5 seconds off Johnson's car. This was an Eggenberger machine, a world-championship contender. It looked good, in fact great, and it was beautifully engineered. My expectation, not unreasonably, was that I'd be on the pace right out of the box – even against people who had had more time with their cars. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain 

That prompted a re-think in his workshop on Malvern Road, Toorak, followed by a repeat of Dick Johnson's expedition to Europe to complain to the manufacturer. This time, however – either because Rudi was less of a crime boss than Andy Rouse, or because Moffat was rather a better diplomat than Johnson – the outcome was very different.

I was thinking deeply about all this. I'd bought a customer car from a works team. What had I expected to happen? The realisation was blindingly obvious and a real kick in the tail.

Of course I wouldn't get works-car treatment. I'd get a car that was well-built, bulletproof and not likely to cause a "warranty" complaint. But I wouldn’t get a car that could win.

I was on a plane to Switzerland to confront the gnome in his home. Even though I had an appointment, Rudi kept me waiting a mighty long time. If you ever want to feel like a total inconvenience, just turn up in Switzerland with a complaint.

I have to say the meeting was convivial. I left not with a box of parts or a blueprint of how to rebuild the turbocharger. I left with a computer chip.

A new reality was confronting me. I was an analogue man in a digital world. While I'd been used to manually tuning my cars, and I'd even been introduced to the early concept of engine mapping, this whole process of plugging in a Pac-Man game to alter performance was foreign to me.

I came through Customs feeling no compulsion to declare what I was carrying in my briefcase. I installed it in my Sierra, and won the 1988 Sandown 500. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Qualifying
Without Castrol stumping up the sponsorship dollars there was no "Castrol Chargers" or any other imitation of the Bathurst top-ten shootout, just a trio of 30-minute qualifying sessions to settle the order on the grid. From those sessions, Dick Johnson ultimately took pole for the second year in a row, stopping the clocks at 1:46.94, a second faster than Longhurst – an average one-lap speed of 130.5 km/h. The Nissans looked promising also, Seton putting his GTS-R 3rd on the grid despite having rolled it at The Chase at its Bathurst press launch, while the HSV Commodores lined up 6th and 9th.

Given this was the final year cars would run on the 3.9km layout, it was an opportunity to take stock of how pole times had changed over the years. In 1984, the first year of this layout, George Fury had taken pole in his turbocharged Nissan Bluebird with a time of 1:46.2, an average of 131.5 km/h. Given that was for the older Group C regs, though, it's not especially representative – Fury's engine was 200cc smaller than Johnson's, but had the advantage of an aggressive aero kit and two extra inches of rubber at each corner. Apples and oranges.

The first meaningful data comes with Peter Brock's pole in 1985, the first year of the Group A regs, achieved in a virtually-stock VK Commodore – 1:52.3, or 124.3 km/h. That was a hefty 6.1 seconds and 7.2km/h slower than the Bluebird, so this could be regarded as the natural pace of a Group A car before the evo specials arrived. The following year, 1986, it had fallen to Brock again in the updated VK SS Group A, at 1:49.84 – a solid two-and-a-half second improvement on '85. 1987's pole had been almost as big a jump, Johnson claiming the top spot with a 1:47.59, or two-and-a-quarter seconds better than Brock in the first hit out for the "big turbo" RS500. At only 0.65 seconds faster, 1988 had brought the smallest year-on-year improvement of the Group A era, although that was explainable by the fact that it was the first time nobody had brought a major new homologation package to the track – Johnson was running more or less the same Sierra package he'd debuted the year before, and probably running no more qualifying boost than he had then. The difference this year was race boost, which was sure to be much higher than last year: that's what Johnson and Eggenberger's expensive new computer chips had bought, and it remained to be seen whose would do the business over 500km.

Still, chalk up another all-time track record to George Fury. We hear all about his '84 Bathurst pole, but no-one ever seems to mention the Sandown pole that came before it.

Race Day
Sadly, unlike the '87 edition, the full telecast of the 1988 Enzed 500 doesn't seem to be on YouTube, just a 45-minute highlight reel. It's harder to tease out the way the race unfolded when five-sixths of the broadcast is missing, but then again Sandown '88 wasn't as tense or hard-fought as '87. The Sierras were here, and they were sorted, and they'd cast everything else into the shade. The only question was whether they could last 500km at a pace that could win.

The race got off to a bustling start, with lots of revs and tyre smoke filling the air in front of the grandstands as the field streamed away. Sandown is always a race of high attrition, however, and the green bottles started falling immediately. From 2nd on the grid, Tony Longhurst made a very slow start and limped around his first lap to go straight back to the pits, the team mechanics (in smart yellow B&H uniforms) swarming to check the rear axles. He'd been just a tad too aggressive with his start and broken a driveshaft, which would have to be replaced before he could continue. His race had ended literally as soon as it began.

On the other side of the circuit, everyone behaved themselves through the first series of corners, Johnson leading but chased hard by Miedecke's plain white Sierra, Seton's Nissan, Allam's HSV Commodore, the other HSV Commodore of Perkins, the second Nissan of Fury, and Moffat's ANZ Sierra. Lap 2 started with the same calm, determined ferocity, but it was here we had the first proper retirement of the race, a Toyota – the #29 AE86 Sprinter of Drew Price & John Faulkner, so a works Toyota, at that! That was a sure sign this race wasn't going to come easily, and indeed, on the same lap, Glenn Seton was seen touring very slowly up the back straight in his Skyline, having broken the gearbox, probably off the start. Nobody realised it then, but that had been Glenn Seton's final race lap in a Nissan.

It took a while before the TV commentators found out what had gone wrong, however. The broadcast team for this race included old hands Peter Gee (good), Will Hagon (excellent), and a guest in the form of one of the most colourful figures in Aussie motorsport history, "Captain" Peter Janson. This eccentric, deerstalker-wearing privateer had been responsible for bringing Larry Perkins back into the sport, giving him a co-drive after he returned from that unsuccessful tilt at Formula 1. Four years at the Mountain had earned them a 3rd, two 2nd's and a DNF before Peter Brock headhunted Perkins for the Holden Dealer Team, kicking his career into high gear. That was the substance of Janson's time in touring cars, but what he was remembered for was the style. It wasn't just the parties, which were legendary in their own right: it was little things like, when sponsored by Cadbury-Schweppes, he'd slowed down on parade laps to toss free samples to the crowd, in defiance of the safety regs. Then, when sponsored by NGK spark plugs, he'd sidestepped a rule that kept their logo off the car by legally changing his name to NGK Janson – hey, the rules required that you display the drivers' names...

So a larrikin like Janson was a welcome addition to the commentary team, but new pitlane mike-man John Thompson was rather more of disappointment. He seemed uncomfortable with the job, and forgot that with racing drivers you can't just wait for them to spill the beans, you've got to really squeeze it out of them!

Will Hagon: Down in the pits, let's hear from Glenn Seton as to what did happen to car #15.

John Thompson: I've got Glenn Seton with me, who's out of the race after just 3 laps, he was lying 3rd and third-fastest. Glenn, you must be dreadfully disappointed?

Glenn Seton: Oh, it's very disappointing. This sort of thing is just part of the game in motorsport – these things happen. The car’s still on a development programme, and hopefully we'll fix it for Bathurst.

John Thompson: Good luck at Bathurst, Glenn.

Will Hagon: Well we didn't find out what happened, and I'm not surprised he's disappointed!

Peter Janson: I don't think he wanted to tell us!

After 14 laps it was a comfortable DJR 1-2, Dick ahead of Costanzo, with Allan Moffat well in the shade. But it was early days yet. From 7th on the grid, Moffat had calmly but firmly dealt with George Fury, Larry Perkins and Jeff Allam to be 3rd by lap 3. Costanzo had worked his way up since then, but Moffat was too wise to fight him this early in the game. And behind them more cars were falling by the wayside: the privateer #91 Bryan Bate Motors Corolla and Lawrie Nelson's #28 Capri Components Mustang had already dropped out, while lap 16 saw the Giddings/Stewart Caltex Sierra overheat and stop.

And then on lap 24, it struck Dick Johnson as well, who slowed on the long climb up the back straight and so lost the lead to Moffat, who didn't slow down a jot. Johnson didn't fall away, hanging on to the back of Moffat, but it was clear whatever big advantage he'd held in the opening laps was gone. I have to admit, the first time I watched the replay I thought Johnson had simply turned down the boost: in a turbo car, the way to win an enduro was to turn up the wick and put in some blistering laps early on, then back off when everyone started to chase you, giving them the unenviable choice of breaking their cars trying to close the gap or just accepting their position and circulating behind you. Bill Tuckey had dubbed this the "Brock Crush," because it was exactly what Peter used to do at Bathurst, even in his non-turbo Commodores and Toranas. Now, I'd thought, it looked like Dick had used up whatever early firepower he'd planned on using and it was time to do the sensible thing and run the bulk of the race a little bit slower than everyone else – which Moffat would welcome, because his Eggenberger car was built to go precisely this distance, and wouldn't need to slow down one iota.

But no, that lap Johnson pitted and the mechanics lifted the bonnet tor reveal a water reservoir steaming and bubbling over, although whether that was the cause or merely a symptom of the pit stop was impossible to know. Something always seemed to curse Johnson at Sandown, a race he'd never won, and never would win under Group A regulations.

John Thompson: Dick Johnson, you must be dreadfully disappointed. An overheating problem with the Sierra?

Dick Johnson: Mate, the race is nowhere near finished yet, pal. We can pick that up.

John Thompson: What sort of problem is it?

Dick Johnson: I dunno, it's just started missing and carrying on about 15 laps ago. I tried to stay out there, but it got bad enough that I had to stop because the thing was stopping on me. It's just obviously getting water on the electrics. I dunno where it's leaking from.

John Thompson: Thanks, Dick.

A bit later, Thompson reappeared with another DJR team member by his side.

John Thompson:  We've got Neal Lowe with us, Dick Johnson's team manager. Neal, what was the problem with Dick's car?

Neal Lowe: Well we're not really sure. It started off by misfiring a little on one corner just entering the straight. We brought it in to have a look, and when you turn these turbo cars off from a race speed they tend to boil over. So whether we've fixed the problem or not, we're not really sure. But we filled it up with water, changed the fuel pump over and away it goes. Seems okay at the moment.

Dick rejoined, but he'd lost a lot of time and was well behind the pack, circulating back in 17th.
Rubbing in salt, the #18 car of Alf Constanzo was in not too long after with rear axle problems (Janson guessed it was the diff) – close enough that the team could treat it like a scheduled stop, putting John Smith behind the wheel, but early enough to throw a wrench in their pit strategy for the day. The team took their time servicing it, giving the windscreen a good clean and refuelling without undue haste, as the mechanics at the rear worked frantically to get the axle fixed.The #18 rejoined as well, but like the boss it was well behind the lead.

They were still in better shape than some. Daryl Hendrick's #86 Gemspares Gemini had already dropped out, while Peter McLeod's stunning Yellow Pages Commodore had visited the pits at the end of lap 1, rejoined to circulate with the leaders (a lap down), before stopping out on the circuit and being abandoned. A similar fate befell other Commodore runners, with no chequered flag on the horizon for Terry Finnigan (head gasket), Chris Lambden (oil leak) or later, Bill O'Brien (reasons unknown).

Not that the race leaders were getting a clear run either. On lap 48 Moffat brought the ANZ car in, and in a brisk 37-second stop the team re-tyred and refuelled it and put Gregg Hansford in the driver's seat for the lunchtime shift. Unfortunately, there'd been a problem with the dry-break fuel system – these cars didn't have screw-on filler caps, just a spring-loaded seal that could be pushed open by a refuelling hose and then spring back into place when it was removed. A problem with the O-ring meant this one hadn't sprung back into place properly, so when it returned to the track the car was seen gushing fuel in right-hand turns. Amazingly, Peter Janson told the viewers at home, "That's not dangerous, so they'll just let him go on that" – which made us wonder what planet he lived on, because it was, and they didn't. Within a lap Hansford was given a mechanical black flag and ordered to bring it back to the pits, so on lap 51 Hansford returned to pit lane, had the filler seen to and rejoined with the kind of ferocious haste that comes from being annoyed with yourself.

And while that was going on, Larry Perkins had brought the #10 Commodore in to hand over to Denny Hulme, who gave it a bootful and slid out of his pit box sideways, rejoining 3rd. The order thus had George Fury (who had yet to pit) leading for Nissan, Hulme 2nd, Hansford 3rd and Hahne 4th, putting us in with a good chance of seeing the new Walkinshaw Commodores lead a race for the very first time!

In a rare sign of trouble for the BMWs, on lap 42 Jim Richards started releasing big gusts of smoke from under his #05 M3 – not a constant flow, just at various points around the circuit. Janson quickly spotted that, "he's getting it when on surge" – the same principle that will make you spill your drink in a game of corners – "so it might be the top filler tank, and she's coming over the side and onto the manifold." Three laps later the car was in the pits with the bonnet up, so whatever was going wrong was bad, which was confirmed during Hansford's second unscheduled stop – we caught a glimpse of the Mobil mechanics pushing the #05 BMW into the back of the garage. That didn't necessarily mean whatever had gone wrong was terminal, but it did mean Brock was out of contention for the race he'd won nine times (including seven in a row) in his stellar career. Shortly after, John Thompson was talking to Graeme "Mort" Brown, Brock's team manager.

John Thompson: I've got Graeme Brown with me, the Brock team manager. Graeme, you've had a few problems with the Brock car, I believe an oil filter's split, and Brock's gone out in the second car, is that right?

Graeme Brown: That's correct, yes. When the filter split, Jimmy said it felt like the car lost some power, so we didn't think it had a very long life even after we replaced the filter. So to give the second car a bit more of a chance we've put Peter in it, and we've put Dave Parsons into Peter's car.

A team boss with a long history of cross-entry shenanigans at it again. I'll let you make up your own mind about it, but as with Phil Brock before him, Neil Crompton never got to drive. The #7 car suffered an engine failure on lap 59 with Brock at the wheel – Parsons had started it, Brock killed it, and Crompo was left kicking his heels on the sidelines. Lap 57 had already seen the #11 HSV Commodore stop with a broken axle, so the pond was starting to get awfully short of the big fish. If you could keep going – like Dick Johnson, Allan Moffat and George Fury – you stood a good chance of picking up a result even if you were short of outright speed.

Shortly after, Fury finally pitted to hand over to Mark Skaife, 21 years old and straining at the leash. While he waited for Fred Gibson to give him the go signal, Denny Hulme swept through to take the race lead – so for the first time ever, a Walkinshaw Commodore was leading a race! Sadly however, Skaife didn't get a chance to dispute the lead with Perkins, as on lap 94 the #30 Skyline snapped a propshaft and retired.

That was the last of the retirements, as all the other drivers seemingly got the message and drove gingerly to the finish. All except one – Hansford brought the ANZ Sierra in for his scheduled stop (or as scheduled as it could be given the amount of fuel it had thrown overboard in the early laps) and handed it back to the boss. Moffat climbed aboard for the run to the flag and zoomed out of pit lane like a man on a mission. His cause was helped when Hulme locked up the rear brakes and tipped himself into a spin at the end of the front straight, losing some crucial time. Whether it would've made a difference in the end is debatable as the Moffat Sierra was just faster, reeling him in and passing for the lead with so little drama it didn't even make it into the YouTube highlight reel (or maybe it happened when Hulme pitted to hand it back to Perkins). Although it's not quite true that Moffat and Hansford took the lead and then held it except for the pit stops, it is true that it had been a fairly serene and untroubled run for the ageing Ford hero.

Dick Johnson meanwhile had made good on his promise that it wasn't over yet, and with five laps to go he was back up to 3rd pace. Unfortunately, with four laps to go he ran into problems yet again, as Moffat came up and zoomed past between Turns 2 and 3, putting him a lap down. Given how sick the car was, that might've been a blessing in disguise – it didn't look like the car had four laps of life left in it! By then Dick had a five-lap cushion over the 4th-placed Graham Moore, at the wheel of the #26 Kalari Transport Commodore owned by Tony Noske, but the Moore was running at full pelt and Dick wasn't.

With the finish virtually in sight, the #17 dived into the pits and ignited a frenzy of activity from the mechanics. Moore was 5 laps behind and Moffat was only 3 from the flag. If they retired the car it was all over, but if they kept it running – just running, it didn't have to be fast – they were virtually assured of a podium finish. With steam whooshing from the engine, it didn't look good, but they pulled out every trick they had and it wasn't until Moffat came around to complete his final lap that we realised what they had in mind. As Moffat swept imperiously down the front straight to greet the chequered flag, the #17 Shell Sierra was coaxed back to life and limped into the pit exit road, still bleeding steam, and crawled slowly, slowly, toward the finish line. Down the main straight beside him roared Larry Perkins in the #10 HSV Commodore, the Walky taking its first podium finish, and still the dying Sierra limped on. One final push from the mechanics and it trickled the final couple of hundred metres on the starter motor, crossing the finish line and officially chalking up 3rd place in the 1988 Enzed 500! Noske & Moore protested of course, but the result was upheld.

The final results showed Allan Moffat and Gregg Hansford had won the 1988 Enzed 500 in 4 hours, 4 minutes and 11.26 seconds. 2nd was Larry Perkins and Denny Hulme in the #10 HSV Commodore, with 3rd – somewhat controversially – going to Dick Johnson and John Bowe in the #17 Shell Sierra. The Class B winners were Brock/Richards/Parsons in the #05 Mobil BMW M3, four laps behind Moffat and 7th outright, but it was virtually by default as the only other car in their class had been their #7 sister car, which had failed to finish. Class C had fallen to the #88 Sala/Burbidge Nissan Gazelle, 20 laps down, after all the Toyotas dropped out with mechanical dramas. The exception was the #13 Bob Holden Motors AE86 Corolla, which was still running at the finish, but with just 81 laps on the board it hadn't covered enough distance to be classified. Only 12 of the 32 starters had actually earned a result.

So it had been a bruising race, but one car and its drivers had proven more than enough to see off the competition. The post-race interview showed why Allan Moffat was able to bring together such fine machinery and talent – he worked that much harder to give his sponsors good value.

Peter Gee: Allan, congratulations. You must have some vintage champagne – well it's become vintage, it's been sitting in the fridge so long, waiting for this moment?

Allan Moffat: Well I have to say, I was thinking on the last lap, the last time we had such a nice victory [with his ANZ-branded baseball cap on] was when we launched our Trans-Am Mustang, and it was a very hard drive that day, it was a hard drive today!

Peter Gee: How long has it been since you've taken the chequered flag, first across the line?

Allan Moffat: It's the first win for our Eggenberger Sierra, and I'm delighted about that. It's taken a while, but all things come to those who wait. And I have to thank my crew for working so hard on the car, and Rudi Eggenberger for supplying us with a great car in the first place. And I was just the lucky fella behind the wheel today.

Peter Gee: You've won this race six times now, how does this one compare?

Allan Moffat: Is it? Well I'd like to thank Gregg, I couldn't have done it without him. Held the car together, when I got back in it I didn't even know I'd been out of it, he didn't hurt it at all. He kept the station for me, and the luck of the break with the pit stops and we came through. I am delighted. And I have to thank Dunlop for great tyres as well, we went all the way [switches to Dunlop cap] on Dunlop today.

Peter Gee: You're changing hats quite a bit here Allan!

Allan Moffat: These people helped me a lot!

Peter Gee: Gregg, what sort of instructions did he give you when you took over?

Gregg Hansford: Ah, just to bring the car back in one piece, and go as fast as I could without being too dangerous. I think I did what he asked me to do, and uh, the result was there.

Allan Moffat: He did a great job. I'm very happy and looking forward to Bathurst. If you can't do five-hundred you can't do a thousand.

Peter Gee: Did anything go wrong today?

Allan Moffat: Oh, I made a few mistakes myself, but I... Oh yes, one thing did go wrong! The fuel filler, rubber ring broke in the pit stop, but, uh that won't happen again.

Peter Gee: Well you're really looking forward to October the 2nd now?

Allan Moffat: I am. We've had to suffer some losses throughout the season, the car was never really built as a sprint car. And we had a strategic plan, and I'm happy to say with the support of ANZ we were able to stick to that. They stuck with me, and we got the result.

Peter Gee: Allan, fabulous performance and I think the crowd here are very pleased to see Allan Moffat back, number one. Gregg Hansford as well, well done this afternoon.

As noted, it was the sixth Sandown endurance victory for Moffat, having won it in 1969 (Falcon GT-HO), 1970 (GT-HO Phase II), 1974 (XB GT), 1982 and 1983 (Mazda RX-7). For the record, his last win first across the line had been the February race on the streets of Wellington, just last year. (True, he and John Harvey had won the Monza WTCC round since then, but that had come after the cars ahead of them were disqualified.) His last win with his own team had been the 1984 Valvoline 250 at Oran Park, a whopping 1,484 days ago, which coincidentally had also come with Gregg Hansford co-driving. Although it would've been the work of a pessimist to guess it at the time, it was also his final win on Australian soil, the final flourish for one of the most splendid careers in the business. But this one was all the sweeter because it was not the result you would have predicted after qualifying. Motor racing can be funny like that.

[Dick] took pole at Sandown and all I could muster was 7th. I was ready to spit chips.

But Rudi hadn't let me down. He'd given me a fast car that was bulletproof for 500 kilometres. Gregg and I steadily worked our way through the field and took over the lead at the quarter-distance, losing it only during the pit stops. There's an old adage: "He who wins Sandown never wins Bathurst." I’d proved that wrong as early as 1970 and, standing on the victory dais at Sandown, I was pretty certain the curse would not be on me this year. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain