"We've got a new assignment for you. You're moving to Australia. The R32 GT-R must win Bathurst!"
These were the words with which Alan Heaphy, lately the team manager for Nissan Motorsport Europe, was given his mission for the 1991 season. Living and working in the U.K., he'd been steering Howard Marsden's works Group C sportscar outfit to ever-greater success, including pole at Le Mans in 1990. But Nissan's failure at last year's Bathurst proved the stone that set off an avalanche: in Australia, only one race mattered, and Heaphy was seconded Down Under to turn things around.
Serious Re-Engineering Since the Great Race had moved to its true home Mount Panorama in 1963, just four marques had ever won it, and two of those only once each: in 1966 the Mini Cooper S had run the bigger and heavier opposition into the ground, mostly by not needing to stop for fuel so often; and in 1985, the Jaguar XJ-S had given Tom Walkinshaw his first Mountain triumph, also by not needing to stop for fuel so often (ahem). But apart from these aberrations, every Bathurst whether Series Production, Big Banger Group C or Eurotrash Group A had been won by either a Ford or a Holden; not once had it been won by a Japanese car.
Nissan were determined to be the first, but it wasn't going to come easily. It was no secret that the Mountain was some of the most demanding tarmac in the world, but last year's shock win for Holden had driven home just what it would take. In the modern era, you needed a car that could be driven flat-out for the entire distance, standing up to all the stresses the Mountain could throw at it – the suspension loading up into Sulman Park, the hard braking at the bottom of the Chase, the hard acceleration again out of Hell Corner, the ever-rising engines temps as bugs and dust encrusted the radiator – all of it and more, for six-and-a-half hours straight.
The problem was, the GT-R as delivered wasn't capable of that.
You have to remember that our touring car category in Australia was very competitive and the thing is, a Japanese-spec racecar wouldn't win here. It wouldn't be quick enough against the the Ford Sierras and Holden Commodores.
So we had to homologate the parts that we wanted on the car with the FIA through CAMS to make the racecar a lot better, and that took a lot of work. We used a lot of Australian suppliers to help us get it right. – Fred Gibson, Auto Action #1787
Added Paul Beranger, manager of Nissan Motorsport Australia: "NISMO in Japan wasn't too impressed when we told them we needed to change their pride and joy."
That process had begun in 1990, but once Heaphy was ensconced as Gibson Motorsport's Lead Team Operations Manager, shortly after the Eastern Creek enduro, it kicked into overdrive.
When I arrived here I think at the end of November, I went straight to New Zealand where the team was racing at the Wellington street race and it was a good opportunity to see some of the problems the car had. The car was suffering badly with brake issues, not so much the handling, and there were other components that were just underdone.
They were running a number of Australian made components at that stage. They had their own front and rear uprights that were locally made, wishbones and a number of other components that were made in-house. They also had the Holinger gearbox that replaced the NISMO gearbox as they found it to be unreliable. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
As the old saying goes, when there's hard work to be done some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all. Motor racing tends to weed out the latter two groups pretty quickly, but even by the absurd standards of the business, Fred Gibson had managed to assemble a group of true workaholics. Later Holden Racing Team chief Jeff Grech was one of them, and he remembered the GT-R vividly:
I loved working on them, but they were a mechanic-eater. We were the first to get to the track at six o'clock in the morning and we'd be the last to leave. You had to change both turbos, they were just a nightmare, very complex to service and maintain, but there was a lot of clever stuff. – Jeff Grech, AMC #107
But even for this crew, the off-season of 1990/'91 was remarkably intense. Before the flag fell for the first ATCC round in February, they not only had to sort out the issues in chassis GT-R 002, they also had to build a whole new car – chassis 003 – after Skaife had destroyed 001 in qualifying for the Adelaide Grand Prix support race. Building a new car while simultaneously carrying out a test and development programme ready for the new year was a Herculean task, but fortunately, as the pressure ramped up so did the support from Nissan.
The main problems with the Australian GT-Rs were the brakes, which tended to overheat with hard use; the cylinder blocks, which were cracking; and the turbos, which were failing as they tried to make the immense power required. For 1991 the rules on brakes had been relaxed, so that was the first problem the team tackled. The process was sped up by one of Heaphy's tricks from Europe: real-time telemetry, courtesy of some clever gizmos by PI Data Acquisition, a small company established by a group of Cambridge professors. The team had invested up to $400,000 into this promising new technology, and it paid off almost immediately.
During the Group C Prototype programme I had spent quite a bit of time with the PI data logging system. We had developed this system during the prototype programme and I brought one of those back with me. The engineer at the time was Ross Holder, he and the guys fitted the PI unit and sensors into chassis 002.
With the PI system in the car and the data we got from turbo speeds, brake temperatures and other items, we could basically say, "Change this, check that and do that". We spent almost every day bar Christmas Day modifying bits and pieces in the workshop to get the car up and running to go testing. Then we were out at Calder, I don't know how many days we spent out there, but testing brakes, testing oil coolers and that sort of thing.
The team were running cooling fans on the wheels which was to help with the brake cooling. I was concerned the fans weren't doing what they were supposed to do and believed that they were only covering up the open face of the wheel.
I remember when we fitted the infrared sensor near the disc, you could see the temperature go up and up and with the wheel fan on you could see it come down a little bit, but with the wheel fan off you could see it come down more rapidly. It showed that the brakes ran cooler with no fans and fans were never used again.
The development was just a vertical line, it really was. I mean over the period of late December/early January, the changes to the car and the data information that we got was invaluable. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
Brake cooling was further boosted by some custom rims. Following HRT's lead, Gibson commissioned Kevin Drage of Castalloy in Adelaide to design and manufacture a new kind of 18x11 alloy wheel, lighter and stronger than anything currently on the market.
There were a number of different versions of the wheels because I think we were the first team to run a hollow spoke, a hollow centre as well. The early development wheels were an issue, with some cracking and keeping them tight, we used to have to torque them up to 800 foot-pound of torque to stop them coming undone. Kevin was constantly making changes to try and make them stronger and lighter. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
One idea that popped up during development was a reversible flap located in the brake duct behind the front bumper. When racing on high-speed circuits where engine oil temps would soar, the duct could be bolted in one position to send air to the oil cooler; for tighter tracks that required heavier braking, the air could be ducted to the brakes instead.
The Group A engine was already running a nodular steel crank, beefier rods,
titanium valves and retainers, plus Cosworth pistons, but a problem familiar to GT-R tuners was the straight-six layout itself. Under high power the engine could produce enough torque to twist the block until it cracked around the head bolt holes and into a particular water gallery. Up until Pukekohe, Gibson had been using a new block every race because of this. New engine mounts helped, but what was really needed was a redesign of the bracing inside the block itself, something that could only be implemented at the factory in Omori. Five upgraded blocks were made specifically for the team, virtually overnight, but it would be a couple of races before they arrived in Australia.
While they were there, the Gibson embassage took the opporunity to talk to their turbo suppliers at Garrett. Quality control had been determined the main cause of their Garrett T25 turbochargers failing in 1990, so the team had invested in a balancing machine so they could assemble their own rather than have to buy complete units from Japan.
The team built their own turbochargers in-house. Myself and two other team guys went to Japan to talk to them about the cylinder block because at that stage we were splitting cylinder blocks which we believed were twisting when torque was applied.
We took one of our turbochargers with us and they had an engineering guy from Garrett at NISMO at the time we were there. He looked at that turbocharger, pulled it apart and reckoned our guys were two years in front of them with development work.
We had a 360 thrust bearing turbo and we had a balancing machine that used to suck the air out of everything and the guys could run and balance them up to about 120-130,000rpm. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
Another bugbear was keeping oil in the sump, which required an intricate solution.
It was very complicated. It had a breather out the top of the engine that went into a separator tank and back into the sump. It even got the point where the final catch tank also had a pump that put the oil back into the sump. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
Having experimented with triple-plate carbon clutches with the old HR31 in Europe, the idea had been transferred across to the R90CK Le Mans cars, before returning to touring cars now with the GT-R. A triple-plate carbon clutch fed the torque of the engine into the familiar Holinger 6-speed gearbox, which was retained because it worked very well. The HS6 became the flagship product for Holinger, adopted by many motorsport categories worldwide including the future V8 Supercars – where it would remain a staple until replaced by the current sequential unit in 2009. The team was soon exporting Holinger gearboxes to NISMO to hand out to Group A teams in Europe and Japan.
The Holinger box was about $18,000 back then and the NISMO box was $33,000. The GT-R produced so much torque that it could destroy the Nissan box with little effort!
The car didn't really need a 6-speed, it had plenty of torque you could have got away with less and it still would have won races. The same 6-speed was a good thing for other teams, particularly those with normally-aspirated engines. Teams like Perkins Engineering, HRT and many others used this gearbox. – Alan Heaphy, Auto Action #1787
Only a few Nissan parts remained in the Gibson GT-Rs, including the transfer case, front driveshafts, front diff and the rear diff, which initially was a Nissan LSD. It was reliable, but it it too would be replaced later in the year.
The wheels, the suspension, the gearbox were all local. They [NISMO] made the cylinder blocks, but the Electromotive engine management system was done for us in America.
We had to do so much in-house ourselves – the engines and the whole thing. The only thing we didn't do was the Holinger gearbox. We got new things cast and I still have all the old drawings for that. All those things we got done to make it a better car were done because we had good people. Having the people that engineered the car, designed some of the equipment for the car, was very satisfying. The people made the difference.
We did it all ourselves, which was still very expensive, but not as expensive as getting all the bits from Japan. Our budget wasn't huge. We were very fortunate to have good sponsors as well as Nissan Australia. We were struggling when we first did GT-R because we didn't have enough money to do the job properly. We were lucky to have cigarette money come along [in 1992] because it was a very expensive car to run. – Fred Gibson, Auto Action #1787
Nemesis So the new VN Commdore's big problem heading into 1991 was the Nissan; the Nissan's big problem, by contrast, was the economy. There were a number of factors pushing it downwards at the dawn of the 1990s: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait creating yet another spike in oil prices; the U.S. treasury deciding the economy needed cooling after the cocaine bender of the 1980s, maintaining high interest rates to ward off inflation; and a downturn in the U.S. housing market caused by nothing more malicious than the Baby Boomers all having their houses now, and the Gen-X buyers that followed them happening to be much fewer in number. But the big factor for Australia was that the Japanese economic bubble of the late-1980s had finally started to burst, leading the country into what they still call "the Lost Decade". It would bring on things like the notorious Fuji banking scandal, which was profoundly shocking at the time but now reads like little more than a preview of basically all financial news post-Enron (F1 fans might remember the pretty blue Leyton House cars of this era; team moneybags Akira Akagi was jailed for his part in the Fuji Bank conspiracy).
Globally, share prices dropped 25 percent; here in Australia, however, they fell 40 percent. At the time we were Japan's single largest supplier of coal, iron, wool, sugar and beef, so if the Japanese economy tanked ours wouldn't be far behind. And sure enough, by September 1990 the data showed Australia's GDP had dropped 1.8 percent, and on 29 November then-Treasurer Paul Keating delivered the line that would follow him into eternity: "This was the recession we had to have."
There were business failures, bankruptcies, negative equity, falling investment and mounting unemployed. All the debt-financed business carpetbaggers like Russell Goward, Christopher Skase, Abe Goldberg etc were put out of commission. Australia was as Keating put it "de-spivved". Inflation was exorcised out of the Australian economy. It was a policy-induced recession though it was not meant to be; the econocrats were aiming for a soft landing but it all went terribly wrong.
The double-digit interest rates that were intended to give us that transition went awry, with the economy sent crashing. ...
Keating masterminded the recovery using a modest Keynesian stimulus but he was never to really see a full recovery. Unemployment remained stubbornly high at one point hitting 11.25 per cent of the workforce; they called it "the jobless recovery". – Alex Millmow, "Twenty-five years on from the recession we had to have", The Sydney Morning Herald
For context, my parents bought their first house around this time, and they remembered interest rates were up around 17 percent, compared to around 2 percent at the time of writing. Anyone with serious debt was basically wiped out, a couple of my dad's friends losing their farms, and one of them losing a lot more than that. If interest rates hadn't been so high, he told me darkly, he never would've had to go driving trucks to make ends meet, and so wouldn't have had the truck accident that killed him.
In short, it was the worst banking downturn in a century, and for once the old maxim that motor racing is last into a recession and last out again didn't hold true. For those who held sponsorship contracts with the big banks – like Allan Moffat, who was in bed with ANZ – the pain filtered through almost immediately.
One of my disappointments was in 1990, when I still had ANZ sponsorship. The managing director, Will Bailey, called me into his office to tell me that the bank had suffered its first loss in history and he'd had to dismiss some 3,000 people. Well, of course, they couldn't maintain the race team.
He told me the cars were mine and all the bills would be paid. Then he handed me an envelope with a cheque in it and you how much it was for? How about $250,000? That truly was, aw shit, the nicest thing that ever happened to me. He told me it was a donation to help me get my next sponsor.
From that day onward I spent most Christmas Day celebrations with Will Bailey and his wife. – Allan Moffat, AMC #79
So Gibson Motorsport had the misfortune to be launching the most expensive touring car Australia had ever seen, in the midst of Australia's worst recession from 1929 to 2020.
When people realised the GT-R was going to be the gun car, they knocked on our door and wanted to run GT-Rs – until we told them the budget. Two things killed that [customer cars] – one was the budget required and the second was that they would have to deal through Fred, because NISMO didn't want to deal with independent teams in Australia. They said they were happy to supply through Gibson Motorsport.
And motorsport being what it is, those people always believed they'd get second-rate service because Fred would be the works team and the rest would get hand-me-downs.
Fred was successful, of course, with the GIO car which ran under him, but the rest of the people – and I mean oil company sponsored teams – actually knocked on my door and asked us if they could be part of GT-R and ultimately they walked away from it because of the cost of doing it, even compared with the Sierra Cosworth RS500. – Paul Beranger, Auto Action #1787
So we would not see the ATCC become "Formula GT-R" like in Japan, where 18 NISMO-prepped Skylines duked it out for line honours at Fuji and Suzuka. Only one team in the country could afford that, and the only reason they could afford it was because, ironically, their corporate backers were deep in the red. The Button Car Plan was in full effect at this time but Nissan's cosy tie-up with Holden had meant for the last few years the most important car rolling down their Clayton production line was not the R31 Skyline, but the Pulsar hatchback, which was also being sold as the Holden Astra. When the shared engine contract was abruptly severed, Nissan had instead extended the hand of friendship to Broadmeadows, which resulted in the GQ Patrol becoming available as the Ford Maverick. But Ford's existing relationship with Mazda rather diluted their need for Nissan, and when Nissan presented a plan to build the next front-wheel drive Bluebird locally as both the Nissan Pintara and the Ford Corsair (replacing Ford's imported Telstar), Broadmeadows quietly brushed it off – the last thing they needed was another mid-size sedan creating volume issues for their Falcon. Nissan's days as an Australian manufacturer were rapidly spiralling to a close, so they had no choice but to promote like hell and hope for the best. The $1 million annual budget allocated to Gibson Motorsport was peanuts compared to what they stood to lose if they gave up that visibility.
Actual photo of Nissan Australia c.1991
Godzilla was finally ready to wade ashore and start its rampage, but it was hiding the fact that the company behind it was now sliding beneath the waves...
The VN Commodore was the car that brought Holden back from the brink. It returned Australia's Own to profitability after a decade of getting their head kicked in by their cross-town rivals at Ford. But it was also, in a roundabout way, the car that would bury them 30 years later.
To explain how such a thing happened means a deep dive not just into the car itself, but into the people who ended up driving it, and thus into the image the company backed itself into. An image that eventually leads back to the racetrack, especially the one on a smallish hill just south of a medium-sized city in regional NSW.
The Design: A Wide Brown Car For Me When the big new VN Commodore launched at Sanctuary Cove, Queensland, on 17 August 1988, it was the culmination of a decade of hard lessons for Holden. Ever since the Commodore had arrived way back in 1978, it had been suffering from a fundamental flaw: it was too damn small. Designed as an Opel Rekord for the medieval streets of West Germany, it just felt cramped to Australians accustomed to cars that could take three adults across the back seat.
That couldn't be corrected because, according to product planners working in the aftermath of the Oil Crisis, that was meant to be a feature and not a bug: small was supposed to mean fuel-efficient. Unfortunately, Holden had shot themselves in the foot by retaining the Red inline-six from the Kingswood, an engine beloved for its reliability and ease of maintenance, but one that was notoriously thirsty. At the time debuting both a new body and a new engine must have seemed a risk too far, but with 20/20 hindsight some boldness would've served Holden well: with a Red under the bonnet, the Commodore simply wasn't frugal enough to justify squeezing your family into its smaller cabin, especially when it wasn't as well-built as a similarly-sized Japanese car. The mistake was compounded by Ford, who'd deliberately reworked their own ageing straight-six with Alloy Heads to give it pretty much the same economy figures as the Commodore, allowing their salesman to argue that if it used no more fuel anyway, why not buy the more spacious car?
The loss of sales hit Holden hard, and the company spent the mid-1980s in a painful downsizing and restructuring period. Even worse, the nature of the Rekord platform itself completely precluded a commercial range – no ute to sell to farmers, no panel van to offer the tradies, no cab chassis to build into ambulances and mobile repair workshops. When the Acacia Ridge plant in Brisbane had closed and taken the WB with it, the entire commercials market had been abandoned to Ford, along with the prestige car niche once owned by the Holden Statesman. That hadn't been an easy decision to make, as Holden managing director Chuck Chapman had outlined at the launch of the VK in 1984:
At the same time we were going through the agonising process of rationalising our workforce, making hard decisions about future plant operations and trying to maintain sales in a declining market. I don't think too many people understand what a big company goes through at a time like this in an industry which must be exploring new and expensive frontiers of technology several years ahead while simultaneously undergoing the immediate trauma we faced.
So Holden's mission as they started shopping for a new model in the early 1980s was clear: they had to match the Falcon for internal space, they had to serve up a proper commercial range, and they had to return to the long-wheelbase prestige car market after several years away. Whichever model they chose, the development and "Australianisation" process would have to take place while the company was posting year-on-year losses and laying off workers by the thousands. And just to add some extra difficulty, they had to do it while offering up a whole new six-cylinder engine as well. No pressure.
The early days of the project saw Holden retreading the path that had led to the Commodore in the first place – they went to Opel in Germany. The Opel designers had been working on a replacement for the old Rekord called the Omega A, which had been designed with the typical early-1980s focus on aerodynamics. Flush-fitting side glass, a steeply-raked windscreen and low-profile headlights were very much in evidence, giving the car a drag coefficient of just 0.28 – necessary to improve fuel consumption and make the car stable on the high-speed autobahns of West Germany. It was the most aerodynamic sedan in the world at the time, but try as he might, Chapman could not prevail upon his Opel colleagues to widen the floorplan so they could share. In October 1982, the Germans told Holden that any further increase in width would have too severe an impact on their precious aerodynamics.
This was a bad sign, because about this time Holden planning director Ray Grigg outlined four possible programmes for the second-gen Commodore. The most expensive option would be to stretch the existing V-car floorplan and clad it in parts taken from the Omega: this would create an enormous amount of work and incur steep development costs, but was the most strategic option as it would set Holden up for the following decade. By contrast, the cheapest options were simply to facelift the VL again (as the VM), or just to adopt the Omega as it was... so of course these were the approaches favoured by the higher-ups. Fearing GM fatuity was about to sink Holden forever, the planning department's Roger Gibbs conspired with other design staff to convince Chapman the Omega as it was just wouldn't work. A mock-up that mimicked the proposed interior dimensions failed to move him, as he simply countered, "This is static; you'd get a different impression of size if you were moving." So, pulling out the final stops, they bought a secondhand XE Falcon and performed a quick cut-and-shut to reproduce the interior size they wanted, then took Chapman and a couple of other intransigents for a thorough backseat road-test. Just for good measure, they also brought along a standard Falcon and the much skinnier VK Commodore for comparison. That did the trick: although it would mean begging Detroit for a bail-out – money by no means guaranteed given the losses of the last decade – Chapman agreed to take their proposal for a wide-body Commodore to his bosses at GM.
On 23 January 1985, Chapman and Grigg gave a 15-minute blitz presentation to GM brass at the Warren Tech Centre in Detroit. The Americans were disquieted: a nine-figure sum for a project they were sure they'd got right this time was a big ask. But on this occasion GM came to the rescue, granting $200 million for the new-generation Commodore, $50 million of which would have to go towards the needed increase in width. The rest would be spent upgrading Elizabeth with two fully automatic transfer presses and new tooling, as well as adopting Toyota-style Kanban or "just in time" parts supply protocols. Producing full VNs at both Elizabeth and Dandenong would have added $200 to the asking price of each vehicle, so Elizabeth was chosen to shoulder the burden alone. On 3 December 1986, Chapman reported to the Australian media: "The money from General Motors has released us from a burden of debt we could never have earned our way out of."
Therefore, the VN ended up based on the same V-car platform as the outgoing VL: Phil Zmood and his design team took the blueprints and basically did a reverse Mad fold-in, stitching an extra 72mm of width into the body of the car. The axles and other bits and bobs were then stretched to suit, the greater under-bonnet area at last allowing Holden to bring the air conditioning up to an Australian level.
To go easy on GM's bail-out money they looked to Opel's work where possible, starting with that lovely flush glasshouse. The Omega also provided a fine template for the rear quarters, especially that higher aero-styled body line that allowed for a bigger boot, while the Senator B (the long-wheelbase version of the Omega) donated its doors and roof panels. The wider radiator grille was entirely Holden's work, however, necessary not only to replace the Omega's iffy face and plug the gap at the front, but to hide the cost-cutting going on under the skin: the extra millimetres added to the body did not translate to the suspension, which carried over the VL's MacPherson struts at the front (although the more direct front anti-roll bar mounts were a major advance), and the same old Rekord semi-trailing arms with a Salisbury live axle at the rear. There just wasn't enough cash to widen all these gubbins to match, so the front end basically had to be transferred directly across, leaving the car with a "knock-kneed" appearance, especially on the basic 14-inch wheels. Zmood's solution was to ditch the traditional integrated wheel arch flares, leaving the car to sit comfortably over the VL's narrower front track, yet blend subtly outwards to meet the wider rear track. Some carefully chosen steering lock in the promotional photos took care of the rest.
But more size was only part of the solution: Holden also needed to lift their game as far as build quality went. It seems unbelievable now, when the VN is renowned for being a crude beast, but at the time it really was a step forward: the VN was a quantum leap in assembly accuracy and finer tolerances, courtesy of new centralised assembly practices at Elizabeth. An ongoing confab between the design and development teams and those who actually built them on the line helped ensure the new methods became habit, and given the VN's flush aero bodywork, it hadn't come a moment too soon.
The interior too ended up being entirely local, featuring a one-piece dash fascia with wide centre console and binnacle-style controls. For many years Holden's dashboards, gauges, heater units and other controls had been installed by patient and flexible workers but, inspired by Opel, Holden had switched over to a new modular method of assembly: the firewall, dash steering column, pedals, fuse box and wiring harness were pre-assembled off-line before being dropped into the car through the front windscreen and glued into place. Opel door trims were rejected as too expensive, so instead the VN got Holden's first moulded door trims after decades of Masonite boards. Holden also held firm on their preferred rack-and-pinion steering rather than following Opel in returning to recirculating-ball, a decision made easier when very good racks were being made just up the road in Albury-Wodonga.
The Buick 3800 V6 The powerplant chosen for this new-generation Commodore was to prove as big, uncouth and effective as the car itself. Initially the plan was to carry on with the Powertech 6Ei Nissan RB30E, the beautifully smooth and refined inline-six that had powered the VL. Nissan Australia had been keen to build an enlarged 3.3-litre version of this engine locally rather than carry on importing, as its cost was heading northwards of 40 percent of the value of each car sold under Keating's "banana republic" dollar.
The problem was, Nissan would need a long-term commitment from Holden to go ahead with that plan, and Holden had concerns over whether the engine could be stretched beyond 3.3 litres to meet future needs. They were also worried about the long-term prospects of Nissan's bread-and-butter Skyline after Mitsubishi's wide-body Magna exposed its biggest shortfall. The final nail in the coffin came from the marketing department, who thought a big new Commodore would need a big new donk to match. With Ford busy expanding their 3.2-litre six to a 3.9, they really didn't want to leave their buyers with a shortage of cubes that would have to be defended in pub arguments. Looking to the future, a 3.3 just wouldn't cut it.
Several other ideas were tossed about: dusting off the old Red engine and giving it overhead cams and a crossflow head; slicing two cylinders off the faithful old Holden V8 to make a V6 (four running prototypes were built before this idea was canned); welding a couple of extra pots onto the four-cylinder Family II engine from the Astra; or even – yes, really – buying new overhead-cam sixes from Ford, an idea that was shot down not because it was morally repugnant to put Ford hardware under the bonnet of a Holden, but because that hardware proved too tall to fit under said bonnet!
With time ticking away and no serious alternatives locked in by mid-1986, Chuck Chapman and Don Wylie, director of engineering and design, flew to Detroit to check on the progress of the 3.8-litre V6 being developed by sister brand Buick. This engine had started life in 1961 as the "Aluminum Fireball" V8, which Buick had discarded by 1963 because the American customer just didn't give it the maintenance it needed (especially regarding the expensive coolant not generally available Stateside). Since a steel block was good enough for 'Murkans, Buick had happily sold the rights to Rover instead, where it would become a legend in cars like the Rover SD1 and most Land Rovers up to 2003. Interest in the U.S. was only revived by the 1973 Oil Crisis, as the Americans belatedly realised they needed to get this fuel consumption thing under control. And this, in a roundabout way, led to the 300ci member of this family of V8s undergoing surgery to remove the last two cylinders, emerging as a 3,791cc, 90-degree V6 instead.
With unleaded petrol adopted early in the U.S., GM put the V6 through a major redesign ready for a 1988 relaunch. Among the updates were a a 23 percent reduction in reciprocating mass, a longer cylinder block that placed the connecting rods in the centreline of the bores and pistons, and a Mitsubishi-type balance shaft for smoother running. It was certainly not technically innovative, particularly with its pushrod-actuated valves, but it was endowed with the latest in electronic gadgetry such as GM's multipoint EFI and three coil packs for ignition.
Chapman and Wylie came away impressed with this engine's newfound refinement, approving it for the upcoming VN at once. Dandenong began retooling to produce this engine in numbers, although initially it would have to be imported, with local content due to tick upwards with each new update. With the Nissan engine now set to be axed, the 4-speed Jatco automatic gearbox that backed it was set to disappear as well, so Chapman made sure to arrange a supply of GM's Turbo-Hydramatic 700 to replace it. Even so, knowing the new Commodore was only two years away, Holden hedged their bets by not cancelling the RB30E contract until mid-1987, when they could be sure the V6 was on track for its 1988 release.
Despite the press blurbs insisting this was a long-planned strategic move, Holden barely had time to cobble up a set of exhaust headers, sump, oil filter adaptor, throttle body and a suitable cross-member with hydraulic mounts before the car's August 1988 launch. The long tortuous routes of the radiator hoses and the lousy positioning of the thermostat in the earliest cars highlighted how little time Holden had to adapt the V6 for its home in the Commodore.
The engine, when it arrived, was both a revelation and a disappointment. For an oldschool iron-block pushrod engine, it was surprisingly torquey and economical, with a claimed 8 litres per 100km in the city and 12.5 on the highway. But it was the power that really blew minds. Officially, it delivered 125 kW at 4,800rpm, and 292 Nm of torque at 3,600rpm, though most of it was available just above idle. For context, that wasn't just more power than Ford's Multipoint 3.9, that was more than the carburettored V8 in the VL Commodore! For the first time since the introduction of ULP, an Australian car felt as gutsy as it looked, and with kerb weights starting at just 1,290kg, it was enough to throw the basic VNs around like a ragdoll.
Chapman and his people seem to've missed a trick, however. The V6 had been developed with an automatic gearbox in mind, and only for use in front-wheel drive cars, where the engine could be mounted transversally to hide its inherent roughness. In the Commodore, where it would have to be mounted longitudinally to meet the long driveshaft of a rear-wheel drive car, it would also have to be mated to a pair of gearboxes it had never been intended for – the aforementioned TH700, and the Borg Warner T5 manual. All this, combined with the fact the engineering department had spent all their time just getting the damn thing running, worked to expose what Buick had done so well to hide. Despite the new balance shaft and hydraulic engine mounts, the V6 was actually as rough as guts and had the engine note of a leaf-blower, resulting in NVH readings that had to be seen to be disbelieved. It was something that couldn't really be ironed out as, due to its conception as a V8, it had the wrong V-angle for a V6, 90 degrees rather than the 60 that is optimum for engine balance and evenly-spaced firing pulses. Despite that, the engine and indeed the whole car would prove to be very durable: owners found the drivetrain would shake and vibrate early on until they loosened up, and then last forever without any further deterioration. Crude it might have been, but I bet a few Captiva owners today wish they could have it back.
Executive Privilege So the VN became the first Holden since 1948 to debut a new body and a new engine at the same time. And whereas Ford had offered their six-cylinder engine in a confusing array of 3.2s and 3.9s, with or without Multipoint injection, Holden made theirs available in a single spec – the highest – and then made it standard even on the entry-level Executive.
In 1988, a brand-new VN Executive would set you back $20,014 ($45,500 in 2019 dollars), although all you got for it was 14-inch steel wheels, the rather clunky T5 manual and no air conditioning. The 4-speed auto was optional, but in truth you were better off with the clunky manual, as the auto was rather lazy and tended to vibrate at normal road speeds, especially in fourth (although Ford's auto at this point was an even worse 3-speeder, and many owners found the solution was to drive it manually and never do normal road speeds!). A limited-slip diff was an extra $350, while that highly necessary A/C would set you back a whopping $1,478. You could also have 15-inch alloys and Holden's famous FE2 police suspension pack, which in stiffening everything up actually made the car more comfortable rather than less the car became less wallow-y. Cruise control was added in 1989 for an extra $315, a big help on the 13-hour road trip from Sydney to Melbourne.
Above the Executive was the Berlina, which was decked out as the "budget-luxury" version. For $24,781 ($56,300 in 2019) the air con and 4-speed auto were now standard, with the cruise control, FE2 and alloys optional. This was also the first appearance of what Holden called the "Optional Power Pack", which for an extra $1,586 added electric windows, a retractable antenna and powered mirrors. A decent car for the suburban dad, especially when both the Berlina and the Executive could also be had as wagons, which no amount of shopping bags or school projects would faze.
A curious thing happened when you got to Calais level, however. Ever since the axing of the Statesman, the Calais had become Holden's flagship model, priced a couple of grand above Ford's Fairmont Ghia because it was also supposed to be competing with the Fairlane as well. With the Statesman due to make a comeback, however, the Calais lost its place at the head of the table. Consequently, its price was given a haircut to move it into direct competition with the Ghia, and that meant some of the appointments it had enjoyed as a VL had to be scrapped. The standard velour interior still counted as plastic door trim to this kind of buyer, and it didn't even get a variable intermittent wiper setting. But there was still plenty there – computer-assisted trip meter, climate control, remote central locking, a built-in car alarm and an upmarket AM/FM cassette stereo system with four speakers all came standard. It also scored a better set of gauges to replace the rather garish units on the repmobiles. For a price you could also add the Country Pack suspension (a higher ride height for rough roads), leather upholstery and even Sports Suspension (don't laugh, a firmer ride made the car more comfortable, remember).
Cosmetically, the Calais differentiated itself from lesser Commodores with a different grille, some badges, two-tone paint and special alloy wheels fitted with 205/65/HR15 tyres. It was the tyres that made the biggest difference to the driver, as the wider footprint made the Calais hang on harder and turn in more sharply, without compromising the ride quality. The basic VN maladies of floaty suspension and vague steering remained, but at normal road speeds most drivers would never really notice.
At $31,265 ($71,000), the Calais wasn't cheap, and compared to a Fairmont Ghia the cabin was a tad Spartan, which hurt it in the sales race. But if a BMW or Mercedes was what you were hankering after, you'd have to pay the Federal Government's punitive 58.5 percent import tariff, and that was going to hurt. At least the build quality issues that plagued this generation of Australian car seemed to apply least to the Calais, as if the robots at Elizabeth actually took their time on these things in the knowledge they were destined for actual people rather than faceless companies. Even at this level, however, the V6 was standard, and although the Calais' extra sound-deadening did its best to damp down its noise and vibration, it was fighting a doomed rearguard action. Fortunately, there was also...
The 5000i V8 The VN won Wheels magazine's coveted Car Of The Year award for 1988, but there was an asterisk over it – everyone knew the award had been won on the strength of the V8 models, which didn't come along until March 1989. Go figure.
Like the V6, the long-serving 5.0-litre Holden V8 had been sent to finishing school ahead of its VN re-launch. Usually the first thing a new owner would do was lift the bonnet to show off to their mates, and this was particularly rewarding with a VN, as the crude airbox on top of the Walky had been swapped for the shiny new "bunch of bananas" inlet manifold. A thing of beauty, it really did set the tone for what lay beneath: Holden had used the opportunity to rid the V8 of issues that had been there since the beginning.
Updates included a reinforced block with extra ribbing below the head bolts, revised cooling passages and injector mounting bosses from the Walky, a proper multi-point fuel injection system with twin plenum chambers, better-breathing symmetrical-port heads, a Delco management system, beefier A9L conrods, and heavy-duty Tri-metal F770 main bearings (although the basic roadgoing version only got two-bolt units unlike the four of the homologation specials).
The result was a stonking 165 kW at 4,400rpm and 385 Nm at 3,600rpm, a completely different world to the 122 kW and 323 Nm of the VL. Turn the key in the morning and it would start first time every time, and thanks to its new injectors, settle into a nice, even idle around 600rpm. Without the induction noise of carburettors some of the V8's brassy trumpeting was gone, but underneath it retained the familiar pig-iron gurgle of a true muscle car. Slide it into first (or even D for dattaway...) and you'd find the expected huge reserves of torque, except they came at you with a fluid-like smoothness, virtually from idle. Owners discovered it would pull evenly from 30 km/h to 220km/h without a single gear change. Wheeling through the traffic was no problem at all, as all it took was the barest prod of the big toe to maintain your place in the line. Break out the heavy foot, however, and you'd soon find the V8 was ready to light up the rears in any gear, at almost any speed, even if it was an auto. It made the VN, according to the April 1989 edition of Wheels, "the fastest family car in the world".
Obviously the V8 was heavier than the V6, so Holden had to cough up some new suspension rates to keep the nose off the ground. The outcome of that little project was that there ended up being four distinct suspension tunes – normal, FE2, V8 normal and V8 FE2 – with not a few arguing the ultra-stiff V8 FE2 was the best for any VN Commodore, regardless of the engine. All VNs came with four wheel disc brakes, but sensibly V8 models got better ones to cope with the extra performance and momentum. They also got the same HR-rated tyres and 15-inch rims as the Calais. If you had a phobia of clutch pedals, then the same automatic as the V6 was fitted as it was considered strong enough to contain the extra torque – the engineering department simply recalibrated the shift points and called it a day.
Surprisingly though, even as an auto the V8 wouldn't necessarily empty the 84-litre fuel tank like a bathtub drain. Highway cruising would return maximum figures of around 11 litres per 100km, while the suburban grind of roundabouts and traffic lights would see that rise to 14.5 or so. Put your foot down and that would disappear in a hurry, of course, but it was impressive that for once the V8 could be driven frugally.
The V8 was optional across the range, but its true home was in the muscular Commodore SS. Released in March 1989, for the first time the SS was to be an ongoing rather than limited-edition model. Released in either Phoenix Red or Atlas Grey (with the very contemporary Alpine White added later on), in execution it was basically an Executive with a mandatory V8 and some exterior garnish – SS decals, striping, a modest bodykit and a unique set of 15-inch alloys. Because the flyweight VN was barely any heavier than the VL, the 1,360kg SS served up remarkable performance for the era, charging from 0-100 in 7.3 seconds on the way to a top speed of 228km/h. As long as you had the manual, the drag strip could be dealt with in as little as 15.2 seconds. At just $25,375 ($53,600), the SS became Holden's working-class hero – as long as you didn't mind the inherent Holden-ness of the thing.
At the press launch, I remember thinking what a curious mixture this new SS was. On the one hand, it was almost embarrassingly cheap-feeling with a mediocre finish, oversized kiddy-car gauges and those red stripes, which were still de rigeur on local sports sedans at the time. But, on the other hand, it was a remarkably effective performance sedan with a fuel-injected V8 running through a 5-speed manual transmission or the 4-speed slushbox...
It was also smooth and mechanically refined in a manner that served to accentuate the crudity of its shortcomings. There were triumphs of engineering beneath the mostly tasteless trimmings – if you like, the VN SS was a BMW trying to fight its way out of all that Holden kitsch. – Jarrod Witcombe, Unique Cars Is. 358
Not every SS was for civilian use, either. As Ford boasted about building Australia's unbreakable taxi fleet, Holden decided their brand was better known as the maker of the nation's police cruisers instead. With the BT1 Police Pack on the options list, the VN soon owned the state police fleets once monopolised by Ford, taking over just as the last of Ford's XE V8 police cars were taken out of service. Pent-up demand for a V8 sedan with enough rear seat width for a burly officer to sit either side of a suspect caused VN police car orders to soar.
Interestingly, it turns out there was also a model aimed at the boy-racers called the Commodore S. Think of it as half an SS and you've got the idea: at $21,665 ($49,200), it was positioned as the budget sports model and was basically an SS minus the V8 (or if you're less generous, an Executive with a bodykit). Since I'd never even heard of it until starting research for this blog, I can't imagine it was an overwhelming success. Anyone out there know how many they sold? Hell, anyone out there actually have one? The comment box is below.
The Group A So if the SS was good, the SS Group A had to be better, right? Not exactly...
Between them, the various V8-optioned VNs (plus all the highway patrol cars) gave Holden the 5,000 they needed to qualify the car for Group A racing. The next stage was the "sporting evolution" you needed if you actually wanted to win, and it was here that things got a bit wobbly.
The VN Commodore SS Group A SV was the end of an era, not just the last genuine homologation special Holden would ever build, but the last one Australia would ever see as well. It was built to meet three key demands from the race teams. They wanted the fuel-injected, pushrod-actuated engine that was safe to 8,000rpm, to give them enough power to compete with the computerised, turbocharged powerplants coming from Ford and Nissan. They also wanted a 6-speed gearbox and a body that provided enough clearance to fit 12-inch wheels. With the VN, Holden ticked every single box.
Built at Elizabeth but extensively modified at the Holden Special Vehicles facility in Clayton, Victoria, the Group A's beating heart was a stronger version of the 5000i V8. Developed with feedback from the Holden Racing Team, the block was strengthened with thicker castings in known trouble spots, it was given four-bolt mains and roller rockers, and since it needed the twin throttle body of the Walky, it was marked out by the incongruously primitive-looking boxy inlet manifold. Holden also beefed up the crankshaft and conrods, but HRT engine man Rob Benson would soon find they'd actually overdone it, as the excess reciprocating mass made the engine a tad sluggish up through the revs. On the road it developed 215 kW at 5,200rpm and 411 Nm at a relatively high 4,000rpm, but in race tune of course you'd start with 380 kW and negotiate from there. The 0-100 time was 6.5 seconds, the quarter mile time was 14.5, and the top speed a deeply impressive 253km/h. Not exactly supercar numbers, even at the time, but probably faster than what you drive today.
To harness the extra engine, the Group A was fitted with a heavy-duty AP Racing clutch mated to a special ZF S6-40 6-speed manual gearbox (taken straight from the ZR-1 Corvette). Stopping was achieved via a set of ventilated discs on all four wheels, using special twin-piston callipers designed for the HSV tuned version. Room for these was made by upsized 17x8 alloy wheels shod with Goodyear Eagles, and they were kept on the deck thanks to stiffer springs and the now-familiar Bilstein gas shocks.
On the outside, the Group A came with a much less confronting bodykit than the Walky. This time Phil Zmood had been sent over to liaise with the Tom Walkinshaw Racing people, rather than trusting the job to TWR's own consultant Peter Stevens (who'd done work with Lotus and McLaren). Developed once again at the MIRA windtunnel in Warwickshire, this time the fibreglass could be kept to a minimum, as the car had been designed to be aerodynamic in the first place. A new moulding for the front bumper (with an extra piece to blank off the standard car's slatted radiator grille), a subtly-sculpted "ducktail" rear spoiler, a slight bonnet bulge and a set of side skirts (with cut-outs for a racing exhaust) were all that was required. It all resulted in a drag co-efficient of less than 0.30, making the VN the slipperiest Commodore yet.
On paper it was all pretty tasty, but in the grand tradition of the XU-1 Toranas and the Phase II Falcons, these upgrades did not make the Group A any better as a road car. Upon the car's launch in June 1990, the assembled journos were taken for rides at Lang Lang by Allan Grice, who drove it at about eight-tenths and generally impressed; Phil Anders recalled that he was taken enough that he nearly bought one straight after. But once he drove it for himself, he was glad he hadn't.
The AP clutch was ridiculously heavy, making town driving a chore. The toughening-up left the engine feeling like a truck. The bigger wheels, low-profile tyres and stiff suspension were too much for the mattress-like VN platform, making the ride unbearable (compounded by possibly the least comfortable seats ever fitted to an Australian car). The steering was so nervous it was impossible to place the car on a winding road with any accuracy. Its grip in the wet or on rippled surfaces was tenuous at best and dependent on fresh rubber.
But the worst thing by a country mile was the Corvette gearbox, which was obstructive and stiff and featured a set of ratios that didn't seem to've been changed on the boat ride across the Pacific – it was essentially a wide-ratio 4-speed, with two uselessly tall gears on top. Highway cruising at 100km/h in fourth felt fine, but change to fifth and the engine struggled as the revs dropped below the torque band. Sixth was completely out of the question. Coupled with the constant flexing of the chassis itself, and the Group A constantly generated the impression there was a massive powertrain ready to break loose from its moorings at any time.
Even as a posemobile it was limited, as although the bodykit looked great and just begged for an aggressive shade to set it off – the Tooheys giveaway cars in black were a symphony of evil – the colour chosen was Durif Red, a dull maroon that managed to make this racecar with a number plate into a wallflower. But what really brought these shortcomings to a head was the price. The Group A retailed for a staggering $59,850, or more than $114,000 in 2019 money – too much for a sports car that was actually pretty rubbish at being a sports car, let alone in a recession, and far, far too much for anything with a Holden badge. If you absolutely had to turn your daily commute into an homage to Brock or Perkins, you bought the normal SS and used the change to buy one-third of a house in Sydney.
The Hoon Factor So overall, the VN was the final proof that size did matter. Comparing it to the rival EA Falcon is kind of pointless, a bit like comparing the M3 "Grease Gun" to the British Sten – both were cheap, mass-produced pieces of crap that did the job, and the Holden won just by taking away the Falcon's ability to use size as a sweetener. So despite being a worse car than its predecessor in almost every way, the VN returned Holden an operating profit of $157.3 million in 1989 alone, and would ultimately sell to the tune of 215,180 across all models, compared to fewer than 152,000 for the VL. The lesson sank in, and Australian cars would get bigger with every generation from now on. Having walked the company through its darkest days, Chuck Chapman signed off and slipped into a very deserved retirement on 31 December, 1987: he got Holden back on top with the VN, then dropped the mike.
But there was a darker side to this sales renaissance. In 2010, after a promising free practice for the Australian Grand Prix, a 25-year-old Lewis Hamilton did his part for world linguistics by bringing "hoon" to the rest of the English-speaking world. After spending the evening going through data in the McLaren F1 team's garage, Hamilton needed to unwind and, unfortunately, chose to do it on public roads in his Mercedes C63 AMG. Lewis accelerated around some cars waiting to leave Albert Park ahead of him, kicking out the rear of the car and screeching his tyres – right in front of a police divisional van, who pulled him over and charged him – the 2008 World Champion – with "improper use of a motor vehicle". Lewis, who was described as "extremely cooperative" and "fairly disappointed" with the incident, had discovered Victoria's anti-hoon laws the hard way.
Those laws largely existed because of VN drivers.
As well as debuting a new body and a new engine, the VN also marked the start of a new sales strategy for Holden. Again, up to 90 percent of Australian cars in this era were sold not to private buyers, but to fleets, and that fleet focus permeated everything Ford and Holden did. Ford had got ahead for the 1980s by tailoring their vehicles specifically to the fleet buyers, risking a wide-body XD even after the Oil Crisis because the taxi companies needed it, and building wagons that matched what Telecom had asked for pretty much to the millimetre. That these vehicles ended up in every suburban driveway as secondhand buys was mostly a useful by-product, as thousands of company cars finished their year on the job and were sold off cheap.
In this environment, Holden's attempt to sell the Commodore as a refined, fuel-efficient Euro-box had fallen short, so now they had a new strategy. Where Ford had landed huge fleet sales by building cars especially for the fleets, Holden would wrongfoot them by building the best second-hand car, ensuring good resale value by guaranteeing every ex-government and company car would have a private buyer waiting for it at the end of its life.
This was the true purpose of the racing programme: to make the Commodore a rite of passage for the thrusting young men of Generation X who'd just shed their L plates and were now nursing Peter Brock fantasies. Viewed dispassionately, a full-size family car was the last thing a teenage driver needed, but the glamour of "BROCKYYYY WOO!" and some ever-more-aggressive offerings from HSV meant by the dawn of the 90's, a Commodore was every teenager's dream first car. It was less, "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday" than "Win on Sunday, better resale on Monday", and it caught the whole industry napping.
The problem was, the VN was in no way a suitable car for such drivers. It wasn't just that we had a car with more power than the old V8 models, which came on like a light switch; it was also that the flyweight construction of the body, which was meant to boost fuel economy, offered absolutely no protection in the event of a crash. In a time before ANCAP safety ratings, the only way to find out the survivability of a car was to look up hospital admissions, and for VN drivers that made for grim reading. "Safety" was about to become the big theme of the 90's, and the unsuitability of the VN platform on this front was about to force Holden into another desperate rearguard action.
A common incident in Dubbo and oh Jesus I live here now (source)
But the final nail in the coffin (often literally) was that Holden had plonked a big new body with a powerful new engine onto rear suspension only ever intended for a four-cylinder Opel. When Holden had adopted the Rekord E as the basis for the original Commodore, the suspension had come as part of the package, and that suspension concealed a fatal flaw. Under hard braking or cornering, or even a severe change in road camber, it was easy to apply too much sideways force to either rear wheel, distorting the mounting bushes and allowing the wheel to steer of its own accord. The usual way of controlling a car stepping out at the back wouldn't always work, because the car wasn't sliding, but steering itself sideways. Driven sensibly, such a car wasn't all that dangerous; driven by a young man with a heavy foot and a full load of passengers on a late-night Maccas run (or perhaps a servo run – I don't think there were many 24-hour McDonalds around in those days), a sudden camber change was enough to deflect the suspension and steer the car into a sideways shunt or a series of barrel rolls. The danger only went up if the young man added fatter rear tyres and correspondingly increased the grip and forces involved.
To deal with this, Opel had cooked up some new toe control links and made them mandatory on any car with a six-cylinder or bigger, debuting them on the Omega in 1987. Holden, in their great wisdom, disregarded this entirely in order to keep the bean-counters happy. So the VN, which had a lot more power than any Opel, piss-poor throttle linkage geometry, instant torque, a light tail and poor rear grip, was leaving the factory without the needed toe control links, and then being deliberately marketed at testosterone-poisoned younger men: if you were the parent of a P-plater in the early 90's, the VN was a veritable nightmare. Wrote Joe Kenwright in his Shannons Club article, Holden Milestone or Unguided Missile?:
There was another wildcard. During this period, this writer once interviewed dealers on a weekly basis for a series of national used car columns. One dealer in particular based his entire business on turning over near new fleet Falcons and Commodores as they hit 30-40,000km in their first year. He was therefore one of the first to stock a used VN. A tough operator, you could imagine him selling a Lightburn Zeta as a family wagon for a family of five but the arrival of his first used VN exposed a different side.
After hauling me into his office with some ceremony away from his staff, he suggested quite forcefully: "Youse blokes must be on drugs raving about the VN and giving it the Car of the Year." I took a deep breath and had a fair idea of what was coming. I had driven an early VN Executive V6 or two. They all left me at odds with my colleagues as they struck me as lethal in the wrong hands.
He continued: "I wouldn't let my wife drive that (pointing to the shiny metallic blue VN on the lot), let alone my teenage kids. There is no progression in that accelerator pedal. You just touch it and all hell breaks loose without warning. It's as rough as guts."
"And I now have to sell them to all these hyped-up young blokes that come in here desperate for one."
And that's without even mentioning the substandard thief-proofing that made the VN the chariot of joyriders and ram-raiders, reaching epidemic levels in Western Australia especially... it just went on and on. All this, combined with the rough finish that meant buying one meant trading quality for #AussiePride, meant within a few years VN owners were of... a certain type. How can it be put with delicacy and tact? Perhaps, that they were the sorts of people who'd wear stubbies and double-pluggers to court? Yes, that about sums it up. The archetypal VN driver was someone with a beautifully-cultivated mullet and a flanno, biting his bottom lip as he single-pegged it out of the roundabout in front of you, or perhaps a single mum with a station wagon full of kids and a pack of Winnie Blues tucked into her bra. The VN confirmed Holden as the brand of choice for knuckle-draggers, and genuine Commodore enthusiasts were tainted by association. This had been an element of Holden's image all along, and they'd worked hard to scotch it with the European-ness of the earlier Commodores, but the VN undid it all in a heartbeat. Until the very end, when the VF was objectively a pretty good car, you couldn't buy one because it was just a bit... well, bogan. What would the neighbours think?
That's why I say the VN is the car that killed Holden, even as it revived them. It wasn't mere cultural cringe that killed the Australian car, it was the statement that buying one made, that you were happy to be associated with all of the above. It was an association that would only get stronger as we headed into the V8 Supercar era, which would grow fat pandering to this same reservoir of Akka-Dakka, Barnesy and Chisel fans. To have lost Holden is a crying shame, but one of the reasons Australia stopped buying Holdens is, thank god, this country has moved on.
And so, at last, the 1990 season reached its conclusion with a very special race: the Nissan 500, the grand opening for the new Eastern Creek Raceway built in the hills of western Sydney.
The circumstances of the track's development are better detailed here: suffice to say that with the 500cc motorcyles going to Phillip Island and Formula 1 to Adelaide (Adelaide!), the suits behind Australia's most iconic city were none too pleased at having missed out on the headlines. Their return serve was to build a brand-new, FIA-certified permanent circuit in the city's west. Sydney had a robust motorsport culture already, of course, but it was a bit lowbrow compared to the polished international events now being held in Victoria and South Australia. However beloved by the fans, Oran and Amaroo Parks were always going to be a bit rough around the edges, holdouts from an earlier time when a glorified school tuck shop would suffice for a concession stand, and you didn't need to build grandstands because families would bring picnic blankets. Even if they could be upgraded to meet the first real stirrings of safety culture in motorsport, they wouldn't exactly lend themselves to blue-chip sponsors: Rolex and Qantas were never going to be seen promoting a Sports Sedan race at Oran Park. And that's before we mention the real core of the Sydney motorsport scene, the speedways – Liverpool and Parramatta might have produced some fond memories, but clay was never going to attract a top-level FIA championship.
Thus, Eastern Creek. Technically the circuit had opened with a dress-rehearsal Superbike race, but I haven't been able to find a single detail about it other than it happened. My friend who's into bikes (whom I keep around to meet diversity quotas) commented that Superbikes were a very new category back then, so it was unlikely they would've got the international series. Given the Australian series apparently started in 1980 and was revamped into the Australian Superbike Championship in 1989, the machines and riders definitely would have been around, but whether this was a championship race or not (and even who won) are complete mysteries to me. Anyone know for a fact? Comment box, please.
Either way, now in the fight of their lives to remain a local manufacturer, the money for the opening 500km enduro had been put up by Nissan Australia, creating the Nissan 500 (usually called the Nissan Sydney 500 to differentiate it from the race of the same name over in Wellington). Nissan's money attracted a sizeable 41-strong entry list, which whittled itself down to a more workable 36-car grid. Most of these were very familiar to us: Chris Lambden in the Bearepaires Skyline; Alf & Tim Grant in the equivalent Sizzler machine; Garry Willmington in his privateer Supra; Mark Gibbs and Rohan Onslow in the GIO Walky; John Cotter and Peter Doulman in one BMW M3, Brett Riley and Craig Baird in another, racing for class honours against Phil Ward & John Goss in the Monroe Mercedes; Kevin Waldock in the Playscape Sierra; Ray Lintott and former AMSCAR champ Terry Shiel in the Valvoline Sierra; and of course a whole slew of Sydney-based privateers in Holdens, spearheaded by Trevor Ashby & Steve Reed in the Lansvale Smash Repairs Walky (no debates about whether Eastern Creek should go to Ashby or Reed – an enduro would need both of them).
But as usual, these cars were only grid-fillers. The real race was sizing up between the five big professional teams of Dick Johnson, Peter Brock, Tony Longhurst, Glenn Seton and Fred Gibson. The catch was, this being the end of the season (with Bathurst now firmly in their rear-view), budgets were basically dry and all these teams were running on fumes.
It surprised no-one that the cash-strapped Holden Racing Team didn't even make an appearance, as whatever budget splurge they'd got after the problems at Sandown had been spent on Bathurst (and rightly so, given the results). Dick Johnson Racing only brought along a single car, the #17 for Johnson himself and sidekick John Bowe, which was actually chassis DJR4, Bowe's ride for this year's ATCC and used since then by Paul Radisich and Jeff Allam at Sandown; it hadn't raced at Bathurst at all. In other words, they'd basically entered the team's T-car, pressing it into service while DJRs 5 and 6 were back at the workshop being rebuilt for 1991.
By contrast, Peter Brock brought along two cars, palming the #6 (one of the Rouse-built ones) off on some old friends, Queensland pay driver Charlie O'Brien, and talented Tasmanian dairy farmer David "Skippy" Parsons. For himself Brock retained car AR1, the most recent and fastest of his Sierras with the #05 on the sides, which had been in use throughout 1990. With Andy Rouse returned to the U.K., co-driving duties rotated back to Andrew Miedecke, although the Port Macquarie used car salesman was a bit touch-and-go this weekend. Unable to put fast laps together, Miedecke had gone to see the circuit doctor, who diagnosed a problem that affected his balance. "I had a bad ear infection that got worse and worse from Thursday onwards," explained Miedecke. "By first thing Saturday [i.e. race day] it was so bad that I went to a private hospital in Bondi to have the pressure released. I was pretty determined to get back to the track and do the race." Somehow, Miedecke was cleared by the doctors, and although he still wasn't a hundred percent when start time came around, his pace wasn't too far behind Brocky's. Just to be safe, Neil Crompton had been given enough practice laps to clear him to race if Miedecke bowed out.
Tony Longhurst and Frank Gardner also brought two cars along, their yellow-cage TLR5 for Tony himself and established co-driver Alan Jones, while the other was more or less rented out to a pair of pay drivers – specifically, the Brabham brothers Gary & David, sons of triple F1 World Champion, Sir Jack Brabham. It was their first time ever sharing a car together, but that car was either TLR3 or 4, one of the black-caged Sierras, which came as a bit of a shock to these open-wheel specialists. Both had contested Formula 1 this year, Gary with Life and David, ironically, with Brabham, so a car with a roof with its extensive suspension travel and huge roll angles took a bit of getting used to. Once he got his head around it though, David admitted enjoying the challenge of the Sierra, which required a whole different approach from a car with huge wings and no weight. Gary probably thought the same, but we don't talk about Gary.
Glenn Seton also brought two cars, but didn't end up running them the way he'd planned. It might've been expected that the Sandown-winning pair of Seton and George Fury would team up for another 500km event, but Fury had put his foot down. Even though he knew perfectly well Glenn would always get the better of the team's Bo Seton-built engines, he refused to share a car with Glenn any longer. "Glenn wanted me to co-drive for him and my ego wouldn't handle that," Fury remembered. "I wanted my own car. The last race I did was at Eastern Creek in an endurance race. It turned out that the two cars weren't the same and I thought, 'Oh, bugger that.' I was over it by then. The enjoyment was there, but the politicking..." Fury ended up lead driver in the #30, shared with Drew Price.
So that left Seton in need of a co-driver, but he found quite a neat solution. With his own car having worn the wall in Adelaide only a week before, Colin Bond was a free agent, so the pair did a quick handshake deal to share the #35, even though that meant climbing aboard in his red-and-white Caltex race suit rather than a blue Peter Jackson one! Ironically though, one of Bondy's own cars was on the grid that day, the #19 Caltex machine leased out to the father-and-son duo of Ken and John Matthews. One presumes that deal had been done before Bond had wiped out his own ride in Adelaide, leaving him stranded.
And lastly of course, there was Gibson Motorsport, who were pitching their sole remaining GT-R Skyline at the event in the hope they could take at least one major race victory from a disappointing endurance season. They experimented with various spring and sway bar settings looking to get the best out of Yokohama's hard "S-compound" tyres, and seemingly found something that worked. Despite that, the team as a whole were not in the best of places this weekend: not only was Mark Skaife only barely cleared to race after his Adelaide shunt (busy-bee Crompo practiced this car as well), Fred Gibson had to be marked absent as he was in hospital with his arm in a sling. So, no team leader, just one car and only one-and-a-half drivers to complete a 500km distance at a completely unknown circuit – it was going to be a tough couple of days.
Qualy Questions Queried In qualifying on Friday, Richards of course took pole with a lap of 1:35.26, but the shock of the session came when it wasn't a Sierra that took the number two spot – it was Larry Perkins in his Walkinshaw Commodore, chassis PE 010. With an all-new Holden coming next year, Larry had a nice little spares inventory that needed using up, so he decided to blow the lot of it on this race. For qualifying he'd fit the car with a special 8,400rpm grenade engine and changed down two diff ratios for maximum acceleration: even better, he'd got himself a supply of Dunlop D15 tyres, the same ones developed especially for HRT to use at Bathurst. Presumably that meant he'd also got some of HRT's wider Castalloy wheels, giving him more lateral grip to hang on through those long, constant-radius corners. The result was a banzai lap of 1:35.66, only four-tenths behind the Nissan and one of only three cars to break into the 35s (the other being Tony Longhurst, with a 1:35.78). His race settings would be more sensible, obviously, but such a turn of speed was shocking from a car that was supposed to be the tortoise rather than the hare. And most worrying, he would maintain the advantage of those Dunlop tyres throughout the race – a fact which became even more important given what happened a few hours later.
Because on Friday night, while everyone but the Perkins mechanics were in their hotel rooms punching zeds, an sizeable storm front blew through the area and reportedly dropped an inch-and-a-half of rain in less than an hour. All the rubber that had been laid down over the course of practice and qualifying was completely washed away, returning the track to "green" status, just as it had been at the start of the weekend. All the setups that had been lovingly dialled in over the course of those sessions had to be thrown away, with new settings improvised or simply guessed at: the teams would just have to wing it. Worst of all, the green track penalised some tyres more than others: Alan Jones revealed that the Longhurst team's Yokohamas liked a bit of oil and rubber buildup, and that in the morning warm-up the track was much slipperier than it had been in qualifying, especially off-line where the dust left by the rain wasn't being cleared away by passing racecars.
So, an unexpected P2 for Perkins, who had the advantage of special Dunlop tyres. Godzilla was on pole, but with the handicap of Yokohamas, and no guarantees it would be able to go 500km without a problem. Seton was a proven winner over this distance, but he too was on Yokohamas, and had an unfamiliar co-driver to deal with. And the Brock and Longhurst teams were theoretically in the mix, but only if their cars held together – with new machinery on the cards for both these teams in 1991, every component they had now well out of warranty and ready for the scrapheap.
So many questions, so few answers – this could be a hell of a race.
Race Day: Revenge of the Repressed The Nissan Sydney 500 had been set for 125 laps of Eastern Creek's 3.930km "Grand Prix" circuit, or 3½ hours, whichever came first. And joy of joys, after the Grand Prix in Adelaide, Murray Walker had stayed in the country an extra week to join the commentary team for this race. Since it was being broadcast on Nine's Wide World of Sports rather than Channel Seven, that meant we got Darrell Eastlake in place of Mike Raymond, plus Win Percy (who had nothing better to do) and Alan Jones on a shift basis, when he wasn't driving the B&H Sierra.
And so, for the final time on Australian soil, the class of 1990 lined up on the grid, ready to take starter's orders. Tachos strained as the multi-cylinder symphony filled the air; first gears were selected but clutches held in as the red lights came on, held for a deliberate pause, then went out and turned green. The Nissan Sydney 500 was on.
As expected, Jim Richards fairly leapt off the line and pulled out a gap of 50 metres before the first corner. Perkins and Longhurst were rather less boisterous, making slower getaways that left them vulnerable to a pouncing John Bowe, who made his first attempt to gain places through the long, sweeping Turn 1. But Richards was showing Godzilla no mercy this day, throwing the GT-R into a nice little slide on the entry to Turn 2, then winding it through the twisting complex at the back of the circuit, while Brock moved up to 2nd and Longhurst, who'd made a good initial start but then bogged down, a fighting 3rd. 4th was Larry Perkins, then Bowe in 5th and Glenn Seton in 6th.
The first incident came soon. Approaching the end of lap 1, Brock made a mistake exiting the Turn 9 hairpin and got a wheel up on the kerbs, raising a tiny puff of dust. Although trivial in itself, that mistake was enough to give Tony Longhurst a speed differential down the following straight, putting him ahead by the time of Turn 10. Brocky really ought to've relented at that point, but sometimes a racer's gotta race, and he tried to get the place back on sheer bravery, going around the outside into the tricky kink before the final left-hander. With better tyres it might have worked: on cold Bridgestones however, it became a classic case of ambition ahead of adhesion. Alan Jones had warned it would be slippery out there, and sure enough, Brocky lost the back end on the dirty line, got into a tank-slapper, nearly caught it but then over-corrected and spun the other way, planting the shiny white Mobil Sierra firmly in the sand trap. He managed to trickle out and rejoin, but with the field still compressed he'd lost an ungodly number of places, rejoining way all the way back in 20th. Scratch one Peter Brock, first of the big five to fall.
The second was Tony Longhurst. On lap 3, Larry Perkins dived under him into the final turn, emerging onto the front straight in 2nd place. While Larry pulled away, Tony then found himself fighting door-to-door with an opportunistic John Bowe, leaving the yellow Sierra 4th by the time they started lap 4. That 4th was reduced to a 5th in the process of negotiating Turn 1, as Tony's battle with Bowe had put him on the outside line heading into the turn, leaving him vulnerable to a feisty Glenn Seton as well. Dropping 2nd to 5th in half a lap was a bad sign, but it was nothing next to the midfield cars "streaming past" on the laps that followed, leaving the yellow car floundering down in 12th.
When they asked team manager Frank Gardner what was wrong, he told them with his usual tact, "If I knew that, I would fix it." In fact he did know, sort of: it was an electrical gremlin of the kind that had sidelined the car in Adelaide, one they'd been battling with all weekend. When it hadn't re-emerged during the morning warm-up they'd dared to hope, but no such luck: it had merely been lying low for the race. Tony's car was fast while it was working, but it only seemed to be working every other lap: in the meantime he was losing time he would never get back. So Tony Longhurst and the Benson & Hedges team were out of contention too, and we were yet to see lap 10.
So although Godzilla had no peer this day (or any day), the closest it had to a challenger came in the person of John Bowe in the #17 Shell Sierra. Unusually, Johnson had allowed Bowe to take the start which, given how strategies worked out, implied he would be in at the finish as well. Since those were the two most important parts of the race – and between them made up two-thirds of the total distance, leaving just the middle third for the co-driver – that was a tacit admission that Bowe was now the faster of the pair, which couldn't have been easy on Dick.
But it wasn't half paying off. Charging from the very first lap, Bowe benefitted from the demise of both Brock and Longhurst, then caught up to Larry Perkins as early as lap 8, just as they hit the first round of backmarkers. Bowe menaced him for a lap while awaiting his chance, then down the front straight, he got it: catching a tow behind the slippery Commodore, he applied the full power of a Dick Johnson Cozza to pass Larry just as they crossed the line to begin lap 10, powering into Turn 1 firmly ahead. From 5th on the grid, Bowe had fought his way up to a deserved 2nd in only ten laps.
But of course, 1st place was nowhere in sight. By the end of the second lap, Richards had pulled out a gap of three seconds: a lap later, it had become five. By the time Bowe was hounding Perkins on lap 8, Richards had been a full six seconds up the road. By lap 15, when the gap was being measured back to Bowe rather than Perkins, it was a full ten seconds. By lap 20, it was a scarcely-believable fourteen. On lap 21, however, it went back to zero in a damn hurry.
From following Brock's charge back up through the field, the cameras abruptly cut back to show the Nissan limping into pit lane with its chin spoiler scraping along the road! The tyre bouncing along behind it told the whole story: the left-front wheel had parted company with the rest of the car, basically out of nowhere. The loose wheel rolled into pit lane and eventually impacted the tyre barrier inside the concrete wall, bouncing high and then crashing back down behind, safely out of the way.
Richards sheepishly limped Godzilla back to its pit bay, where the waiting Gibson mechanics leapt to work – there was no guarantee something critical hadn't broken, after all. Win Percy speculated that he'd ground the bottom off the brake disc, but the worst didn't come to pass. After a quick check to make sure everything was still there, all the Gibson mechanics did was fit a new wheel and drop the car, sending Richo back on his way. Some have said Richards was lucky the failure happened so close to the pit entry, minimising the time lost, but it wasn't really luck: Richards had felt there was something wrong and already decided to head for the pits. That also possibly explains what the commentators wondered on the day – why didn't the team change the other four wheels and top up the tank while they were at it? The answer seems to be that they simply hadn't had time, it had only been a few seconds from "I can feel a vibration" to "I'm coming in". They simply hadn't had a chance to bring out some tyres and calibrate a fuel churn.
So with an easy victory once again snatched away by a mechanical failure, an impressively Zen Jim Richards rejoined in 12th and carried on with the job. Channel Nine's pit reporter, Charles Stewart, tracked down Mark Skaife for an interview, but it had all happened so fast Skaifey still had his mind on other things.
Charles Stewart: Mark, what on earth happened?
Mark Skaife: Well the tyres on the car, Charles, are still fine. What we decided to do was come in a little earlier, so that we were gonna have to make one full stop and a half stop. So we've done our half stop now, and we'll do one full stop later in the race and then I'll get in the car. So Jimmy's done one and a half, sort of, stints.
Stewart: But he came in without one front wheel?! How does that work?
Skaife: Exactly right. I'm not sure what's happened there yet. But we'll go and have a look at that now, I've just looked at the tyres.
Stewart: Really worrying?
Skaife: Well, the tyres are fine. But the wheel coming off is fairly worrying, yeah.
So now the race lead belonged to John Bowe, with Larry Perkins not all that far behind, hanging on like "a shearer's dog with a bone" in the words of Darrell Eastlake. Although the occasional little slide from the rear of that white Commodore gave away that Perkins really was hooking in, it didn't seem like he had anything over the red Sierra ahead of him. Bowe was having to judge the boost and try and average out the climb rate of that turbo, sure, but he had enough in hand to make it work. Perkins just had to wring its neck and wait for tyre deg to start kicking in.
He didn't have long to wait. Perkins inched up on Bowe during the next ad break and just, as they cut back to the live feed, BAM. Going deep into the braking zone for Turn 2 – the left-hand hairpin that followed the front straight and nearly-flat first corner – Bowe lost the rear of his Sierra and spun, landing in the dust going backwards. Larry, of course, slipped through and absconded with the lead, but Bowe wasn't beached and got going again almost straight away. He was able to rejoin without damage, but had to wait for Glenn Seton to nip by as well, lest he be slammed for a dangerous rejoin. He rejoined 3rd, chastened but unmarked.
So with those two having sorted themselves out for now, attention turned back to Peter Brock, who'd provided the entertainment in the first stage of the race. From 20th at the end of lap 1, he'd risen steadily through the ranks to be 7th by the time the Nissan shed its wheel. Flat-out was how Peter loved to drive, but it came at a price: he'd started on the hardest Bridgestone compounds he could find, and even those weren't hard enough. Although the pit window for a two-stop strategy opened somewhere between laps 40 and 45, Peter was compelled to pick a prior point to pit for pneumatics and petrol, pulling in at the end of lap 30. He handed the car over to Andrew Miedecke.
Charles Stewart: Well Peter Brock has just come in, a little bit earlier than you'd hoped, Peter?
Peter Brock: Yeah, I was hoping for lap 35. But, ah, we're still on schedule basically, it's just tyre wear. Well, tyres sort of having a bit of a blister in this hot temperature. But we're sort of half-happy considering the start of the race where I got pushed into all the muck on the side of the track and it was just like driving on marbles actually for a few seconds.
Stewart: So how is it out there at the moment? You've been making up a lot of ground, is that a position that you enjoy?
Brock: Yeah, a bit of incentive, a bit of a red flag to a bull. Basically, if you keep on-line, do it nice and clean and accurate, you're gonna go well. It's going to be a fantastic race as it wears on, I'm sure of that. And to see Larry Perkins out in front is fantastic. Good racing.
On lap 32 Seton followed him in, but although it had the appearance of a routine stop, it was still too early. Most tellingly, Seton himself stayed in for a double-stint rather than hand over to his co-driver. Seems likely they'd planned to stop around lap 40, but with the track washed clean overnight the tyres just couldn't make it, so it was better to just come in than keep losing time on the track.
Tony Longhurst tried a similar trick, but for a different reason. Coming on lap 37, his first stop was closer to the theoretical ideal than these earlier-stoppers, but tyre wear was the least of his worries right now. Tyre wear on a Sierra was mostly caused by the turbo lag breaking into wheelspin, and that was a problem Tony would've dearly loved to have, given his sick engine was cutting out more or less at random. Alan Jones excused himself from the commentary box and headed down to pit lane, ready to take his shift, but in the end Frank Gardner left him on the bench for the moment. Jonesy told us why when Charles Stewart inevitably came visiting with his microphone.
Stewart: Alan, what have you heard about what's going on?
Jones: Well, we don't really know. We've had some trouble all weekend with some electrical problem. The car just literally cuts itself off and I've been up on the pit counter and he's passed a few times literally in what appears to be angel gear, with the engine just dead. It may be the same old problem re-occurring. Frank Gardner's now suggested something that we make it a little bit easier for the oil tank to breathe, because it might be creating a little bit of a pressure, and putting a bit too much load on the pump, and therefore affecting the whole electronics. If that's the case we might leave Tony in to do one more stint because he at least is familiar with what's going on, whereas if I jump in I have to cope with learning how to drive the car with its problems.
Later, Jonesy revealed that the car was refusing to rev higher than 6,000rpm, which was about 1,400 down on where it should've been. The problem seemed to be related to engine temps – as soon as the car got hot, it wouldn't go beyond 6,000, which was a kick in the teeth on such a warm day. With a load of fresh fuel after its first stop the car seemed happier, but it remained to be seen what would happen once temps started climbing again. For now, the only treatment was to cross the fingers and go as hard as possible.
The contrast with the Perkins Engineering garage was stark: Perkins made his first stop from the lead at the end of lap 43, pretty much right on the money. Intriguingly, Perkins had let it be known that he planned to change brake pads at his first stop rather than the second, so two new brake pads, four new Dunlops and a handover to Tomas Mezera were all on the cards. With Bowe's spin they had an extra 28 seconds in the bank, so they had time to get the stop done as they pleased, working with grim briskness but no real tension. True to claims that it was hot, Larry had his helmet off as soon as he was out of the car, although that might also have been to facilitate communication with Mezera, who was now strapped into the driver's seat. While the car was standing still Bowe rocketed past to re-take the race lead, but the team didn't flinch, they just calmly finished the job. With the pads done, new wheels were bolted on (still five-studders!), and the car was dropped and sent on its way. They had been stationary for 45 seconds, meaning Mezera fed back out in 11th, but that would quickly become 3rd again as the traffic ahead all pitted. And their only real rivals still had a brake pad change of their own in their future.
Speaking of whom, by the time Perkins was pitting, Dick Johnson himself was standing by with his helmet on. Spin aside, Bowe had put together a very workmanlike first stint, so it wasn't until lap 44 that he had to come in – again, right where you wanted to be. Bowe pulled up exactly on the marks, pirouetted out of the car and yeeted his seat insert to make room for Dick's larger backside. The boss climbed in as his crew refuelled and re-tyred the car, Bowe holding the seat belts out of the way until they were needed. It was a quicker stop than Perkins, so Dick rejoined ahead of his main rival, but that didn't really mean much when the strategy had yet to play out. The meat of the race – its middle third – was still to come.
With Mark Gibbs also pitting the GIO Commodore, on lap 47 Jim Richards resumed the race lead in the GT-R, having spent the last forty minutes doing his usual impression of Moses with the traffic. Glenn Seton was circulating behind him in 2nd, with Tomas Mezera now 3rd, Dick Johnson 4th and Drew Price, who'd taken over the other Seton team Sierra from George Fury, in 5th. All these cars were expecting a promotion once the Nissan made its first genuine stop, and they got it – but unexpectedly, they also got to keep it.
On lap 52, Richards finally pitted for real, with all four wheels still attached. Jim stepped out and Mark climbed in, then sat and waited as the mechanics changed the front brake pads – this was going to be a long stop. As the seconds ticked by, however, and the stop dragged on... and on... and on, it became clear that even with a pad change, this was no routine pit stop. The Nissan was in trouble. The bonnet was lifted and a confab of mechanics gathered around, trying to work out what wasn't doing what it should've. It was only later that Richo would tell us the car had been overheating slightly just before the stop, hinting that it had started losing its coolant. Accounts differ, so it's not entirely clear whether the car had blown a head gasket or – a bugbear familiar to all the tuners out there – torsional stress from the stupendous horsepower being asked of it had actually cracked the block, but either way the result was the same. After three minutes without moving, the team decided the car was a lost cause and put it away. A bitterly disappointed Skaife never even got to drive.
The GT-R was only the most high-profile of the retirements, of which there would be a few, as there always were in an endurance race. Garry Willmington had brought his turbocharged MA70 Supra into the pits as early as lap 1, ultimately dropping out on lap 25 for reasons unknown. Chris Lambden's HR31 Skyline was likewise seen parked near the pit exit after lap 18, suggesting he'd pitted to fix a problem, and failed. The Matthews pair, father and son, found their Colin Bond rent-a-car less than reliable as well, dropping out on lap 28 for reasons unexplained. And on lap 64, even the well-run GIO Walkinshaw of Mark Gibbs and Rohan Onslow would see its engine expire, the ambient or the pace on the day too hot for the car to handle.
The demise of the Nissan team put Glenn Seton into the race lead for the first time, although Murray Walker apparently thought it was Colin Bond, which was as amusing as it was confusing. Good old Murray was welcome in the commentary box any time, but he gave away his unfamiliarity with the Australian scene more than once. Helpfully filling in the viewers on what an experienced driver was Colin Bond and what a good season he'd had in 1990, when it was clearly still Seton at the wheel, was only part of it. He also got excited thinking Peter Brock's engine was about to expire, when in fact he'd merely gone back to his ultra-smoky sprint-race exhaust layout. Charles Stewart later cornered Andrew Miedecke on lap 84 (after he'd finished his stint on lap 77), and asked bluntly if the smoke was a sign of a problem. "No I don't think so, that's one of our secret weapons," was Miedecke's cheerful reply. "It's really nothing to worry about and we believe that car will be running strongly at the end." Well, Murray hadn't been here for Symmons Plains, had he?
Anyway, with Seton (not Bond) now leading, Mezera was only 11 seconds behind, and Dick Johnson slowly working his way back toward the front as well (impressively, the Lansvale team had got themselves up to 6th outright before their mid-race pit stop – not bad for a pair of part-timers). By lap 61 Seton had eked the gap out to 15 seconds, as Mezera struggled to match his pace in a fat, fuelled-up Walkinshaw Commodore. Seton was also driving the thing ragged, the brake lights that stayed on deep into every corner giving away that he was doing a lot of left-foot braking, trying to keep the nose on the ground and make it turn. It might have been proof the Yokohamas were struggling, but at this point it was working, as by lap 65 the gap to Mezera was nearly twenty seconds.
On lap 73 – just past half-way – Seton finally made his second pit stop. He handed the car over to Colin Bond, who as previously noted did look rather out of place in the wrong sponsor's overalls, but no matter. With a change of front pads it was a long stop, over 39 seconds, so by the time Bondy got going again the car had dropped down to 3rd, behind Dick Johnson. By lap 77, the gaps were 16.17 seconds from Mezera to Johnson, with another 25 seconds back to Bond in 3rd. Colin had commented that Seton's car was much easier to drive than his own Caltex machines, with a more linear throttle response thanks to tuning by Bo Seton, who'd once built the best Capri V6s in the business. Less boost to save the tyres was a wise approach in a 500km enduro, but it did leave the car a little bit short of ultimate pace, and now it was Bondy's turn to struggle with a full fuel load and lose time bedding in brake pads. The #35 would not lead the race again.
Because on lap 87, Mezera finished his stint and brought the #11 in for its final visit to the pits. On the schematic it was a quick stop, with only a driver change, some fresh rubber and a fuel top-up planned... but you know what they say about battle plans. The right-rear wheel proved stubborn and took several seconds to remove. The mechanic responsible doubled down, revved up the air gun once more and finally got the damn thing off, quickly fitting its replacement, but the whole procedure had been delayed. What should have been a 20-second stop had taken 27 seconds, and Perkins shot away with the tyre squeal muffling his language – that little problem might have derailed his entire strategy.
Dick Johnson sniffed an opportunity and went for it. He was already driving his Shell Sierra just as hard as he knew how, shaving the gap down to 11 seconds before Mezera pitted, and with the stop delayed he seemingly had the thin end of the wedge he needed. The fight for 2nd place between Perkins and Bond was now taking place 44
seconds behind his leading Sierra, but including time to traverse pit
lane, 44 seconds was about how long his next pit stop would take. And it
couldn't have been far away, either, given he was now 44 laps into his
stint.
Exactly how it played out I don't know, because the broadcast as it appears on the DVD seems to have lost about eight laps – we cut abruptly from lap 88 to lap 96. It was on this lap Johnson finally made his stop, the proud #17 Sierra receiving four new tyres, a fuel top-up and a change of driver, rotating back to John Bowe. There were no hiccoughs, and the #17 zoomed away from its final stop to re-emerge in 2nd place – right behind Perkins. The gap between them was now down to just 2.5 seconds, with nothing between either car and the chequered flag but each other.
Charles Stewart: Dick, two seconds between your car and Larry Perkins. Fairly nail-biting stuff for you?
Dick Johnson: S'good race ay? Took a good while to get my backside into gear, my eyes have been playing up in the last week. Fortunately I overcame that and started trucking on and doing decent times. But, it's going to be a hell of a race to the end, and I think it'll be good for the guys if they can have a win this year.
Stewart: Is it going to be hard for you, sitting here in the pits and watching Johnny Bowe drive?
Johnson: No, I've got every confidence in the guy. He's an excellent driver and I know he'll do his very, very best. And hopefully just bring the car home.
Stewart: Yes, well what about the car? Has it been having any problems with it at all?
Johnson: The car's absolutely perfect. It's a credit to the guys, they've done a fabulous job on the car, and in their pit stops. We made up like ten seconds in the pit stop, and that's what it's all about in a professional team, and I think we've got the best in Australia.
Stewart: Can you make up the two seconds?
Johnson: I sincerely hope so. I betcha John will be trying his damnedest!
By lap 101 the gap was down from 2.09 to 1.82 seconds... but then was back out to 2.2 seconds as they started lap 102. The pace was absolutely merciless, but the speed of the two cars was actually fairly even, so the swings were down to imponderables like mechanical failures or traffic. With so much of the lap spend in long, constant-radius corners, getting stuck behind a backmarker could easily lose you a second or more. On the face of it, then, you'd put your money on the younger guy to be a bit more reckless and take more risks in traffic, but you reckoned without the determination of Larry Perkins when he had a win in his sights. Another lap and Larry had stretched the gap out to 3 seconds, just by being more daring in the traffic.
On lap 107 the margin shrank to a heart-stopping 1.2 seconds as Larry got badly held up by Peter Brock, who apparently didn't believe in blue flags (although to be fair, nobody knew better than Brock the dangers of getting off-line...). Then Bowe got held up in turn, restoring some of the gap, but not all – by lap 110 it was still only 1.4 seconds. And by this stage, the Perkins team were admitting Commodore was walking wounded.
Charles Stewart: There is a problem with the car, isn't there?
Tomas Mezera: There's a little problem with the alternator. We have the red light on all the time and we bit worried we could run out of electricity in a car. We keep switching the oil gearbox pump and the diff pump then leaving it oil to warm up to 160 degrees, then flip the pumps on again for a couple of laps to cool it down and keep repeating it. Try to save some electricity.
Stewart: So there's a very fine line between maintaining the electrical system, and seizing a diff and gearbox, is that right?
Mezera: That's right. You don't wanna run it too hot, but you still need the electricity to have the engine running strongly, otherway it could develop a misfire in the top end.
Stewart: So Tomas how are the nerves, sitting here watching all this happen, for you?
Mezera: Well... I'd rather be out there. But I'm pretty confident in Larry, if he will not have many problems then he... I don't think he would let John by. Should keep his place there.
That was interesting, because earlier on Larry had actively denied there was anything wrong with his alternator. After his first stop Charles Stewart had asked, "You were saying earlier the alternator light's on, is that a problem?" Larry had replied, "Nah, we've got one diode's dropped out, but we've got plenty of charge here so it's not a problem." So either Larry was playing mind games, or the problem had got a lot worse in the hour-and-a-half since then.
So although he had the measure of Bowe, Perkins really couldn't afford to hang around, as demonstrated on lap 113 when he drove straight between two Corollas between Turns 3 and 4. These were the blue AE86 of Peter Verheyan and the red FX-GT of David Sala, who were deep in their own private battle at the time, but thankfully both used their mirrors enough to see Larry coming and put up no resistance as he came barging through. Even so, by the approach to the Turn 10-Turn 11 complex, the gap to Bowe was down to just one second. This was not the time to get held up by Mike Twigden's BMW 323i, but that happened only a lap later as well, so by the time they crossed the finish line to start lap 115 the gap was under a second. Larry's rear tyres were starting to get very threadbare, evidenced by the rear of the car now hanging very loose through those turns, and he was likely overheating by inches as well. The car only had to hang on for ten more laps, but there was no guarantee it could make it that far.
On lap 116 Larry got a wheel in the dirt through the outside of Turn 1, showing all and sundry he was milking this car for all it was worth, determined to at least go down fighting. By grabbing the traffic by the ears Larry pulled the gap back out to 3 seconds in two laps, but a big wobble in the middle of Turn 1 (again) revealed that his tyres were pretty close to finished. Even so he wasn't backing off, with a 3.2-second gap with five laps to go. And then Murray Walker stuck his nose in and tempted fate:
...And I'm wondering in the back of my mind, all the time, just a little suspiciously, Win, whether John Bowe, at the appropriate moment, can reach out and on a neck-or-nothing basis, turn a turbo screw or a turbo control, wind up the boost, risk blowing the engine but in so doing close on and perhaps pass Larry Perkins in the very closing stages?
He just had to say it...
In truth, the DJR counterattack was already finished. The car was losing time and had been for several laps now, with Larry's lead out to 4.2 seconds with just three to the flag. What happened next was just the final cherry on top. On lap 124 – just one from the finish – the TV feed suddenly showed the red #17 Sierra spinning violently off the track and falling utterly still in a cloud of dust. At first it just looked like a spin, but then we saw the replay: into Turn 10, still in the acceleration zone, Bowe was already sideways and blowing white smoke. And then whoosh, out came a huge jet of flame, like the U.S. Marines hitting the beach on Iwo Jima. This wasn't a simple driver error, this was an engine failure of the most catastrophic kind.
"Well that is rotten, cruel, bitter luck for John Bowe," said Murray Walker, and for once it was an understatement: Bowe and Johnson had thoroughly deserved to win. But they hadn't deserved it quite as much as the man now reeling off the final lap and taking the chequered flag to clinch an absolutely magnificent victory, Larry Perkins. On the podium, sporting the widest ear-to-ear grin you'd ever seen, Larry thanked his team, the race organisers and most of all his three sponsors – Castrol, Dunlop and Holden. "None of them claim to be a major sponsor," he said, referring to the fact that "Perkins Engineering" was still the biggst logo on his doors, "but I'll tell you, to me they're extremely major."
What had happened to Seton and Bond in that last stint is difficult to determine, because the broadcast almost forgot they existed. Around lap 100 they'd mentioned that Bond had dropped 30 seconds but was now charging back, which sounds an awful lot like a pit stop was made somewhere in that memory hole between laps 88 and 96, but they'd also mentioned he was falling away again by lap 108. Intuiting with what we have, it feels like Bondy recognised the Yokohamas for the handicap they were, made peace with it and drove within his limits to reach the flag. If that was the case, there was still a consolation prize for the team. The Australian Endurance Championship handed out points to the top ten finishers at Sandown, Bathurst and Eastern Creek on a 20-15-12-10-8-6-4-3-2-1 basis. With a win at Sandown and a 2nd here at Eastern Creek, that meant Glenn Seton had earned himself 35 points, annointing him as the Australian Endurance Champion for 1990. If George Fury had put his ego aside and shared the car with Glenn just one last time, they would've been joint champions, making this the third and final time Fury missed on a major touring car title. But then, to certain minds, defeat is more bearable than shared glory: two heads can't wear one crown, after all.
Addendum Although he'd been in the commentary box in Adelaide, Allan Moffat and his team were nowhere to be seen at Eastern Creek. The reason was that the following day – Armistice Day – he was in the land of our old enemy, on the slopes of Mount Fuji to once again contest the InterTEC 500. He and Klaus Niedwiedz had won this race last year, but Moffat was now retired, so driving duties were passed down to Niedzwiedz and Gregg Hansford instead. Their car was the #9 ANZ Sierra, the same car which had won in 1989, but it came up short in 1990. They only finished 3rd behind – what else? – a pair of GT-Rs, one of them the legendary Calsonic machine of Kazuyoshi Hoshino and Toshio Suzuki. A changing of the guard if ever there was one.
Three weeks later, on 2 December, Australia's Nissan team fronted up in Wellington for the other Nissan 500. Once again Richards took pole with a lap of 1:29.09, but once again Godzilla folded in the main event, bowing out with another head gasket failure. Peter Brock and co-driver Miedecke did their part for the Australian contingent by finishing 2nd, behind only the winner Emanuele Pirro and Johnny Cecotto in the new BMW M3 Evo. Despite a mediocre 6th-place finish, Tony Longhurst must have been all smiles afterward – that car was his new ride for 1991.
As a consolation prize, Brock and Miedecke went on to win the second half of the Nissan Mobil series at Pukekohe Park, after the Nissan again failed to finish, this time with a broken turbo. It was the last time Peter ever drove a Sierra, so it was nice to round out the era with a win, especially one that wrapped up the series as a whole (whatever that was worth). 1991 was just around the corner, and when it came Peter would be back in a Holden – a new Holden – and the world would be back to normal. It was just a question of how hot those new Longhurst BMWs would be, and whether Gibson Motorsport could sort out the remaining weak links in their high-tech GT-R.
As they all knocked off for the Christmas break at the end of 1990, they couldn't have realised that things would have to get much, much worse before they could get any better...
