17 March: It's Carnivale!

Thankfully, for the race fan bored with Nissan's domination of the ATCC, there was at least one alternative in early 1991: IndyCar racing was coming to the Gold Coast.

(Source)

The CART before the Horse
One question I haven't heard lately (but which I used to get all the time), is: "F1 versus IndyCar – what's the diff?" It's a question that's mostly gone away since 2008, when IndyCar held its final race at Surfers Paradise, but was fairly frequent around the 2005-'07 era when Surfers was still on the calendar (and confusingly, the U.S. Grand Prix was being held at Indianapolis). Those were the days when people would be surprised when I told them F1 cars didn't run on methanol, or that the Grand Prix in Melbourne wasn't IndyCar race. A thorough investigation of the differences would get lost in the tech weeds pretty quickly, and only be interesting to those who already know, so to sidestep all that let's just say, "F1 is European, IndyCar is American." That pretty much covers it, because all the other differences stem from there.

The CamelCase term "IndyCar" itself is surprisingly recent, dating back only to the 1980s. The "Indy" part refers to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the iconic 2.5-mile oval that remains the fountainhead of the whole sport – you worked that much out all on your own, right? It would be like calling V8 Supercars "BatCar", which would just be stupi... actually, never mind. Point is, there was no such word as "IndyCar" before the 1980s, because until then American insularity meant the term "National Championship" had sufficed. To the wider world, the Indy 500 itself might occasionally make the news, but the rest of the series never did – never televised, only making the papers Stateside, and even then only filling in gaps in the sports page. IndyCar didn't get big enough to need branding until the early 1980s, when CART took over.

The start of CART: the 1979 Jimmy Bryan 150 at Phoenix.

CART – or "Championship Auto Racing Teams" – was the strangler fig of IndyCar, a series that built itself on the history and traditions of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before snuffing out its rival almost completely. USAC (the United States Auto Club) had failed to cook up a commercial package that took advantage of television, so with the costs heading through the stratosphere the team owners had banded together as CART to do the job themselves. The fans voted with their feet and the rival USAC series had withered on the vine, leaving CART supreme, but the barons thus created for themselves a serious conflict of interest – working as a sanctioning body to determine the rules under which they, as team owners, would compete. This was the first grievance against CART.

The second was their preference for road courses and street tracks. USAC's National Championship had been an all-oval series, but the decline of Formula 5000 in the U.S. had created an opportunity the CART barons didn't want to miss. Riverside, Mid-Ohio, Elkhart Lake – F5000 basically donated their whole schedule to the burgeoning CART series – while F1 did their part by cutting the Long Beach Grand Prix, giving CART a blue-ribbon event second only to Indy itself. Even now, think of palm trees lining the concrete walls of a street track, and you're thinking of CART.

Mario Andretti leads CART's first Long Beach Grand Prix, 1984.

Traditionalists might've grumbled, arguing the shift to the streets took the sport ever-further from its roots on the dirt speedways of the Midwest. But the low overheads of the temporary circuits made financial sense, and despite what some might tell you, these events were popular: fans packed the grandstands and tuned in to watch on TV, and as a result these races made money. There can be little doubt CART's management brought IndyCar to the pinnacle of its commercial success, and as their bank accounts had grown, so had their ambitions. By the early 1990s, they had plans to expand the series internationally, into Australia, Japan and South America – all traditionally F1 turf – and one day perhaps even continental Europe itself, the Formula 1 heartland. Australia would be the guinea pig, the lab test to determine whether it was possible to hold a flyaway race for the benefit of a TV audience Stateside.

Australia wasn't the obvious choice for the first CART race outside North America. The logistics of getting the cars, equipment and teams across the vastness of the Pacific were formidable (indeed, the plane carrying it all nearly ran out of fuel and crashed – yes, really), especially when Japan wasn't yet on the schedule to help amortise the costs. The key was that those costs (to the tune of some $12 million) were being covered by the Queensland government, who wanted to promote their state for international tourism. That meant the race would not be profitable in its early years, and so would be a political football for the two major parties, but that's another story entirely.

The circuit chosen was yet another street track, this one laid around the high-rise hotels of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. With the pits located on Macintosh Island, the cars would race south down the Gold Coast Highway (interrupted by a couple of chicanes), turn sharply left onto Palm Avenue, then left again and scream back up Main Beach Parade (again, interrupted by a couple of chicanes and one brutal left-right kink). From there they ducked through Breaker Street and Hill Parade before negotiating a tight left-hander to rejoin the Highway – a corner sure to be a challenge for these cars, as their turbocharged engines struggled to get the power down. One practice session was all the drivers needed to realise that, with several savage braking zones, this place was going to be hard on brakes, a fact that would be decisive in how the race turned out...

Not only did it show off Queensland as a tourist destination beautifully, Surfers also had the advantage of a built-in motorsport culture, having lost the long-serving Surfers Paradise International Raceway only a few years prior. It was also totally on-brand for CART: the marriage (well, more of a hook-up...) of the sun 'n' sand of Queensland with the Vegas sleaze of the visiting Americans was a match made in heaven, and although it started small, the Gold Coast Indy Carnival would soon become nothing less than a week-long, citywide party. The Miss Indy swimsuit competition was not the sort of thing that could've come from South Australia, a state colonised by Lutherans, and in time the debauchery in the nightclubs (and sometimes trackside...) would become a horrorshow for moral guardians. But in 1991 all that was in the future, and for the maiden IndyCar race the people of Queensland were mostly well-behaved. Mostly...

There was also some actual racing, wasn't there?
Yes, although that wasn't without controversy either. CART moving into an F1 market generated some political unease, as CAMS – the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport, the sanctioning body that ran most racing in Australia – was a member club of the FIA, the sanctioning body behind F1. Seeing a power move by their bitterest rival, CAMS threatened life bans for anyone who raced or officiated at the Gold Coast Indy, so flag marshals, timekeepers and other officials had to come from the great outlaw of Australian racing – Bob Jane’s Thunderdome. That explained the main support act of this all-American extravaganza, NASCAR, as the touring cars wouldn't go within cooee of it.

Similarly, the ATCC's broadcast partner, Channel Seven, couldn't touch the event without losing their rights to the big dance at Bathurst. So as with last year's Eastern Creek enduro, this event was broadcast on Kerry Packer's Nine network, meaning our lead commentator was Darrel Eastlake. He was joined by American expert Tom Sneva, aka. "the Gas Man", who was not only a two-time series champion and a one-time Indianapolis winner back in the USAC days, but also the first driver to officially lap Indianapolis at more than 200mph – a lap time of forty-five seconds flat. Mediating between them was our own Alan Jones, who actually wasn't a bad choice of commentator, and not just because he was a former World Champion. Although he didn't mention it, Jonesy had driven in this series as recently as 1985, when he'd subbed for an injured Mario Andretti in the Provimi Veal 200 at Elkhart Lake. Managed a podium finish with 3rd, too, not bad for his first time driving that car in anger.

Race-day Sunday in fact opened with a 5-lap Celebrity Race to help warm up the crowd, but the only two names I recognised were NRL star Wally Lewis, and Olympic swimmer Grant Kenny (and I only know Kenny's name because of Dick Johnson...). The cars were ordinary production Ford Lasers (i.e. rebadged Mazda 323s), with tiny 1.6-litre engines... which still wasn't small enough to keep the celebs out of trouble!

The AUSCAR race that followed doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but the NASCAR race that followed that certainly is, and frankly it was a shitshow – not mincing words here. It's not that it lacked for entertainment – it had it in spades – but the safety protocols in place proved woefully inadequate for 1,600-kilo cars with up to 560 kW under the bonnet crammed into a narrow street circuit on the Gold Coast. Leaving Walter Giles' #91 Buick Regal in the sand trap at the first chicane rather than towing it to safety was the kind of decision that didn't cut much ice even in 1991, let alone today. The folly of it was confirmed three laps later when Steve Cosson's #77 Oldsmobile Delta 88 had a coming-together with the #71 Pontiac Grand Prix Aerocoupe on approach to that chicane, and hurled himself over Giles' bonnet and into the fence! A couple of inches in the wrong direction and the impact could've been catastrophic.

The Main Course – à la CART
But with the preliminaries over, the IndyCars themselves headed to the grid and started off on the first of several formation laps.

Source

So what exactly were we looking at here? What were these machines, and who were the men driving them? Well the basics are well-known: open-wheel single-seater racecars, powered by 2.65-litre methanol-burning V8s boosted by a single turbo running at a limited 45 inHg (about 1.5 bar, or 22psi). In this generation of engine, that meant around 720hp at 11,000rpm, maybe 11,500 if you wanted to push the envelope. What might surprise you is that CART was not a spec series, as it is sometimes unfairly remembered, but an open formula like F1. If you wanted to build your own car and engine there wasn't really anything stopping you, and two of the big teams of the 1980s – Jim Trueman's Truesports, and Roger Penske's Team Penske – had chosen to do just that. But this didn't automatically mean they won. For most of the 1980s, the best cars had been made by specialist constructor March, and in 1984 Penske had found his home-brew PC-12 to be less than competitive at Indy, so he'd thrown in the towel and bought a fleet of Marches like everyone else – and, thanks to some stellar driving from Rick Mears, he'd won.

So most teams were better off just buying a car rather than trying to build one. By 1991 March had faded, so pretty much everyone was running a Lola, either their latest '91-spec car (the T91/00) or, if they were short on cash, a secondhand one that was a year or two out of date. These older cars (such as the '89-spec T89/00) were identifiable by their tubbier, more porpoise-like outlines compared to the sleek, needle-like silhouettes of the latest models. They weren't ideal, because the extra drag slowed them down, but if they were all you could afford you didn't have much choice – like little brothers, midfield and backmarker teams got hand-me-downs.

It was the same situation when it came to powerplants. The engine to have was the "Chevy Indy V8", to be retroactively dubbed the Chevy/A once the B-version came out in 1992. This engine had been derided as a knock-off of the venerable Cosworth DFX (the legendary DFV rekerjiggered for Indy rules), but it was a brilliant little engine, which despite the name was built by a relatively young firm called Ilmor, itself a knock-off of Cosworth. These engines had debuted in 1986 with Penske, as Roger had co-financed the project in return for exclusivity. This had rankled the grid a bit but, as a small business just starting out, Ilmor could only turn out so many engines per year, and naturally they only wanted to supply winning teams. So if you wanted one, you had to prove you were the best – without the equipment the best were using. It was the familiar Catch-22 of motorsport, but the cycle was especially vicious here in CART, creating distinct tiers of haves and have-nots. It was driven by nothing more malicious than market forces, but as we Millennials know, there is nothing more malicious than market forces, and it led not a few bitter fans to complain that "CART" actually stood for "Chevy And Rich Team-owners".

The DFS was a stopgap; the next Cozza would be better.

Admittedly, by 1991 the situation was a little better, as Ilmor's contract with Penske had expired and the company had grown enough to make the Chevy/A more widely available... but there were still plenty of teams left scrounging without one. Since the Chevy had forced Cosworth to react, the best alternative was probably Cosworth's latest, the DFS – like the Chevy/A, a DFX where every part was a little bit better. Failing that, the DFX itself was still viable, although its best days were now firmly behind it. For those of a more independent bent, there was also the Judd AV, based on a Honda F1 engine that never happened, which was known to be down on power but often did well in the 500-milers thanks to its ability to sip the fuel and stretch out long stints. And there was also an Alfa Romeo engine on the grid, but its presence was kind of incidental: the project had imploded late last year and the engine would be gone by the time the heartland races rolled around, so its presence in Australia suggested the Patrick team had made the trip with leftover machinery. So for this, the opening race of the 1991 CART PPG IndyCar World Series, the winning ticket was a Lola T91/00 chassis with a Chevy/A engine, and this was the combination all the top teams were running.

The thing was, all these names – March, Lola, Cosworth, Ilmor – they were all a tad British. Most of them were based in the same Midlands valley where most of the world's F1 teams could be found: Marches were made in Bicester, Lolas in Huntington. Ilmor's factory was in Brixworth, and although Cosworth did have a factory rebuilding engines in Indianapolis, the company's main facility was just down the road from Ilmor, in Northampton. Even Penske's cars were built in Poole, Dorset. The harsh fact was the last American-made car to win the Indy 500 had been Gordon Johncock's Wildcat back in 1982, and that was a source of quiet but growing embarrassment to the proud American fanbase. The CART barons didn't seem to care – they needed the best, and if the best was British, what of it? – but it was yet another grievance against CART.

So in an effort to promote “Made in U.S.A.” technology, USAC had also opened up the rules to allow "stock-block" engines, balancing their less-than-cutting-edge technology with that most American of solutions, more cubes. Originally this had meant a limit of 5.8 litres, as USAC tried to tempt some of the NASCAR teams to bring their tuning skills to the Brickyard, but it came too late as an engine big enough to match the DFX in power was now too wide to fit into the narrow fuselage of an IndyCar. Instead, USAC had re-allowed the turbo but dialled back the displacement, meaning if you were willing to forego double overhead cams and limit yourself to two valves per cylinder, you could have 3.3 litres instead of 2.65.

Only one engine had stepped up to the challenge, the Buick 3800 V6 – yes, the same engine that was now under the bonnet of our own VN Commodore. Reduced to 3,300cc as per the rules, its pushrods limited it to around 9,000rpm, which gave it a very flat torque curve that made it both powerful and fragile. Neither of these two characteristics were as important as the third, however: it was cheap. You could pick one up for as little as $30,000, making it a godsend to all the small teams with big hopes.

So in summary, at one end of the grid you had power teams like Marlboro Team Penske and Newman/Haas Racing, both with Chevy/A engines and both with the latest '91-spec chassis (Lola T91/00s for Newman/Haas, Penske PC-20s for Roger). Drivers with this combination, such as Mario Andretti or Al Unser Jr, were in with a chance of winning the race. At the other end of the grid you had guys like Mark Dismal Disney Dismore, who was sitting in an outdated Penske PC-17 chassis fitted with a Buick engine it was never designed to carry. The difference between the haves and the have-nots was startling, as fastest-qualifier Michael Andretti (son of, and now teammate to, the great Mario) had taken pole with a lap of 1:40.047, just 0.043 seconds faster than America's former F1 star, Eddie Cheever. One of the slowest was future 500 winner Buddy Lazier, who had only an '88-spec Lola and a DFX engine and so managed only 1:49.930 – nearly ten seconds slower than Michael in just a single lap! That sort of performance gap would never fly today, but look at it this way: Lazier was on the grid and getting that most precious of commodities for a young racing driver, seat time, and at a fraction of the cost of a REC or a fully-fledged Dallara-Honda. Meanwhile, the frontrunning teams had managed to square the circle of having racing that was on the cutting edge of technology and still close, heart-stopping wheel-to-wheel action. So CART's way of doing things wasn't perfect, and it certainly wasn't what you'd call fair, but it wasn't without its benefits.

Gold Coast Indy Grand Prix
Anyway, the race itself, which came in two halves. The first half was charitably described as "intense", rather than "exciting", as scions of the Andretti and Unser clans battled it out for the race lead. But those who had the patience to stick it out were rewarded, because the second half burst forth into a kaleidoscope of reversals and shifts of fortune, and at the end gave us a wonderfully unexpected race winner.

In a nutshell, Little Al passed Michael for the lead on lap 1 and never looked back, the two of them leaving the rest of the field behind as they rushed off on their own private duel. This duel didn't last very long as it emerged Al had a very slight car advantage – Michael was unbelievably fast diving into the corners but a touch taily coming out of them again, whereas Al's was beautifully hooked up and never misbehaved, making him faster overall. Given they were both driving identical Lola-Chevs, it was illustratrative of how tiny differences in setup and driving style mattered. But before that could really develop into anything, Scott Goodyear crashed at the back kink and brought out an early caution, which was even less interesting to watch than Unser slowly pulling away from Andretti.

Stay with me though, it did get better. Although Unser had an advantage of 4.44 seconds by lap 13, Michael was finding his mirrors filling up with Eddie Cheever, who was only 0.3 seconds behind. Early on lap 17 Cheever made a move at the first chicane and wrestled 2nd place off Michael – only to lose it again when Hiro Matsushita put his car into the wall on lap 19, bringing out yet another yellow-flag period. The leaders took advantage by making their first pit stops while the Pace Car was out, and in the process Cheever got shuffled back behind Michael. By lap 21 the order was Little Al, Michael, Cheever, Bobby Rahal, Mario Andretti and then Emerson Fittipaldi.

Little Al backed them right up for the restart on lap 23, and although plodding behind the Pace Car seemed to've done the car some damage, the exhaust giving a slight puff of greasy black smoke in right-hand turns ever after, it never seemed to affect his pace. Unser continued to lead after the green, still leaving the field behind at a steady rate. Despite that, Emerson Fittipaldi was feeling confident: the two-time F1 champ was famous for his work ethic as a test driver (a necessity when driving for Penske), and had reported that he was very comfortable with the car and fully expected to be there at the end when it mattered. Unfortunately, that idea went to hell on lap 28 when he pitted with a mechanical problem. The team removed the engine cowl to check it out and soon discovered they had a gearbox problem (despite my best Googling, I wasn't able to find out who made their gearboxes. Anyone know?). It was inoperable, so after a long and frustrating stop Emmo's Penske was retired on lap 32.

 

By lap 37 Michael was driving like a wild animal and catching back up to Little Al, which was no small concern with the next round of pit stops just around the corner. By lap 40 he'd caught up and was ready to try a very brave move, out-braking Little Al into the first chicane in the front straight – around the outside! Al got held up by backmarker Randy Lewis in last year's Lola-Cosworth, so he was vulnerable, but even so both cars were very marginal on grip, tiptoeing through all crossed up with locked wheels. But both negotiated the corner intact, and poor Michael had to stay where he was, unable to make the pass this time. Nothing daunted, Michael tried again in the final complex of turns and this time took no prisoners, imposing himself on Little Al and forcing his way through, simply taking track position away and leaving Al with no option but to yield. Michael Andretti now led the race.

But then on lap 42 things started to happen in a hurry. At the back chicanes, the leaders caught up with another backmarker with the Andretti name – Michael's brother Jeff, who was driving the black Texaco Lola-Cosworth. Michael had to lean on him pretty hard before he got out of the way, but not even Michael got the treatment Little Al did: either not seeing him coming (or seeing a rival racing dynasty coming through and not willing to lift...), Jeff simply didn't leave Unser enough room to follow Michael through. Realising too late that Jeff was taking the line for himself, Unser slammed on the brakes and so lost the rear. The result was a sudden spin entering the back chicanes, his rear wing brushing the concrete and gently separating from the rest of the car. Game over for Al Unser Jr.

Game over, but not crash over. Finding the road blocked, Eddie Cheever couldn't brake hard enough to stop in time and elected to clip the wall just behind Unser rather than pile into his cockpit. Unsighted behind Cheever, Mario Andretti – Jeff and Michael's father! – was forced into the opposite evasive manoeuvre and drove over Little Al's nose, the odd angle on the right-front wheel coming out of that accident signalling the end of Mario's day as well. Just for good measure, Eddie Cheever ended up in the fracas as well, although exactly how was a bit of a mystery.

With that little pile-up the race needed a breather, so naturally the Pace Car came out and sent everyone to the pits. Michael took service from the Newman/Haas mechanics in 14.4 seconds and came out just in time to catch the Pace Car, lest he go a lap down. The caution flags would remain out for the next six laps while the mess was cleaned up, the order being Michael, Mike Groff (backmarker), Rick Mears (Penske), Danny Sullivan (Lola-Alfa) and then John Andretti in the yellow Pennzoil car run by Jim Hall, the nephew of the great man Mario only now entering the picture.

The long caution lasted until lap 49 and Sullivan pitted late in the yellow flag period, leaving us with a brisk 15-lap shootout to the end between Michael Andretti and the man who'd caused the Andretti clan so much anguish in the past – Rick Mears, driving for Penske. When the Pace Car subsided Michael once again caught the rest napping and took off into an early lead, but it was Mears who was on the move now, throwing his Penske around to close the gap, and succeeding.

A note about Rick Mears is warranted at this point. Seeing Mears so competitive on a street circuit was nothing less than a triumph for the man personally, as he'd suffered what really should've been a career-ending shunt at Sanair Super Speedway in St-Pie, Quebec, way back in 1984. Ignore the name, the track was a tiny tri-oval barely eight-tenths of a mile long: early in the race Mears had stuck his nose where it didn't belong and run into the back of another car, bouncing off it and burying said nose in the guardrail separating the pits from the track. The impact had been so severe it had dissassembled part of the guardrail itself, and more worryingly, the front of the car also: Mears came to rest with the front bulkhead and pedal assembly missing. Both his feet had been badly crushed in the impact, and he literally broke every bone in his right foot, all twenty-seven of them; at the hospital there'd been talk of amputating it to save his life. Not liking the sound of that, Roger Penske had intervened to bring in some highly-recommended medical specialists of his own, and Mears began the slow, painful road to recovery. For many years after, however, he'd had trouble driving because his right foot simply wouldn't do what it was told; he won only two races in the next three years, both of them at Pocono, where experience and strategy meant more than outright pace.

 

So to see a scarred old warhorse like Mears chasing down a hungry tiger like Michael Andretti – on a street circuit, no less – said more than words ever could about his recovery: Rick Mears was back, and he had Michael worried. On lap 55 Michael had a bit of a moment entering the first chicane, over-braking and nearly losing the rear end (some impressive car control was required to get it back in line at all!). It was well done, but it still cost him some time, and that was enough for Mears to close right up for the rest of the lap. Having got into position it was just a matter of time, and at the end of the beach straight he did it, diving into the 90-degree corner and wresting the lead away from Michael in a move that was hard, but fair. Alan Jones opined that Michael had been forced into such a hot pace by Little Al and Eddie Cheever in the early part of the race that he just didn't have enough brakes left here at the business end, which explained why Emmo had been so confident earlier on; at the time of his gearbox problem, he'd been ahead of his teammate Mears...

So Rick Mears now led the race, by 1.53 seconds by the time they crossed the finish line again. A lap later and John Andretti was also ahead of Michael, whose brake problem was apparently becoming critical: John easily outbraked him into the back chicane, and shortly thereafter Michael stuck his Lola-Chev into the tyre barrier in the escape road at the end of the front straight. His brakes had finally given up completely, leaving him no way to stop the car. So the order now had Mears 1st and John Andretti a distant 2nd, with 8 laps to the flag.

John had Bobby Rahal on a late charge behind him, but there was a reasonable cushion between them; the problem was, there was also a reasonable cushion to Rick Mears ahead. It didn't look like the Andrettis were going to get anything much out of this race... until, on lap 63 of 65, it all went wrong for Mears. On the approach to Turn 8, the left-hander after the back straight, Mears managed to dispatch the #19 of Randy Lewis (again!) quite easily, then on the short chute from 8 to Turn 9 he got alongside the #21 of Dean Hall as well, ready to take the line. The problem was, he didn't have enough brakes left to pull off a move like that, and he was forced to point his nose up the escape road. Meanwhile, Lewis had got ideas above his station and decided to follow Mears through his pass of Hall, but too late realised Mears had chosen the wrong braking point and was not going to make the corner. As Lewis pressed the panic pedal he lost the back end and spun, collecting an undeserving Dean Hall in the process. The three cars clattered to a halt on the entrance to the escape road, two of them damaged, and a third (Mears) trying desperately to perform a three-point turn and rejoin. He kept going, but it didn't matter: John Andretti, formerly 2nd, was through and gone, unable to believe his luck.

John Andretti completed the final lap and greeted the chequered flag, clinching his first (and, as it would turn out, only) win in the CART PPG IndyCar World Series. In the process he collected a trophy that was nearly as big as he was (like a lot of racing drivers, he was a tiny, jockey-sized man), as well as a substantial cheque. The Americans had never made any bones about racing for cash, and an Indianapolis winner never needed to work again: lesser races paid less, but even the inaugural Gold Coast IndyCar Grand Prix was worth $126,000 U.S. dollars. Even nicer, some of that would go to car owner Jim Hall, who'd won the championship in the early 1980s but was best known for his Chaparral sports cars in the 1960s. This was Jim's first race back as a team owner, so to win first time out with his new driver was more than either of them had dreamed. When they asked a beaming Jim, "Did you expect that?" he told them straight: "You know I didn't!"

Summing Up
Overall it had been a fine beginning to IndyCar racing on the Gold Coast. Despite the slow start the race had been dramatic and exciting; the winner was likeable and rather wholesome; even the Queensland crowd had mostly behaved themselves. Best of all, pretty much everyone involved went on to have a better year. Rick Mears would recover to win that year's Indianapolis 500 for a record-equalling fourth time, and the tenth for Roger Penske. Although he'd lose that race-ending duel at Indy, Michael Andretti would go on to dominate the championship, winning 8 of the 17 rounds including four of the final five to take his only IndyCar title. That achievement would buy him a ticket to Formula 1, although that would be a very different story. And although he'd never win a CART race again, in 1994 John Andretti would become the first driver to complete "the double" of the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR's Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte on the same day. Whether in CART, NASCAR, IMSA or even drag racing, John would be famous for his versatility... right up until his death from colon cancer in January 2020, at the age of 56. He will always be missed.

Vale, John.

 

Kick-Off: Sandown & Symmons

It was amazingly fast. You could tell it had plenty of potential. [But] It was a pretty raw beast. Crude to begin with, lots of things broke and it wasn't very driveable at the start. It all came right in '91, but we had to spend a huge amount of money on it. – Mark Skaife, Auto Action #1787

1991 was the nadir. The evidence of that came with the entry list for Round 1 of the Shell Ultra Australian Touring Car Championship, at Sandown Raceway in Melbourne, where just nineteen cars showed up to attempt the race. That wasn't quite the record, as in the Oil Crisis days of the mid-1970s grids as small as fourteen or fifteen were common – but it was enough to be concerning. The recession plus the new generation of money-hungry Group A cars was proving a toxic combination.

R1 – Sandown
So who were these irrepressible nineteen? Well, obviously there was reigning champ Jim Richards and his sidekick Mark Skaife, riding high in a pair of Nissan Skyline R32 GT-Rs. Both cars looked smart in their shiny new Nissan corporate livery, which recalled the R90CK prototypes that had raced at Le Mans rather than their old HR31s, making it clear their mission this year was to advertise the Nissan Motor Company. Sanctioning body CAMS had made another attempt to rebalance the scales by adding 15 kilos to the GT-R's homolgation weight, but with the boost turned up for qualifying they'd barely even noticed it, claiming the front row of the grid with times of 1:13.91 and 1:13.94, respectively. They were the only drivers to break the 14 barrier.

Next-fastest was John Bowe, first of the Dick Johnson Shell Sierras, with a time of 1:14.59 – a heroic effort here at the Home of Horsepower, where the straight-line speed of the Sierra should've minimised the damage, but still more than six-tenths slower than a GT-R. With last year's 85kg weight penalty gone the Sierra was theoretically back to its winning ways, except that Dick himself was back in 5th, kept off the second row by the startlingly quick #30 Peter Jackson Sierra of Glenn Seton. The younger Ford Hero continued to be a thorn in the side of the older.

In 6th place was Win Percy, fulfilling his brief as the works driver by being the fastest of the Holdens. After the buzz and success of last year the Holden Racing Team were entering 1991 with high hopes – hopes that would soon be brought crashing to earth. Holden's share of the 1991 performance re-balance was a 75kg cut to their homologation weight, dropping from 1,325 to 1,250kg, plus the axeing of all the rules regarding stock inlet and exhaust manifolds. The Group A engine philosophy had always been that you could make them rev, but you couldn't make them breathe: teams were free to heat-treat and modify and generally toughen-up their internals as much as they liked, but they were restricted to breathing through road-car inlet and exhaust manifolds. CAMS did away with that for the naturally-aspirated cars on the theory that it would give the Commodores a boost, which it did, but it also ticked off a lot of people at Holden who'd just seen all the expense and effort put into the VN Group A voided overnight. To take advantage and actually gain the promised power, the teams would have develop new intakes and exhausts for their engines, and that would take time and yet more money.

HRT owner Tom Walkinshaw took the opportunity to sound off to the press, telling Auto Action: "I think the rules are flawed in their conception in several important areas. I am confused to know why a country like Australia is playing with fire in regulations to allow imported cars in, while eliminating any possibility of a home-built motor car being competitive." He'd even placed HRT's season commitment under review, although some couldn't help seeing this as a cynical ploy to squeeze more funding out of Fishermans Bend. Either way, Win Percy was back on the grid for 1991 in a brand-new VN Commodore built by Dennis Watson's Dencar operation, who'd formerly built Sierras for Peter Brock. It came about after a chance meeting following HRT's win at Bathurst the previous year, but it meant Dencar, including Watson's friend and partner-in-crime George Smith, would build most HRT cars for the rest of the decade.

I didn't know Win from a bar of soap. He was in a very good mood having won the race. I'd been working on Brock's pit crew and introduced myself, and he stopped and chatted. I had some business cards and told him we were setting up to do bodyshell and general fabrication work. I think I just caught him at the absolutely right moment. Win put the card in his race suit, then rang two days later. We had a meeting and it was pretty much agreed right there and then that we had all their fabrication work. – George Smith, AMC #97

With an 8,500rpm redline and slippery new aerodynamics, this VN had turned test laps nearly a second faster than last year's Walkinshaw VL, but risk to the engine meant 7,800rpm was a more sensible limit over a race distance. Despite that, Percy had posted a time only slightly behind the leading Sierras, his 1:15.47 even placing him ahead of Colin Bond and Kevin Waldock in their familiar Caltex and Playscape Sierras, respectively... but still nearly one-and-a-half seconds slower than the benchmark GT-Rs. Maybe Tom had a point.

Lining up 9th and 10th were two very familiar names. After winning the Pukekohe 500 at the end of 1990, Peter Brock had put his Sierra inventory up for sale and moved back to the Holden camp via an arrangement with Eastern Creek winner Larry Perkins. Peter Perfect's grand return to Holden was a story in itself, but if it looked like Peter was getting the band back together, that was an illusion: this was a marriage of convenience, not a love match. Perkins Engineering had spent the 1990 season desperately short of sponsorship, kept afloat only by bulding customer cars: Brock meanwhile had finished 1990 in the knowledge that 1991 would see the British scene transition completely to the new Super Touring formula, meaning his benefactor Andy Rouse would no longer be building Sierras and would instead be putting all his time and energy into a 2.0-litre Toyota Carina. The pipeline of parts and technical data Peter depended on was about to be closed off, and finding some other source of hardware was imperative. So on one hand there was Larry, with a fully-stocked workshop turning out customer Holdens, but desperately short of cash; and on the other there was Peter with his lucrative Mobil sponsorship, but no cars...

For 1991, therefore, Brock and Perkins would both run in Mobil-sponsored VN Commodores under the Perkins Engineering banner, Perkins in his #11 and Brocky, of course, in 05. With Brock came a contract for Bridgestone tyres, and although they were less durable than last year's Dunlops, at least they were free, which saved the penny-pinching Perkins yet another unwelcome bill. The downside was, he would claim later, that there was a clause in the contract stating he had to finish behind Brock unless it was unavoidable: the hatchet between these two would not be buried in 1991, it seemed.

11th and 12th on the grid were Tony Longhurst and Alan Jones respectively, once again in Benson & Hedges cars under Frank Gardner management. Those cars were no longer Ford Sierras, however, but new DTM-spec BMW M3 Evos, with bigger 2.5-litre engines and aggressive new aerodynamics. As the only entries in Class 2 they were at least guaranteed a class win, provided they could fend off the handful of privateer Commodores all around them – amateurs with 5.0 litres underfoot had proven roughly as fast in qualifying as professionals with 2.5. Of these amateurs we could count Steve Reed of the Lansvale Smash Repairs team, who'd brought along a new VN, as had Bob Pearson in the #33 Pro-Duct Commodore – chassis PE 011, the first VN ever built by Perkins, preceding even the Mobil cars he and Peter were driving.

AMSCAR stalwart Terry Finnigan meanwhile had fronted with an outdated VL Walkinshaw, as had privateer Wayne Park, and Mark Gibbs driving the GIO #21 for Bob Forbes Racing – although that would not be the car the team finished the year with. And rounding out the field were the tiny Toyotas of Class 3, John Faulkner at the wheel of the well-used #13 AE86 Corolla GT of Bob Holden Motors, while David Sala had brought along his red #72 FX-GT hatchback.

And that was it, the whole nineteen. The upshot of this was brought home by the highlights reel posted below – bluntly, there weren't any.

Oh to be a fly on the wall the day they brought the editing team those dailies and told them to make a highlight reel out of them. It was an impossible task: they show the start of the race, and the finish of the race, but the bits in between are sort of a void, with nothing actually going on. About the only moment of interest was Longhurst audaciously diving under Jim Richards at the hairpin and successfully making a pass, which sounds good until you realise he was actually un-lapping himself, and even then only momentarily, as Richo roared off under power just seconds later. In the event the Skyline twins straight-up dismantled the opposition that day, posting a dominant 1-2 to open their scorecards with 20 points for Richards and 15 for Skaife. Richo's post-race comments to Channel Seven's Neil Crompton summed up the situation perfectly:

Neil Crompton: Richo, congratulations. That was a way to start the new season. Reigning champion, you've done the business?

Jim Richards: Well yeah, it was a matter of getting out in front and trying to hold a gap over the rest of the field. We chose a softer tyre than we probably should've, so we had to work it hard at the start and then drive it nice and easy toward the end. But, it paid off.

Crompton: No problems with the car?

Richards: No, car was perfect. No problem.

R2 – Symmons Plains
The second round was both better and worse than the first – better because there was some genuine on-track action, which generated something that might loosely be called interest, but worse because the Nissans not only finished 1-2 yet again, but this time were the only cars on the lead lap!

It was also worse in that there were only thirteen starters this time around, as the continental privateers found the freight to Tasmania too costly for their wallets, and the contingent of local privateers that had once padded out the grid either found the recession was hitting their bottom line (David "Skippy" Parsons), had moved on to other series (Steve Harrington), or were just too grown up for this stuff nowadays (Garth Wigston).

The grid could've been even shorter had only a little bit more bad luck befallen one of the drivers: in practice, Mark Skaife had an impressive shunt that could easily have resulted in an Adelaide 2.0-style crash, but this time he only kicked up some dust. It was a lucky escape.

Neil Crompton: A difficult time for at least one of the Nissans yesterday. Mark Skaife speared off at the end of the back straight, leapt into the mud, mate, there were bits flying everywhere. What happened?

Mark Skaife: All I did was, I turned into the big fast right-hander down the back straight, and the left-front disc brake exploded! Cut the wheel in half, set the tyre flat and speared off down through the paddock. It was a pretty wild ride.

As a result Skaife failed to set a time in qualfying and had to start from the very back of the grid, but Gibson didn't need to stress too much – Richo had delivered pole anyway. In fact, P2 to P9 had all qualified within a second of each other, Kevin Waldock and Larry Perkins clocking identical 1:01.02 lap times, with Bowe, Brock, Bond, Johnson and Seton just barely ahead of them. Win Percy had impressed with a banzai 1:00.31 lap to abscond with P2. But nothing, absolutely nothing, could live with the GT-R, Richo pulling out a 58-dead without a single visit to the panel-beaters.

That's right, 2.3 seconds in 2.4 kilometres. Let that sink in.

The race brought action aplenty. As they waved the green flag, Dick Johnson dramatically launched himself into 2nd place, chasing and actually managing to stay with Jim Richards all the way through the first lap. Into the hairpin at the start of lap 2 he even made an attempt to wrest away the lead, but it was never on, as Richo forced him to the outside to go the long way around. And Johnson was on borrowed time anyway, as his challenge would last only as long as his tyres did. Once the RWD Sierra burned up its tyres (which the 4WD Skyline wouldn't), the race would be firmly in Richo's grasp. He was left free to win as he pleased, even setting a new lap record of 56.84 seconds – 1.16 seconds faster than his own pole time!

But the real story of the race was Skaife, who picked off most of the field in the opening laps to shadow John Bowe very early on. Feeling the pressure, Bowe made an unwise move around the outside of Seton on the dive into the hairpin, touching the blue car's right-hand door and tipping himself into a spin. Seton's tail had a bit of a wag but as he wasn't on the throttle at that point the damage was minimal, and he took the corner gingerly and then zoomed away. Bowe was left with his nose pointed into the traffic, waiting for the whole world to go by before he could rejoin safely.

Skaife, of course, caught Seton on the following straight, taking him up to 4th place. That put Win Percy in his sights next, but the Pommy bastard was an old hand at this so there were no mistakes from him. The canny Percy left Skaife to the outside lane for the run down to the hairpin, forcing him to go the long way, and against a normal car that would've been enough. But the GT-R was no normal car. From the outside, Skaife turned the wheel a little harder and went for the criss-cross, and the magnificent GT-R responded by biting the tarmac with all four wheels and taking off like it had been shot out of a gun. Down the long backstretch they were once more side-by-side, and although Skaife had the inside line for the upcoming corner, the lighter Commodore could go a lot deeper on the brakes, turning this into the chicken run of all chicken runs.

And Skaife won it. Despite crashing here only yesterday, he held off until the absolute last possible moment and then stomped on that brake pedal without a hint of doubt as to the state of his rotors, landing in the corner ahead of the HRT Commodore. As he turned in smoothly and dashed away, he was up to 3rd, with only Johnson and Richards still ahead of him.

Shortly thereafter Skaife reeled in and passed Dick Johnson in a mirror-image of the move on Percy, the GT-R forced to the outside this time as Dick clung doggedly to the inside line. It didn't matter: even if he could brake later and claim every strategic advantage on the track, Johnson simply couldn't unleash the power of his turbo engine suddenly enough to match the Nissan. Skaife held his nerve and moved up to 2nd place, and as his rear tyres burned up Dick fell into the clutches of Win Percy. Those tortured rear Dunlops finally let go and tipped Johnson into a spin at the hairpin, and a visit to the pits for a new set would see him end a disappointing race only 5th. Teammate Bowe provided some more fireworks in a battle with Peter Brock, but it meant nothing as he made two pit stops in the course of the race, finishing a lowly 11th overall. That was the same as second-last, as Percy then became the race's only DNF when the Holden V8 broke a cam follower, leaving the Englishman with a long walk back to the pits.

He might have started last, but by the time the chequered flag came out Skaife was virtually line astern with Jim Richards – the sort of thing that happened when you forgot to turn the difficulty up, not the stuff of championship-level ATCC races! As the two Nissans hummed around their cooldown lap in formation, side-by-side, the message being broadcast by the TV cameras could not have been clearer: this championship belonged to the Nissan Motor Company. For everyone else, it was a race for 3rd.

So after two rounds Richards led the championship with 40 points, with teammate Skaife trailing on 30, and Dick Johnson putting up something that might generously be described as resistance, with 18. Longhurst, Seton and Bowe were deadlocked on 12 points apiece, thanks partly to the practice of awarding bonus points to class cars having gone the way of the dodo. But even with them, Longhurst would've had the devil's own job interrupting the steady points-hoovering of Gibson Motorsport this year. Two rounds in, and it was already pretty clear who was going to win this championship.

Godzilla Remastered

"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.

(Source)

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...

Size Does Matter: the VN Commodore

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.