Meat, Gods and Aztec Economics

Would you like to know exactly how Aztec sacrifice worked?

Are you sure?

All jokes aside, if you're squeamish you probably shouldn't read this post, because you won't thank me. But if you have the stomach for it, it's actually a pretty interesting topic, and some basic Googling led me to some places I didn't expect. Most of all, though, I was genuinely shocked at how fast and easy the whole process was.

Those stairs probably didn't stay white.

Some time around 1521, the last victim was taken to Tenochtitlán to be sacrificed at the summit of Templo Mayor. At the time, Tenochtitlán was the biggest city in the world, with some 300,000 inhabitants, twice the size of contemporary London. Built on a low island and reclaimed land in the midst of the shallow Lake Texcoco, it had canal streets like Venice, a system of aqueducts (even without the pollution of a whole city, Lake Texcoco was filled by runoff from the mountains, too saline to drink), barber shops, parks (the Aztecs had a passion for flowers) and even a zoo. It was linked to the shores by stone causeways, each with three gaps that allowed canoe traffic to pass through while doubling as drawbridges in case of invasion. And yet the centrepiece of the city was Templo Mayor, a human abbatoir dedicated to the ritual slaughter of prisoners captured in war. As unimaginable as it might be to us, it's quite possible the last victim was consenting, as there are plenty of surviving tales of particularly impressive prisoners being offered their freedom, but preferring to be sacrificed instead, lest they offend whichever god ordained their deaths. With the Aztec power base shaken after La Nocte Triste, it's possible this was the only kind of prisoner they could take.

On the other hand, of course, with their "empire" boiling over the Aztecs would've had no problem finding battles to fight and prisoners to take, so it's equally possible the last sacrifice had to be dragged to the altar by his hair. Either way, for the last time four priests grabbed some poor bastard by the arms and legs and held him over the sacrificial pillar – usually depicted like a mortician's slab, but actually more like a stone-age version of the bollards they use to prevent ram raids (hell on your back, but for obvious reasons the victim's comfort wasn't a concern). And then the priest cut him open with an obsidian blade, removed his heart, and completed the necessary rituals to honour his god, Huitzilopochtli ("Weet-zee-lo-potch-tlee"). Templo Mayor felt its final splash of human blood. Then, Cortés returned and began the Siege of Tenochtitlán, and the end had come. It was the year of One Reed, and the setting of the Fifth Sun.

A Weird & Bloody Religion
"Templo Mayor" just means "Great Temple" in Spanish, which might be parochial as hell, but it's still more accurate than the usual description of Templo Mayor as a pyramid (the Aztecs called it huei teocalli, which means... Great Temple. God-House, technically). Let's be clear the Mesoamerican temples were not pyramids, a Greek word derived from pyramis, "a kind of cake made of roasted wheat grains preserved in honey," which had that characteristic shape. The name was given by Alexander the Great's soldiers, who refused to be impressed by what the Egyptians had accomplished. Upon being shown the greatest feat of architecture in the world, the Greeks dismissed it as a little bun.

No royal tomb, however, Templo Mayor had a completely different function in public life, much closer to the Roman temples that were built on plinths so the public could view the rites for themselves. It was a stage for politico-religious theatre, and the relative height of the temple gives a clue as to how big a crowd would've gathered to watch. It was dedicated to two gods, the aforementioned Huitzilopochtli, the patron deity of the Mexica tribe, and the rain god Tlaloc.

Tlaloc – the Giver, the Green One, God of the North and Lord of Seasons and Weather – isn't hard to comprehend: he's a god of farmers, and having grown up around farmers I completely understand why he was such a big deal. If you somehow convinced the farmers from my hometown that human sacrifice would guarantee them good rain, they'd be all for it, no question. Having the your whole life dependent on the fickle whim of nature will do that to a man. Like most Mesoamerican gods Tlaloc demanded human sacrifice, but being a water god his victims were usually drowned, and they were usually children. For whatever the hell it's worth, a famous palace painting known as The Paradise of Tlaloc shows the afterlife of those slain by drowning, their souls taken care of by Tlaloc, their depictions bright, happy and playing children's games. In the end, though, he's just a god of farming, and not especially interesting.

Relatively.

Huitzilopochtli, the Midday Sun, the Eagle, the Hummingbird, God of the South, is much harder to wrap your head around because he's buried under a lot more cultural metaphor. His nagual, or animal disguise, was the eagle, and it was in the form of an eagle that he showed the Aztecs where they should build their city by alighting on a nopal cactus with a snake in his beak – an image that remains on the Mexican flag today. He was born fully armed and ready for war, wielding his weapon xiuhcoatl, the Turquoise Serpent (i.e. lightning), and his very first act was to slaughter without mercy his rebellious sister Coyolxauhqui and his 400 siblings, their dismembered bodies becoming the moon and stars.

His name is usually translated "Left-Handed Hummingbird," which only adds to the confusion. He's also called a war god, but that's also problematic, because "war" is just what we call it, and the word carries a lot of Western baggage – mainly the assumption that it's political (Clauswitz's postulate that "War continuation of politics by other means," continues to haunt us, because it's one of the most misquoted lines outside of Scripture). The operations of the Aztec warriors were much more bound up with their religion: the Emperor, or tlatoani, was himself a priest of the state religion and often wielded the knife himself. One of the elite divisions of the Aztec army were the Eagle Warriors (cuauhmeh), who dressed for battle in feathered suits complete with talons and a beaked helmet – in other words, they dressed up as Huitzilopochtli. They were very careful not to kill on the battlefield, which was considered clumsy; instead, they did their utmost to bring prisoners back for sacrifice, and their ascent through the ranks was based on how many prisoners they'd taken. A boy who'd taken his first prisoner was a tlamanih, or captor, and was now considered a man. Two, and he was a cuextecatl; three, a papalotl, or butterfly. The ranks climbed higher and higher as prisoners accumulated, until he might achieve the elite rank of ocelotl, or Jaguar Warrior, for capturing twelve in two consecutive battles. Aztec "warfare" then can be seen as a function of, and an expression of, the Aztec religion.

So who was this Huitzilopochtli, the engine behind it all? The first clue is that to translate his name as Left-Handed Hummingbird is apparently to get it exactly backwards. In Classical Náhuatl ("Nah-wat," the language of the Aztecs), huitzilin, or "hummingbird," is the modifier for opochtli, the "left-hand side." So... Hummingbirded Left-Side? That doesn't seem to make a great deal more sense, until you realise the Aztecs believed that dead warriors were reincarnated as hummingbirds, and they considered South to be the left side of the world. So, metaphorically, his name conveyed something more like, "Resurrected Warrior of the South." In other words, he's a god of dulce et decorum est, of military necrophilia, of what Zack Snyder's Spartans called, "a beautiful death." Young Aztec males wanted nothing better than to die gloriously in battle (or on the altar) to return as hummingbirds. In Náhuatl they sang:

There is nothing like death in war,
nothing like the flowery death
so precious to Him who gives life:
far off I see it: my heart yearns for it!

Certainly a commoner working in the fields could expect no such pleasant afterlife, and if you consider gods to be reflections of the people who imagine them, as I do, then that's a big clue to the Aztec national character.

Like Baldr, like Osiris, like Demeter, like Jesus Christ, Huitzilopochtli was also a dying-and-rising god. He died every evening and had to be given the nourishment (tlaxcaltiiliztli) to fight off his moon-and-star siblings and rise again in the morning. To that end he demanded blood, the fiery hot blood of courageous warriors. And as his chosen people, it was up to the Aztecs to give it to him, sacrificing about 15,000 warriors a year on his altars – more than 40 a day. According to the conquistador Bernal Diaz, the resulting skull racks in Tenochtitlán were something to behold.

The poles were separated from each other by a little less than a vara [roughly a yard], and were crowded with cross sticks from top to bottom, and on each cross stick were five skulls impaled through the temples: and the writer and a certain Gonzalo de Umbría, counted the cross sticks and multiplying by five heads per cross stick from pole to pole, as I said, we found that there were 136 thousand heads.

To a culture built on human sacrifice the sight of thousands of skulls was a source of inspiration, not dread. And they must've gained a lot of inspiration from the grand opening of Templo Mayor in 1487, when four lines of prisoners stretching back two miles were slaughtered by teams of priests working in shifts. The precise number of deaths is unknown, but they range from a modest 4,000 to the Aztecs's claimed 80,400. The reality was probably somewhere in between: "Allotting two minutes per sacrifice," says our source above, "the demographer and historian Sherburne Cook estimated that the number of victims associated with that single event was 14,100."

The precise ritual of sacrifice was peculiar to Huitzilopochtli: the victim was slashed open, his heart was torn out, and then the body was sent tumbling down the stairs. Some postulate this was something of a re-enactment, Templo Mayor representing the Hill of Coatepec where Huitzilopochtli was born and slew his sister Coyolxauhqui, tossing her body down the hill. Re-enacting the Sun's defeat of the Moon to give the Sun power to rise again makes intuituve sense to me, though of course I'm no expert. Allegedly the heart was then placed in a brazier and burnt as an offering, but I have serious questions about that as well, because the human heart is supposed to be notoriously difficult to burn. Urban legend? I'm all ears if anyone knows for sure.

Some had questions about whether the priests could actually get the job done in the required two minutes, so joy of joys, Dr Brendan Coventry of the Royal Adelaide Hospital decided to do some experimenting himself (what did I tell you about South Australians?). The results were astounding. Giving himself 20 seconds to get in and remove the heart, he was at first unsuccessful at sawing through the breastplate, because it's all bones. But by cutting through the sternum and diaphragm instead, on his first attempt he was able to extract the heart in 20 seconds flat. The second time, to prove it wasn't a fluke, he did it in just 17.

Medical Investigator Shiya Ribowsky only added to the squick when he commented:

I think the Aztecs had a terrific understanding of human anatomy. When they decided to sacrifice their victims, they knew it was going to be a lot easier to get into the chest cavity by making a hole in the abdominal wall and getting at the heart, than trying to get through the breastplate, the sternum, and the ribs, which were very difficult to saw through.

The victims were held down by four people and the priest would take a knife, and while the victim was still alive, plunge it right into the abdomen, rip open the abdomen with the knife, and made a hole big enough to get their arm in. They put their arm in, pierced through the diaphragm, pushing their hand up into the chest. And the heart is the only thing in the chest that's gonna be going like this [mimics a heart pumping], you know, beating. If feels different than the surrounding tissue. The average adult human's heart is around the size of a small grapefruit, and pretty much weighs around the same, and has that kind of feel in your hand.

So the priest would reach around until he felt the beating heart, grab onto it and then just pull for all he was worth until he yanked it off its attachments. I have no doubt that the victim felt the priest's hand in his abdomen and the hand ripping through the diaphragm, which was, I'm sure, exquisitely painful. And I have no doubt that the victim felt his heart being ripped from its attachments, but at that time the victim would lose consciousness. The reason is, as the heart was being compromised, blood flow to the brain would stop. The brain just doesn't have the capacity to maintain consciousness without that bloodflow.

Most people think that if you pulled somebody's heart out of their body that it wouldn't still be beating, but in fact it absolutely would. The heart has what's called inherent rhythmicity, meaning that the muscle cells of the heart beat on their own and don't require input from the brain to beat. So if you get a heart out of a human body quickly enough, say within a few seconds, it absolutely will still be beating when you're holding it.

I was rather glad to hear the victims lost consciousness once the heart was removed. I know there are anecdotes of guillotined heads seemingly retaining some awareness, but anecdotes don't mean much to me: no blood pressure = no consciousness, okay? It sounds horrific, and it was, but let's not forget that in Europe at the time traitors were broken on the wheel or hung, drawn and quartered. Given the choice of donating my heart to Huitzilopochtli or being drawn and quartered at the pleasure of the English King, I'd much rather the heart thing.

And for the record, don't imagine an obsidian knife wouldn't be up to the job. Obsidian blades can be so absurdly sharp they're still occasionally used to make scalpels today (though for some reason they're not U.S. FDA approved for use on humans). The crystal lattice means obsidian can be made many times sharper than steel, down to 3 nanometres, compared to the 1,000 nanometres (or 1 micron) that is the current definition of "razor sharp." A steel razor presents an edge 10,000 iron atoms thick; in the very best cases, a fresh piece of obsidian can present just one.

Feeding the Masses

Conventional descriptions of the Aztec ritual of sacrifice end with the victim’s body tumbling down the pyramid. Blinded by the image of a still-beating heart held aloft in the hands of the priest, one can easily forget to ask what happened to the body when it came to rest at the bottom of the steps...

This leads to the real surprise of the show: what happened to the dead guy once his heart was gone. The sacrifice scene from Apocalypto up there, being a strange mix of the totally accurate and wildly anachronistic, shows a pitch-perfect Huitzilopochtli sacrifice being carried out by the Mayans (who didn't worship Huitzilopochtli) in the name of Kukulkan (who didn't demand human sacrifice). So it's not such a big deal that it shows the ritual ending with the dude's head being lopped off (unnecessary), and that it later gives us the image of a vast field of dumped bodies to show you what colossal waste of life it all was (with Wally in the middle of it for the cinema release, because Mel Gibson is insane).

But from what I've been reading, there wasn't much waste actually going on. The Aztecs didn't throw the bodies away: they ate them.

After having torn their hearts from them and poured the blood into a gourd vessel, which the master of the slain man himself received, they started the body rolling down the pyramid steps. It came to rest upon a small square below. There some old men, whom they called Quaquacuiltin, laid hold of it and carried it to their tribal temple, where they dismembered it and divided it up in order to eat it...

After they had slain them and torn out their hearts, they took them away gently, rolling them down the steps. When they had reached the bottom, they cut off their heads and inserted a rod though them, and they carried the bodies to the houses which they called calpulli, where they divided them up in order to eat them. – Bernardino de Sahagún

Once the heart had been wrenched out it was offered to the sun and blood sprinkled toward the solar deity. Imitating the descent of the sun in the west the corpse was toppled down the steps of the pyramid. After the sacrifice the warriors celebrated a great feast with much dancing, ceremonial and cannibalism. – Diego Durán

For many years it was assumed the Spaniards made this stuff up to justify the conquest, but recent forensic investigation has confirmed that despite some exaggeration, they were a long way from outright fabrication. Durán in particular deserves your time, because he was writing immediately after the conquest and actually learned Náhuatl, and got into a lot of trouble for allowing the Aztec people to perpetuate aspects of their culture. He has academic cred, in other words, and 500 years later the forensic pathologists are backing him up.

Archaeologist Gabino Lopez Arenas carried out an analysis on craniums, tibia, humerus and jaws located among the offerings of the Great Temple and in the surroundings of the historical centre. The analysis revealed that the individuals had been decapitated and dismembered. It then appears that they were butchered and consumed “to absorb the divine force that held the body of the sacrificed,” said Arenas. “We observed that immediately after the victims were immolated their flesh was removed, this is confirmed because a great quantity of bones had cuts and alterations that were done while the bone was fresh and recently exposed to fire.” – April Holloway, Ancient-Origins.net

The modern perspective on this stuff has been promoted by Michael Harner, whom you can read here; it's a controversial idea, but personally it has me convinced. Not the part about "absorbing the divine force that held the body of the sacrificed", which sounds like bullshit (why to they always assume ancient cultures were fucking Age-of-Aquarius indigo children?). In reality they were after something far more basic: good old-fashioned nutrition.

In the Old World, domestication of herbivorous mammals, such as cattle, sheep, and pigs, proceeded apace with that of food plants. By about 7,200 B.C. in the New World, however, ancient hunters had completely eliminated herbivores suitable for domestication from Mesoamerica. Dogs, such as the Mexican hairless, and wildfowl, such as the turkey, had to be bred for protein. The dog, however, was a far from satisfactory solution because, as a carnivore, it competed with its breeders for animal protein. – Michael Harner, The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice

In other words, having spent several thousand years getting corn to work, the Aztecs had plenty of calories to go around, but they were starved for animal protein. Eating carnivores is always a last resort for people in this situation, because animals are only about 10% efficient at converting their food to bodymass. To grow a tonne of beef you need to feed your cows 10 tonnes of grass. Eating carnivores adds another layer to that process – lion is apparently completely delicious, but to grow an equivalent tonne of lion meat you need to feed your lions 10 tonnes of beef, which in turn takes 100 tonnes of grass. The loophole here was that dogs are actually omnivorous, so the dogs the Aztecs reared for food were efficiently fattened on vegetables and garbage. Even so, it was a luxury reserved for the rich.

The Aztecs responded to their increasing problems of food supply by intensifying agricultural production with a variety of ingenious techniques, including the reclamation of soil from marsh and lake bottoms in the chinampa, or floating garden, method. Unfortunately, their ingenuity could not correct their lack of a suitable domesticable herbivore that could provide animal protein and fats. Hence, the ecological situation of the Aztecs and their Mesoamerican neighbors was unique among the world's major civilizations. I have recently proposed the theory that large-scale cannibalism, disguised as sacrifice, was the natural consequence of these ecological circumstances.

A principal – and sometimes only – objective of Aztec war expeditions was to capture prisoners for sacrifice. While some might be sacrificed and eaten on the field of battle, most were taken to home communities or to the capital, where they were kept in wooden cages to be fattened until sacrificed by the priests at the temple-pyramids. Most of the sacrifices involved tearing out the heart, offering it to the sun and, with some blood, also to the idols. The corpse was then tumbled down the steps of the pyramid and carried off to be butchered. The head went on the local skull rack, displayed in central plazas alongside the temple-pyramids. At least three of the limbs were the property of the captor if he had seized the prisoner without assistance in battle. Later, at a feast given at the captor's quarters, the central dish was a stew of tomatoes, peppers, and the limbs of his victim. The remaining torso, in Tenochtitlán at least, went to the royal zoo where it was used to feed carnivorous mammals, birds, and snakes.

Through cannibalism, the Aztecs appear to have been attempting to reduce very particular nutritional deficiencies. – Michael Harner

Every month – so at least 18 times a year – the Aztecs would  throw feasts like this, explaining why they tolerated such loose control over their conquests. It's not as mad as you might be thinking. A while ago Cracked ran an article about Steve Callahan, who was shipwrecked and left drifting in a dinghy for two months. The effects on his appetite were... interesting.

My sense of taste also changed, and by that I mean I started to see fish eyes as candy. Obviously I started eating fish. You know, it's not like you're going to run into a cow swimming around out there. But by the end of the voyage I looked forward to the eyes and liver, because they had all sorts of vitamins my body was begging me for, and that made the fish taste so unbelievably good. I ate delicacies you find only in exotic seafood restaurants not because I had to, but because I wanted to. You tell yourself it's gross, but you suddenly want it, because fish meat and water are driving you mad, and also you might be dying of some sort of deficiency... Your body is good at guiding you toward the things that will keep it from croaking, and so suddenly you're hungry for fish eyes. – 5 Things I Learned About Survival While I Was Lost At Sea, Cracked.com

Or delicious long pork, as the case may be, which apparently really does taste like pork or veal. Aztec commoners didn't have regular access to the turkeys and dogs the upper classes were eating; if they wanted animal protein, they had to content themselves with worms or snakes – or this month's prisoners.

Some dieticians shoot the idea down, saying the Aztecs could get the eight necessary amino acids from their staple crops corn and beans. But to ensure their bodies absorbed the corn and beans as amino acids instead of just packing them away as energy, the Aztecs would have to've eaten large quantities of both simultaneously – and according to Diego Durán, the poor could not harvest corn and beans simultaneously. Consider also the effect of a crop failure or two, which is often a trigger for war even in the Old World (the French Revolution, for example, was preceded by crop failures brought on by the 1783 eruption of Laki in Iceland). Crop failures mean masses of starving, desperate people, and those tend not to lie down and die quietly. If they're already craving animal fats and have some military training – and the culture's open to the possibility of cannibalism – the solution is obvious.

No, this is just a beef fillet. But apparently it looks pretty similar.

The City of the Gods
The thing is, it wasn't always like this. A thousand years before Tenochtitlán, another city stood in the Valley of Mexico, a place of relative peace and prosperity. Teotihuacán ("Tyo-tee-wah-can"), the Birthplace of the Gods, was already in ruins when the Aztecs arrived, and we know almost nothing about the people who built it – who they were, what language they spoke, even what they called their city (the name is Aztec). The first proper city in the Americas, from 300 to 700 CE it expanded into an architectural masterpiece. Through the city runs the arrow-straight Avenue of the Dead, nearly two-miles long and lined with low, smaller stone pyramids. Beside this Avenue rises the flat-topped Pyramid of the Sun, 220 metres square at the base and 230 metres high, or as high as a 20 storey building – a colossal edifice of earth and sun-baked brick sheathed with stone. The smaller Pyramid of the Moon rises at the northern end of the Avenue, and at its southern end is a great square enclosure walled with massive buildings called the Citadel. Beyond the ceremonial centre lie the remains of humbler dwellings, covering almost 20 square kilometres, making it larger than Imperial Rome.

Fully occupied, it would have been home to some 50,000 people – an unprecedented number for the Americas, which points to some major improvements in agriculture. And indeed, Teotihuacán is believed to have been the culture that perfected the chinampa, the "floating garden" system of agriculture. Artificial islands built in the shallow lakes of the region, chinampas were constructed from reeds and silt from the lake bottom anchored at the corners by willow or cypress trees. They were enormously productive, as the soil was rich and refreshing it was as simple as dredging up a new layer of silt. An important difference from Old World farming, however, was the layout: in the Old World fields were readied by a plough pulled by a beast of burden and then sowed by broadcast seeding, which meant fields tended to be dedicated to a single crop. In the Americas all field prep had to be done by human muscle. There were no animals that could draw a plough, so fields were tilled by hand-held sticks or hoes, and seeds were planted individually. Most New World fields thus came to be mixed gardens of many crops planted together – squash, pumpkins, beans, chillies and of course, corn. To us it sounds more like a veggie patch, but for 1,500 years it fed major world civilisations.

Although well fed, Teotihuacán wasn't quite bloodless, worshipping, among others, the fucking awful Xipe Totec, who had the nastiest rites of all the Mesoamerican gods – a young woman's skin was removed in one piece (and none of my sources will confirm she was dead when they did this) and then worn by a priest like a wet onesie, whereupon he danced to commemorate the arrival of spring, when nature puts on a new coat of vegetation. Why he couldn't just change his robe or something, I don't know. But for its time and place, Teotihuacán seems to've been a relatively peaceful place. Warriors and weapons aren't prominent in the artwork there, and their principle god seems to have been the rain god, Tlaloc. See "major improvements in agriculture," above.

But then suddenly, it all fell apart. Around the year 700, about the same time as the Classical Mayans, Teotihuacán fell, was looted and burned. Its people were massacred or dispersed, and its influence suddenly ceased. The Chichimecs, or Sons of the Dog – nomadic tribes from the north who had probably always been there – had finally broken through. They were a warlike people, so their god was the fierce Tezcatlipoca ("Tez-cat-lee-poke-ah"), the Smoked Mirror. Another confusing name: the Mesoamericans made mirrors out of obsidian, so calling him the Smoked Mirror made him a god of obsidian. It was the same as us calling a deity the Lord of Steel (which I'm pretty sure is a Dio album): he was a war god, in other words, his nagual was the jaguar, and his chosen were the aforementioned Jaguar Warriors. He was emphatically not a god hopeychange, and his people could no longer be held off by the Teotihuacán king's army.

For the longest time we didn't know why, and debate is ongoing, but evidence seems to point to internal unrest: it seems a great civilisation really isn't conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. Or at least been seriously weakened. There is evidence of population decline in the 6th Century, with more young skeletons showing signs of malnutrition. It seems the people of Teotihuacán were no longer being fed. The chinampas had failed them.

Why? Because of droughts that followed the Extreme Weather Events of 535-536, an 18-month period of cloudy skies, crop failures and famines that was described in both Roman and Chinese historical accounts. And for that, current thinking blames the eruption of the Lake Ilopango volcano in El Salvador. This Plinian-type eruption is now known to have occurred at about this time and was much bigger than previously believed, killing about 100,000 people outright and displacing about 400,000 more. Its signature can be found all over the region in the form of a thick, white layer of tephra, locally called the tierra blanca joven, or Young White Earth. Researchers have discovered TBJ deposits as far afield as Nicaragua, Honduras and in offshore deposits, indicating the eruption produced five times the volume of ash and debris than originally estimated, now calculated at 84 cubic kilometers (for comparison, Mount St Helens was a puny 0.25 cubic kilometres). It was the second-largest volcanic eruption of the last 200,000 years, beaten only by the 1815 eruption of Tambora, which blasted 160 cubic kilometres into the air and caused the 1816 Year Without a Summer. (Still dwarfed by the Toba eruption of 75,000 years ago, which put 2,800 cubic kilometres of rock into the air and reduced the human population to just 10,000, maybe as few as 40 breeding pairs. It was the closest human beings ever got to extinction – so far, at least).

Now imagine what that did to farming in the region. Actually, you don't need to imagine, this article about the Mayan Cultural Collapse spells it out in great detail. Again, Apocalypto: remember the scenes leading into the city, full of starving, diseased people and fields of swaying dead crops? Mel got that right, but it actually happened some 700 years earlier than his movie. What he didn't get right was the idea of hunter-gatherers living in virgin jungle. In truth, by the peak of the Classical Mayan civilisation they were packing in up to 240 people per square kilometre in rural areas, and over a thousand in the cities.

Today the Petén, geographically the largest province in Guatemala, has a population of 400,000, living in isolated towns scattered through a forested wilderness. In the eighth century, by some estimates, ten million people lived in the Maya lowlands. In fact, settlements around centers like Tikal reached population densities of up to 2,600 people per square mile. That’s more than half the population density of modern-day New York City. The landscape was an almost unbroken fabric of intensely cultivated farms, gardens, and villages, linked by a web of trails and Sacbe'ob, paved causeways connecting monumental city-states.

It would have been a similar situation further north, but with chinampas rather than the Mayan slash-and-burn farms. And when that many people suddenly can't eat, as I said, they don't usually lie down and die quietly – they pick up a weapon and go after neighbouring tribes, killing or driving them off and taking their food. In an area like Mexico, short on wild game, sooner or later someone is going to give cannibalism a shot (after all, people were the only things around there were more of than needed...) and it only takes one tribe to make it popular, because suddenly their warriors will be well fed and have a major competitive advantage. From there every other tribe will ultimately have to adopt cannibalism or be annihilated.

Thus, Aztecs.

The Last Twitches of Conscience
This is why I consider vegans in the same category as people who place their CDs label side down: conscientious, but misguided. Human beings need animal protein, and we'll go to some insane lengths to get it. That said, I actually agree with vegans that we need to stop harvesting animals for meat, but rather because it's inefficient than because it's unethical. Every one of us needs animal protein, but thanks to the ten-to-one rule I mentioned earlier, we can't possibly grow enough animals to provide it for 7 billion plus. So I'm putting a lot of hope in the synthetic beef idea, or the Beyond Meat guys who are finding ways to make it directly from plants – meat without animals, a beautiful dream.

Because make no mistake, we're heading for exactly the same scenario that created the Aztecs – overpopulation, climate change, no shortage of calories, but completely starved of animal proteins. It's science or soylent green.

So discussions of the morality of the Aztec culture are irrelevant in my view – they did what they had to do to survive, just like everyone else on this planet. They just found a religion to justify it. But they were still human beings, capable of love and compassion and thought and reason, so that doesn't mean they were happy about it. Which brings us to the figure of Quetzalcóatl.

Quetzalcóatl ("Kwet-zal-co-aht-el," or Kukulkan to the Mayans), was the Feathered Serpent, the most famous of the Mesoamerican gods. In his very early days Quetzalcóatl the god was difficult to separate from Quetzalcóatl the man, a Toltec king first called Topiltzin, who changed his name when his reign over the city of Tollan really got into gear. I wonder if maybe we shouldn't separate them at all; ancestors often become gods in the passing of time, and Topiltzin was a very fondly-remembered king, a culture hero, lawgiver and bringer of peace and prosperity to his people. From there to god of wind, spirit and learning, bringer of knowledge and civilisation, isn't such a huge step.

And like King Arthur, Barbarossa and Ghenghis Khan, his people couldn't let him go, believing that one day he would return. According to the tradition, Quetzalcóatl promised to come back in the year of One Reed, some 500 years in the future, and he would be coming from the east, from over the sea. When Moctezuma II, the final Aztec tlatoani, met Hernán Cortés, the ultimate conquistador, popular history says he thought he was meeting a living god whose return had long been foretold. It might be more Spanish propaganda, but his actions were certainly not those of a ruler meeting a military threat. For what it's worth, Moctezuma seems to have been a very different tlatoani from his predecessors, not nearly as into sacrifice with his own hands, and devoted to the peaceful and nerdy Quetzalcóatl. This means a great deal, because centuries earlier Quetzalcóatl – or Topiltzin, who's basically the same thing – tried to forbid human sacrifice once and for all. Quetzalcóatl promised to return to end the killing and usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. The 300 years from the fall of Teotihuacán to the rise of the Toltecs were a long war between the followers of Quetzalcóatl and the followers of Tezcatlipoca, and for the reasons outlined above, the followers of Tezcatlipoca won.

But right from the beginning, their conscience told them their cannibal empire would have to end one day. The clock was always ticking.

Post-scriptum
If you're as tickled by history as I am, two final things: apparently, the outline of Tenochtitlán's island is still preserved in the modern streets of Mexico City, if you know what to look for. In fact, the outline of the city itself conforms pretty closely to the shores of Lake Texcoco, which was drained and reclaimed some time in the 1700s. Amazing to think that the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, a temple to my other great passion, now sits more or less where Lake Xochimilco used to be!

And although a bit of a zombie language, Náhuatl still gave English such useful words as tomato (from xitomatl), chilli (chīlli), coyote (cóyotl) and of course chocolate (from xocolatl, or Bitter Water – Aztec drinking chocolate tasted like black coffee mixed with red wine (better than it sounds!), and it wasn't until Europeans added milk and sugar in the 19th Century that what we call chocolate was invented. You can find a recipe for the real stuff here; just remember to start with raw cacao, not cocoa).

And you only have to go as far as YouTube to hear the music of Náhuatl spoken again.

On This Day... (Another) Motorcraft 100

On this day 30 years ago, another race in an exotic, far-off location: the (second) Motorcraft 100 at Wanneroo Park.

Not pictured: Wanneroo Park

Western Australia is a long bloody way from anywhere. Ronnie Johns, dressed as Eric Bana playing Chopper Reid, once quipped that, "You're so fuckin' far away, Perth, why don't you just fuckin' keep going?" I went onto Google Maps once and asked it to plot a journey from Steep Point, Australia's most westerly point, to Byron Bay, Australia's most easterly point. Computer said no. It's still cheaper to fly to New Zealand – an entirely separate country – than it is to Perth.

Which makes it pretty remarkable that Perth's Wanneroo Park managed to host an ATCC round every year. Remember that Australian touring cars in the 80's were run like Formula 1 in the 60's: the tracks did their deals with the teams individually, offering them appearance money to show up and then hoped to recoup the investment at the gate. The transport costs alone must've made WA an expensive round to attend, so only the big teams that had plenty of finance or a shot at the championship bothered to attend.

Case in point, there were only fifteen starters at Wanneroo Park: the established stars from Volvo, Nissan, Holden, BMW and Ford, plus the cream of the local club racing scene: Graeme Hooley, who'd made the trip to the civilised states a couple of times this year in a VK Commodore backed by Scheel seats; Tim Howton, in a blue #74 Mazda RX-7 (which I didn't know was even homologated for Group A, so who knows, maybe it wasn't?); and a white #12 BMW 635 which I think must've been driven by Simon Emmerling, though you don't need to remember that because he only showed up for this one round.

Oh, and Tim Slako. More on him in a moment.

Qualifying was one of those statistical anomalies that shows up every so often: young John Bowe had taken his first pole position in the Volvo with a 1:01.96, and both Peter Brock and George Fury behind him had set identical times, 1:01.97. At race speed, that worked out as a difference of less than a metre. That might be less astonishing than Jarama '97 because the stopwatches only measured times to the hundredth of a second, but it was still impressively close for three different cars by three different manufacturers, on a track where lap time was determined not just by power or aerodynamics, but by how confidently the driver could throw the car up through the Esses and over the crest at Barbagallo Bend. Everyone had been pushing like crazy – and until the stewards got better stopwatches, it literally couldn’t be closer.

The race was intense, showcasing some beautiful driving from Brock (seriously, watch the way he throws the Commodore up the hill – oversteer flowing like a fine wine), and the young guns Seton and Bowe. And Robbie Francevic recovered from a bad start to bank some valuable points. But for most of them the race ended at the side of the road: a distributor wire fractured in the #05, a pinprick let all the air out of Graeme Crosby's tyre, and then Bowe's Volvo went skit and what should've been an easy first win for Bowe became a DNF (Engine) instead. This was the new car from Eggenberger/RAS Sport, so unlike the older car it didn't have 18 months of local development under its belt, and nobody on the Volvo Dealer Team seemed to have a clue how it worked, as Bowe revealed to Neil Crompton in the interview:

Bowe: "I don’t know, mate. The engine went off and I reckon we maybe had the wrong grade of plugs in it or something. It’s a Swedish engine and we don’t know much about it. It just died altogether, like it cooked the plugs or something. It just definitely hasn’t got any fire though!"

Crompton: "There’s been some strange engine management problems, trying to get the ignition right. Has it been a bit of a worry?"

Bowe: "The only problem is that we really don’t know that much about it at the moment. We didn’t get any instructions with it or anything, so it’s done a remarkable job really. It just pisses me off that I was stroking along pretty easy!"

So after a lot of good, close racing, the win belonged to George Fury, 15 seconds ahead of his teammate Glenn Seton – Gibson Motorsport's first 1-2 finish. Apparently they knew how their engines worked just fine. Francevic, however, despite leading the championship on 133 points, went away from Wanneroo with some hard thinking to do about whether the frontrunning pace of the new #4 Volvo was worth the risk that it mightn’t finish at all.

Spotlight Driver: Tim Slako
A Kiwi who'd made a new home in the wide brown land, Slako had plenty of experience in a number of racing disciplines, but none of them paid as much as touring cars. So, bowing to the inevitable, he'd taken support from his West Racing Motor Development business and bought an ex-Andy Rouse Rover SD1. To that he added backing from Alf Barbagallo, WA's answer to Bob Jane, and radio station 96FM, hence the #96 on his doors. And it was paaaank! With lime green bumpers! Because when you're driving an ugly car, a loud colour scheme just feels right.

Spotlight Car: Rover SD1
The Top Gear boys have already covered this machine a couple of times. In S4E8, Richard Hammond bade farewell to the Rover V8 engine and went historic racing in an SD1, the best home the V8 ever had. Then Jeremy bought one for their British Leyland challenge in S10E7, which ended up costing him £978.

Interestingly, in the engine sendoff Hammond also provided an Australian connection when he mentioned the Rover V8 powering, "the Brabham single-seater." If that's the engine I think it was, he meant the Oldsmobile 215, which because of its light aluminium construction had been the basis of Jack Brabham's 1966-1967 championship-winning Repco F1 engines. Which is not to say the Repco V8 was was the same engine as the Rover V8: Formula 1, especially in the 60's, was a complete free-for-all and Repco thieved parts from Daimler, Alfa Romeo and local suppliers like Len Lukey to screw together the best hot-rod engine they could imagine. Rover would've had their own suppliers and would've ended up with a completely different parts list, compromised further by the Group A regs. But still, pretty versatile block.

Top Gear got some things wrong, though, starting with the looks. Hammond recounted that the designers were so pleased with their styling that they unveiled the prototype next to a collection of Italian supercars, and then referred to it as "handsome." I often worry about the Top Gear crew and how often they get their eyesightchecked, because half the cars they praise for their looks are utterly hideous, and the Rover SD1 was the most hideous of them all. The starting point was basically a cheese wedge on wheels, fer chrissake, which was stretched and melted and slung over the wheels all wrong and then the details were seemingly sketched in by the same design studio behind the Sinclair ZX81. It all added up to a shape that offended the eyes but didn't have the decency to be a wallflower. In the designer's mind it was meant to resemble the Ferrari Daytona, but the Daytona was not an especially good-looking car either. I'm sorry, but it just wasn't: it looked like it was styled by a Detroit sheet metal worker who thought the panels would be made from pig iron (which, being a 1960s Ferrari, they probably were).

Rover SD1, Ferrari Daytona, Mazda RX-7 and the Gadgetmobile. See if you can tell which is which.

Despite that, with a bit of actual care taken in the build process – say, if it was built by a racing team rather than the BMC crew at Longbridge – the SD1 could've been a pretty good racecar. That it wasn't (in Australia especially) is a bit of a mystery. With a 3.5-litre engine, it should've been basically the same car as the BMW 635 that had completely dominated the 1985 season, only with better aerodynamics (that radiator-less front end with the sloping windscreen didn't exactly spoil the airflow) and some 255 kW to the BMW's 240. Cramming in eight cylinders instead of six should've removed the long, ungainly crankshaft all straight-sixes are burdened with, and made for a powerplant that jumped up and down the rev range much more easily.

But that's not what happened, for a number of reasons. For one, the BMW's engine was unusually good (it had come out of the M1 supercar), and under the skin the 635 and the SD1 were nothing alike at all. Where the BMW was independently coiled all-round with a limited-slip diff, the Rover beancounters had forced the design team to bin their planned double wishbones in favour of cheaper MacPherson struts, with a live axle and Watt's linkage at the rear. In other words, at normal road speeds the Rover would give you a fairly comfortable ride, but out on the racetrack it'd be all thumbs. Where the BMW sniffed out every last skerrick of grip, the Rover was left skating, its camber settings changing when it hit a bump and its rear wheels unable to put the extra power down. Basically, when you leaned on them really hard, the BMW hung on and the Rover let go.

Mostly, though, the difference in results was the difference between a cash-strapped West-Australian/Kiwi privateer and a well-funded BMW factory operation. Tim Slako's Rover was originally a Group 1 car built by Patrick Motorsport in 1980, converted to Group A by Andy Rouse in 1982, and sold to Slako at the end of the 1984 season. It shouldn't be conflated with the Tom Walkinshaw factory-backed Rovers that were based on the 1984-model Vitesse, which was a sort of half-arsed evo model.

You can see the effects in the Motorcraft 100. On the swooping, up-and-down Wanneroo tarmac, Slako was lapped before the end, and you could see the Rover constantly stepping out at the back as the driver ran out of grip and had to fall back on talent instead. Slako had the talent, and managed to keep the Scheel Commodore behind him for most of the race, but in the end it was never going to hold up. The SD1 was far more competitive than a badly-built car from a tiny, broke manufacturer should've been, but in the end second is still the first of the losers. Despite running BMW and Volvo ragged for the 1985 and '86 ETCC titles, Rover would pull out at the end of the year, disillusioned with the politics and unable to bear the expense of failed championship tilts.

And before you accuse me of chauvinism, yes, under the skin the Commodores were pretty much the same as the Rover. But they also had a lot more power.

On This Day... the Motorcraft 100

So, Adelaide. Adelaide. City of Churches, home of the Fringe Festival, the Hilltop Hoods and, in one of the great mismatches of history, the Australian Grand Prix. SA's always been a centre for weirdness, but not the flamboyant awesome kind of weirdness of Salvador Dali, the weirdness of a housewife who wakes you at 3am to offer you fresh-baked scones and insists on vacuuming the carpet twice over, once with the grain and once against. It's one of the few places in the world where Coke isn't the number one beverage: Farmers Union outsells it three-to-one.

Something deeply unsettling about that.

This weirdness trickles down to the cars they make, or did, back when they still made them. Mitsubishi released a Magna with a special cupholder that could hold a square Farmers Union carton as well as the round bottles decent human beings use – but no matter how good the Magna is, there's never been a Magna GTI, and it's hard to imagine what one would even be like.* It was the same with Chrysler before they sold their factories to Mitsubishi: the Valiant was a thoroughly adequate car, but it was also infected with Adelaide, so it was about as sexy as a tax accountant's waiting room. When William Balthrop took over as Chrysler MD his first act was to axe the Charger/Pacer racing programme, preferring to spend his promo budget on golf tournaments instead. That says it all.

Hey, could be worse. Ford and Holden both got infected with Melbourne, and look where that got us.

So you could be sure that when it was time for Adelaide to host a round of the ATCC, it was going to be a venue all its own. When Chrysler was testing the Charger, that venue was Mallala, a twisty little circuit that really should've ironed out that understeer. It came back in the late Group A era and gave itself to to the Skylines like the weaboo little whore that it was. But in between was a period of about 15 years where the racing happened at a track called the Adelaide International Raceway.

What made this place different was the distinct impression that it started as a dirt oval and just sort of grew from there. The "Super Bowl" was probably the first paved oval in the country, but its diminutive size – 200-metre straights matched with 200-metre corners, banked at 7 degrees – suggest to me that it was just a paved version of a dirt oval. But when it opened in 1971 Sports Sedans were about to become the big thing that drew the crowds, along with, to a lesser degre, touring cars. So they needed a road course as well, and put in a really simple one, linking the drag strip back to the Super Bowl by a simple-as-you-like corner complex and back straight.

Even in this longest form AIR could produce sub-minute lap times, so despite the name the Motorcraft 100 was actually pegged at 150km, to ensure the customers got their full 40 minutes of racing. The price was that the extra distance would require the drivers to be very careful with their tyres – Dick Johnson got on record as saying some would even have to pit to make it to the finish. He'd know, in the heavy Mustang he was probably one of them.

Qualifying saw George Fury's run of pole positions abruptly ended. Peter Brock was back after a jaunt racing in Europe, and the extra kilometres over there had seemingly done him a world of good, claiming the top spot with a 57.91 laptime. Fury probably could've been faster, but the Nissan's turbo engine really penalised you for getting on the power too early when coming out of the speedbowl – which was exactly what you needed to maximise speed down the long front straight. With a few extra corners the weight of Brock's Commodore might've slowed him down some more, but with so few of those the AIR circuit was totally dominated by that straight, which made up nearly half the lap. Advantage brute force and natural aspiration, assuming you knew how to use it – John Harvey's sister car was back in 7th, beaten by 1.2 seconds.

Spotlight Car: None. Or rather all of them, sort of...
There was no standout car at Adelaide, but there were intriguing signs of the ongoing development war. Brock's pole wasn't purely down to his talent, extraordinary as that was: it was also down to some engine upgrades the Holden Dealer Team refused to clarify but claimed gave an extra 12 kW. But that extra power came at the cost of reliability, and when the engine let go on the back straight Brock decided to return to the pits – immediately, cutting across the grass and entering pit lane from the wrong end. Race control slapped him with a disqualification, stripping him of his fastest lap.

Similarly, the two Peter Jackson Skylines had been fitted with experimental new pistons, but the nature of experiments is that they sometimes fail. When Fury started blowing smoke after just a few laps, he wisely parked it and walked away with a DNF. With the team leader down for the count Seton put in a brilliant drive, completely making up for his Sandown indiscretions, but by half-distance his engine had likewise given up the ghost. A double DNF wasn't much reward for the effort the Gibson Motorsport team had put in, but that's the nature of the game sometimes.

More interesting was the Volvo Dealer Team, who'd entered a second car for a young up-and-comer by the name of John Bowe. Former team boss Mark Petch has recently outlined where he sourced this car: surprisingly, despite being right-hand drive, it wasn't built in Australia, but in Switzerland (not helping the case that it's a completely different country from Sweden). It was originally built by Rudi Eggenberger and, when he became a Ford entrant instead, inherited by Belgian outfit RAS Sport as a spare car to be used for R&D. Since one of the ideas they were testing was whether right-hand drive would give an advantage on tracks with mostly right turns, the T-car ended up converted to RHD and fitted out with all the latest up-to-the-minute upgrades. Enter Mark Petch, in Europe shopping for a new car for the Volvo Dealer Team.

John Stewart and I attended the 3-day Monza RAS tests and agreed to purchase the RHD T-car at the end of the test program despite the fact that none off the works drivers felt their was any real advantage. Thomas Lindström however thought that we would get a small advantage with the RHD as changing gears with your left hand was very natural for drivers in Australia, so on his advice we purchased the car on behalf of Volvo Australia, and had the car airfreighted to Australia, just in time for the 4th round to the ATCC in Adelaide. – Mark Petch, Shannons Club

It was painted in VDT colours (not a huge job, they were the same as the RAS team's Nordica colours) and given the racing #4, but since it was a new car that needed a shakedown, championship leader Robbie Francevic elected to stick with his trusty #10 instead, leaving the new #4 to Bowe. Qualifying showed that the new car was fast, Bowe stopping the clocks at 58.71 seconds to Francevic's 59.54, or the difference between 3rd on the grid and 10th. But Francevic had spent his practice sessions getting the car to baby its tyres rather than go for outright speed, which proved him wise when one green bottle after another tumbled before him. Robbie Francevic did his best impression of Alain Prost that day, driving smoothly and keeping up a strong rhythm until the opposition wilted, and so took another impressive victory.

On the championship table, it was now Francevic first, daylight second: with a massive 110 points, the Aucklander was a full 46 points clear of Tony Longhurst, who was only second thanks to consistency and those handy small-capacity bonus points for his BMW 325i. Fury’s DNF cost him, leaving him on a static 54, while Graeme Crosby headed a tense three-way struggle between himself, Dick Johnson and Jim Richards, with 46, 45 and 44 points respectively.

Robbie Francevic was more on top than ever, but everyone else's cars were getting faster – and his was not.

* Right now Magna fans are probably throwing things at the screen and wondering if I've forgotten the TH Magna Executive, which was lighter than the Sports but had the same 3.5-litre V6. Mitsubishi advertised it as having 147 kW at 5,000rpm, and hoped nobody noticed it actually redlined at 6,000rpm. So, up to 150km/h or so, it was as fast a contemporary HSV – imagine the look on the Haitch-Ess-Vee owner's face when he squirted off at the lights and realised he was unable to pull away! My answer is that, a) they were very careful to hide all that performance under a nothing-to-see-here body and badge, thus proving my point about Adelaide after all, and b) what Magna fans?

On This Day... the Castrol Challenge

30 years ago today, Round 3 of the 1986 Australian Touring Car Championship, the Castrol Challenge at Sandown Raceway.

Yep, a sprint round at Sandown. This sort of thing used to be pretty common actually, back when the circuits made their money from bums on seats; all the major circuits booked both an ATCC round and an Australian Endurance Championship round. Amaroo Park, for example, hosted both an ATCC sprint race (the Better Brakes 100) and an AEC endurance round (the Better Brakes 300); at Sandown it seemed Castrol was calling the shots, so this year the pre-Bathurst warmup would be called the Castrol 500, and the early-season ATCC round simply called itself the Castrol Challenge.

Interesting points for this race? Well, the circuit itself wasn't quite the one we know today, but the slightly longer "international" version they dreamed up in the mid-80's – instead of the fast esses down the hill after Turn 6, the cars turned a hairpin that led to a long loop with a couple of extra twists and turns that finally rejoined around the old Turn 9, bringing the corner count up to 15 and the lap length up to 3.9km. Originally the race was pegged at 25 laps, but TV commitments saw the distance reduced to 21.

The other interesting development was that the Mark Petch Volvo team was no longer the Mark Petch Volvo team. Unable to maintain the team at the level required to chase this championship, Petch had managed to talk Volvo’s surprisingly vast Australian dealer network into buying up the the team’s assets – the well-developed, but now definitely aging, Volvo 240T racecar, plus its associated spares inventory – and run it as a works team, with dealers from Australia and New Zealand to provide 40% of the team’s budget. Seeing a Promised Land of marketing benefits previously reserved for Ford and Holden, Volvo went all in. Robbie Francevic and his car became the core of the shiny new Volvo Dealer Team.

Yes, "Volvo Dealer Team." That name still gets me – it sounds slightly Python-esque, as if it's a dig at the Holden Dealer Team. But in fact they were deadly serious, bringing in former HDT manager John Sheppard to run the show. Petch would later rue the decision: Sheppard was given everything – the car, the equipment, the trained mechanics, the drivers – and ran it into the ground in only a few months (ask Harry Firth, he’d kind of made a career out of that sort of thing...). But at the time Sheppo was well-regarded and there was no way anyone could've known how badly it would turn out.

There is a lot of misinformation about what happened in 1986 when I persuaded Volvo Australia, with the invaluable help of Bob Atkins, to back the formation of a Volvo dealer Team. John Sheppard had nothing to do with the formation of the team and was suggested to me as an ideal person to run the team on a day-to-day basis as the Team Manager. John in theory was supposed to report to me but soon learnt that he could bypass me, and on the 10th July 1986 I resigned, and Volvo Australia paid me out. The rest is pretty much history. – Mark Petch, forum post on The Roaring Season

But one thing Sheppo always got right was presentation: the mechanics arrived in smart new uniforms, the car rolled out of a swish new Volvo transporter, and the basic Castrol livery was updated to proper factory Volvo racing colours – clean white with a series of blue stripes fading to black that recalled the crystal waters of a fjord.

So whatever the future held, right now you had to admit the Volvo Dealer Team looked pretty good – at least until George Fury passed Robbie Francevic in the closing laps and took his first race win of the season. The points table after Round 3: Francevic 82, Fury 54. The rest of the season would be an arm wrestle between these two outstanding drivers.

Spotlight Car: the VK Commodore SS Group A
Sandown was Peter Brock's home track, but Peter himself was off in Europe competing in the Monza 500 with Allan Moffat. So instead let's look at the car he was driving – an important one, because it indirectly ended up the prototype of the modern V8 Supercar. Certain design features that persist to this day – like the long-standing complaint that the V8s are under-tyred for their immense power and weight – trace back to this car and the the Group A rules, where every car had barely enough rubber by design.

The development of this car was a story of crushing disappointment. The short version is that it was a "sporting evolution" of the standard V8-powered VK Commodore SS, and was meant to've been Holden's main strike weapon for Bathurst '85. The problem was it hadn't been ready in time. You had to build 500 evolution models to qualify as a "sporting evolution": the original plan had been for Brock's HDT Special Vehicles to complete them between March and June of '85 for an August 1 deadline. However, wharfie strikes in Victoria delayed the arrival of valvetrain parts shipped from the U.S., meaning he couldn't finish the job until well into December. The VK model was getting long in the tooth by then (it had first launched in '84) and the successor VL was almost here, which kind of set the tone for the Group A Commodores in general – forever a year behind the pace.

Key to the car, as with all Group A cars, was the engine. In its normal trim, the ageing pushrod Holden V8 added up to 5,044cc, or just enough to trigger a savage weight penalty from the rules. To get around it, Holden made the inspired decision to de-stroke the engine by a millimetre, bringing it down to 4,987cc and allowing them to race in the 4.5-litre "class," where the required weight was 75kg lighter. That said, at 1,325kg it was still damn heavy – not wanting the Americans to crash the party, the Group A regs had been especially written to keep out low-tech muscle cars like this – so Holden would have to find some serious power to compensate.

Which they did. Holden had been racing this engine for 12 years now and knew how to get the most out of it. Induction was via the familiar four-barrel Rochester Quadrajet carburettor, mounted on a port-matched manifold fed by a HDT Cold Air Induction system. They had the combustion chambers gas-flowed by their old friends at Perfectune, then the engines were sent back to HDT for final assembly, including fitting the bigger valves, HeadMod tubular extractors, roller rockers and a high-lift Crane cam of HDT's own design. The result was 196 kW on the road, to say nothing of the 300 or so available in race tune, and a 418 Nm wall of torque. HDT claimed it would do 0-100 in 7 seconds flat and cover the quarter mile in 15, but those figures remained unverified.

Since the rules said you had to race with standard bodywork, that meant giving the road car a bodykit to improve the airflow. The front end was accordingly revised, with the radiator intakes reduced to a series of letterboxes, subtle sideskirts, and a bootlid modified with a "bird bath"-type rear spoiler of the kind that had been familiar in Group C, rather than the modest wings that were becoming fashionable in Europe.

Bilstein gas pressure shocks and a reinforced front sway bar were fitted, along with an Aussie M21 gearbox (although you could order a less clunky Borg Warner T5 for a $2,850 premium) mated to a Holden Salisbury diff. 16-inch alloys were standard, either polished or painted white, and the interior came with Scheel sports seats and a Momo wheel and gear knob, but only a simple two-speaker radio, no power steering and no electric anything – this was no luxury cruiser, after all.

The final flourish was its signature "Formula Blue" paint scheme, which gave the car its enduring nickname,"Blue Meanie," but actually came about because Peter had chosen the wrong interior trim – some weird turquoise-green herringbone pattern that didn't match.

The race car blue doesn’t quite match the interior colour, which is a greenish blue. [GM-H stylist] Phil Zmood pointed this out. "No, you’ve got it wrong," he said. So he attacked the problem himself. He added a bit of tinter to the race car colour and invented Formula Blue, which goes perfectly with the interior. – Peter Brock

Or not, as the buyer might decide for themselves. Either way, if you were posing in the carpark it was better to leave the door closed, but then again if you were posing in the carpark with this car you were doing it wrong. Of all the cars Brock built, Blue Meanie was the most focused on the driving dynamics, and therefore the most fondly remembered. Here's a review from back in the day: my favourite bit is, "Under normal circumstances, it’s totally forgiving and deceptively docile in traffic. But start to press on and it’s soon apparent that there’s very little sneeze factor built in. The Commodore will go exactly where it’s pointed, but if the driver points it in the wrong direction it takes a deft hand on the controls to retrieve the situation."

Have no doubts, if Brock'd had this car on time, in 1985, no Jaguar would ever have won Bathurst.

As it was, in 1986, the game had moved on and it was about 90% as good as it needed to be. Which of course, was not good enough.

Spotlight Driver: Graeme Crosby
The VK might've been a bit of a blunt instrument, but Holden's highly-polished orthodoxy wasn't without its benefits – where a new Sierra RS Cosworth would set you back $AU30,000 (not counting punitive import fees and taxes), and the upcoming RS500 closer to $40,000, you could purchase Blue Meanie for just $21,950 off the showroom floor. And – though this might be a bit naive of me – the long-established practice at Holden was to do a small run of 10 to 15 body shells just for the racing teams, so if you bought a racing shell and saved Holden the trouble of fitting all the junk that made it a road car, I imagine you could get it even cheaper. That meant Blue Meanie became the backbone of the ATCC over the '86-'87 period. Besides Brock and John Harvey's factory cars, among those who jumped on the bandwagon were old hands like Allan Grice (who'd go on to win this year's Bathurst) and Larry Perkins (yes, Perkins Engineering got its start with a Brock Commodore). Lower on the food chain were the various weekend warriors, blokes who went racing at their nearby circuits as a (very expensive, but presumably very fun) hobby. In some races half the grid seemed to be made up of VK's; 11 out of 40 entries at the Sandown enduro, for example, were SS Group A's.

Somewhere between the two extremes was Graeme Crosby, usually just "Croz." His Wikipedia page shows the Kiwi was actually an ex-Superbike and MotorGP racer, and from the looks of it a pretty bloody good one, taking scalps in the Isle of Man TT, Suzuka 8 Hours, stuff like that.

So he could be considered a professional racer, except that he was retired, and a bit of touring car action was his idea of a fun retirement. As such his was a privateer operation that had to count the pennies, and he had to scrounge for sponsors in the first two races – racing on his own wallet at Amaroo, then with Bob Jane T-Marts signage at Symmons Plains. Now, at Sandown, he debuted the sponsor that would stay with him for the rest of the ATCC, Systime engine management software, helpfully emblazoning the bonnet with the slogan, "Makes your car go faster."

Yes, an aftermarket ECU company sponsoring a carburettored Holden. Let's not ask questions there.

Croz didn't win a race all year, but he didn't exactly disgrace himself either, finishing well in most races even if he couldn't quite keep up with Fury and Francevic. But he did prove the equal of DIck Johnson in giving great in-car commentary, and he made good on his pledge to compete in every round of the ATCC this year. Maybe he opted for that instead of a holiday in the Caribbean? You can never tell with these turnouts.

It Was Just A Phase

Any Peter Brock fans reading this? Yeah, not anymore. Check this out:

That's 1988, in the middle of Peter's divorce with Holden, and there he is steering an XF Falcon AUSCAR at the Calder Park Thunderdome. So many Brock fans never made it past the denial stage of grief and prefer to forget that he ever drove Fords, or at least console themselves that, "He never put a Ford sticker on his Sierra."

But there's no getting around this one. In 1988 Brock was racing a BMW in touring cars, and the Sierra was in the future. But sponsors call the shots, and when Bob Jane opened the Thunderdome, Mobil decreed that Brock must race there. And after that messy Polarizer business he could hardly go and knock on Holden's door and ask for a spare Commodore, could he? So that's the famous #05, on the door of a Falcon, with Mobil sponsorship and proper blue-oval sticker. The man who once said, "I don't even like backing a Ford out of the driveway," was racing a Ford.

I've covered AUSCAR before, sort of, but the history of this weird little corner of Australian motorsport remains as fascinating as it is forgotten. It seems for the early days – the very early days, given the Dome didn't open until February '88 – the organisers allowed a fairly severe mismatch in machinery to get the grid numbers up. Holden runners could get a VL Commodore with a 5-litre V8 easily enough, but Ford runners were in a bit of a bind since the Cleveland V8 had been axed five years earlier. But a few people managed to get hold of them nevertheless, so presumably a few race teams out there still had them lying around from the Group C years.

Okay, so you could get some V8 muscle under the bonnet of your XF; there was still the problem of racing a wide-body Falcon against a much smaller VL Commodore which, let's not forget, was originally designed as a Torana replacement. Even with that bigger engine – 351 cubes against the General's 308 – you were still going to need some assistance to be competitive on a speedway.

Enter Wayne Draper. A former Ford designer, Draper had been the one who first designed the Group C Falcons's wild bodykits, the ones that made Tru-Blu and Greens-Tuf look oh-so good. It's often forgotten today, but to get cars like Tru-Blu onto a racetrack he'd first had to put them on the road. At the time Ford had been dead-set against racing, so Draper had gone over their heads into a silent partnership with fiberglass specialist Bob McWilliam, who ran an automotive body shop in Melbourne. Together they'd created Phase Autos Pty Ltd, and started producing the necessary 25 XD Falcons with Draper's extra bodywork, which they called the Phase 5, picking up where the stillborn Phase IV had left off. By the time the XE Falcon arrived Ford was back on board with racing, and those who ran Falcons in touring cars beat a path to Phase Autos Ltd's door to pick up a Phase 6 bodykit.

The Phase 6 Series II was applied to the follow-up XF Falcon of 1988, and so famously never went racing... in touring cars. In fact, with some minor tweaks, the XF and its body mods did see the racetrack, as AUSCAR stock cars, with a rear wing, deep chin spoiler and even a strange little flap along the rear roofline to keep the airflow under control. If you can't read the image above, it quotes Draper as saying:

"Jim Richards track-tested a car with and without the aero parts and said the car felt really great to drive with them fitted. We (Phase Autos) then said to AUSCAR that this would be a good package but the powers-that-be, conservative as they always are, weren't comfortable with things like roof spoilers etc. They let us run it for a short time in the early days, but eventually made us take it off. In the end, the AUSCAR guys just wanted a basic front spoiler and NASCAR-style rear spoiler for the XFs, just like the Commodores. The front spoiler they ended up with actually came off the Millennium Falcon Ute show car that I also designed."

If you're into alternative history, it also provides a glimpse of what a Group A Falcon might've looked like, had Broadmeadows tried it. Without V8 power, they would've been forced to dust off Dick Johnson's turbocharged Falcon Grand Prix of 1982. While that might've worked – multiplying the 4.1-litre Geelong six by the 1.4 turbo allowance stipulated in the rules results in a number pretty close to the old 5.8-litre Clevo – I personally think the resulting programme would've been a disaster, a black hole for money. And its only result would've been a car that combined all the worst traits of the Sierra RS500 and VN Commodore in one nightmare vehicle – fast in a straight line (like supersonic-freight-train-fast), but heavy, cumbersome, laggy, tyre-shredding and fragile as grandma's fine china.

So there you are. By 1990 or so the problem had disappeared: Holden had upgraded to the VN Commodore in both the ATCC and AUSCAR, a proper wide-body car with the same drag penalty as the EA Falcon, allowing the rulemakers to mandate the Fords run a similar 5-litre V8 to the Holdens. Their choice was an updated version of the Boss 302, replacing the elderly 351 Cleveland (which must've been getting hard to source parts for by now).

So whenever they tell you, "The XF didn't race!" you'll know better. It did. And in the hands of Peter Brock, no less. That gotta win you something at your local.

Django Unmatched

Django Unchained is one of the best movies ever made.

It doesn't seem so at first. While you're watching it it just seems like a gleefully violent Spaghetti Western Southern crossed with homages to the Blaxploitation films of the 70's. Fun, but hardly a D&M.

Its true impact doesn't become clear until later, when you sit down to watch sentimental tripe like Cold Mountain and realise it's now utterly unwatchable – as it should've been all along. It's tough to give a shit whether Inman comes home to his girl when you know he's been whipping Lil' Jody for breakin' eggs. Likewise, you don't care how fond Scarlett is of Mammy, you just wonder how many days she's spent in the hot box. And you don't weep for a single life lost in Pickett's Charge when you know it's a whole army of Brittles commanded by Candies. This is the gift of exploitation cinema.

Could somebody who so ardently admires and emulates the exploitation movies of ages past really make a film on this subject that would do justice to the gravity of the material? Actually, watching Django Unchained has convinced me that to ask such a question is to frame the issue exactly backwards. Particularly when compared to "serious" movies about American slavery, Django Unchained demonstrates that there are some things so baroquely horrible that only an exploitation treatment can do them justice. Unless an artist is willing to get their hands dirty; unless they’re prepared to call a monster a monster; unless they feel no qualms about slapping the audience upside the head with atrocities, and rubbing their faces in rank, steaming piles of cruelty — unless, that is, they have the courage not to give a single shit about decency or good taste — then they haven’t a chance of coming to honest grips with something as grotesque as slavery the way it was practiced in the Americas. There is no way to face directly the ingenuity of evil that slavery fostered without being lurid and offensive, because the reality itself was lurid and offensive. To a disgraceful extent, people in this country are still in denial about slavery nearly 150 years after its abolition; we need commercial art about the Antebellum South that is full of rape and flagellation and castration and people being branded in the face. That’s what slavery was, and it’s high time we as a society looked that history in the eye. Amistad, Glory, and Roots aren’t going to get us there, whatever their merits otherwise; only something like Django Unchained can do the job. – Scott "El Santo" Ashlin, 1,000 Misspent Hours and Counting

Given that, and given Australia's own deeply shameful and ongoing history of race relations, there's only one question left to ask:

How do we get George Miller to remake Rabbit Proof Fence?