Where Did That Come From? Bathurst '92, Pt.1

It could only end in tears. The 1992 season had gone ahead in the knowledge that Group A would shortly be history, and that gave each event on the calendar a slight "stations of the cross" vibe – a drumbeat on the road to inevitable doom. Now at last we arrived at the Hill of the Skull, ready to receive the final nails, and beheld the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R looming over it all with a cold smile and nail gun in hand.

But this was to be a chaotic weekend, and not all would go according to the executioner's plan...

Best Foot Ford
I've said before that an underlying theme of 1992 was the rebirth of Ford as a performance brand. In Australia, that mostly came in the form of the new Falcon XR8, the first V8 to come out of Ford Australia in ten long years. Representing it on the track were the two '93-spec EB Falcons of Glenn Seton and Dick Johnson, which got a grand reveal on pit straight, driving through a big banner to a rapturous reception from the crowd. 

No cars at Bathurst got more attention this year, not even the opposing VP Commodores of Peter Brock and the Holden Racing Team (after all, a V8 Commodore wasn't exactly humdrum, but it was hardly new). In the event Seton and co-driver Alan Jones managed a 2:15.53 in qualifying, which put them a provisional 6th on the grid and into the Tooheys Top Ten shootout – a splendid result for a car only one race old, and one that was still roughly a hundred kilogrammes over the minimum weight. Chassis GSR1 was still the team's only Falcon, however, meaning backup had to come in form of a Sierra, the #35 entrusted to Seton's ATCC teammate, Wayne Park, and the Tasmanian dairy farmer, David "Skippy" Parsons.

I co-drove at the enduros with Wayne Park, who was doing ATCC rounds. The bloody things [Sierras] were a big handful. Both Glenn and I chipped our right elbows. They used to lock the rear brakes, we'd grab a handful of lock and blacked my elbow on the foamless cross-members [of the rollcage]. I still have a floating bit of bone in my elbow. – Skippy Parsons, Australian Muscle Car #89

Their great rivals would of course be the Ford powerhouse team Dick Johnson Racing, and if Dick's own EB Falcon was only a display car this weekend, he made up for it by entering two Shell Sierras instead. The #17 was of course the prime car, to be driven by Johnson and Bowe themselves, so they'd stuck to chassis DJR5, the same car they'd driven to victory in 1989. The #18, chassis DJR6, had been put in the hands of Terry Shiel and the new Sports Sedan champion Greg Crick, who'd brought some sponsorship from Tourism Tasmania (hence the new windscreen stickers). With cross-entry no longer allowed, however, Dick had almost no incentive to put any time or effort into the #18 car. Shiel was disappointed to find that after a promising start to the week, the team detuned the engine to ensure it would finish, and then basically forgot about it.

The car was fantastic on the Thursday, we were as quick as anything there. I really thought we could do well. But for some reason I couldn't get back to that time again. It sounds like sour grapes, but I think they decided to run a conservative boost, because both Dick and I had engine problems on Wednesday. I think they decided to focus on Dick's car. What upset me was that they never told me. In qualifying I really pushed hard but couldn't beat my Thursday time. I couldn't work it out. After the race, one of the mechanics did admit it was detuned for the race. – Terry Shiel, AMC #131

So on Friday, where Bowe qualified for the Tooheys Top Ten with a 2:14.56 – good enough for 3rd outright – Shiel was way down in 17th, beaten by six whole seconds. It was hard to take, especially for a man who didn't exactly have time on his side. As a curiosity, also on the team that weekend was the winner of the Motorcraft Formula Ford Driver to Europe series, who'd thereby won the promised test session with DJR at Lakeside. His name was Cameron McConville, and Johnson had been sufficiently impressed to make him the team's reserve driver for the weekend. 

Then there was Allan Moffat. He still had Cenovis Vitamins money behind him, and they'd been sufficiently pleased with his results in 1991 to hand over a better budget this year, which was duly spent adding a pair of aces to the deck – Rudi Eggenberger was back, and with him he'd brought his star driver, Klaus Niedzwiedz. One of Rudi's Swiss mechanics had been in the country for the last two months, tightening all the bolts and upgrading the cars with the latest trick parts (most notably 6-speed Holinger gearboxes), so even if they'd been under a sheet since Bathurst last year, they were now tweaked and primped and ready to race.

Niedzwiedz of course nominated the #10 (chassis EGMO 7/89) as his steed and the amiable and fast Gregg Hansford as his co-driver. Charlie O'Brien was to partner Gary Brabham in the sister #9. The old gang that made the Sierra fly in 1988 were back together, and they set about the task at hand.

For 1992, there was only one choice. Rudi had to come back – and he had to bring Klaus with him. Ka-ching. The cash register rang out again. There was money only for Rudi and Klaus, not the others.

Gregg Hansford had gone with another team the previous year but I enticed him back with promises of the second seat alongside Klaus.

Charlie [O'Brien] and Gary Brabham would take the second car. At the time, you entered a second car not as an equal contender but almost as a Plan B, a spare if anything went wrong with the lead vehicle. Our second car wasn't going to get much attention. Charlie was concerned that, "Gary hadn't learned a lot in the past twelve months," and they spent the weekend being frustrated with each other. It was to be Gary's last drive at Bathurst.

Klaus was, as usual, magnificent. He didn't get pole, but he put a car that had not turned a wheel for a year onto 3rd place on the grid behind one of the all-conquering Nissans and the works Holden Commodore. This was to be the last year of the Sierra. In 1993 the Great race would become an all V8 affair – Commodore versus Falcon – with a smattering of BMWs under licence in the transition period and, of course, the small classes still included.

In one respect I couldn't wait to get back into a V8 assault on Bathurst, even if only as a team owner. On the other hand this was my last chance to turn my Sierra into a winner. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

In fact, Klaus pulled out a 2:14.98 in qualifying, which did put him into the Shootout, but 4th on roll rather than 3rd. But the car ahead of them was Johnson's, and as I've pointed out before, Allan would say almost anything rather than give credit to the man who undercut his relationship with Ford...

Colin Bond was also driving a #8 Caltex Sierra with long-service professional, John Smith. This was chassis CXT2, a shell that had been sitting around in Bond's workshop for several years and only now been built up into a racecar (why? Probably to clear shelves. Bondy would be racing Corollas in '93, so his Sierra inventory was about to become useless clutter). CXT1 was handed over for Peter Hopwood and Terry Bosnjak to race as the #7, while Kevin Waldock was again sharing his yellow #28 Ampol Sierra (chassis MM6) with Brett Peters. In addition, Bryan Sala was back in his #50 Sierra (one of the former Longhurst cars), with co-driving from Kevin Weeks.

The really intriguing entry, however, was the #36 of Sydney prestige car dealer Ken Mathews. In truth, Mathews was probably just a ring-in to ensure there was some real driving experience in the group: the actual team was Rod Jones Racing, a speedway outfit based in Tasmania, whose owner Rod was the second driver on the entry list. The car itself was new to Australia, chassis ARE KAL 0988 – meaning Andy Rouse Engineering, Kaliber sponsorship, chassis #9 built in 1988. In other words, this was the sister to the Mobil car Peter Brock had raced in 1989, and this was to be its only race in Australia. The real key to the operation was the third driver listed on the rear window, British businessman Mike Newton, who was funding it all via a rather classy Dedicated Micros livery. "Micros" in this context meant microcomputers, and the "DVST" across the flank referred to Digital Video Storage and Transmission, which was pretty far-sighted given this was thirteen years before the founding of YouTube. Newton would later have a decent career at Le Mans, stretching from 2003 to 2011, so Bathurst '92 must have been one of his very first tastes of the racing game.

Body Made Wrong
Of the BMW entries, the Gulson family (father Ray and son Graham) were back once again in their old, slow, but reliable 635 CSi, which this year they were sharing with New Zealand's Graham Beck. They had sponsorship from electronics company NEC, and they'd qualified surprisingly well considering the age of the car: 2:28.24 for 33rd place was nothing to sniff at for a "mere" 3.5-litre, especially when there were V8s behind it. 

But prime on the BMW roster were of course the yellow Benson & Hedges machines of Tony Longhurst Racing. Team manager Frank Gardner had split his aces this time, pairing Longhurst in the #25 with Venezuelan BMW star, Johnny Cecotto. The car was a brand-new machine built up from a new shell supplied by BMW Motorsport, which made it probably the last E30 M3 racecar ever built. But it was also possibly the fastest: Tony actually made the top-ten shootout on merit (unlike Brock in 1988...), and it took only a tiny sliver away from his achievement when you realise it had been done with a tow from Larry Perkins...

The best car I ever drove was the M3 at Bathurst with Johnny Cecotto. I did a 2:15.9 or something, got into the Top 10 Shootout in a four-cylinder car. It was revving to 10-something and if you missed two gear changes it would blow up. They sent out the factory driver and I beat him by nearly a second in qualifying. – Tony Longhurst, AMC #82

The #20 on the other hand had been entrusted to the darling of Sandown, Paul Morris, with seasoning to come from the wisdom and experience of 1967 Formula 1 World Champion, Denny Hulme. Denny, once known as "the Bear", was now 56 years old and since retiring from Grand Prix racing eighteen years earlier, he'd slipped into the quiet life in his native New Zealand – except of course for the odd bout of touring car racing. Bathurst was his favourite race, so of course he was going to be here.

Backing up the Longhurst team were Peter Doulman & John Cotter with their #52 Impala Kitchens M3, but it was a bitterly expensive weekend for the M3 Motorsports pair. Impala Kitchens' money had been spent on a new 2.5-litre engine to allow the car to run on the faster DTM homologation Longhurst had pioneered. In fact, the engine had surely come from Longhurst workshop – next year their M3s would be running with 2.0-litre engines, so there was a need to clear shelves before the year closed. The parts-bin nature of the exercise, combined with Doulman's relative inexperience with such a trick bit of kit, might explain why they had the misfortune to put a rod through the side of the block after qualifying on Friday. Their only spare was an old 2.3, with homologation papers dating back to 1987, so the car's only appearance as a 2.5 never even made it to the race start. Small wonder they were twelve-and-a-half seconds and twenty-six places behind Longhurst after qualifying.

Australia's Own
As usual, there were about as many Holdens as there were all the other brands put together, and they ran the gamut from factory-backed potential winners to grid-fillers with big dreams.

At the sharp end, once again HRT had brought along their new '93-spec VP Commodores. At the wheel of the #16 was the new Member for Broadwater, the Honourable Allan Grice, MP. Broadwater was a new Queensland parliament electorate located on the northern end of the Gold Coast, created in the 1991 redistribution: Grice had been elected to the seat as a member of the rural centre-right National Party, and gave his reasons for doing so in a neat little interview with Liz Hayes for the official opening of the newly-completed Sydney Harbour Tunnel.

For the record, the car he was driving was HRT's original VN display car, hence the weird combination of VP wings and Dencar roll cage with a normal road-car interior. As a pilot-build car, it's a genuine factory SS Group A (hence the Holden, not Chevy, V8 roar), and yet it's not numbered among the 300 production units: it's a car with a unique provenance, a genuine HRT Commodore that was never a racecar. Anyway, if you can't see the video, the relevant bit is transcribed below: 

Liz Hayes: Allan, I have to ask, what's a nice racing car driver like you doing wanting to be a politician?

Grice: Well, I'm not a politician. But really, just "anger", I think is the word. I've got 7- and 10-year-old daughters and a 2-year-old son, and the way our country's been going for the last eight years, I don't know where they're going to grow up. So, I got all angry, got all wound up, got all involved and I'm standing for a conservative seat for the National Party of Queensland.

Ours being the post-Trump, post-Brexit era, we know now what that kind of talk really means, but that was probably inevitable. As Jean-Pierre Sarti told us, to do something as dangerous as motor racing requires a certain absence of imagination, and a conservative, almost by definition, lacks imagination (and therefore empathy). But you don't have to agree with a man's politics to admire his driving, and there can be no doubt that was still formidable – especially paired with his old dance partner, Win Percy.

I think I drove three times for HRT at Bathurst and finished with a win, a 2nd and class win. The latter was when the regulations changed and Win and I ran the new car and won the 5.0-litre V8 category in the last of the Group A races.

I was the opposition spokesperson for police and corrective services, so I was pretty full on with that. – Allan Grice, AMC: Muscle Racers Vol.2

The other two VPs on the entry list were the second HRT car (the #15 of Tomas Mezera and Brad Jones), and the brand-new #05 Mobil car of Peter Brock. Looking very nice in its crisp white Mobil livery, 05 would be shared with German ring-in Manuel Reuter, an up-and-coming DTM driver who'd won that year's Interserie Division I. The other Advantage Racing entry, #55, remained in VN spec for Brock's Sandown co-driver Troy Dunstan and former teammate Andrew Miedecke – which was a bit of cheek for a man who owned a Ford dealership. If both cars had been prepared to the same level it might've been a valuable opportunity to see how the VN stacked up against the VP, but this was Advantage Racing: all the resources were focused on 05. That meant Peter made it into the shootout, 9th with a 2:15.98, but the 2.28-second gap back to Miedecke probably told us very little.

Other VNs were entered by the Lansvale team (#3 Dulux Commodore, Steve Reed & Trevor Ashby) and Terry Finnigan (#27 Foodtown Commodore, co-driven by Garry Rogers), but perhaps the most notable was Graham Moore. With Bob Forbes Racing focusing on their GT-R, their old Raider Motorsport-built VN (chassis variously designated as either RF04, or Dencar 1) was available for hire. The offer had been taken up by Moore, who leased the car for Bathurst and painted it up in his usual Strathfield Car Radios livery, bearing the racing number 42.

As co-driver, however, Moore dropped a bombshell – it was the Wollongong Whiz, our former World Motorcycle champion Wayne Gardner. Gardner had seen enough injuries on Grand Prix bikes that quitting and getting his kicks from the safe confines of a roll cage had started to sound pretty good. Thanks to his international contacts, Gardner had tested the #20 Jägermeister BMW with the Linder team, then raced it in a DTM event at the Nürburgring on 20 September. After Bathurst, he was due to return to Germany for the series finale at Hockenheim on 11 October, but he kept his feet on the ground: Gardner admitted that he was a rookie, and he was here to learn, and there would be plenty of learning to do – the power of a 5.0-litre Holden V8 would hardly faze a man who'd mastered the two-stroke Grand Prix bikes of the era, but the floppy VN chassis, sending spooky, inconsistent signals to the driver, must've felt a world away from the user-friendly M3.

Behind those were the usual landslide of Walkinshaw VLs, many of which had been on blocks since last year. Bob Jones carried over his association with the Captain, Peter Janson, in the Ampol Max 3 Oil car they'd run at Sandown. Daryl Hendrick and John Blanchard came back for another go in the #26 Gemspares Walky, while former "search for a star" winner Peter Gazzard also returned with rookie Stuart McColl in the #44 (sponsored, since Gazzard was from Mount Gambier, by the Scott's trucking concern). 

For reasons he can no longer remember, Bill O'Brien had elected to put his mechanicals from PE 003 into Brian Callaghan's VL bodyshell to create a yellow Everlast Battery Service Walky. The team was completed by Barry Graham, whom O'Brien got to do the engine in return for a steer (Graham had flown in for the occasiona direct from Charlotte, North Carolina, where he and Richard Petty owned the Nastrak driving school). And our old friend John Trimbole bailed out of his #22 Daily Planet Walkinshaw when it caught fire in practice, so quickly in fact that he actually abandoned ship while it was still moving... and before switching off the fuel pump, meaning the car burned virtually to the ground! Failing to take the start, he instead joined teammates Andrew Harris and Gary Cooke in the team's second car. 

As a rule though, these guys were nowhere, the fastest of them qualifying almost ten seconds behind the frontrunners. In stark contrast, all three of the new VP Commodores had made the shootout, so it was no small irony that the fastest Holden of them all was yet another Walkinshaw, chassis PE 010, the Bob Jane T-Marts-sponsored #11 of Larry Perkins and Steve Harrington. With that Sandown win in their back pocket the team had a spring in their step, but even so they were shockingly fast for what was supposed to be a superseded model – 2:14.08 and 2nd in regular qualifying was a truly stunning effort, only a quarter of a second off provisional pole. The car had proved so fast the scrutineers had  chosen to take a closer look at it, just to ensure it was legal, but no: all was above-board and given a clean bill of health. Larry really was just that good.

House of the Rising Sun
One must mention the John Bourke/Keith Carling R&R Racing Toyota Supra (the ex-Garry Willmington car; John Smith still owned the former works Toyota team car), which would probably find itself locked in an epic battle with the Grant family and their #6 Sizzler HR31 Skyline.

But of course, everyone had to take a step back when the three Nissan GT-Rs came past. Out of a drive with Brock, Neil Crompton had made the most of that by securing a drive in the second Gibson car instead. That had probably come about thanks to his new association with Bob Forbes Racing: despite success in both production and touring cars, their regular driver Mark Gibbs had decided to call time on his motor racing career to focus his energies on Mark Gibbs Panel House, his auto smash repair and parts business. That meant there was a seat open with Forbes for 1993, and seeing a young driver who deserved a chance, Bob had given it Crompo. That gave him a foot in the door at Nissan, so when Gibson Motorsport called up needing a driver, Crompton found himself in the right place at the right time. While Gibbs would race the #4 GIO machine with his established partner Rohan Onslow, Crompton would be paired with super-Swede Anders Olofsson in the #2 of Gibson Motorsport themselves. That was a juicy combination, as not only was Anders fast and experienced – two things you always wanted – he'd won the 1991 Spa 24-Hour race in a NISMO Europe GT-R, so clearly he knew how to babysit Godzilla over a distance.

But of course, everyone knew the grid peaked with the #1 Winfield GT-R of Mark Skaife and Jim Richards. Not only was Skaife the new Australian Touring Car Champion, he was the man who'd done all the team's test and development work in the last three years: no-one in the country knew the GT-R better. His car would be the focus of Gibson's efforts this weekend, and his co-driver was, if anything, even more experienced than Olofsson. The combination of Skaifey and Richo with the full might of Gibson Motorsport behind them would take some beating. 

Even so, they weren't invincible. Despite Fred Gibson's best efforts, the Winfield and GIO Skylines would be racing with the full 1,500kg homologation weight they'd been burdened with since Lakeside, as no amount of badgering, bribery, threats or tears had managed to get the ballast removed. Fred had argued it was now getting beyond a parity question, as those bespoke hollow Castalloy wheels were starting to crack under the strain, making it a clear safety issue. He took CAMS to the High Court in Canberra, and even boycotted the Sandown 500, all to no avail. The ballast remained in place, meaning Godzilla would tackle its final Bathurst with a kerb weight on par with a NASCAR stock car – or, if you prefer, a modern V8 Supercar with a full 44-gallon drum on board.

We finished up being 1,600kg. I was dark about that because it's dangerous when you start putting another 150-200kg of weight in the car. So what we did is put it low down in the car – we filled the rear cross-member up with lead pellets. – Fred Gibson

But because this team never stopped, all that extra weight didn't end up penalising the GT-R's speed all that much. The story of Gibson Motorsport this year had been their slow-but-inevitable recovery from the inconvenience of boost control valves, forced upon them by CAMS to limit their engine power. The development curve had been plain for those with eyes to see: slow at Eastern Creek, really slow at Symmons Plains, but then back on it by Winton, and by the time they got to Wanneroo, Fred Gibson was quietly turning the wick down as he tried to square the circle of winning the championship without incurring further penalties – once bitten twice shy, as they say.

It all pointed to a development programme to re-tune the RB26 engine to work with the 1.3-bar boost limit, especially when you considered the bizarre lack of revs they'd displayed in Tasmania. Of course, today we don't have to guess, as team technical head Alan Heaphy has revealed what was going on in a fantastic interview recorded at Sydney Motorsport Park during the 2016 World Time Attack weekend.

When we had the boost restriction put on us, back to 1.3 instead of 1.8, the guys had to get their thinking hat on and say, "Right, how can we get our power back?" And they did. They individually tuned each cylinder so it got maximum performance out of each cylinder, and then combined with all six doing everything they're supposed to be doing, we went from about 570 horsepower back to 640, 645. – Alan Heaphy

As ricer fans will know, a limiting factor on the RB26 was the factory crank angle sensor, which sensed the position of the crankshaft so the management system knew when to do important stuff like fire the spark plugs. Nissan's 360-degree optical sensor was pretty good in roadgoing applications, but it was mounted on the front of the exhaust cam, not to the crankshaft itself. Once you started getting up to serious power outputs at high rpm (which you would, because you owned a GT-R), timing belt deflection meant the cam position might not truly represent the position of the crank anymore. Even when the sensor was new, there was a significant amount of "jitter" in the signal; when the sensor was old and its bearings dried out, and you ran lots of upgraded parts, the jitter became absolutely horrendous. The only way to get stable spark timing was to fit a new trigger wheel that mounted directly on the crankshaft, rather than relying on the cam drive.

R32 unit on the right. (source)

So it will come as no surprise to learn that Gibson Motorsport had long since junked the factory crank angle sensor in favour of an aftermarket trigger, which they used to feed the ECU with engine rpm readings. They then used a modified cam angle sensor simply to tell the ECU which cycle the engine was currently on, or which cylinder was currently firing, and it was this that allowed them to take things to the next level and start the real fine-tuning.

The guys data-logged the crankshaft rotation based on a sensor that picked up the teeth of the flywheel, and then made up a package that then sensed the pressure transducers on the spark plugs. So the combination of putting that information together, they were able to then create a system where they could tune the engine to maximum cylinder pressure at 250rpm increments on each cylinder. And that in itself... I mean, it was a lot more complicated than that, but they finally got around to where they had each cylinder doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing. And they picked up 90-odd horsepower again. Brilliant people, they just did a marvellous job. – Alan Heaphy

Tooheys Top Ten
The top ten shootout for pole was always one of the most anticipated bits of television all year: just the ten fastest cars in the country with an empty track and nowhere to hide, a single death-or-glory lap for the honour of starting first (and a giant novelty cheque, of course). First to make the attempt was Allan Grice, and sadly his lap started messy, as he got the big Commodore up onto the ripple strips exiting Hell Corner and put two wheels through the dust. The ripple strip broke the VP's fancy new fibreglass splitter, throwing away all front end downforce, so his run was compromised from the start. The understeer from the lack of front-end grip forced Gricey to provoke the tail to make up for it, with visible results at the grate, and especially exiting the Chase. His final time was a 2:16.215, which was surely going to tumble down the order as subsequent times came in. "Just one bad corner," said Grice ruefully, "and then I lost some downforce from the front, which means that it understeered for the rest of the lap. But all things considered, that's what we've got."

Next in the queue was Peter Brock, but his lap doesn't seem to be available online. A great pity. It would've been fascinating to see what he could do with a more planted version of the car in which he'd been so spectacular in 1991, but such is life. His time was a 2:16.459, about a quarter of a second slower than Grice with a broken splitter, which must have needled a bit. "A very poor time," said Brocky. "Ahh, tyres a bit cold. Need a few more laps, I think, to get them warm. But, oh well, that's the way it goes."

Third to make an attempt was Mark Gibbs in the GIO car. No heroics from the third of the Nissans, just a steady lap of 2:16.168 – a little bit quicker than Gricey, but nearly a second and a half slower than this time last year. "Just happy to be here" said a resigned Gibbs – all the restrictions put on the GT-R meant any speed at all was a pleasant surprise. "We've got a problem with a pop-off valve – the thing that CAMS supplied to us is popping its head off. Was good as gold yesterday... so yeah, we're happy I s'pose."

Next up Mezera, but once again the footage doesn't seem to be out there. He cut a 2:16.028 that went straight to the top, hinting at what the broken splitter had cost Gricey.

Next was Glenn Seton. Seton's decision to run the Falcon rather than the Sierra even after the problems of Sandown wasn't as hard to understand as the commentators thought. They weren't likely to win with either Ford, so quite apart from the priceless seat time and track testing ahead of 1993, well, there was a more basic consideration: it was cheaper. The British series had long since shifted to the 2.0-litre formula, so the parts supply they used to rely on just wasn't there anymore. If you were going to blow an engine chasing Godzilla, it might as well be a big, simple V8 that was easy to replace! Seton worked the wheel constantly but the overall lap was smooth, with the result a stunning 2:14.971. He'd leapfrogged the 15's altogether! It set the Ford fans in the grandstands alight, and Seton was no less delighted: "I'm rapt. It's a credit to the whole team. It's taken a long while [to get the car right], but we're there now."

Next was Longhurst, but he completed the trifecta of laps lost down the memory hole. Without Perkins to give him a draft the BMW was slowest so far, but it was intended to wear them down over the distance, not blitz them over a single lap. "Oh mate, I got a good tow from Larry yesterday. But I'm rapt, that's a good lap from me."

As a former polesitter, Klaus Niedzwiedz should in theory have been a lap worth watching. From the outside it looked undramatic, but the time at the end was a bit of a shock – only a a 2:16.943, slower even than the BMW! A bitter Niedzwiedz reported that his foot had slipped off the throttle pedal twice over (they'd been moved to give his co-driver Gregg Hansford a bit more clearance for his bigger feet, which caught Klaus out). Some high-grip sandpaper on the surfaces would help tomorrow, but Saturday was now already lost.

But however much it hurt, it was about to get an awful lot worse. The harsh truth was that Eggenberger wasn't really the Sierra Whisperer anymore; these days he raced Opels, so the team that was really at the cutting edge of Sierra development was just down the pit lane, behind the big Shell signs. Like most teams, Dick Johnson Racing had shelves to clear and nothing to lose from blowing an engine, so they'd put together a special grenade engine good for a claimed 465 kW (and they'd had the Stone Brothers massaging the handling all year). But surprisingly, given John Bowe was typically faster these days, Dick elected to take the lap himself this year. Perhaps he didn't trust anyone else to judge what the engine was capable of, or perhaps he was just feeling some big Dick energy today, but either way the result bore him out. Dick showed the red Sierra absolutely no mercy: climbing over the kerbs exiting Hell Corner, getting it sideways through Griffin's, driving with real attitude from one end of the Mountain to the other. When they clicked the stopwatch at the end, once again the time had suddenly leapfrogged ahead, as Johnson went more than two seconds quicker than Seton to record a 2:12.898! That not only rocketed him to the top of the timesheets, it was faster than Niedzwiedz's erstwhile Sierra record in 1990, and barely two-tenths slower than Skaife's pole time last year. "The greyer the hairs I think the faster we go!" said a delighted Dick. "The car feels good, I feel good... must be all those three kilometres I swim every morning."

Next up? Larry Perkins, in the most tweaked VL Walkinshaw in the country. If this car went faster than the works team's VPs, then that would be a major embarrassment for Holden. Knowing that, Larry was absolutely breathtaking, the car hanging on by its fingernails in the middle of every corner. There were puffs of tyre smoke as he danced on the brakes – a slight wandering under braking for the Chase showed he was really pushing it. His final time? A 2:14.431, splitting Johnson and Seton to be 2nd overall. "That's as good as I could do," said Perkins philosophically. "She's pretty new under the bonnet, don't worry!"

And last of all, who else but Skaife? Godzilla in its blood-red Winfield war paint was sure to demolish all the rest over the course of a lap at the Mountain. This was what everyone expected, and Skaife's driving was of course beautiful to behold, controlled aggression all the way. The split time at the top however was one second off Johnson, leading to speculation we were about to see a Sierra on pole after all. When the time came in, it was only a 2:14.546 – not only slower than Johnson, it was slower even than Perkins! The extra weight and the pop-off valves had really dented Godzilla's bite over a single lap.

So the $15,000 for pole position went to Dick Johnson, who would be taking starter's orders alongside Larry Perkins. Mark Skaife would have to rely on his fast-starting 4WD system to get him ahead of them before the first corner, while behind, Mark Gibbs would have to play tail-gunner against the slew of Commodores and Sierras starting behind. Godzilla would not be starting its final Bathurst from 1st place, that much we now knew; Sunday would have to tell whether or not it would finish there...

Driving Through the Drink: the '92 Sandown 500

The first and penultimate enduro of the season, the Sandown 500 as usual stood in the shadow of its big brother at the Mountain in NSW, producing a grim but simple arithmetic. Being an expensive, attritional endurance race that wasn't the big one at Bathurst was always going to cull the entry list, and the shortage of funds meant a good portion of those who did enter were never going to see the chequered flag. The difference was, this not only produced a surprise and popular winner this time around... it arguably gave us the best race of 1992. 

The Resuscitator
Breathing new life into the flatlining Sandown 500 was no easy mission. The promoter who chose to accept it was, with some irony, Jon Davison, son of the same Lex Davison who'd died here practising for a Tasman race in early 1965. Having the son take over the very circuit that had claimed the father almost thirty years earlier was heartwarming in some ways, inspiring even, but could easily have been viewed by the racing gods as a provocation. We would have to see.

To his benefit, both the title sponsorship of the race and its broadcast had been taken up by public money, so even though the coffers weren't especially deep, they were a tad more resistant to the red ink than a business. Since 1989, Victoria's Transport Accident Commision had been pushing their famous, "If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot" ad campaign, aimed at curbing the rise in alcohol-related smashes. It was one of those cultural touchstones that made our blunt, direct mode of speech famous internationally, but it did its job: in the first twelve months after the ad's release, the accident rate dropped 37 percent. (Trigger warning for distressing hospital scenes, and for generally being a buzzkill.)

The TV broadcast was public as well. Traditionally the race had been carried by the ABC (which had nothing to do with the U.S. network of the same name, instead being our version of the Beeb), but this year it had been picked up by Australia's other taxpayer-funded channel, SBS. The infamous "Sex and Bloody Soccer", which specialised in non-English programming, had expanded its coverage in the late 1980s and only the year before had (controversially) begun showing ads. That meant it was in a position to beam the race into more households than would've been possible even a few years earlier, and with TAC eager to get their message out, the Don't Drink Drive 500 became a surprisingly resilient beast. Given the economy though, and the fact that they were going up against an AFL semi-final, which was basically the same thing as a religious festival in Victoria, it needed to be (Geelong Cats vs West Coast Eagles at the MCG, since you were wondering; West Coast won, 133 to 95, and a few weeks later they went on to become the first non-Victorian team to win the premiership. Go birds.). That they managed to get a crowd big enough to elicit remarks from the TV commentary team indicated Jon had succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

Thunder Down Under
So how had he done it? Well, partly by doing what the ARDC had been threatening to do at Bathurst for a couple of years now: padding the grid with other categories. Of the 27 eventual starters, only sixteen were proper Group A cars; eight of the rest were Group E Production Cars, and the other three were the new '93-spec 5.0-litre touring cars, here to have what would essentially be a very public shakedown.

The new breed of V8s had been given their first public outing at the Bathurst media day in August, but this was their first time hitting the track in anger, and by now even the casual fans had heard they were the future. Mechanically, they were like you'd described a Group A touring car down the phone to a NASCAR team in North Carolina: construction started with an ordinary production bodyshell from either an EB Falcon or VP Commodore, and from there you added the usual racing accoutrements (roll cage, fire extinguisher, electrical cut-off, etc) and started bolting in the go-faster bits. In their initial guise, they ran to a 1,300kg minimum weight, set deliberately high to eliminate the need for expensive exotic materials. Standard rolling stock was 17x11-inch wheels with 12-inch wide tyres; the rear end consisted of multi-link rear suspension with a live axle, while front suspension architecture had to remain faithful to the showroom product, meaning double wishbones in the Falcon and MacPherson struts in the Commodore. To keep costs down the cars used as many local parts as possible – the diff on both brands used the venerable Ford 9-inch crown wheel and pinion, for example, while the gearbox was the same Holinger 6-speed used by the Nissan GT-Rs. 

The all-important V8 engines, however, came from the States. They were NASCAR-based two-valve pushrod V8s, supplied by the competition departments of either Ford or Chevrolet, with no real connection to any roadgoing product. It's often forgotten now, but in those days the Busch Grand National Series (now the Xfinity Series) used 311ci V8s, so there was plenty of off-the-shelf technology available Stateside. The Aussie versions had a 5.0-litre capacity, a 7,500rpm rev limit and a maximum 10:1 compression ratio to keep running costs down; power was estimated to be around the 410 kW mark, with 600 Nm of torque, although it would've been slightly less in endurance trim. Most visibly however, they ran aerodynamic devices in the form of a vast rear wing and a sizeable front splitter under-tray – basically a diffuser at the front – to provide real downforce. That placed the all-important aero package firmly within the jurisdiction of the governing body, where it could be re-jiggered for parity at the start of each year, allowing them to dial out any aero differences as new models came down the pipeline.

There were three of these new machines on the grid for the Don't Drink Drive 500, two of them provided by the Holden Racing Team, who were finally going to be doing some racing. The #15 of Tomas Mezera and co-driver Brad Jones was chassis HRT 026, Win Percy's VN racecar from 1991; the #16 of Percy and dance partner Allan Grice, on the other hand, was HRT 027, better known as Elvis. This was the car Mezera had raced in his three ATCC appearances this year, and true to its nickname, it had spent the practice sessions crashing into things. After an early off-track incident (where it miraculously didn't hit anything), its first proper shunt of the weekend had damaged the front end somewhat, but not enough to take it out of service. The second touch-up, however, caused enough damage to necessitate an overnight rebuild, which must've pleased Wally and the boys.

The sole Falcon on the other hand was chassis GSR1, entered by Glenn Seton Racing in the #30 Peter Jackson livery. With its powerful Ford V8, double-wishbone front end and superior aerodynamic package, this privately-entered Falcon was poised to be a match even for the factory-backed Commodores of the other side, provided they could get reliability under control. The Commodores had continuity and were a known quantity, after all; the Falcon didn't, and was not.

The real question was, why wasn't there a second Falcon on the grid? Seton's outfit was only one of the big Ford teams in the country, after all, and at this stage not the more important one. But Dick Johnson Racing had hit an unexpected snag. The car, chassis DJR EB1, had been in the workshop since late 1991 being put together under the supervision of team manager Neal Lowe. When they'd fronted up for the Bathurst media day, however, the CAMS technical staff had found some issues with it. Said the car's later owner, Derek Vince:

Dick took it to Bathurst for the media day and he screamed around on the track for 20-odd laps and CAMS stepped in and said there was plenty of things wrong with it.

They said the front wheel tubs were too wide, the engine mounts were solid; they basically told him the car was an out and out Sports Sedan rather than a touring car. – Derek Vince, quoted in V8 Sleuth's The Falcon Files

Basically, by mounting the engine with an aluminium plate they'd turned it into a structural member that added stiffness, which was a bridge too far for the gentlemen of CAMS. It was a bitter blow for Dick, and it's probably no coincidence that Neal Lowe had vacated the team in mid-July, barely a month before that media day: after making the wrong tyre call at the Great Race of 1990, and now the "$300,000 mistake", his bridges were well and truly burned at DJR.

The A-List
Dick put on a brave face and brought two Sierras to Sandown instead, even though he doubtless would've brought the Falcon if he could, even as a third entry. Chassis DJR5 would be the #17 of himself and Bowe, and it was a slight salve to Johnson's mood when Bowe stuck it on pole with a lap of 1:15.87, three-quarters of a second faster than the next-fastest driver (which was Tomas Mezera in the HRT Commodore – the new breed was quick). Car DJR6 meanwhile was pressed into service as the #18 of former Sandown winner Terry Shiel, paired with the new Australian Sports Sedan champion Greg Crick. There was little Johnson could do except pretend this had been the plan all along, as he told the cameras:

Dick Johnson: The car's running extremely well indeed, and certainly the conditions here in the last couple of days have been far from perfect, and I don't suppose today's an awful lot different. In all conditions I think the car has shown that it has the speed to be able to win.

John Smailes: But reliability's still a bit of a question mark?

Johnson: Reliability [has been fine], that's why we've chosen to drive these in preference to the Falcon – not that there's anything wrong with the Falcon, it's just that I feel we're better-prepared with the Sierras for the next two events.

The other half of the Seton team were likewise aboard a Sierra, with the Peter Jackson #35 in the hands of full-time teammate Wayne Park, plus Tasmanian dairy farmer turned enduro hireling, David "Skippy" Parsons.

There was interest from Tomas Mezera, who was running HRT, and Dick Johnson offered me $25,000, but Glenn had been watching. I saw him and said, "I'm stopping with you." Not many know about that. – David Parsons, AMC #89

With Alan Jones having also decamped to Seton, Frank Gardner was left to enter a single BMW M3 Sport Evo for Tony Longhurst and the find of the year, Paul Morris. John Cotter and Peter Doulman were the only other BMW runners present, entering their well-worn M3 (no Evo), which had now picked up sponsorship from Impala Kitchens. The striped impala livery looked great, but they qualified only 15th with a 1:28.27 – seven places and nearly ten seconds behind Longhurst.

There was also the usual brace of privateer entries: Kevin Waldock had brought along his yellow Sierra, now with Ampol signage on the doors, while Bob Jones had planned to team up with Heather Spurle in his Walky but had to find a substitute at the last minute; into the breach stepped Melbourne socialite Peter Janson, "the captain" always up for a good time. Peter Brock had brought along the race's sole VN Commodore, and for co-driving duties had tipped Formula Ford racer Troy Dunstan – so depending how you chose to spin it, he was either giving another opportunity to an up-and-comer who deserved one, or was once again having to rely on someone who'd work for free. There was also the standard assortment of Toyota Corollas entered by Bob Holden Motors, though how much of an impact they expected to have here at the Home of Horsepower was anyone's guess. I did note one them was displaying signage for the Atari Lynx, however, which really took me back – an old childhood friend had one of those.

Back when a colour screen meant absolutely murdering your batteries. Oh wait...

In fact, the only team really missing from the roster was Gibson Motorsport and their trio of GT-R Skylines. It emerged the Nissan cartel were boycotting the race in protest over excessive weight and turbo boost restrictions being placed on them for the enduros, but it sort of backfired. Too late they realised that sort of thing only works if anyone actually misses you...

Formula E
That said, there was a Nissan on the grid that weekend, a single Pulsar SSS racing as a Group E Production Car in the hands of none other than Murray Carter (reminder that this man cut his teeth in the 1950s, and didn't hang up his helmet until 2017). The Pulsar would realistically only be racing against the rival Autobarn-backed Suzuki Swift GTi, as the rest of the class was comprised of the six-cylinder Falcons and Commodores the Group E rules had been written for.

"Pole" for the Group E class had fallen to the #10 EB Falcon of Kent Youlden and Ken Douglas, which had backing from Festo, a maker of high-tech industrial products (electronics, pneumatics, that sort of thing), although the Motorcraft decals front and rear pointed to Ford factory involvement as well. With a lap time of 1:32.74, it might've been nearly 17 seconds behind Bowe, but it was a full second faster than any of the V6 Commodores it had to beat. It was no accident, either: the resurgence of production car racing had seen Ford build a special "SS" version of the Series II EB just for the category, which Mark Oastler has called, "Ford Australia's rarest factory racecar". With input from Tickford Vehicle Engineering, the 4.0-litre straight-six had been massaged with a higher compression ratio, some timing tweaks and a higher 5,700rpm redline to produce an extra 13 kW and 20 Nm (for 161 and 365, respectively – the same numbers that would be quoted for the XR6 when it arrived a few months later). It used the V8 model's larger radiator to ensure adequate cooling, the V8's aluminium tailshaft, and a special version of the Borg Warner T5 gearbox to ensure there was a ratio for every situation. Just ten of them were ever built, with three of them snapped up by Douglas, Youlden and our old friend Mal Rose. What happened to the other seven is a mystery, although one was reportedly sold by a dealership in western Sydney for a sticker price of $31,467 (just over $62,000 in 2021).

The rival "V6 SS" Commodore is more of a head-scratcher, and although Oastler doesn't seem to know how many were actually built or where they ended up, rumour says there might've been as many as 150. Terry Lewis rose from the obscurity of grassroots Street Sedan racing to win the '92 production car series in one, and he was driving a similar car with Peter Fitzgerald today, although the most threatening of the Holdens would prove to be the #4 Falken Tyres machine of Peter Ogilvie and Paul Fordham. The #7 Palmer Tube Mills car was worth a second glance as well, if only for the weirdness of seeing the Palmer Tube Mills livery on a Holden, while the #6 of Tony Scott and Ed Lamont carried signage from the Meguiar's car detailing empire, but was dressed overall in a similar "lion and helmet" livery as the HRT cars. Did this machine have the factory's blessing?

Showtime
Despite moments of sunshine, the weekend showcased that beautiful Melbourne weather: constant overcast, with a sine curve of on-again, off-again drizzle and even a touch of hail on Friday night. That meant there were still patches of standing water on the track as zero hour approached, a fact that everyone had to bear in mind as they drew up their game plan. Rule of thumb said the thirsty Sierras would need two scheduled fuel stops to make the full 500km distance, while the efficient BMWs could get by on only one. The Holdens fell somewhere in between – they could run a two-stop strategy, or alternatively treat the race as a one-stopper with a splash-n-dash near the end. But that was in the dry: a wet track meant lower average speeds, which might bring the 4:50pm noise curfew into play, and correspondingly reduce the distance ahead of them. But a wet surface usually also meant higher fuel consumption, as drivers spent more time spinning up their wheels (and engines) in the slippery conditions. Trying to find the break-even point for optimum speed among all these variables was why team managers made the big bucks.

To Larry Perkins, who'd last seen victory in the Nissan Sydney 500 two years earlier, it all must have felt a bit familiar. He'd spent the year racing in PE 010, the very Walkinshaw Commodore that had brought him that Sydney win, except it was now dressed in a smart yellow-and-blue livery courtesy of a late sponsorship deal with Bob Jane T-Marts. Pulling out a result would mean balancing the Walky's excellent aero penetration against Win Percy's carbon-metallic brake package and special 11-inch Dunlop tyres, while also extracting a decent stint from co-driver Steve Harrington. The former Roadways star might've known how to handle an Aussie V8, but he hadn't been a full-time driver for several years now, so there was a bit of an asterisk over his race fitness. Thinking it all over, Perkins elected to change the engine overnight and swap in a slightly taller diff, finding he was running out of revs on the straights. With the start time about to arrive, it was time to find out whether he'd made the right decisions.

The race got complicated before it had even properly started. As they rounded Turn 12 on the parade lap, Tony Longhurst peeled off and ducked into pit lane, following a last-minute change of heart from Frank Gardner – the rain had stopped and he decided they'd need dry tyres rather than full wets. The price was that Longhurst had to give up his 8th place on the grid and start from pit lane, not to feed back in until the whole rest of the grid had passed by, but that was a fairly small tax for the BMW team; they didn't have the power to make use of track position anyway. So as the starter raised the green flag, twenty-six cars engaged first gear and held the revs at maximum, waiting for it to wave them away, and one sat in pit lane taking on new tyres. They didn't have to wait long.

Bowe got away smartly, as did Brock and Perkins, but in the new HRT Commodore Allan Grice embarrassingly stalled and was lucky not to get hammered by someone zooming up from behind. Virtually the whole field went by him before he got it moving, and he arrived in Turn 1 behind even Tony Longhurst, with a lot of ground to make up. The opening order had Bowe, Brock, Perkins, Wayne Park, Tomas Mezera and then Glenn Seton in the EB Falcon V8.

From the very beginning John Bowe was on a mission to blitz them, and within the first lap he'd pulled out a 1.5-second gap on Larry Perkins, who was half a second ahead of Peter Brock and another second ahead of Mezera in the other HRT Commodore – not exactly nose-to-tail, but not being left for dead either. At the start of lap 3, Seton dived into the pits for the team to remove the front wheels, plug in some tubes and start feeding in brake fluid. It was the start of a race-long battle against fading brakes for the Seton team.

There'd been a lot of smoke coming from the #18 Sierra of Terry Shiel, indicating problems for the second DJR entry right from the word go. That was seemingly confirmed when Bowe overtook Shiel on the track, putting his teammate a lap down – in just five laps! For what it's worth, Troy Dunstan later said after his only stint: "I was following the second Dick Johnson Sierra. Seems to have a bit of an oil leak or something, the windscreen after a while... well, I just couldn't see out of it. It was worth a chance just to try the wiper, but that made it worse." So this car was basically crippled from the beginning.

To be fair though, quite a few drivers were having trouble in the tricky semi-wet conditions, and even the ones who had their heads together had to put up with fragile cars thanks to the tricky, semi-recovered economy. Case in point, the #39 Protech Microsystems Walky of Chris Smerdon skated off the track at Turn 1, where it would be smacked into by anyone else who missed their braking mark into the turn. It would need some serious assistance to get free of the wet grass, and it came just after the mint-green #31 Ampol Max 3 Oil Walky of New Zealand's Robbie Ker stopped at the side of the road with a broken camshaft. Well, it's not like anyone thought this wouldn't be a race of attrition...

So although Bowe had a comfy 2.6-second lead after just six laps, and had already caught up to the slowest of the Group E backmarkers, it came to nothing as race control decided there were enough stranded cars littering the track to warrant the first Pace Car intervention of the day. Said Pace Car – a black EB Falcon, almost certainly an XR8 like the one we'd seen on the Gold Coast – then incorrectly picked up Seton rather than race leader Bowe, and although it took a moment to work out what they should do, they soon waved Seton past. Not that it mattered all that much – his radio chatter was all about whether they should return to the pits to bleed the brakes, meaning his car was still playing up and not really in the race. It might have been less than polished, but the Pace Car did its job: Ker's Walky was towed back to the pits by a Nissan Patrol recovery vehicle, while the Protech car was pushed back onto the circuit to rejoin, albeit a lap down. The #88 Gregg Easton/Brad Stratton Corolla, however, overheated behind the Pace Car – scratch yet another entry.

While the Pace Car continued to lead the field around, Tomas Mezera opted to take a pit stop in his HRT Commodore. The mechanics immediately lifted the bonnet, so something wasn't right, and it fell to co-driver Brad Jones to tell us what:

The problem was on the start, fouled a plug and was missing and Tomas stalled it, so, we got it going and there was a little bit of oil smoke coming out the back of it. We believe the rocker covers might've been – well, we're certainly sure that's where it's leaking from, or we hope. And so they've tied them up and the yellow flag was the best time to come in and tie them up and see what happens.

Before the Pace Car, Peter Brock had been inching up o the back of his former workshop manager Larry Perkins. At the restart, he made the most of the slippery track, the drop-off in tyre temp during the yellow and his own considerable talent to catch Perkins napping, relieving him of a place. We were treated to the sight of three generations of racing Commodore line astern – but all behind the Ford of Bowe, of course, who had once again started edging away.

A lap later Allan Grice too passed Perkins, then set off after Brock, seeking to put one over his longtime nemesis in front of his home crowd. That set off the duel that defined the first third of the race, as for almost thirty laps there was nothing else worth watching. It started in the final left-hander at Turn 12, where Grice managed to sneak the VP through, but then discovered he couldn't pull away. Both Holdens were stuck with a 7,500rpm rev limit, but where the Mobil VN was more streamlined and allowed a 12 or even 13:1 compression ratio for torque, the factory's own VP had better-breathing heads for better top-end power and proper downforce in the corners. The result over the course of a lap was a dead heat, leaving Brock and Grice to pursue the latest chapter in a twenty-year rivalry in front of a delighted Melbourne crowd.

Their cause was helped when Perkins pitted at the end of lap 12 for a bonnet check, taking him out of the leading pack. He rejoined just behind Bowe, having lost almost exactly a lap, but it would've been just a matter of time before he'd have lost that lap anyway. Bowe was still pulling away easily, with the full length of the pit straight between himself and Grice in just a couple of laps – nearly 5.7 seconds! He'd now lapped all but the top eight, and he continued to drive with attitude even as his rear tyres began to fall off – this was not a conservation drive.

It was at this point that we lost Seton again, who brought his Falcon back to the pits at the end of lap 21 and parked it. After the brake troubles he was three laps down, so it wasn't quite as painful as it sounded. Pit lane reporter John Smailes stuck a microphone in his face and got the story:

It looks like it's done a uni joint on a tailshaft, so... It's a little bit disappointing, but these things happen with new cars.

The team spent the next forty minutes fitting a replacement so Glenn could continue, but the new diff proved no more durable than the old one and the #30 Peter Jackson Falcon ended its day parked at the side of the road between turns 1 and 2, with just 18 laps to its credit. 2,000km of testing at Phillip Island had seemingly netted them nothing.

John Smailes: Now Alan Jones did in fact get a drive in the car, but only for about half a lap. Glenn, what happened this time?

Glenn Seton: It broke a pinion in the diff. It's very unusual for the Ford 9-inch diffs to break, that's the first one we've ever broken in a whole racing career, because they use the same diffs in the Sierra as well. But, um, this is what race miles are for – is to do testing and find the reliability of the car.

Smailes: Well Glenn, the problem started at the front of the car and worked its way all the way to the back, in retrospect was it a wise idea to bring [the Falcon] into competition right now?

Seton: I think so. I think the only way to do testing with the car, and to get it reliable, is to do race miles. You can do all the testing you want behind scenes, and it never ever goes right when you come to the races. Race miles is always the way to test your car and find the faults, because that's when it all happens.

But while one Ford was joining the DNF list, another continued to dominate. The track was still drying, which was to the advantage of the turbo cars, and John Bowe's most of all. After 20 laps, the #17 Shell Sierra had 22.23 seconds in hand over Grice's rumbling V8 – no replacement for displacement? Don't you believe it! Brock was of course not far behind, with Wayne Park in the sole remaining Peter Jackson entry only 2.8 seconds behind Brock. And astonishingly, despite only half an engine and despite starting from pit lane with that tyre change, in 5th place was none other than Tony Longhurst, just 7.9 seconds behind the blue Sierra. That was twenty-two positions gained in almost as many laps! The speed of the M3 Evo was an old story, sure, but you really had to admire how Tony burned up the road!

After ten laps of trying, Brock finally got past Grice again when they split around a Corolla on lap 23. From there Brock swiftly pulled out three seconds on his old rival, as Grice elected to let him go. Or did he? In fact, by lap 27 Grice had lost a place to Longhurst as well, which hinted that something wasn't kosher on the HRT Commodore. It wasn't until his scheduled pit stop later on that John Smailes got the truth out of him.

Smailes: Allan, it's very rare that we see you concede to anyone on the track, especially Peter Brock. Why did you do it?

Grice: The rear-right tyre – the car is absolutely perfect in everything about it, except the rear-right tyre. And it was just starting to get sideways, if I'd kept the pace on it, it would've blistered and we'd be in the pits. So by running at the pace that I was running and not a half a second more, I was able to just keep it at the same. Just keep it poor instead of horrible.

At the same time, with the BMW team on a one-stop strategy the bigger cars knew they had to pull away by a second a lap – at least – to stay ahead overall, and they definitely weren't doing that right now. Well, one car was, but as for Bowe...

At the end of lap 31 the leading Shell Sierra pitted, too early for it to be a scheduled stop. Indeed, after a moment they started pushing the car back into the garage, a resigned John Bowe the lame duck behind the wheel. Whatever the problem was, that car was probably out of contention now: DJR had claimed five pole positions in six years at the Sandown 500, but poor Dick had never, ever won it. Worse, the organisers had decided that the old trick of cross-entering, which allowed drivers to take over a secondary car if their first car broke down, would be banned for 1992, leaving Bowe and Johnson with nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs for the duration. It was up to the second SBS pitlane reporter, Ian Campbell, to find out how they felt about that.

Campbell: Down in the pits we've got Bowe. Started off very well, and it all went away in a mystery?

Bowe: Well, it was really doing it very easily. We weren't stretching the car at all. The oil pressure started to fluctuate and obviously if it keeps doing that it's gonna destroy the engine. Why it's done it I don't know, I'm not that mechanical, but you can't keep driving it because you'll wreck a thirty-thousand, forty-thousand dollar engine. So unfortunately our luck, which has always been bad here, continues that way.

Campbell: Dick Johnson, all dressed up and nowhere to go at the moment?

Johnson: I've heard that before too. But, y'know, I suppose that's just part and parcel of this race for us over the past fifteen years or so. We'll go to Bathurst and if we can save all our luck 'til there we could be looking good.

Campbell: Little bit disappointing there's no cross-entering anymore?

Johnson: Actually I think it's quite stupid, really, that in the first thirty percent of the race you can't do something like that. Because commercially I don't think it's a good proposition.

Bowe's demise put Peter Brock into the lead of his home race, with Grice now a reasonable distance behind. Shortly, however, Murray Carter's Group E Nissan Pulsar was seen stuck in the mud up against a tyre barrier. He'd understeered off the track and rallycross'd through the mud until he whacked into the tyres, but not hard enough to properly damage the car. From the commentary box, Howard Marsden noted that the Pulsar's livery had clearly been inspired by his Nissan Le Mans team, so he quipped that he'd be expecting a cheque from Murray any day now.

Nevertheless, Carter's Pulsar triggered the second Pace Car intervention of the day – if another car left the track and slammed into him, it could be a disaster. The #26 Gemspares Walky was dragged back to the pits as well, and Terry Shiel brought the second DJR Sierra in for a free pit stop under yellow – which he needed, because the car was given a squirt of oil. Skippy Parsons however was the loser of the bunch, as he was slapped with a stop/go penalty for passing another car under yellow, which cost the #35 Peter Jackson Sierra about 35 seconds, dropping it from 3rd to 4th place. Longhurst inherited 3rd as a result.

The Pace Car stayed out for three laps, during which Grice pitted in the HRT Commodore, handing it over to Win Percy. It was a routine stop except for a huge splashback of fuel, which thankfully failed to find a spark and barbecue the whole stall: "Luckily nobody smokes nowadays," quipped Howard Marsden. The stop dropped the car from 2nd to 4th, meaning the order was now Brock leading over Longhurst and then Perkins in 3rd. The commentators also found some delight in the way Grice pulled his race suit down to expose his traditional Fosters t-shirt, which was a tad iffy at the Don't Drink Drive 500. But that was our Gricey.

Smailes: Allan Grice – lap 38 your first stop. What does that do to your race plan?

Grice: Well it's pretty good for us, because it means we've only got one more stop to go. We needed two lots of sixty, and then a thirty, so we get our thirty up the front so we'll just divide the rest up and one more stop and I'll jump in and go home.

He added: "Win and I have always had the advantage that he and I can run exactly the same times, and in a race like this there's no co-drivers, there's two drivers." In other words, never mind Grice-vs-Brock, watch what happens when it's Win Percy versus Troy Dunstan. That was when the duel with 05 would be decided.

On lap 39 the Pace Car pulled off the track and the green flag signalled the resumption of hostilities. Brock immediately put the hammer down and pulled out two-and-a-half seconds on Tony Longhurst, but Larry Perkins wasn't taking many prisoners today either, some savage driving getting him ahead of Kevin Waldock's yellow Sierra – in 5th place, but a lap down.

Brock's joy was short-lived, however. On lap 43 Peter abruptly slowed with a burst of flame from his exhaust – the car didn't look too sick, but it was trickling along and had to sit helplessly as first Perkins then Win Percy blasted by. Perkins assumed the race lead (mostly because he had yet to make a scheduled stop), but the big question was why Brock suddenly had no drive. Just as suddenly as he'd stopped, Brock got going again, returning to full noise only after dropping to a lowly 7th place (a lap and 53 seconds behind). Howard Marsden guessed it had been a broken throttle cable, and it turned out he was exactly right. Brock had bodged it back together temporarily, with no change to his pit schedule necessary, as Peter would later reveal:

The throttle cable popped out of the accelerator linkage and I couldn't find it, obviously, until I had a peer under the dash. Reeled around and fitted it back on and thought, "Well, I'll press on and get back on schedule as far as fuel stops are concerned," and also give the guys a bit of breathing on fuel.

So by lap 45 Larry Perkins was finally in the lead, with Win Percy trailing by half a lap and Tony Longhurst almost a full lap behind – he was just ahead of Larry on the road. That was a lot further behind than Tony had been a handful of laps earlier, and it emerged he'd just paid a visit to the pits, which was a surprise when this was supposed to be a one-stopping car. As it turned out, it hadn't been by choice.

John Smailes: And Tony Longhurst has just sped into the pits for a 28.5-second stop. But Tony Longhurst of course was the man who was supposed to get through with only one stop, and only one hour has gone in the race. Team manager Frank Gardner, what happened?

Frank Gardner: Well he got stuck behind one of the "indestructible" V8s when it blew and we've got oil all over the windscreen, and he just couldn't see so he's dumping over six seconds a lap, so it was beneficial to bring him in. While we brought him in cleaning off the windscreen, which took some twenty seconds, we threw on tyres and fuel. So he can hang out there for another sixty laps, which is the maximum time he's allowed to use anyway.

Smailes: Nonetheless, you've lost one advantage...

Gardner: We have lost an advantage, yeah, there's no two ways about it. But tactically we were gonna lose six seconds a lap, which wouldn't take long to cancel out the advantage that we may have had.

Smailes: Frank, your decision to start him from pit lane, right at the start of the race, what was that about?

Gardner: We had on intermediate tyres and the rain never came, it went away. We rang up the airport for some actuals, the airport said there will be some showers soon, but they obviously missed Sandown.

Smailes: So at the moment how are you feeling about his chances?

Gardner: I never feel any way. At the end of a race I'm either elated or miserable.

"If he's going to be miserable, he won't have to change will he?" laughed Will Hagon; Frank Gardner always remained Frank Gardner. The curious thing was that the only "indestructible" V8 to have blown so far was Robbie Ker's, and that had been almost an hour previously, so it couldn't have been the one to coat Tony's windscreen in oil. Could it have been Peter Brock instead? If so, that meant there was more than just a throttle cable going wrong with 05.

Indeed, by lap 47 the stopwatches had revealed that Brock was 54.1 seconds behind Perkins, and also lapping slower and losing time. There was nothing for it: at the end of that lap, Brock pitted and stuffed Troy Dunstan into the car instead, the team swapping out the tyres in the meantime. There seemed to be a problem with the refuelling, which resulted in a longer stop than they planned, but Dunstan was fired up and gave it a bootfull on the way out of his pit box, rejoining still in 7th. "Not a good pit stop that one," Brock admitted after. "We lost a lot of time with the fuelling system here which was playing up. But I s'pose that's one of the reasons why you race at Sandown, so you can de-bug the car!"

After 50 laps, Perkins still led, with Win Percy 17.68 seconds behind and Tony Longhurst still pedalling his heart out in 3rd, 1 minute and 15.55 seconds down. The next two cars were both Sierras, the #28 of Kevin Waldock and the #18 of Shiel, but they were both a lap down. Indeed, Dunstan in 7th briefly held Larry Perkins up, but saw sense and braked early for Turn 1 to let the race leader by, whereupon a lap later Larry got past Tony Longhurst as well to put him a whole lap down. A cosy margin indeed, but somewhat deceptive, as Perkins still had not stopped whereas Percy and Longhurst had. It was beginning to look like Perkins was going for a one-stop race – if he could hold out another 16 laps, said Howard Marsden, that would be on the cards. Will Hagon took the time to tell a quick story:

An individual who a while ago was thinking of expanding, and he said, "Considering the economic situation these days, I'm glad I didn't." And I said, "Larry, you need somebody to project-manage you, to look after your sponsors, to get sponsors for you and everything." He says, "Yeah, my bank manager says that too. But I said to the bank manager, 'Did you see my tax return for last year?'" He said, "'How did your bank go? So which one of us is the better economic manager?'" He says, "'The bank manager doesn’t like me, 'cause I don't owe him anything!'"

In truth, with all the '93-spec Commodore shells he built that year, on top of keeping up a full race programme, 1992 was probably the busiest and most lucrative of Perkins' entire career!

Regardless, nearing half-distance Perkins had a lose entering Turn 2 and somehow neither beached it in the sand nor collected Longhurst as he rejoined, which was a bit of luck. All the same, that triggered another Pace Car, so Larry took the opportunity to finally pit and hand over to Steve Harrington, with the stop only slightly delayed by a scheduled brake pad change. It dropped Steve to 2nd place on the road, but he was still in with a chance, just 11.2 seconds shy of the now-leading BMW.

The Pace Car delayed proceedings for another three laps (63-65), whereupon Tony Longhurst resumed the race lead, still pulling away from Harrington, who fell back to 15.81 seconds behind by lap 71. Wayne Park was now the only other car on the lead lap, 1 minute and 16.61 seconds behind and therefore about to be lapped also. The yellow Waldock Sierra was in a lonely 4th, a lap down, while the #18 Shell Sierra was 2 laps down in 5th. Park was soon in serious dramas of his own, however, beached at the side of the road outside Turn 1 having apparently lost all control. It was the work of a moment to surmise that Park had been caught out in one of the heaviest braking zones in the country with no brakes; brake troubles seemed to be a bit of a theme for the Seton team today.

The #35 Sierra eventually made it out of the kitty litter (with the help of the race marshals, but without a Pace Car intervention), but it had lost so much time that it was kind of a lost cause after that. Understandably, the brakes were given attention at the following pit stop, including a pad change, but the car had dropped to 9th place outright, which was the same thing as last for a Group A entry.

Because the car that had been running 10th most of the day was, appropriately, car #10, the Festo EB Falcon of Ken Douglas. When the timing screens suddenly revealed the #7 Palmer Tube Mills Commodore (which had been trailing a loose rear bumper all race long) was now leading the class, it could only mean one thing: the Festo Falcon must've made a pit stop. Sure enough, it emerged that Douglas had made a scheduled stop on lap 62 (when the leaders were on lap 72), which included a full brake pad change and a switch to Kent Youlden. They'd planned to change the front pads only, but it "turned out there were only about 20 laps left in the pads, so it worked out well". Their rival Ian Palmer had elected to do the race on one set of brakes and even one set of tyres, so he was now leading the class; car #4 (the Falken Tyres VP Commodore) was 11th outright and 2nd in class, so 3rd in class (and now 12th outright), back on the same lap as the other two, was the Youlden Falcon.

Fresh from his stint at the wheel, Ken Douglas was brought up to the commentary box to give his opinion of the race so far. By the time he'd got there, the pit cycles meant the car was back in the lead of its class.

Will Hagon: It's been an incredibly incident-packed race, Ken. Why?

Ken Douglas: Well, part of the problem is going down into Dandenong Road Corner [Turn 9], you can clearly see on the television that there's a line of water there and everyone's hitting it. We're actually having a bit of an easy run: the Falcon that you can see on the screen's actually got ABS – anti-lock brakes – and that really makes it easy down into that corner.

Hagon: So you just jump on those brakes as hard as you like and this computer-controlled system looks after what should be driver abuse, what would be if you didn't have the system?

Douglas: Oh, exactly. It does it better than a driver can – it senses each individual wheel, whereas we can only brake to the worst wheel. So it's just great.

Hagon: This is the option that Ford introduced for less than a thousand dollars, and that's worth – what? What do you think it'd be worth to you in time on the track?

Douglas: Well, every time we flat-spot a tyre it costs us $300, so it's saved us a lot!

Hagon: Apart from braking ability, at least one section of the track, do you use it in other sections? On dry sections?

Douglas: Well, if we were punishing the brakes, if it were a shorter race we'd be using it on every corner, but right now we're braking less than what the car can to conserve pads.

Hagon: Because the interesting thing is that in Europe, they're running anti-lock BMWs [in DTM], they say they're worth anything up to a second a lap. Tony Longhurst's not allowed to run them in his car.

Douglas: No, I think it's an old homologation on that car. But the SS Falcon was homologated with anti-lock brakes, so we've grabbed it with both hands and run with it.

On lap 84 Longhurst finally pitted, then surprisingly, immediately departed again: it was an astonishingly brief stop. He rejoined still in the lead, with 9 seconds in hand over Steve Harrington, but it was a bit of a head-scratcher. In fact, it was only explained two laps later when the BMW returned to pit lane and this time the team attached a fuel churn and swapped Longhurst out for Paul Morris. Howard Marsden pointed out that Frank Gardner had been out in pit lane with a cup of coffee in hand, so that first stop clearly hadn't been planned. He speculated that Tony had simply run out of time (the race was close to the two-hour mark, the maximum any driver could spend at the wheel without a break), but the truth turned out to be even uglier: the first stop had been to serve a stop-n-go penalty, handed down for passing another car under yellow. So the car that was supposed to be a one-stop proposition had now made three stops, and Tony was less than pleased about that:

John Smailes: Tony, that stop-n-go, do you reckon it was justified?

Tony Longhurst: No! Bloody idiots. They were going down the end of the straight and Wayne Park or one of the blue Sierras had spun off. Double yellow flags, you know you don't pass while double yellow flags. I could see the car in the sandpit. As we came around the corner, there's a guy waving the green flag, and there's a slow Group E car and I overtook the car right in front of the green flag. Now car's doing twenty miles per hour, some of those Group E cars, just ridiculous.

Smailes: So what are you gonna do about it Tony?

Longhurst: Well, what do you do? It's done now. CAMS officials should have a little bit more sense when they've got such slow cars out here racing against [the Group A] cars. You know, we're lapping blokes in three laps here!

To confirm: yes, the Peter Jackson Sierra had indeed spun off again, indulging in a spot of cross-country that was just as ugly as it looked.

It got worse though: on lap 87 it took a trip across the grass once more – its brakes were coming and going almost at random. This time its driver managed to scoot through the mud without bogging, avoiding the sand trap, but then lost the tail trying to rejoin and ended up back on the circuit with the rear end dangling over the racing line. This didn't trigger another Pace Car purely because it was able to get going again under its own power, but only after several cars had pounded through the corner and shaved a few layers of paint.

Mercifully, the team gave up shortly thereafter, allowing John Smailes to ask Wayne Park what had gone wrong.

John Smailes: And car 35 now is also out of the Drink Drive 500, Wayne has parked it. Wayne Park, what happened?

Wayne Park: Unfortunately John, it just lost all of its brakes. David was having some problem with the brakes: we came in, tried to remedy the situation and I went back out. But it just deteriorated that bad that I lost the complete brakes at the end of the straight.

Smailes: How does that feel?

Park: Not too good. That happened to me at Easter in the 12-Hour race and to have it happen twice in one year, yeah, I've gotta give it away I reckon!

Smailes: Wayne, you looking forward to seeing Bathurst in the car?

Park: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully with better brakes.

So we had two red Sierras that wouldn't go, and a blue one that wouldn't stop; the big boys were rather underperforming today. One Sierra that was overperforming, however, was the yellow Ampol machine of Kevin Waldock. The Playscape Racing team had been put through an even more brutal Saturday than most, as Waldock had almost written the car off in a late-practice shunt on Saturday afternoon. Despite an overnight rebuild, and despite being a mere privateer with virtually no factory support, he was currently running in 3rd.

Kevin Waldock: Yeah I tell ya, the effort of the boys overnight is just absolutely monumental.

John Smailes: What happened yesterday?

Waldock: Well I was coming down into the Dandenong Corner over here in about fourth gear, got behind Win Percy. Win got a little bit sidewards in the water that comes across the track there and I went to go 'round him thinking that he was going to spin, and got one wheel out on the ripple strip and it's just goodnight nurse.

Smailes: How much damage was done?

Waldock: Oh, we wrote off three corners of the car. It was almost a write-off.

Smailes: So how'd you anticipate it this morning? That you were either going to A) Start the race, or B) Be in third place?

Waldock: Well at 4:30 this morning we got it back from the panel-beaters, some fabulous guys down here that just gave us a hand and did it for nothing – I've gotta thank those guys in a few minutes. Pulled it back into shape – they got it onto a jig, we stripped the car completely, put it onto a jig, put it back, Phil Curtis my chassis guy here, just returned from the States, got it all back together from 4:30 in the morning, at 6:30 the engine went back in, 8:30 it was ready to run.

Smailes: Is it driving alright?

Waldock: Perfect, absolutely perfect. If you look at it very closely you'll see a bit of rough panel work on it, but at 180mph, 160mph you can't tell the difference.

With 86 laps completed, Harrington was still leading with Morris 48.95 seconds behind. They were now the only cars within cooee of the lead, as Waldock's co-driver Peters and Troy Dunstan in the #05 Mobil Commodore were both two laps down, with the #18 Shell Sierra still three laps down, in 5th.

Fifteen laps later, Harrington had the gap out to 1 minute and 2.0 seconds, but that just wasn't good enough. Larry had stopped on Lap 64: with the 5:00pm deadline fast approaching, it was likely the #11 would need a quick splash of fuel near the end to make it to the finish, but the BMW would not. To be in with a shout, Perkins needed Harrington to pull out enough time to make that final stop, top up the tank and then rejoin still in the lead, and so far he wasn't doing that. This wasn't yet decided.

John Smailes: Lying in 2nd in the motor race, 59 seconds behind Larry Perkins, is the BMW with Paul Morris at the wheel. It doesn't need another stop, but Larry Perkins does. It's going to be a tight finish, Larry?

Larry Perkins: That's true. Hopefully we'll only be stationary here for 20-25 seconds, but we still lose 50, sometimes 60 seconds out of the lap because of the slow-down and the speed-up. So it's gonna be real tight, and I might add I think we're a lap and 59 seconds ahead, but we have to presume we're only 59 seconds in case it is that way [NB: the official timing did indeed have Morris just 59.51 seconds behind].

Smailes: That probably means you'll get back on the track behind the BMW. What then are your tactics?

Perkins: Well, I've gotta pass him. I've gotta race him, and I will do everything I can to race him and pass him and hopefully we can do it.

Smailes: How long 'til you stop, Larry?

Perkins: Well, it's about... the car'll be stationary for 20 seconds.

Smailes: But how long before you stop?

Perkins: Oh! Two laps! Only two or three more laps. Then I'm hopping in.

Smailes: How are you feeling?

Perkins: I'm alright. I better put my hat on, though...

Larry had clearly decided to have that splash-n-dash early and put himself back in the car because, although Harrington was no slouch behind the wheel, he wasn't as quick as Larry himself. But then, few were...

On lap 112 Harrington pitted, and Perkins got back in. The tyres and refuelling went like clockwork, but a delay getting the seat belts sorted meant the car was stationary for almost 50 seconds, half a minute longer than Larry had planned! As Morris swept by to assume the lead, Larry gunned it out of the pits and set off in hot pursuit. He had 24 seconds to make up, and about the same number of laps to get it done.

John Smailes: Steve Harrington spent 31 frustrating seconds trying to get that seat belt onto Larry Perkins. It must've been the hardest 30 seconds of your life?

Steve Harrington: Yeah it was, John. It's my first race back for a while and I just didn't have any strength in my hands. They gave me plenty of warning but I just couldn't undo the belts. So I just had to release them and we were slow because I just didn't leave Larry enough strap.

Smailes: Have you given the car back to him in good condition?

Harrington: Yeah, the car's fine, John. I missed a gear, one gear, and the brake pedal was going away just ever so slightly, but with the wet/dry conditions Larry was mucking around with the brake balance such a lot to try and get it right. I wasn't quite sure where it was, so I was losing just a little through brake balance. But it is fine now: I mean, he'll get it back, he'll be right.

On lap 105, Troy Dunstan had returned to his pit box after a nothing-special, but nothing-wrong-with-it-either kind of stint, just the sort you wanted from a rookie. Brock took his car back for the run to the flag, only to return to the pits just eight laps later to have his engine seen to. He returned to the track shortly thereafter, only to come back to the pits again within within mere moments: it emerged the fuel pump was playing up. In fact, the main fuel pump had been problematic early in the race and forced Brocky onto his reserve pump; now the reserve pump was starting to wave a white flag as well – just another sign this car was being held together with chewing gum and hope. Visible behind him during that stop, meanwhile, the #18 Shell Sierra returned to pit lane and drove straight to the back of the garage and retirement. Whatever oil problem it had been nursing all race long, it had finally proved terminal.

Larry lost a little bit of time on his outlap, the gap extending to 29 seconds with an estimated 23 laps remaining. He got his head down and charged, and two laps later the gap had reduced to 26.2 seconds, with maybe 21 laps remaining. The mountain he had to climb was getting steeper, but now at last his tyres were up to temp and the chase was on. He pulled in only half a second on lap 117, but by lap 119 the margin was down to 24.7 seconds. Then it was down to 23.5, then 22.1, then 21.26, and on and on it went. By the start of lap 124, he was just 19.6 seconds shy of Paul Morris – closing in, but not quite fast enough to do the job. It was starting to look like this one wouldn't go his way after all.

And then, it happened.

At the end of that same lap, the #26 Gemspares Walky of Daryl Hendrick had a quick spin at Dandenong Corner, the same waterlogged corner that had been causing trouble all day. It would need a push from the marshals to dislodge, and protecting their safety would mean local yellow flags, which were duly deployed. Because they happened to push the Gemspares car onto the racing line at the very moment he arrived, Paul Morris had to slowed right down and trickle through the corner; by the time Perkins arrived, however, it was all but clear, meaning he was able to sail through at the speed of a thousand tortoises. Result: at the start of lap 125, even without a Pace Car intervention, the gap was down to just 11 seconds. It wasn't quite the race on a silver platter, but it just might be enough.

Said John Smailes with incisive timing: "There’s not a nail left unbitten in the BMW pit, as Tony Longhurst sees a 19-second lead destroyed to an 11-second by one yellow flag. Tony, what do you think of that?"

Tony Longhurst: I don't think it's too good, the flags aren't working for us today! [laughing] I feel a little bit better now I've cooled down. It appears the big V8's running about two seconds a lap quicker than us, and unless Larry gets held up he'll win the race now.

Smailes: What has Paul Morris got left in him that can fight back when Larry gets onto is tail?

Longhurst: Well nothing, y'know, the car is much slower down the straight. So, once a bigger car comes up it can just pass you down the straight, there's absolutely nothing he can do [as far as] blocking him fairly.

Smailes: You're not going to concede it just yet, are you?

Longhurst: Oh, no! You gotta be realistic though. Larry's running two seconds a lap quicker. The Sandown circuit doesn’t suit the BMW. The V8s and turbos are much quicker. We're just going for consistency today, and I’m very very happy [if] the little Benson & Hedges BMW picks up a 2nd. That'll be great.

With 127 laps completed, Larry was just 8.94 seconds behind Morris and chasing hard. A lap later it was 7.25 seconds, but there were just 11 minutes remaining. Lap 130: 6.4 seconds, and neither Perkins nor Morris were holding anything back. Both cars were using all the revs, burning up their brakes, getting a touch sideways in the middle of the turns, and there were 9 minutes left until curfew.

At the start of lap 131, the gap was just 4.94 seconds, close enough that Morris was visible just ahead. But on that lap Morris got held up at Dandenong Corner by one of the Corollas, which was the sort of problem that affacted him far more than Larry, who could do his passing in a straight line. At the start of lap 132, Larry wound it through the final complex of corners and, just as he accelerated across the start/finish line, he moved ahead of Morris to reclaim the race lead! The crowd rose to their feet with a cheer as he... lost it again under brakes into Turn 1!

Yes, really: Morris had not accepted that he was beaten just yet. In a fighting mood, Larry got past again on the long back straight – flashed a quick glance at his rival on the way past – and this time moved to block as they crested the rise at the top, preventing Morris from making any cheeky moves where the cars got light. Through the following complex down to Dandenong Corner they were good as tied together; down to Turn 11 Larry moved over to close that door before it opened; Morris went wide instead, but there was nowhere to go out there. But Morris however absolutely would not quit. Despite losing carlengths down the front straight at the start of lap 133, the youngster took another brave pill and held off braking until the sand trap absolutely filled his windscreen, catching Larry napping and sneaking it up the inside once more!

Larry got it back on the climb up the back straight again, and this time maintained a gap of about 1 second at the line, which was enough to ensure he wouldn't be dive-bombed again. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was about that: Morris kept sniffing and never, ever backed off, but the deal was done. With three minutes left on the clock, Larry finally had it sewn up. Down into Dandenong Corner on the final lap, Larry's Commodore had a wiggle, as the water on the track unsettled the rear end, but he was still surfing the adrenaline and on top of it in an instant. When he finally crossed the finish line for the 136th and final time, he was ahead by 0.97 of a second, sealing the win.

It was amazing to think Larry had only won this race once before – in 1984, the last year of the Group C ruleset, which felt like a lifetime ago now. But that win had been part of Peter Brock's all-singing, all-dancing Holden Dealer Team: this one had been all his own work. He'd built the car with his own hands, engineered it to perform, tweaked the setup at the last minute and – with a little help from Steve Harrington – driven it to the podium with style. Perkins was a deserved winner, but so too was the young Paul Morris, who'd displayed a startling combination of level-headed maturity and sheer fighting spirit, cowed by no-one. Definitely one to watch.

In the final standings, it was Perkins and Harrington 1st in 3 hours, 10 minutes and 9.64 seconds, for an average speed of 133.2 km/h. Longhurst and Morris took a hard-fought 2nd, of course, while 3rd (after Waldock and Peters broke a tie rod in the final laps – sometimes life isn't fair) went to the beleaguered #15 HRT Commodore of Tomas Mezera and Brad Jones, a surprisingly good finish considering their earlier trials, though it owed much to the demise of the Sierras ahead of them. 4th was Bob Jones and Peter Janson in the #13 Ampol Max 3 Oil Walky – no unlucky number today. And 5th outright, amazingly, was Kent Youlden and Ken Douglas in their Group E Falcon, which showed the value of good, consistent braking under race conditions. 8th was the #75 Bob Holden Motors Corolla, which would've won its class had there been a small-car Group A class. 6th, 7th and 9th were all Group E Commodores, while the top ten was completed by the #05 VN of Brock, which had lost so many laps with mechanical dramas. 11th and 12th went to tiddler production cars (the Autobarn Suzuki beating Carter's Pulsar in the end). No-one else was classified: Hendrick's Gemspares Commodore was technically still running, but neither it, nor the #73 Bob Holden Corolla, nor the Cotter/Doulman BMW M3 covered enough laps to be classified. The last DNF of the day was Allan Grice, who had an accident and ended the #16 HRT Commodore's race on the grass, only slightly ahead of schedule. It hadn't been a blue ribbon day for the team anyway, however, as Win Percy told:

Yeah, Allan touched a car very early on, I think it was a slow car anyway, one of the Group E cars. It's caused an overheating engine. We've had a centre bearing go in the propshaft. So no, it's not a good day for us. In fact it's not a good weekend to be truthful!

But if it was a touch embarrassing for Holden to see their fancy new works cars beaten by a four-year-old VL covered in fibreglass, they didn't show it: Larry's win was as popular as it had been dramatic, a feelgood story emerging from the best race of the year so far. One thing was for certain: if they could put on a race like this at Bathurst – complete with another against-all-odds victory for a little Aussie battler – then maybe Group A could be forgiven after all.