Bathurst '89: Mountain Redemption, Pt.1

After the controversy and legal chaos of the last two Bathurst classics, the 1989 running of the Great Race was refreshingly straightforward, with few crashes and no safety cars. In a straight pistols-at-dawn fight of reliability and speed, the race was dominated by a single car that led all 161 laps, capping off two years of total tyranny for that team and its drivers. For Dick Johnson, the 1989 Tooheys 1000 was a jewel he had waited a long time to affix in his crown, and victory was sweet.

But not inevitable.

Tantric Racing
Dick arrived at Mount Panorama in 1989 with a substantial chip on his shoulder. The reasons why went back to 1980, when he'd hit the rock in Tru-Blu at the rise through Reid Park. Dick and his wife Jillie had mortgaged their house to pay for that car, so abruptly writing it off from a comfortable lead at the biggest race in the country – a race that could have made them for life – was a heartbreaking blow. Dick spoke to the TV cameras with tears in his eyes, telling them if he didn't get $20,000 to rebuild Tru-Blu he was finished.

Of course, within the hour people from all across Australia were ringing in to pledge money to rebuild the car, turning Bathurst 1980 into an impromptu telethon – "Dick Aid", if you will. And then, seeing a huge marketing opportunity, Ford Australia got on the horn and promised to match the public's donation dollar-for-dollar. With that arsenal, Dick had been able to build Tru-Blu II, the car with which he won the 1981 ATCC after a hammer-and-tongs battle with Peter Brock.

That had left Bathurst '81 the only mountain left to climb, and Dick had duly taken the lead and held it for most of the day. But late in the race things had come awry. Chasing hard after Dick in a similar XD Falcon, Bob Morris had tripped over Christine Gibson (wife of Nissan team owner Fred) in yet another Falcon and set off a colossal accident. The pile-up had blocked the track, and co-driver John French (who was at the wheel at the time) was forced to come to a halt at The Cutting and switch the car off while it was all cleared away. That process had taken more than an hour.

In the meantime, Tru-Blu II had developed a bit of an oil leak, so when the way was finally clear and the car fired up again, it let out a huge plume of white smoke. That raised a few eyebrows around the paddock: Dick insists it was nothing serious and they could've finished the race as they'd run it so far, but Bob Morris says he could've caught French and won instead. And then there was Allan Moffat in his works-backed Mazda RX-7: he'd been some way behind at the time, but he'd also made his final stop so, unlike Morris and Johnson, he could've got to the end without a time-consuming pit stop to refill the tank with awkward hand-held fuel churns.

But the organisers read the rules and decided enough of the race had been run that they could call a result, so Johnson was declared the winner, but in the eyes of many he wore a tainted crown: the feeling was that he couldn’t have won the race if it had been restarted, or if it had run uninterrupted in the first place, and that the organisers had arranged things to bring the Dick Johnson fairytale to its logical conclusion. In short, Dick hadn't taken the chequered flag that day, and had never won a full-length Bathurst.

The problem was he'd never run so well again. In '82 he’d been out of contention completely, fighting to get the rear suspension in the new XE Falcon to behave; in '83 he'd pitched it into the trees in Hardie's Heroes, necessitating an overnight rebuild; in '84, like everyone else, he'd been cast into the shade by Peter Brock's VK "Big Banger" 1-2; in '85 and '86 he'd been saddled with a gutless Mustang; and in '87 he’d had the worst Bathurst of his life, both his new Sierras failing virtually on the opening lap in front of a paddock full of corporate guests from his big new sponsor, Shell. And in '88, he’d finished a fighting 2nd in one of the three cars he'd entered, but that was nothing to brag about – 2nd was merely the first of the losers, and he’d been eclipsed all day by the ANZ Sierra of Ford rival Allan Moffat.

But now – on the third year of a three-year deal with Shell, in the fastest Sierras on the planet – Dick had the best chance he would ever have. If he wanted to win a Bathurst 1000, rather than the Bathurst 747, it was probably now or never.

First Among Equals
As they once said of Michael Schumacher, "Crushing domination may be impressive but it ain't show business." I can't speak for the event itself, but Bathurst 1989 is a tougher writing challenge than the Great Races of '87 or '88. There were no close battles and no dramatic reversals of fortune, with the result clear pretty much from the word go. But a victory is only taken because someone else didn't quite rise to the occasion, so perhaps the best way to illustrate Johnson and his team's achievement is to highlight who they beat that day – a grid of quality drivers, some of them legends, and most of them in other Sierras. The state of play had basically been set by the preceding Australian Touring Car Championship, which I haven't covered this year because reasons.

Handily though, the first six minutes of this video amount to a season highlights package, so go nuts.

The new kids on the block were a team owned and run by a literal kid, Glenn Seton Racing. The official reason for Glenn quitting Gibson Motorsport was that Nissan didn't want tobacco sponsorship on their cars any more. It's a claim I find a bit fishy when Gibson picked up Winfield sponsorship only a couple of seasons later, but that might have to do with the Fuji Bank Scandal and Japanese economic crash slashing Nissan's budget, combined with the team having to lay the groundwork for the upcoming Ford-vs-Holden formula, a place Nissan money couldn't go. Either way, Seton had left the works Nissan team after two good years and one lean one to start afresh, and had walked off with the lucrative Peter Jackson contract in the process.

Throughout 1988 Nissan said they didn’t want to be associated with cigarettes. Ken Potter, who was responsible for sponsorship at Phillip Morris, approached my dad because they still wanted to be involved in touring car racing. That’s when we made the decision that this was probably the best way to control our destiny. – Glenn Seton, Australian Muscle Car #80

With a first-year budget of $800,000 (or roughly $1.6 million in 2018), Glenn and his engine-builder/father Bo had elected to run a Sierra, which they saw as the best way to be on the pace immediately. The new #30 Glenn Seton Racing Sierra hit the track in a splendid blue Peter Jackson livery, and was immediately as fast as your standard Rouse-sourced RS500, but not quite on a level with the DJR machines.

The first year was really, really hard. We only had the contract to run one car, but we actually built three cars that year. I lost one in that big crash at Lakeside.

We had nothing. I think we had about five people all up, including myself and Bo. There was a lot of work but not a lot of reward. – Glenn Seton, AMC #80

With Seton out of a Nissan, however, there was a seat spare at Gibson Motorsport, and it hadn't taken Freddy long to pounce on Jim Richards. With Peter Brock shifting his team away from a BMW and into a Ford, Gentleman Jim was out of a BMW drive for the first time since 1982, and officially on the market.

I realised in the HR31 days we needed to get an experienced driver on the team to really tutor the young guys. And I said, "You write out a list of six people, I'll write out a list of six people on a bit of paper, and we'll look at the lists." At the top of both lists was Jim Richards. – Fred Gibson

Unfortunately, like the Schumacher/Räikkönen/Ferrari situation in 2006, there were now three drivers to try and fit into two seats. Someone was going to be pushed out, and it was inevitable that someone would be George Fury. Despite having been with the team since its founding in 1981, Fred was never going to trade a young up-and-comer like Mark Skaife, let alone a driver at his peak like Richards, for one who was, whisper it, now a bit over the hill. Like Schumacher however, Fury went down swinging, taking a final win in that wet & wild ATCC round at Winton.

I'm not silly. He had three drivers happening at the same time and I kept doing silly things like winning the touring cars at Winton... He nearly sacked me at Winton, I could see it coming, and then we won the race!

I mainly didn't like it because I didn't like Mark [Skaife], and I didn't think that Mark was the way to go, but Fred wanted somebody young to push on with because he'd just lost Glenn Seton. I think Mark's father had a bit of input, so Freddy was pushing Mark and I kind of took that badly. – George Fury, AMC

So in his final Bathurst, Fury was slotted to be lead driver in the #3 HR31 Skyline, paired with Swedish journeyman Anders Olofsson. The #2, the team's lead car with all the loving attention from the mechanics, would be driven by Richards and Skaife, who apparently had no problems working together having won the awkwardly-named ".05 500" at Sandown immediately before Bathurst.

Pictured: actually Skaife at the Winton ATCC round.

Then there were the long-suffering Commodore runners. The championship had in fact become the first since 1970 not to feature a factory Holden attack at all: the Walkinshaw organisation had tried to get their own squad started and brought two cars to the opening ATCC round at Amaroo Park, intending to have Win Percy and Neil Crompton drive the whole season. Unfortunately, they'd immediately got their arses handed to them, the cars lapping several seconds off the pace. Seeing there was zero percent chance of beating a turbo car in a sprint race, and there were few marketing benefits to running around at the back, and with plenty on their plate getting Holden Special Vehicles off the ground, TWR didn't bother showing up after that. Which left the privateer Holden teams to run their Walkies – or even ordinary VL Group A's – without any factory support at all, a gamble the company could get away with because the VN was now on sale and the VL no longer needed promoting in the first place.

But it was unthinkable that there wouldn't be a factory Holden team at Bathurst so, doubtless with a resigned sigh, Larry Perkins scrounged up three cars and headed to the Mountain. They arrived in an iconic new livery, matte white with a black Holden lion on each side, which coincided with the first use of the name "Holden Racing Team". Given they hadn't been seen since Amaroo however, there were plenty of jokes about the Holden Not-Racing Team, and once again Holden was really only there as a sponsor: this outfit was still really Perkins Engineering, and the Perkins/Walkinshaw partnership would be coming to an end very soon.

There were no imported TWR cars this time, as all cars were prepared locally by Perkins. The #16 was a new car built that September, chassis PE 008, and it would be driven by Larry himself with help from last year's winner, Czech gun for hire Tomas Mezera. The #7 on the other hand was chassis TWR 022, the prototype car Walkinshaw himself had first driven in Birmingham, and would be in the hands of TWR's preferred drivers Win Percy and Neil Crompton, who was also pulling double-duty as a Channel Seven commentator. (The third car, the PE 005 that had won the Adelaide GP support race last year, was only brought along as a spare and didn't race).

Of BMW M3s in the 2.5-litre class, there were now precious few. They'd learned by now the Bathurst circuit really didn't suit them, and tellingly there were no works cars entered at all, with the premier entries coming from John Sax Racing of New Zealand. Their two cars (the #56 of Sax himself with Graham Lorimer, and the #57 of Craig Turner/Kent Baigent) would basically be racing against the Bryce Racing entry (the #50 Plaspak entry of Brett Riley and former JPS team engine man Ludwig Finauer), and the #52 of Peter Doulman/John Cotter.

In the 1.6-litre class it was, as usual, an intra-Toyota matter, with the works E90 Corollas (in FX-GT hatchback form) of Toyota Team Australia competing against the older AE86 coupés of Bob Holden's team, plus a couple of other dreamers.

Car pictured in 1990.

An interesting variation however was TTA putting their two prime drivers, John Smith and Drew Price, into a brand-new MA70 Supra Turbo. The car really deserves a write-up all its own, which I haven't done because again reasons, so we're lucky Mark Oastler has already done one for Shannons Club. For our purposes, suffice to say the Supra was a rear-wheel drive Celica with a 2,954cc 7M-GE DOHC straight-six engine, either naturally-aspirated or boosted by a single turbo. The option of NA or turbo created an interesting problem for race teams, as it meant they could either run NA in the 3,000cc division with 10-inch tyres and 1,035kg minimum weight, or affix a turbo and incur the FIA's x1.7 equivalency formula and be considered part of the 5,500cc tier, restricted to 12-inch tyres and a beefy 1,400kg minimum weight.

In the long run the turbo was the better option, as the heavyweight Supra couldn't get within 50kg of the 1,035 limit. But it did leave the Supra racing in the same weight class as the Jaguar XJS back in 1985, without any more power. Although Toyota had produced an evo 500 model, the Turbo A, it hadn't gone far enough: throttle body, intercooler and turbo sizes had been increased for more power, but the new turbo unit was still smaller than the Sierra's and it used the standard factory exhaust manifold. Like everyone else, Toyota had simply been caught out by Ford's "big turbo" version of the Sierra, even though it rendered it useless on the road, and the FIA increasing the turbo equivalence from 1.4 to 1.7 in an attempt to rein in the Sierra had wrongfooted the Supra badly. Supra Turbos had run well in Japan in 1988, but in Australia in 1989, not so much: a 1,400kg Supra was never going to trouble a 1,185kg Sierra with the same power or more.

Contrary to a popular myth, none of the Supras that raced in Group A were built by Toyota Racing Development in Japan. Of eleven known works cars, seven were built by Taichi Oiwa Motor Sport, aka TOM'S, Toyota's legendary in-house tuners. It was one of these cars that had been dispatched to Toyota Team Australia, where it had come home a fighting 5th at Sandown.

The Four Horsemen
In truth though, all these other cars were just making up the numbers. When it came time to hand actual money to the bookies, it was really a question of which Sierra you thought was going to win. And even within the Sierra ranks of 1989, there were only four that were in with a real chance of victory, the four horsemen of Australian racing: Johnson, Brock, Longhurst or Moffat.

The white horse was the Eggenberger car of Allan Moffat Racing, as Allan's sponsors at the ANZ bank had proved as good as their word. After the humiliation of last year, Rudi and Allan had braced themselves to cop a blast from bank chairman Will Bailey. Instead he'd given them a second chance, hissing the magic words, "Next year, bring two cars."

And so they had. Rudi had brought along his usual battery of computer screens and suitcases full of EPROM chips to keep the all-important Bosch Motronic 1.7 engine management system in the pink of health. The #9 car that had failed last year was kept around as the team tortoise, with Gregg Hansford and Pierre Dieudonné at the wheel, but the real strike weapon was the new #10, chassis EGMO 7/89. This car, which only ever raced with the #10 on its doors, was destined to end its career with just four entries in its CAMS log book – Bathurst in 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1992. It was a car built to win just one race, and it had been entered with Eggenberger's Klaus Niedzwiedz as lead driver. Moffat himself was listed as co-driver, but co-driving duties on the day instead went to a young German named Frank Biela – a future DTM, BTCC, Sebring and Le Mans champion for Audi, but at the time just a highly-rated youngster like Mark Skaife.

Rudi came back this time not only with a new car to supplement mine but with no fewer than three of his works drivers – Klaus, of course; Frank Biela, a 25-year-old member of Ford's Youngster team who'd go on to win Le Mans five times for Audi; and Pierre Dieudonné, disqualified winner of the 1987 Bathurst. My contribution was Gregg Hansford, who deserved redemption.

A lot had changed in a year. In 1987 and 1988 it was fair to say the Europeans held the upper hand. They were state of the art in their development processes, spurred on by the intensity of competition and the demands of the vast European market.

But Australians are a resilient bunch... Pretty much every counter-measure for performance deficiencies in the Sierras – things like engine overheating and weak axles – had been developed by local engineers and tested to destruction in the cauldron of the local touring-car title.

When Rudi turned up, he was faced with an entirely different prospect from that which he'd experienced in the previous two years. No doubt his car was stronger and better than anything he'd built before, and my current car would receive near to similar upgrades, but he was up against cars that were purpose-built for Bathurst. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

One of those was Peter Brock's Mobil #05. Unlike the two Rouse-built cars with which he'd started the year, this car was a new one, chassis BRT S1 – Brock Racing Team, Sierra #1 – built (as mentioned previously) by Dencar in Melbourne. This car had made its debut at Sandown, driven by Brock and Paul Radisich, but as a fully paid-up and rather high-profile Rouse customer Brock had been able to tempt Andy himself into coming Down Under to co-drive. The pairing of the nine-times King of the Mountain with a three-time Sierra BTCC champion was sure to make some very serious people in pitlane nervous.

Rouse dropping it through The Dipper

Then there was Tony Longhurst's #25 Benson & Hedges Sierra. What was remarkable about this team is that their competitiveness came from the sheer experience and racing nous of Tony's mentor, Frank Gardner. Frank had been one of the loudest voices protesting Eggenberger's win in 1987, the result of which had cost Ford the World Touring Car Championship; that fact made him persona non grata at Ford, so you could bet your bottom dollar no-one at Ford Motorsport was in a hurry to crate up the latest chips and development parts and ship them to Frank's team. They'd had to do it all on their own, a mission made a little easier by the local parts supply opened up by Dick Johnson, but still... if you were making a movie about this time they'd be your heroes, a team of underdogs punching far above their weight.

If Gardner was Yoda and Longhurst was Luke, then the X-Wing was the car itself, chassis TLR2, was a left-hand drive car that had probably started as a Rouse kit-car, but with its performance lifted to another level by Gardner's incessant testing and canny race prep. Being funded by B&H probably helped too: tobacco advertising was about halfway along its evolution from being allowed to advertise anyfuckingwhere, to not even on their own packets like it is today. TV advertising had been banned back in 1973, and about the time of this race parliament was actually in the process of drafting the Smoking and Tobacco Products Advertisements (Prohibition) Act, which would shortly ban it from print media as well. But some furious lobbying would see them leave open "accidental and incidental" viewing that would allow sports advertising, such as football games (any code) and motorsport. Tony Longhurst Racing's budget was looking secure for the time being, at least.

Then there was Dick Johnson's #17. The team had built a new car, DJR4, for Dick to win the ATCC – then built another new one, DJR5, for the season of endurance. The development on these cars never stopped in the entire six years Dick raced them, and as an engine man at heart Dick's focus was always going to be on that turbocharged 2.0-litre donk, which was now reaching its peak.

When we were starting to pump some horsepower out of them they were splitting blocks and things like that between the welch plugs – blowing the thing in half! So through our, say, engineering nous and a bit of forward-thinking, we ended up bolting the head studs right through the main bearings and that’s what held the whole thing together! When you pulled the heads down you were virtually holding the block together as well! – Dick Johnson, AMC #77

In 1988 he'd had the most power, great for sprint racing, but suspect reliability over any distance greater than 150km or so. Now in 1989, after two years of playing around with the management system, Dick finally found a way to maintain that volanic power without sacrificing reliability. He still had to de-tune slightly – down from 462 kW to, say, 410 or so – but that was okay when the opposition had to peg it back to 335 kW for this sort of distance.

The most visible changes however were the wheels. From the same BBS three-piece wheels everyone else was using, DJR had made the switch to striking gold seven-spoke wheels seen on the cars from mid-1989. Made for the team by Castalloy in South Australia, the aim was apparently to give better brake clearance than the BBS wheels, although it didn't hurt that they were stronger and stiffer as well. The design mimicked the aftermarket seven-spoke alloy wheels Ford were selling at the time, and had "DJR" cast into the front face. Like the 9-inch "Dicky diff" and Holinger gearbox, these wheels joined the Sierra's worldwide parts catalogue, and ended up appearing on several international Sierras.

It was still going to be a tough fight, of course – Tony Longhurst was the reigning champion and now knew how to win; Rudi Eggenberger had finally won this year's Spa 24 Hours, a distance greater than three Bathursts back-to-back, so his enduro cred was unquestionable; and Peter Brock always seemed to find a little something extra here at the Mountain – but overall Johnson and his team knew they had a real shot at this one. They knew it in practice, they knew it in qualifying, and they still knew it when the top-ten shootout began and the gloves finally came off. All excuses were officially cancelled; now, it was go time.

Tooheys Top Guns
The Shootout started rough when Andrew Bagnall planted his Gulliver's Travels Sierra in the wall at the top of the Mountain. Says the most recent issue of Australian Muscle Car:

Bagnall looked like an accident waiting to happen through the first half of his Shootout lap. Sure enough, he speared off the track at Sulman Park in the Gulliver's Travels-sponsored Sierra, side-swiping the concrete for 150 metres, to the delight of the crowd up-top. Given that the fictitious Gulliver endured a series of mishaps, disasters and wrecks, Bagnall’s team was aptly named. – AMC #112

Unlike Johnson’s off from '83, however, the car was salvageable and the TAFE smash repair crew were able to get it running, ready to start from pit lane on Sunday. Alan Jones in the second Benson & Hedges Sierra then started a trend by going more than half a second slower on his shootout lap than he had in qualifying: Glenn Seton, Brad Jones and Andrew Miedecke all had the same problem, with Jim Richards a massive 1.23 seconds slower on his lap than he had been on Friday. Clearly, the track had lost some speed overnight.

Again, that's actually Skaife at Amaroo, but no matter.

But with the herd done, we were down to the Big Four. Johnson, Brock Longhurst and Niedzwiedz were in a completely different race from the rest, having qualified more than a second clear of the herd but within four-tenths of one another. Niedzwiedz had been given the choice of ANZ Sierra and opted for EGMO 7/89, the new #10, widely touted in the build-up as the fastest Sierra ever to come out of Europe. Klaus nailed in a great lap, admirably smooth and fast, and he emerged slower than his best time on Friday, but still 0.4 seconds quicker than the next runner. His time in P1 however lasted only until the next car took to the track: Klaus was immediately pipped for pole position by Longhurst, Brock and Johnson in succession.

It came as a bit of a shock when Klaus was comprehensively beaten in the top ten shoot-out, 4th behind Peter Brock, Dick Johnson and Tony Longhurst. The other car was just outside the top ten, perfectly positioned. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Rudi blamed a poor tyre choice on his part, but the radar told another story: 245km/h up Mountain Straight and 279 down Conrod was, amazingly, a fairly lacklustre pair of figures when Dick Johnson was around posting 252 and 285km/h, respectively. It seemed, just like the ATCC, Moffat's cars had the best handling but the worst engines. Rudi probably scowled to himself and had another rummage through his collection of EPROM chips, and started thinking about Sunday.

Tony Longhurst stepped up in his yellow B&H Sierra and pulled out a mammoth effort to post a time identical to his lap on Friday, 2:16.98. Sure, it was no faster, but with everyone else actually going slower that seemed likely to put him in the box seat for pole position.

And then along came Brock.

Working the wheel through Hell Corner; twitching under power, the rear trying to break loose; Brock was sublime, neat and tidy in a car that was anything but. There was a tiny chirp from the front tyre as he slightly over-braked it into The Cutting; smooth through Sulman and Reid Parks; up on the kerb at McPhillamy but with no loss of control; sliding it into the Esses, then two-wheeling it down through the Dipper; flitting like a shadow between the walls to the Elbow; quick as a flash down Conrod, bouncing and lurching through the lightning-fast kink that started the Chase; and across the line to stop the clocks at a momentous 2:15.80. Not only was he faster than Longhurst, that was eight-tenths faster than his own best lap in qualifying on Friday. At last, someone had managed to improve their time.

"That's good!" he said with masterful understatement when they stuck a microphone in his face: "I'm very happy about that." But as soon as the scrutineers got a look at the car, they realised the lap was owed more than just brilliant driving: an onboard fire extinguisher nozzle was found pointed at the intercooler. Presumably it hadn't been there on Friday, so the popular inference was that the extinguisher had been spraying supercooled halon onto the intercooler during the lap, keeping it extra cool to boost horsepower.

Nothing was proven of course, and there were no actual rules dictating where the fire extinguishers had to point or about when they could be discharged, so Brock couldn't be stripped of his pole (his record sixth at Bathurst). Snippy, the teams' association (not CAMS) settled for fining him $5,000 for a "moral infringement" of the rules (which reminds me of a line from Billy Connolly vehicle The Man Who Sued God: "What are you after? Some kind of moral victory?" "Yes, I would prefer it to be moral, if possible." Which was the Rouse philosophy in a nutshell).

Anyway, there wasn’t much sting to a $5,000 fine when the prize for pole position was a solid $15,000 – and then later the same afternoon the team also won the Esso pit stop competition, picking up another $20,000 for their trouble.

Dramatic reconstruction.

Dick Johnson was now the only one left who could knock Brock off his perch, and he was up for it, the car feeling better than ever.

Complete with windows, a fresh polish and an engine that had finally reached its peak, our car conquered all as we floored around the Mountain. It drove sensationally. Full of grunt and roar up the hill, balanced and precise across the top, and lethal coming down, we recorded a stunning time of 2:14.58 [sic]. We were the car to beat with the quickest time. Brock was also ominous, less than a second behind in his Sierra.

We moved into the Tooheys Top 10 and pulled out an almost perfect lap. Under immense pressure, we clocked a 2:12.898 [sic], which was good but not good enough.

Thanks to some devious trickery, we were relegated to second place. Bordering on illegal, Brock discharged his halon-gas fire extinguisher, which was angled across his intercooler, giving him added horsepower going up the straight. He copped a $5,000 fine but kept his pole. We weren’t concerned because we knew we could outlast and outrace him the following day. – Dick Johnson, The Autobiography

Not sure where he’s getting his numbers from, because elsewhere it’s on record that he did a 2:16.58 in qualy and a 2:16.79 in the Shootout, but no matter. Without the halon trick he too went slower than on Friday – still faster than everyone else, but slower than Brock. He and John Bowe would be starting the Great Race from 2nd place... but given that was on the racing line, whereas pole had the inside line but started from the dirty side of the track, that wasn’t such a bad place to be. Sunday’s Great Race would tell the tale.

Air Base Speedway

This is pretty cool. NASCAR, but still pretty cool.

A couple of weeks ago YouTuber S1apSh0es posted a video detailing his search for a "ghost track", a minor venue from the 1950s that had all but disappeared from the records. In local terms, imagine if it turned out one of the Bathurst Easter meetings hadn't been held at Mount Panorama after all, but on the old Vale Circuit instead. And then imagine it was completely forgotten about, because the race reports only mentioned "Bathurst" so the archivists just assumed it was the Mountain.

(And given you probably had no idea there was a second circuit at Bathurst before the Mount Panorama Scenic Drive went in, the comparison's kind of apt. I certainly had no idea the Vale Circuit was there until the old man and I fulfilled a promise to visit the National Motor Racing Museum, took in a looping doco on the area's rich motorcycle history, then got in the car to check it out ourselves.)

Anyway: pretty cool. As someone who also spends more time than they're proud of sifting through racing archives and old forum posts for clues to racing mysteries, I could definitely relate. Even so, I didn't think much of it until the second video went up. It seem the first had triggered one of the internet's finer crowdsourcing exercises, and the result was S1ap finding exactly what he was looking for.

That's some fine sleuthing, S1ap. Looking forward to video three, and whether the drone shots reveal anything. God knows a drone won't reveal much of Amaroo or Oran Park anymore (although Lowood's Mobilgas Hairpin is still fairly distinct if you know where to look. And Mount Druitt remains a complete mystery to me.)

"Happy Fathers Day, Dad": Portland '86

Fathers Day raises a number of important questions for me each year – starting with, "Where does the apostrophe go?" All options look equally wrong, it's maddening. That one usually takes up so much of my time that I never manage to move on to the second: what is the greatest gift a father can give?

This year however, with a month's warning I was able to hold an informal Facebook poll to see what others thought. Answers varied from "time" (rather good), to "life itself" (ha). My real purpose however was just to see if anyone else was thinking along the lines I was, and of course the answer to that was, "No, of course not, what a stupid question." Because you know what I think a father's greatest gift to his offspring is?

A target.

We don't talk about it much, but even in your pipe-dream 1950s nuclear family, fathers and sons have a complicated relationship. Right from day one they're competing for attention from the mother, which is only made more tense by the fact the eldest son is typically a mother's favourite (daddy tends to gravitate to the youngest daughter... which sounds dirtier than I meant it to, but oh well). Then there's the basic contest for dominance that will occur between any two creatures with a lick of testosterone, complicated by the fact that one of them taught the other everything he knows, and (ideally, at least) they both love each other as well. A father will be overcome with that kind of pride completely bereft of ego to see his offspring is growing great enough to actually cause him trouble, but at the same time he'll double down to stay ahead. It's a pas-de-deux of of love, duty, mutual admiration and ambition, and like a Tool song it spirals out forever. Even someone well practiced at playing Tetris with emotions would have a hard time getting to the bottom of it, and in our society, most men aren't.

Which makes me wonder if the racetrack might be one of the healthier places to take this stuff – out there the rules are clear and the stopwatch doesn't lie, so measuring yourself against your own flesh and blood is simple. It's either "Congratulations" or "Keep practicing": there's no room, or need, for bitterness.

Which brings me to the Andrettis.

Nonno Mario

Mario Andretti is a true American success story. His love affair with racing began when he and his twin brother Aldo witnessed the great Alberto Ascari hustle his Ferrari at the grand old lady Monza. But then his family had boarded a steamer to the U.S., and the dream of racing at Monza and becoming World Champion one day seemingly faded... until they arrived in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and heard the familiar roar of racing engines. It turned out they had auto racing in America too, and Mario threw himself into it with gusto, starting with stock cars and steadily rising up the ranks of USAC midget, sprint and finally championship cars. He might have learned his craft on the dirt ovals, not the open roads of Italy like his hero Ascari, but it didn't matter: Mario won on the smaller ovals, taking the USAC National Championship in his first full season in 1965 – then on the bigger ones, claiming the Daytona 500 in a Holman-Moody Fairlane in 1967, then the Indianapolis 500 in a Brawner Hawk in 1969.

USAC championships for 1966 and '69 had also come, but Formula 1 remained unfinished business. When the chance came to switch to the European series full-time, he jumped at it, crossing the Atlantic with American team Vel's Parnelli Jones Racing – a tie-up between 1963 Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones, and his business partner Vel Miletich. Unfortunately, it wasn't the longest-lasting F1 team in history: finding the costs a lot higher than USAC and the prize money much stingier, they quit F1 in mid-season 1976 – without telling Mario.

I found out in the cockpit at the start of the race at Long Beach. The commentator said, "Mario, how does it feel to be in your last F1 race?" I said, "Do you think I'm going to kill myself or something?" He said, "Vel Miletich just announced this is his last race." Vel hadn't said anything to me.

Happily, his contract with VPJ had only been a payment schedule, so he was able to tell Miletich to wipe his backside with it and stay in Europe. Colin Chapman had just lost his star driver Ronnie Peterson, so Mario was able to fill his seat at Lotus in the knowledge Colin was busy working on something very special – the first ground effects cars. After two years of polishing the concept, Andretti struck out with the Lotus 79 and won the 1978 World Championship in style, clinching it in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, where the dream had begun all those years ago.

That was it: Mario had nothing left to prove now. But of course, away from the track he'd also had a life, and in 1962 he and his wife Dee Ann had their first son, Michael.

Mimmo Michael
Michael Andretti's path to racing was very different from his father's. He cut his teeth karting, won a Formula Ford championship in 1981, then Formula Super Vee in 1982 and Formula Mondial (intended to replace Formula Atlantic) in 1983. Between breezing the junior formulae, and the serious name recognition that came with being an Andretti, it was almost inevitable that he would make the final step to IndyCar, and he made his debut with the Kraco team in 1984.

Source

By then, the Andrettis' careers were as intertwined as their home lives: Michael owed his career to his father Mario, of course, but Mario also owed his current seat to his son. The early 1980s had seen CART take in refugee teams from the defunct Formula 5000/Can-Am series, one of which was a partnership between cigar-chomping businessman Carl Haas and Hollywood royalty-slash-amateur racer Paul Newman. Haas and Newman had run competing Can-Am teams, and since the Chicago-based Haas was also the American distributor for Lola Cars Ltd (who built successful cars of all types – F1, CART, Can-Am, Formula 5000, the lot), Newman had frequently been in his office complaining about cars that were delivered late or overweight. But with Can-Am coming to an end, both needed a fresh challenge, and although potentially lucrative CART was too expensive for either to manage alone. A partnership made sense, especially since Haas had first dibs on the products of one of the world's preeminent chassis-makers. They just needed a great driver to complete the package, someone who could wow the sponsors as much as deliver on-track results.

Haas had been working on that: guess who'd own the team in which Michael won his Formula Ford title? And with Michael in the team, there'd been plenty of access to the proud father Mario, who often came to watch his son race and was finding life with Team Lotus in the 1980s wasn't the experience it had been in the 1970s.

Working with Colin was no trip to Paris, you know? He and I had some monumental arguments. We were struggling. Colin was getting bored and was looking for something totally new which never really materialised. Colin used to detest it whenever a driver volunteered some engineering suggestions. He was: "Just drive the bloody thing!" and I was: "Yeah, I’ll drive the bloody thing but I can’t drive it because you don’t know what you’re doing!" We used to really go at it.

[As an aside, this was the era when Chapman committed Lotus Cars to do detail work for the DeLorean project, which ended with John DeLorean going to prison for drug trafficking and Her Majesty's auditors going through Lotus' murky financial records with a fine-tooth comb. The stress was probably a factor in Chapman's fatal heart attack at the end of 1982.]

So thanks to his dad, Michael had a seat in a top CART team, Kraco Enterprizes; and thanks to his son, Mario also had a seat in a top CART team, Newman-Haas Racing, the longest partnership he would have with a single team. Their paths were set to collide in Portland, Oregon, on 15 June 1986.

The Budweiser/G.I. Joe's 200
In June '86 both Andrettis were riding high. Mario had won his fourth IndyCar title two years earlier (and fifteen years after the last!), while Michael had taken his breakthrough win only the week before, in a 200-miler at the Milwaukee Mile. Winning changes a person, as Alain Prost once told us: "Before you thought you could do it; now you know you can." Buoyed with confidence and beginning to that sweet spot between seasoning and aggression, Michael was out to prove Milwaukee had been no fluke. 104 laps of the 1.9-mile Portland International Raceway were all that stood between himself and glory.

His car was a March 86C, the latest evolution of the '85 March chassis which had been partly designed by his race engineer – an aero whiz kid from Britain by the name of Adrian Newey. As such it had a slight edge in downforce compared to the Lola T86/00, but as Lola's distributor (not quite their works team, but definitely their preferred customers), Newman-Haas could race no other. Engine-wise nearly all teams were using the Cosworth DFX, a turbocharged, methanol-burning 2.65-litre development of the legendary DFV. Andretti might've stayed in Europe, but VPJ had brought the DFV home to America and done the hard work of turning a 500hp F1 engine into an 800hp IndyCar engine.

One exception was our own Geoff Brabham (another second-gen driver), who was giving a very early version of the Honda Indy V8 some precious racing mileage. The others were the three Penske team cars, who ran Roger Penske's own chassis (the PC-15, which was somewhere between the March and Lola in downforce), and a new Ilmor-built engine that would one day be known as the Chevy/A.

A wet qualifying session meant pole position had gone to one of Penske's drivers, a Brazilian "rookie" by the name of Emerson Fittipaldi, driving the #20 Marlboro entry. But the moment the pace car released the field, it was clear this was Michael's race to lose – he streaked away in the #18 Kraco March and never looked back, building a gap of 3.7 seconds by lap 3, 10 seconds by lap 18, and 11 seconds by lap 27. On lap 31 he pitted, a little earlier than the other planned two-stoppers (the window opened around lap 35), but after the rest cycled through he was still in the lead, which he would hold until lap 52. He lapped the field all the way up to 10th place.

Mario didn't even rate a mention until lap 39, where he was seen in a scrap with Geoff Brabham over 6th and 7th places – no danger there, it seemed. On lap 58 Michael came up to put a lap on him, dive-bombing through the tight final corner and giving Mario's right-front tyre a love tap on the way through. That would've sent a vicious shock through the steering rack and straight into Dad's wrists, but if he had a complaint about that we never heard it. So Michael had now lapped everyone up to 7th place.

By the middle of his second stint, however, Michael was losing ground: the man catching him Danny Sullivan in the #4 Miller Penske, who was steadily clawing the gap back – 11.7 seconds, then 11.0, 10.4, 9.6, 8.5, and on it went. Some of that, crew chief Barry Green said, was Michael turning the boost down to conserve fuel, but there was also no doubt the Penskes would gain substantially at every pit stop as they'd recently adopted the F1 innovation of tyre warmers. Sullivan and Fittipaldi (who was trying for a one-stop strategy) would be straight back on the pace on their outlap, whereas Michael would have to take some time to warm up his tyres before he could push.

So by the time he lapped his father Mario, Michael's gap back to Danny Sullivan was only 1.9 seconds. Some of that was down to traffic however, as by lap 67, after negotiating the backmarkers himself, Sullivan was back to 9.2 seconds behind. By now there were only three cars still on the lead lap – Michael, Sullivan and Fittipaldi.

On lap 70 Michael made his second stop, and something must have gone wrong, because thanks to a brilliant stop from the Penske team (and some pre-warmed tyres), Sullivan managed to leapfrog him and assume the lead. Michael tore off after him, but when he failed to find a way past on the outlap, the team radioed him to cut it out, turn the boost down from the maximum 48inHg to 45 (1.6 bar to 1.5, or if you prefer 24 psi to 22), and save some fuel. Sullivan had deprived the Andrettis of a second Indianapolis 500 two years earlier, when he'd spun trying to pass Mario but hadn't actually hit anything; recovering, he'd hooked a gear, rejoined the race, tried the same move again and made it stick, ever after earning the nickname "Spin & Win". He was looking pretty good to deprive another Andretti of the win here today, and complicating matters, Fittipaldi's one-stop strategy was beginning to look rather brilliant as he slowly but steadily reeled in them both.

But then, around lap 80, both Penske cars were abruptly eliminated, virtually within a minute of each other. Emmo's clever strategy came to nought when his Chevy V8 simply exploded, sending him back to the pits with a DNF. Then at the front Sullivan hit traffic, and Michael had his chance. He caught up through the Turn 4-5-6 complex, then pulled alongside through Turn 7. Bravely, he drove around the outside of Sullivan through the turn, but couldn’t find enough purchase to finish the pass in a single corner. Side-by-side they raced out of the complex and onto the back straight, but crucially, there was a slight kink before the straight proper. The contest between the two most aggressive drivers in the field could only end in tears: moving across to take his line, Sullivan’s left-rear overlapped with Michael’s right-front and the Penske spun dramatically out of control, whizzing across Michael’s nose and slamming sideways into the tyre wall in a cloud of dust. There’d be no spin & win today. As the car came to rest, the left-hand side of the Penske was mangled beyond recovery.

The impact had punctured Michael’s right-front tyre however, so he skated back to the pits to have a new one fitted. The team took the opportunity to fit a new left-rear as well, and check for damage, but then he was dropped and sent on his way. But the stop, on top of the slow in-lap, had taken time, and that had put the man behind him back on the lead lap – his father, Mario.

Mario had his own problems, busy holding off Al Unser Jr (yet another second-gen racer) in a Doug Shierson Lola. By lap 90 Michael was still 10 seconds ahead of his father, but he’d now turned the boost down and was having to short-shift, because after that blistering opening stint, the fight with Danny Sullivan and an extra visit to the pits for a spare, he was marginal on fuel. And this was CART, meaning although refuelling was allowed, you only got a finite amount to finish the race, and the team’s reservoir in pit lane was bone-dry. Michael’s lead was shaved from 14.4 seconds on lap 88, to 8.9 on lap 94. This was going to be close.

Five laps to go, and Michael continued to circulate.

Four to go, and there began to be serious concerns his fuel budget was in the red.

Three to go, and in pit lane wife Sandy was looking distraught.

Two to go, and Geoff Brabham was waving Mario by, happy his Honda engine was still running and not caring that he was yet another lap down.

White flag: now only 2.9 seconds ahead of dad, who was reeling him in by two seconds per lap. Lift and coast, just try to meter out those last few drops of fuel...

And then, swinging through the final turn, Michael’s DFX coughed and finally starved, the force of the turn tugging the remaining fuel away from the pickup. He still had momentum and could coast to the finish, but roaring out of the turn behind him, foot hard on the throttle, came his old man Mario. Across the line they were neck-and-neck, too close for the commentary team to call, but down on pit lane they knew the truth: Mario had got a nose ahead. The official timing revealed the gap was 0.07 seconds, or about four inches at race speeds. At the time, it was the closest finish in IndyCar history.

"Funny thing is," said Mario in the post-race interview, a wry smile creasing his leathery features, "I don't pity him at all."

Michael was gutted of course, but chin-up, he said the only things he could: "If anyone's gonna beat me I'm glad it's him. Happy Fathers Day, Dad." The Americans have to do everything their own way, so of course, 15 June 1986 was also Fathers Day.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Michael the Superstar
Michael Andretti gets a bum rap in F1 circles, remembered only as the guy who was Ayrton Senna's teammate at McLaren for all of five races back in 1993, before he quit to make room for a young and green Mika Häkkinen. But stateside he was one of the greats, taking the CART championship in 1991 on his way to 42 total race wins, making him the most successful driver of the CART era. Today he owns and operates Andretti-Green Racing, one of the power teams of modern IndyCar, and also owns a substantial share of the former Holden Racing Team, which has been renamed Walkinshaw Andretti United in his honour. The man's no slouch is what I'm saying, and didn't seem the worse for wear after the old man put him in his place.

But I still have unanswered questions. Michael was a chip off the old block, an apple that fell right next to the tree, so he and Mario spoke the same language: every one of those 42 wins was Michael telling Mario, "Look what you've done, Dad!" Even when he beat him; especially when he beat him. But what if Michael had found his calling as, I don't know, a tax accountant? How would he have spoken his father's language then? How would he have shown his dad what he'd done? I don't know, and I suspect I won't know for many moons to come.

But right now, I think starting a motoring blog helps.

Brock & Ford: The Weirdness of Group A

There used to be a saying: "All Mercedes' planning is done in Munich, and all BMW's planning is done in Stuttgart." Meaning, in the long war between Mercedes and BMW for world domination, neither side was able to introduce a new car without the other side countering with something similar, so both sides ended up building the same cars with different badges.

From the late 1980s onward, a similar thing was happening in Australia: All Holden's planning was done in Broadmeadows, and all Ford's planning was done at Fishermans Bend. The model year 1988, which had brought white Australia its bicentennial, had coincidentally also brought us Holden's next-gen VN Commodore and Ford's next-gen EA Falcon, within six months of each other. In the process their design philosophies had merged, marking the start of the era where both manufacturers were trying to sell us the exact same car.

Engineering after Aesthetics – the EA Falcon
In truth, both Ford and Holden resembled punch-drunk prize fighters at this time – battered, bloodied and ready to fall, but neither with enough strength to land that knockout blow. Holden had spent the revenue from thirty years of supremacy on the first-gen Commodore, a compact sedan that had never really recouped. With their wide-body Falcon, Ford had been handed the Australian market virtually on a plate, but then spent huge financial and engineering resources on a plan to replace the Falcon with the smaller and more efficient Telstar – a car in the same size class as the Commodore, and front-wheel drive to boot.

The horror.

When the oil crisis of 1979-'80 ended up being milder and briefer than the one back in '74, it caught everyone by surprise, voiding a decade's worth of product planning virtually overnight. Hence Holden went back to GM in Detroit to beg for a bail-out, asking for the funds to develop a second-gen Commodore to get back in the game. That reached the market in late 1988 as the new VN, which would hit the racetrack late in its lifespan and so we'll be covering it then.

Ford likewise had to go to their bosses in Detroit and make a case for a new unique-to-Australia model, kicking off the age where Broadmeadows had to go to Dearborn once a decade and, more or less, beg for the right to exist. All this explained the half-hearted facelift of the XF, a car that was never supposed to've happened at all, its only job to hold the line while Ford got the next-gen Falcon together, and it had done an amazing job all things considered. The XF's floorplan would in fact live on in the XG and XH utes, which would remain Ford's bread & butter commercial line well into the late 90's, but by 1988 there was no disguising the skeleton was straight out of a 1966 Fairlane. It was time to start again.

The replacement EA was developed in a $700 million project designated EA26 – E meaning a large-class car, A for Australia, and 26 being a sequential global project number. Its brief was to maximise what had been right with the XD-XF series while bringing the hardware into the modern era – the Falcon's ascendancy over the cramped Commodore hinted that a large car was still the way to go, as even though private buyers usually preferred the Commodore, they were a drop in the bucket compared to sales volumes to the Three T's (Taxis, Tradies and Telecom). The taxi companies especially held Ford Australia by the nose at this time, and above all they needed a car that could comfortably seat three people across the rear. The importance of towing also drove the design – in the leadup to the XD, veteran Ford designers had apparently sent troublesome juniors out to random car parks around Melbourne with instructions to count the tow bars. Ten years on it seemed the lesson had sunk in, explaining why the Falcon remained rear-wheel drive right up to the end: you needed RWD to tow, and weekends with boats, trailers and caravans were just part of the culture.

So overall it seemed Broadmeadows knew what they were doing, but with the clock ticking until the XF was completely obsolete, they were forced to bring the EA to market before it was really ready. That by itself explained how the same car could end up being so good and yet so bad.

The battle for first impressions was a victory, as the styling immediately won hearts. The studio had access to global Ford offerings for inspiration, so the resulting shape looked a little like an enlarged Ford Scorpio, complying with the trend toward European styling complete with a fashionable "letterbox" radiator grille. Also in line with the times, it was the first Falcon to spend any time at all in a windtunnel, which even in a country with a maximum 110km/h speed limit could only have helped matters – Ford would rather you didn't ask about the XF's coefficient of drag, or Cd, but independent measurements had revealed numbers as bad as 0.50. The EA hit the market at just 0.38, delivering fuel economy figures around 10 litres per 100km and theoretical top speeds north of 200km/h. Bingo.

Unfortunately, the looks were where the EA peaked, as it all went downhill once you actually climbed behind the wheel. It might not've been styled like a bargain-bin special but it definitely felt like one, with ill-fitting panels, a cheap plasticky interior, and heavy plastic bumpers that seemed prone to abandon ship at a moment's notice. There were constant computer glitches, poor paint quality, iffy handling and a general feeling of being thrown together at five to five on a Friday by a crew who'd already been handed their retrenchment papers. The difference between the best and worst of the EAs was staggering.

Which was a shame, because if you'd got one that had been put together with care, then you had one of the best cars in the world for price. The front end was all-new and actually pretty good, with new rack & pinion steering and SLALS (short and long arm long spindle) suspension arrangement – basically an el cheapo alternative to double wishbones. In a few years this system would be the bugbear of early V8 Supercars as, with their MacPherson strut front ends, the Holden teams would be unable to match the bite and turn-in of the Falcons, but on a road car that was really neither here nor there. What mattered was that many hit the road without having been aligned properly, leading to distressingly short front tyre life and an early return to the dealership for adjustment. And although a welcome improvement over the XF's recirculating ball setup, the new rack & pinion steering was only as good as what the Commodore had had for a decade, so all it really represented was Ford belatedly catching up.

Soft lighting make this interior look nicer than it is: what you're actually looking at is acres of grey plastic, with all the squeaks and rattles that give it away as budget transport for the masses.

The rear was similarly disappointing, with no IRS, and an LSD only as a $350 option. Otherwise you got the same old coil-sprung live axle as the XF, carried over from the previous model to save costs. This meant it also inherited the XF's rear-end nervousness, as the familiar transverse Watt's linkage still had its centre pivot mounted to the diff housing, leaving the car with a roll centre set far too high. The resulting roll-steer ranged from spooky to dangerous – the wonderfully progressive, slow-motion oversteer of the XD must've seemed like an awfully long time ago.

With that in mind the gutless standard engine could almost be viewed as a blessing – starting with 90 kW at 4,000rpm (and 235 Nm at 3,250), there just wasn't enough power to get you into real trouble. There were three engines to be had, all variants on the long-serving Falcon straight-six: the basic 3.2-litre, a bigger 3.9-litre, and the 3.9 with multi-point injection, or MPI. Units without MPI generally had throttle-body injection (TBI) instead, controlled by Ford's corporate EEC-4 engine management system, and all had single overhead camshafts in place of the old pushrods. They were smoother than their OHV predecessors, but the 3.2's lacklustre torque forced the driver to flog it to make anything happen, which led to fuel economy worse than the optional 3.9 anyway (and thus leading the 3.2 into a quiet retirement in December '88). So the 3.9, which was optional on the base-model GL and standard on anything higher, became the real mainstream engine with figures of 120 kW at 4,250rpm and 311 Nm at 3,250 – better, but hardly world-beating. In 1988 it was all still fairly agricultural, but at least the raw configuration was now in place, and that would allow Ford and their partners to start tweaking it in the years ahead.

Unfortunately, even the 3.9 was let down by the transmission to which it was mated. The 5-speed manual, a Borg Warner T50D with synchros on all five cogs, was actually pretty good, but it was an optional extra. As standard Ford had wanted to use Borg Warner's upcoming ML85LE electronic 4-speed auto, but had known as early as a year before launch that this unit wouldn't be ready in time. To head them off at the pass, a few months out Ford had invited the journalists for a pep talk from no-one less than their star quality control officer, Sir Jackie Stewart. Stewart used his considerable communication skills to dazzle the room into believing in the upcoming Falcon as much as he did, talking long and loud about how perfectly the engine had been matched to the standby Borg Warner M51 – a 3-speeder that was outdated in both concept and execution. Despite Sir Jackie's bluster it was immediately obvious it was garbage – despite being the model all the taxi companies and other fleets would buy, at launch none of the journalists were allowed to drive it. It turned out the unit was noisy and thirsty and its final drive ratio was far too short, leaving the car to run out of revs at around 170km/h. In the end, buyers had to wait until 1990 before they could get the auto the car had actually been built for, and although it would eventually mature into a world-class gearbox, teething problems would often see them lose drive somewhere in the first 100,000km. To their credit, Ford would often cover the repairs on a goodwill basis, even on cars that were technically out of warranty.

Prices started just above $20,000 for a basic GL with a 3.2 and 3-speed auto, roughly $44,500 in 2018 dollars, or about the same as the performance models of the late Noughties – Australian cars were relatively expensive during this period. An automatic Falcon S with the 3.9 – the lowest spec a private buyer would seriously consider – was $22,139, or just over $49,000 in 2018, with air con an extra $1,478 and a rather attractive set of Snoflake alloys $580 (a must-have, as the plastic wheel covers weren't fooling anyone). The real trick was to opt for MPI and a 5-speed manual, as only then did you get a better car than the equivalent VN. With 139 kW and 338 Nm, MPI cars could cover the 400m in 16 seconds or thereabouts, and go on to a true top speed of 216km/h – figures that rivalled a V8-engined VL Group A just 12 months earlier. Not since the GT had gone extinct had anyone seen a Falcon produce numbers like these.

Why they got the secret love child of Kimi Räikkönen and Jack Dee to advertise it is anyone's guess.

Famously, Wheels magazine took both an EA Falcon GL and the rival VN Commodore Executive – both basic as basic could be – on a tri-state road trip totalling 21,000km in just one week. Starting from Sydney and heading south through the Snowies, then through Victoria, to South Australia and back to Sydney again, the cars were flogged along empty roads, outback dust, gravel, snow, sand, tiny towns, and the obligatory water crossing shots. Wheels' mission was to "Break the bastards!" and notoriously, they did: between them, there were loose bonnet latches, shedding interior trim, weakened shocks, ineffective handbrake cables, punctured fuel tanks, electrical infidelity, dangling bumpers and terrible dust sealing. The quality issues that would soon be a big problem for both manufacturers were laid bare for all to see. But, it has to be said, both cars made it back to Sydney alive. Wheels writer Michael Stahl remembered, "Over so many long days at the wheel, my respect for the Falcon's lazy, loping stability was set, over everything from harsh shale to wet, buttery clay. Not just big cars, but big hearts." Mike McCarthy agreed: "What this greatest epic mostly reinforced, surely, was the belief that no other stock-standard cars would take such massive battering over such gruelling distance. Made in, and for Australia, they done good."

Reprinted by Wheels in 2016.

Nevertheless, it was pretty clear that both Broadmeadows and the Bend needed to take their cars back to the factory and finish the damn things off. So bad was the situation that several aftermarket tuning companies sprung up to do the job on their behalf, as a matter of fact... and the most famous of them was none other than Holden's former golden boy, Peter Brock.

Do Not Adjust Your Screen – Brock in a Sierra
Yes, we've mentioned it before, but witnesses at the scene could still report blizzard conditions in Hell – Peter Brock really was racing a Ford. His main sponsor was Mobil, who'd been with him for several years and would remain with him to the end of his career, and they weren't satisfied with mere class racing. They demanded (and stumped up the cash) for Brock to put the BMW aside and jump into a frontrunning car once again. In 1989 there was only one candidate for the job – the former Holden star had to go buy himself a Ford Sierra RS500. The die-hard fans who'd been with him since the Torana days threw up their hands in horror, but Peter himself had no hang-ups whatsoever. "He quite enjoyed the nuisance of it," said Peter's unofficial business manager Alan Gow. "He thought it would be quite funny to show Holden that, 'Well, you can't shoot me down. Here I am!' He didn’t have any nightmares about swapping over to a Ford product at all."

As soon as Mobil promised the money, Brock, Gow and team manager Graeme "Mort" Brown were on a plane to Europe to do a deal with someone. "When we made the decision to go for a Sierra we had a few options," said Gow. "We were either going to buy a couple of Eggenberger Sierras in Germany or a couple of Andy Rouse-built cars from the U.K., because they were the hot cars to have at that stage. We landed in England and looked at Andy's cars. They were such a good deal, because we knew what price Eggenberger was asking, and he [Andy] offered us such a good deal that we made the decision right then and there to buy the cars. Peter then was no longer interested in going to Eggenberger or anywhere else. He'd made a decision and wanted to go back and paint his house. He changed his ticket, went back the next day, and left Mort and I to go to Eggenberger and go through the charade of having a look at their cars. That was typical of the way he handled any business."

Spanner-man George Smith had a similar recollection of how the decision was made.

Brock, Mort and Alan Gow went to Europe to see Eggenberger and just before they left Mort discovered they wanted to go and see Rouse as well. He was furious: "We don’t want to go anywhere near Rouse's." But Brock decided to go and see him first. Mort thought they were getting conned; he reckoned they would get results with Eggenberger because they were really on it, but after the meeting [with Rouse] Brock left and sent Gow and Mort to Eggenberger's. So they went and wasted a day of Eggenberger's time because the Rouse deal was done. They bought two Rouse cars; they had aluminium roll-cages in them so there was no structural stability or anything. – George Smith, AMC #97

One wonders what Moffat would've said at the idea of Rudi offering Peter a customer car and Peter only pretending to consider it!

Brock originally imported two ex-Andy Rouse Engineering Sierras for the beginning of the 1989 Australian Touring Car Championship, but it seemed Peter only wanted something to tide him over, and maybe provide some hints about how to build these things, as by mid-year a new chassis was under construction by a new Melbourne startup called Dencar. Founded by George Smith's best mate and partner in crime, Dennis Watson, the name was an amalgamation of the names of Dennis and his wife Carol, and in time it would grow to become a legend of the V8 Supercar scene, the people to whom no-one less than the Holden Racing Team outsourced much of their chassis construction. But in 1989 it was just another tiny engineering firm in the local racing scene, short on cash but long on expertise. In that sense it was a perfect fit for Team Brock, but it was yet another little irony that the name behind so many future race-winning Holdens first cut their teeth on a Ford.

Anyway, Andy Rouse of course had a reputation to maintain, having screwed over both Dick Johnson and Allan Moffat in successive years. With Peter Brock now on his customer list as well there was a chance to complete the trifecta, and he didn't disappoint. Things started badly when both cars blew up after only a few laps of the first test – Smith said they later discovered new sumps had been fitted by the work experience kid before being shipped to Australia. "The first year of the Sierras we kept on blowing up engines all year," agreed Gow. "At Wanneroo, after the Friday practice, we'd literally run out of engines, so the boys had to build an engine in the back of the transporter. We were then faced with putting it in Peter's car, brand new, without being run-in, which is never ideal. We asked the organiser if we could run around the track at night to run the car in, which is what we did. We went for hours. The Sierras didn't have any headlights of any note, so there was a rental car and the race car going around for laps and laps and laps, to run the engine in, and getting faster and faster and faster. The number of times we threw the rental car into the gravel traps, having fun trying to keep up! We'd all swap around. After a while I'd get bored in the rental car so I'd jump in and drive the Sierra while Peter drove the rental car. It became a fun park for a couple of hours in the two cars."

Fun and games aside, the '89 championship was a mixed bag for Brock, with two retirements spoiling any hope of a title run despite three solid 2nd-place finishes (at Symmons Plains, Mallala and Sandown) and even a win in the season-closer at Oran Park. Impressively, that meant it was usually a coin-toss whether he'd finish ahead of John Bowe, who was driving the second Dick Johnson car but spent most of the year finishing 3rd. Consistency told however, and with zero DNFs Bowe was able to finish ahead of Brock in the final standings, though neither were able to offer more than token resistance to Johnson, who ran away with the series to take his record-equalling fifth ATCC title.

Gr8 B8 m8 – the Brock B8
Away from the track, Peter still had an interest in tuning road cars, and that the newest Falcon was so transparently lacking in polish created a serious opportunity. He and Gow duly formed Austech Automotive Developments Ltd in Newlands Street, Coburg, and set about trying to get lightning to strike twice. "Peter wanted me to come in a a partner, and be a director of the company, and it was basically Peter and I," Alan Gow told Australian Muscle Car #82. "We still had the race team but it had a workshop near Airport West. Peter loved doing road car stuff so it made sense to have the two go hand-in-hand, being Ford and Ford."

The EA Falcon B8 – so named because it was the eighth generation of Brock projects – started as a promotion for Mobil and project car for Modern Motor. It was silver, which remained arguably the B8's finest colour. "Brock was doing one side skirt on one car, and fitting the completed rear skirt on my car at the same time," said Craig Fletcher, then-workshop manager, later a director of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation. "He said, 'It's my best car yet, and destined to be my most exclusive too.' I still remember the tagline – Body by Ford, soul by Brock."

That sounded awfully familiar, but Brock insisted he wasn't trying to re-create the glory days of HDT Special Vehicles using Ford products – it was all meant to be much more low-key this time around. That the Brock logo bore a striking resemblance to the later "T-wings" of Tickford was, all parties insisted, just a coincidence.

"We didn’t do it with any idea of getting money out of Ford," said Gow. "Peter also wanted to do it on a much smaller scale than he had with HDT. He didn't want to go down that road again. Funnily enough, the B8 badge on the side of the car was very similar to the one later used by Ford. Everyone thought it was the precursor." So the project got underway, with Brock in charge of vehicle development, Fletcher in the workshop and Gow watching the books.

The deal was, you brought in either a Falcon S or a Fairmont Ghia donor car, then handed over $12,500 (or $9,890 – the plush Ghia required fewer interior changes), and in return Austech would tweak the suspension, re-trim the interior, give the engine a massage and clothe it all in a nice little bodykit. This was no Walkinshaw monstrosity, however, as the shape that emerged was surprisingly tasteful, enhancing what the EA already was with such subtlety it could almost pass for a factory job. Comprising of front and rear spoilers, rear valance panel and sideskirts, it complimented the Falcon's lines quite nicely, avoiding the impression of slab-sided weight that spoiled so many kits. Crucially, it also avoided interfering with the tow bar – clearly this was intended as a usable daily driver, not a track-day-only garage queen.

Like the exterior, the interior treatment was a pleasing blend of subtle form that didn't sacrifice functionality. The front seats were actually standard units reworked for lateral support and upholstered in a tasteful grey cloth with red striped inserts by Paratus Industries, the company responsible for the OEM seats. Using stock frames meant that Austech had no problems with ADRs, helping to keep the price reasonable. Rear seats were trimmed to match, while finishing touches included the addition of a Ghia centre console and the ubiquitous fat-rimmed leather wheel and similarly-attired gearstick.

As usual though, it was the engine that attracted the most attention. Ford's insane quality control programme meant there was always plenty of potential left in their engines, and Austech arguably did the best job of unlocking it. A reworked cam, blueprinted ignition, recontoured airbox (Ford's own were usually optimised for quiet operation rather than flow) and engine management tweaks were welcome, but the real gravy was an all-new set of gorgeously polished six-into-two extractors, feeding into twin exhausts that terminated with a common silencer box and a single tailpipe. With all that, Austech claimed not only were emissions reduced, but power jumped 30% to an impressive 165 kW – which, if true, was more than a VL Turbo, and on par with an XR6 or even a V8-powered SS Commodore half a decade later. Top speed for the manual was a measured 202km/h, and although that was less than the standard car had posted at its launch, that had been achieved on the banked speedbowl at Ford's You Yangs Proving Ground – given the same venue, the B8 could conceivably have been faster. 0-100 was in the order of 8 seconds, and the 400m about 15.6, all good numbers for something that "wasn't a performance car"!

That claim was borne out by the suspension tune. Austech fitted new springs front and rear, specific gas shock valving, sturdier anti-roll bars, modified the top strut mounts and spring pads and tweaked the bushes.The end result wasn't what you're thinking, however. Although it would hang on well after the standard Falcon had given up and landed in the weeds, the team hadn't completely eliminated the EA's understeer, opting for a more compliant ride instead. Although stiffer than the standard car, the B8 was much less unsettled by the bumps and potholes of a normal Aussie back road, meaning in the real world it would paradoxically end up faster than a bone-shaking track car. Again, it was meant to be a pleasant thing to use every day, not a toy for weekends. Neither was there a Polarizer, or at least, “Not that I can recall,” laughed Fletcher. The Bridgestone RE71 tyres did run with suspiciously low pressures for a while, though...

We did two B8 models, a Falcon and a Fairmont [one of which Brock had as his daily drive]. There was the odd one-off and Fairlanes, but that was not the normal run-of-the-mill. We had a good number of Ford dealers who sent cars to us and some private owners. We didn't own any cars. It was very low overheads. The majority of them were silver; the second most popular was [Indigo] blue. The dealers brought them, or the owners. Peter enjoyed it, because he got to play with cars. At one point he also started playing with an aerodynamic truck. It gave him the latitude to try other things.

They were nice cars. They were a much more subtle car than what HDT were making. They were mainly concerned with a better-handling, better-riding car. It was a bit of extra performance with the straight six, with valve timing and exhausts and things. And things like front and rear bumpers and side skirts. It wasn’t over the top and the cars weren’t that expensive. We had our own wheels designed, he had his seats done by a company in Geelong, and he got Bridgestone tyres that were probably run at a low pressure for a time.

It wasn't a performance package. It wasn't meant to be a performance car. It was only marginally quicker than a standard Falcon. But it had the Peter Brock badge on it. Funnily enough, it's the sort of upgrade you expect now from the Audis of this world. – Alan Gow, AMC #82

They were helped along by a "silent partner" who was happy to chip in cash to keep the business afloat – nothing sinister, just a fan who was happy to help out (again, living Peter's charmed life came in very handy sometimes). "He was a bloke who ran weekend markets in Melbourne," Gow told AMC. "When Peter needed money, he'd go and see him and come back with a brown paper bag full of cash from the markets. His name was... let me see if I remember. Yes, it was Chipperfield."

"Peter borrowed money as and when he needed it," Gow added. "The company wasn't profitable, but it didn't lose money. It was all right and washed its own face, considering any start-up is difficult to make money."

Ultimately, the window of opportunity was open only briefly. Having planned to build 250, Austech only modified 126 Falcons and 24 Fairlanes before selling out. Those production volumes were dwarfed by the factory, obviously, with 223,612 EAs leaving Broadmeadows in its three-year stint, but few today realise they were even humbled by the 1,000-odd Falcon SVOs built by former race engine builder Mick Webb. The SVO was the one you really wanted if you absolutely had to have a performance Falcon – Momo steering wheel, Recaro seats, Bilstein shocks, the brand names said it all. It was a sharper and more focused drive than the B8, but it was also a semi-official project undertaken by Webb after hiring lots of ex-HDT personnel, and aided by Ford employees (some of them quite high-level) moonlighting with the factory's blessing. Officially unofficial, the SVO was Webb's attempt to land the deal that would eventually go to Tickford. Sadly for Webb, thanks to charisma, exclusivity, the Brock name or some combination of them all, it was the B8 that would go on to become a minor collectible; the SVO, technically a better car, is all but forgotten now and I doubt it would be hugely expensive to buy one, even in mint condition. The market for all these modified Falcons was destined to dry up, however, once Tickford arrived and started building the XR6.

Not to forget the XR8 of course, which would one day highlight the real chink in the EA's armour – no V8. Without a V8 option, there was no true performance version (XR8), no super-dooper performance version with Bathurst pretensions (GT), and nothing to put under the bonnet of the big luxo-barges like the NA Fairlane and LTD limousine. I mean, a Fairmont Ghia would set you back $31,265, or just under $70,000 in 2018, but it was really hard to justify that price and claim a cut-above image when all it had for power was a common or garden six. Plenty of small business owners and Silent Generation retirees opted for a Calais instead, and Ford would eventually be forced to take notice, but too late for the EA.

I'll sign off  with one of the strangest photos in my collection, which seems to date from 10 December 1989. As with the preceeding XF, a lot of revheads might tell you the EA never raced: once again, however, Bob Jane's Thunderdome comes riding to the rescue. Here's an EA Falcon given the full Gen-4 treatment and entered in Australian NASCAR, powered by a 351ci Windsor V8.

I can't quite make out the name on the fender, but the VN Commodore alongside it (powered by a 350 Chevy small block) is being driven by Brad Jones, the King of the Dome, and already a reigning AUSCAR champion at the time. Apparently both these cars were built at Calder Park's own workshops and Jane had high hopes they'd be competitive with imported machinery from the U.S., boosting local interest in the series. Does anyone know any more? If so I'd love to hear about it. The comment box is below. Otherwise, just enjoy the free drinks you'll win from knowing even this Falcon saw limited track action.