1 March: First Blood to Seton

That a Nissan Skyline took the first round of the 1987 Australian Touring Car Championship was no surprise to anyone. That it was the #15 of Glenn Seton, however, rather than established ace George Fury, very much was. The son of 1965 Bathurst winnner Bo Seton was the odd one out in pit lane right now: Larry Perkins was 36 years old; Jim Richards was 39; Dick Johnson, George Fury and Peter Brock were all 42. Seton, in contrast, was just 21. As of last year he was just a kid rookie responsible for more than a few dented panels. History would remember him as the first of a new generation of drivers just starting to filter through from the lower formulae – Skaife, Lowndes, Murphy, Ingall – none of them asking for quarter, and absolutely none of them giving any.

The only photo I could find was from the Pressreader edition of Australian Muscle Car #80. "The Baby-Faced Assassin" was pretty accurate: even today, in his 50s, something about him suggests a hat with a propeller on top.

Technically, the curtain-raiser for the Australian season had come on 15 February, at Oran Park’s 25th Anniversary meeting, where the the headlining event was the $25,000 Castrol Clash For Cash. Since professional teams were thin on the ground, it became the debut win for the Lansvale Smash Repairs team, later the kings of the privateer ranks. The lads had realised their best bet was to focus on Sydney events, specialising in Amaroo Park (for Trevor Ashby) and Oran Park (for Steve Reed). In the ex-Ken Matthews VK Commodore, Reed had slowly reeled in and then passed the new Alfa Romeo 75 Turbo of Colin Bond, to take the win. Trevor Ashby was almost as successful in the opening AMSCAR round, splitting the JPS BMWs after a canny tyre choice from team manager Wally Storey.

We had our own tracks and because we had to work and worked hard to pay for it, we couldn’t do everything or pay for two cars. We had some sponsors that were very good to us and Lansvale Smash Repairs was our main sponsor. While one of us was away racing, the other would be at work. Even when we raced, whoever was racing would flash home Sunday night and be at work Monday morning like nothing had happened. – Trevor Ashby, AMC #90

Car seen here at Bathurst '86

When the teams assembled for Round 1 of the ATCC at Calder Park, the talk was still of Holden’s dumping of Peter Brock the week before, and the Mobil Holden Dealer Team’s planned three-car attack, which was to’ve included the world debut of the new VL Commodore, was pared down to just two older VKs instead. In Wellington the commentary team had mentioned that Brock’s race-winning VK had been sold to an Australian buyer for $80,000, not including spares, which they considered a bargain when it had cost $110,000 to build and the Momo wheels alone were $2,000 each (bear in mind that $110,000 back then equals a quarter of a million today). Cashflow concerns post-breakup however had forced Brock to sell the team’s newer VL instead, since it could fetch a higher price, and take the ageing VKs racing once again. Queenslander Gary Scott, ousted from Gibson Motorsport after their unsuccessful Bathurst campaign last year, was drafted in to replace the decamped Allan Moffat and John Harvey, and Mobil HDT was in (shaky) business.

Complicating things for Brock, there were now two other headline acts in the Holden lineup. Allan Grice had struck a deal with Graeme Bailey to race their Bathurst-winning VK with minimal Chickadee and Bob Jane T-Marts sponsorship, while Larry Perkins maintained his Enzed Fluid Connectors backing on the #11, the same PE 002 chassis he’d raced in Wellington. PE 001 was also on the grid in the form of Tony Noske’s #26 Kalari Transport Commodore, who was one of the three privateer Commodore drivers on the grid (the others being trucking magnate Graham Lusty and former motorcycle champion Graeme Crosby).

The other heavy-hitters were all there, too: Fred Gibson’s Peter Jackson Nissan team was unchanged apart from Scott’s departure, with the same Nissan Skyline RS DR30s as last year for drivers George Fury (#30) and Glenn Seton (#15). Development was ceaseless, however: the team had sorted out their tyre-chewing issues from Bathurst last year, and their engines were now being rebuilt by Glenn’s father Bo, complete with his own dyno trucked from Sydney to Melbourne. Backup would came from the #14 Everlast Batteries entry of Murray Carter.

This and all subsequent photos sourced from account "malscar" on Photobucket. Hope that's okay.

But of course, whatever gossip was left over after discussing Brock and Holden was being spent on the teams that had brought new machinery. Frank Gardner’s JPS Team BMW had brought along a pair of BMW’s new strike weapon, the M3, light and compact but jammed with a naturally-aspirated four-cylinder engine with a redline somewhere in the stratosphere. Officially its homologation papers didn’t take effect until 1 March – race day itself – but in a rare demonstration of good sense CAMS got approval from all the other competitors and allowed them to practice and qualify anyway. Which they must've immediately regretted, because in the rainy Saturday sessions lead driver Jim Richards had stuck his #3 on pole with a lap of 1.05.74 – a time that‘d be smashed in the dry on race day – with teammate Tony Longhurst back in 4th, nearly a second slower.

Lining up alongside Richards was Dick Johnson in his new Sierra RS Cosworth. Like BMW, their arch-rivals Ford of Europe had put together a new car specifically to win this year’s World Touring Car Championship, and as Ford Australia’s de facto works team DJR had first dibs. Although cars had been put together in their new workshop at the back of Ross Palmer’s factory in Brisbane, the hardware underneath was all Andy Rouse, which had cost a mint. Thankfully, Johnson had a mint to spend thanks to his new prime sponsor Shell, who were bankrolling him to the tune of $1.1 million a year (only Fred Gibson had more). With that kind of money, Johnson had been able to expand to a two-car outfit for the first time, drafting in former motorcycle racer Gregg Hansford to drive the second Sierra: Dick’s #17, chassis DJR1, was built in conventional right-hand drive, while Gregg’s #18, chassis DJR2, was built in European left-hand drive, to take advantage of circuits that turned mostly left or mostly right (alas, the idea turned out to be an expensive flop). Other Fords on the grid included the less fondly-remembered Oxo Supercube Sierras, also Rouse-sourced cars, being run by a new team put together by Don Smith (#36) in partnership with Port Macquarie’s Andrew Miedecke (#35). New Zealand’s Neville Crichton was also there in the older XR4 Ti, most likely the ex-Steve Soper Eggenberger car he’d raced in Wellington, while Lawrie Nelson had brought along his #28 Capri Components Mustang.

Even more exotic was Colin Bond’s new Alfa Romeo 75 Turbo – the #75 on his doors vestigial no longer. Like his previous GTV6s, the 75 had been built by the Belgian Luigi team, and had allegedly run briefly – very briefly – at Zolder. In Europe the 75 was notoriously fickle, but here in Australia it seemed to find some reliability, even though it had yet to be “Australianised,” meaning it was still LHD. The price of reliability, however, was a chronic shortage of power: at Oran Park Bondy had come away guessing his engine was producing only about 150 kW instead of the promised 240 – barely better than the road version’s 114. Nevertheless, Bond had given it a proper Caltex livery and was ready to race in the Under 2.5-litre class – pitching it directly against the BMWs.

So it was that the BMW M3, the Sierra RS Cosworth and the Alfa Romeo 75 Turbo – built to win at Monza, Spa and the Nürburgring – together made their world debuts at lowly Calder Park, on the northern outskirts of Melbourne. Go figure.

As per FISA rules, the race began behind a safety car, an orange VL Commodore leading the healthy 26-car field around for a Eurocentric rolling start. And it started with a terrific bang. The wet qualifying sessions had seen slower cars start ahead of faster ones, and the resulting kerfuffle into Coca-Cola Corner was gargantuan. The pack swarmed down the front front straight four- and five-wide, with Larry Perkins, one of the fastest, avalanching down the outside to take the lead for a brief, glorious moment. Then he overcooked it into Coca-Cola and landed in the gravel, leaving the first lap to be led by the rather more composed Jim Richards, with the youngster Glenn Seton in hot pursuit and the old fox George Fury holding off Allan Grice. Dick Johnson’s turbo Sierra had taken to the rolling start like a fat hippo, and he was left circulating well down the order. Completing the first-lap chaos, George Fury ran wide on the exit of Gloweave Corner and kicked up some dust, losing places to Grice, Peter Brock and Tony Longhurst.

As the second lap began it was clear the war was on. Richards and Seton had already pulled out a major gap on the rest of the pack, giving an early preview of what the ‘87 season would look like. But, using the full power of Dads’s FJ20ET engine, Glenn was able to haul past Richards on that long front straight and take a lead he would never lose.

The forumers seem to like this engine

At the chicane on the back straight, however, Graeme Crosby clipped the kerb too hard and flicked his #8 Bob Jane T-Marts Commodore up onto two wheels, tipping it into a spin that almost went the full 360, sending Johnson, Hansford and Brock scrambling to avoid him. Andrew Miedecke had to take the Oxo Sierra off-track to avoid him, but somehow everyone got away without a dent. Croz kept the engine running and rejoined, chastened but unmarked.

Conversely, by lap 3 Allan Grice was up into 2nd place, getting ahead of Jim Richards around the back stretch, although Jim was making him work for it, Gricey locking up the wheels under braking and generally throwing the VK around like a Formula Ford. For all the pressure through the corners, however, it was pretty clear Calder’s long front straight was penalising the BMWs severely: Richo could keep Gricey honest only until they pulled out of Gloweave, at which point the Commodore was off and gone. Indeed, by lap 5 Richards was trying to hold off Peter Brock, who had a look around the outside Coca-Cola but found the handling of the BMW was too good for him. Brock fell back into line for the Turn 2/3 complex and followed Richards up over the hill, then pulled out again for an outside run into the Turn 6/7 tooth-puller, but this time the brakes on the BMW defeated him.

If the fight between Richards and Brock wasn’t exciting enough, it soon became a three-way as George Fury caught them up and threw in his Skyline into the mix. Where Seton had opted for the newest of Gibson Motorsport’s DR30 racecars, Fury had gone back to the oldest, the one in which his setups worked and he felt most comfortable. The effect was a lot less speed than Seton, but much, much more than Brock. As they thundered down the front straight again it was turbo four vs big V8 – which ended in a draw, as Fury was forced to take the outside line into Coca-Cola, which dropped him back behind Brock and into the clutches of Richards. This ménage à trois continued into 3/4 before the hill, where Fury had a rare moment of clumsiness and gave Richards a whack, sending the BMW’s outside wheel over the ripple strip and into the dust. The moment of lost inertia allowed Brock to get away and let Tony Longhurst into the mix, taking a neater line through that turn and up over the hill to pass his team leader and very nearly Fury as well! The straight afterward killed off that idea, but the pace of these small-engined BMWs was coming as a wicked shock to the rest of the grid. A good team player, Longhurst dutifully dropped back behind Richards before the next turn, but in the meantime Fury had made a break and was once more free to chase down Brock.

A short time later, Gary Scott made the most of his first drive for HDT and put his Holden V8 to good use, driving right between the BMWs on the front straight and relieving them of two positions in the space of about a kilometre. Clearly after his ousting from the Nissan team he had something to prove.

As did Larry Perkins, it seemed. Niggly at himself for his first-lap mistake, Perkins had put in a magnificent comeback drive and was back with the big boys inside the first ten laps. He passed Tony Longhurst into Coca-Cola on lap 8, but didn’t quite have the pace to nab Richards in the same move. Not to worry, it was just a matter of waiting another lap for the front straight to come up again, and then he was past Richards and off after Gary Scott in the factory car – Perkins’s old ride. Larry’s grudge move on Scott into Coca-Cola disrupted the Queenslander’s rhythm, so Richards re-took the place as they exited the turn.

Meanwhile, the arm-wrestle between Brock and Fury over 3rd place carried on apace, but – a sign of experienced hands – they weren’t losing speed doing it, so all the while they were catching up to Grice in 2nd. By lap 15, however, they themselves had been caught by the storming Larry Perkins, who split Brock and Fury on the lunge into Coca-Cola! Perkins followed his old boss around the twisties at the back, then got a little sideways on the run onto the front straight in his eagerness to get on the power sooner than Brock. Down the front straight they came, Holden V8 vs Holden V8, and it was Perkins who emerged in front. The Polarizer hadn’t helped Brocky much on that one...

So by lap 16 it was Perkins 3rd, Brock 4th and Fury 5th, with Seton still leading and Grice still chasing after him – a Commodore 2-3-4. Of course, there was no question the Commodore could be driven hard, the real question was for how long, given the toll its weight exacted on tyres and brakes. By lap 17, Brock’s VK was giving little hints its rear tyres were starting to die (maybe his starting pressures were too low...), and that gave Fury all the encouragement he’d ever need. Few were braver with the brake pedal than Fury, and on lap 17 he finally clawed his way past Brock again. He went wide into Coca-Cola, got across the bows of the Commodore and emerged in front – and Brock being Brock, they didn’t swap any paint in the process.

By lap 20 Glenn Seton was 4.5 seconds up the road from Allan Grice, who was himself 1.89 ahead of Larry Perkins. Sensing an opportunity, the commentary team pulled one of those moments that apparently left the Americans gobsmacked, and dialled up Gricey for an in-race chat. Unfortunately, that chat had to be cut short, as by lap 28 Perkins was in the draft and catching up. His best lap was a 1:01.61, faster than anyone else would go all day, whereas Gricey’s best was only a 1:02.14. There were slight but telling differences in driving style, Grice clipping the kerbs on the way through Coca-Cola, Perkins staying off them and keeping it smooth... and not losing any speed. A lap later and Perkins made his move, pulling out of the slipstream and having a lunge into Coca-Cola Corner. Perkins took the inside line and so forced Grice onto the outside, forcibly relieving him of 2nd place. That left Perkins free to chase down Glenn Seton, but that was going to be a tall order – the Nissan was now some 5.5 seconds up the road, and he wasn’t slowing down. In fact, his driving a delight to behold, brisk and tidy, no histrionics.

With Perkins past him the fire seemed to go out of Gricey’s driving, and the race seemed to settle down into its rhythm. The only thing left was for some retirements to stir the pot. Graham Lusty’s day had ended in the sand trap outside the Turn 6/7 complex, and Gregg Hansford had dropped out after 25 laps when his boost pressure vanished. Both the Toyota Team Australia drivers dropped out, Drew Price after John Smith, the long Calder straight proving too much for the Corolla’s little engine. But the big shock came on lap 36 when the TV returned to show Peter Brock in the pits, smoke having been seen pouring from the engine. Neil Crompton bravely stepped forward to interview him for the cameras.

Neil Crompton: Brocky you carved them up in the early stint, but unfortnunately things went wrong towards the end?

Peter Brock: Yeah, uh... Very happy off the grid, I was having a ball there for a few laps, but the new experimental Bridgestones we’re using weren’t quite right. We had no chance of testing them, they’ve got new ones on the way, I’m sure they’ll be great. But, uh, that was going for it. I revved it up extremely high and, uh, well certainly something was very much amiss there!

Crompton: What let go, any idea?

Brock: No, no idea. I think it’d be the top end of the motor, I don’t think it’s a lubrication problem.

Crompton: Will we expect to see you at Symmons next weekend?

Brock: Yeah certainly, yeah. Gary and I will both be down there, we’ll both be wiser because of this experience this weekend, we know what compounds to run, we know, uh... Well, the cars were going pretty good, let’s face it. Early on there I was sort of being pretty close to the lead, I was pretty happy.

Crompton: You said yesterday in the press conference that you were going to sit down and discuss Gary’s future last night. Did you do that and have you come up with a future for him?

Brock: Yes we have. We’re planning that Gary’ll be down there on Thursday, tyre testing – new tyres in from Bridgestone’s being dropped down to the workshop tomorrow. And we hope to really get to grips with the chassis development part of the car, we think we’re on the right track, obviously our cars were... well, you saw how fast it was early in the race.

Crompton: Okay Pete, let you get back to it. Thanks for talking to us.

Even worse, the next time the TV came back from an ad break it was to show Gary Scott in the gravel too, a front-left tyre deflated and almost ripped off the rim. The slow-motion replay showed him putting a move on Dick Johnson into the Turn 6/7 section and missing his braking point; the Commodore broke loose at the rear and skated off into the sandtrap, giving a little nudge to the Lusty Commodore already beached there, which broke his front-left suspension and popped his tyre. This double retirement put the cherry on top of what was surely the shittiest week of Peter Brock’s life, especially when both retirements were down to simple driver error.

By the closing stages of the race the TV revealed Glenn Seton was just 1.42 seconds ahead of Larry Perkins, which was a stunning effort given his first-lap indiscretions. The question of whether Perkins could maintain pace and position once his tyres started going off had been answered, and the answer was yes, but only just, because George Fury’s had too. Silver for Perkins was his reward for the days upon days of testing he’d done over the off-season, showing what could be achieved with a Commodore if you managed its appetite for tyres. Even so, with Fury a sizeable 5.68 seconds behind the Enzed Commodore by the finish, it seemed nothing could live with a Nissan FJ20ET once the turbo wound up. This race had belonged completely to Glenn Seton who opened his 1987 scorecard with a dominant win.

Though he'd have a fight to maintain it...

With championship points to be awarded on a 20-15-12-10-8-6-4-3-2-1 basis for the top ten positions outright, plus 9-6-4-3-2-1 for the top six positions in each of the two classes, Seton started the year with a perfect 29 points. Next was Larry Perkins on 21, but Jim Richards was ahead of George Fury 17 points to 16, benefitting from racing in the Under 2,500cc class. The Australian Manufacturers Championship was being run concurrently with the ATCC this year, rather than in the end-of-year enduros, with points awarded 20-15-12-10-8-6-4-3-2-1 for the top ten placings in each class, but with only highest-placed car allowed to score. This class system again showed its teeth with Nissan and BMW starting the year on an even 20 points – first place in each of their respective classes. Holden was third on 15.

Still, with the front row in qualifying going to a BMW and a Ford, the fastest race lap to a Holden and the race win to a Nissan, it was looking like the beginning of a fantastic year.

25 February: Brock Polarizes Opinion

On this day in 1987, Peter Brock got up and went to work, only to find that it wasn't really there anymore. The Holden Dealer Team was no longer affiliated with either General Motors-Holden or their dealer network, and his Special Vehicles operation no longer had the special relationship with the factory that made the whole thing work.

In effect, HDT was dead in the water, and to explain why I'll have to commit what is the ultimate blasphemy in Australia.

Onward.

1984: The Ghost of Le Mans
To those in the know, the whole thing started at Le Mans in June 1984. Brock had taken a Bob Jane T-Marts-sponsored Porsche 956 to the 24-hour classic, to be driven by himself and Larry Perkins. That project is mostly beyond the scope of this article, so suffice to say they didn't do very well, underperforming by the standards of the other privateer entries, not to mention their own.

The crucial incident had come around the seventh hour, when John Sheldon lost control of his Aston Martin-powered Nimrod NRA/C2 at the kink in the Mulsanne Straight, and hit the Armco at over 300km/h. He survived with severe burns, but 42-year-old marshal Jacky Loiseau was not so lucky. The poor man had been asleep at his post, head resting on the guardrail, and the shockwave of the impact had broken his neck. For almost an hour while the marshals cleaned it up, Brock had been forced to lap the black, smoking wreck, over and over again. And believe it or not, he came to believe the soul of Loiseau had infested his body for the trip back to Australia.

For you see, Peter came home from Le Mans in very bad shape. He looked gaunt, and the spark and vitality that had characterised him all his life was gone. Some of it was simply his body telling him he wasn't 18 anymore (he'd turned 39 that February), but some of it was also twenty years of cigarettes and booze catching up with him. More than a few believe he'd developed a case of fibreglass poisoning – an occupational hazard in car manufacturing, but exacerbated by the hours spent in the Porsche, or Bob Jane's Chevy Monza Sports Sedan, or both. Either way, the stress of the last few weeks, of spending hours in the furnace heat of the Porsche's cockpit on top of weeks without proper sleep, had turned the situation critical. It was clear something had to be done about his health, and it was at this point Bev stepped in.

Beverley was the de facto Mrs Brock, and even if it was by deed poll rather than a marriage certificate, and she was the longest and most significant relationship of Peter's life. She was also a fan of all sorts of New Age hippie stuff, so she took Peter to see her chiropractor, a Victorian schoolteacher-turned-health practitioner who became the most notorious name in the Australian automotive landscape – Dr Eric Dowker, soon better known by his nickname, "Dr Feelgood."

Source

Now there's nothing fundamentally wrong with New Age spirituality itself. It's bullshit, sure, but it's mostly harmless bullshit, which puts it ahead of most of the other kinds of bullshit. There's also nothing wrong with being a schoolteacher, which is one of the most underappreciated jobs out there (especially if you measure jobs by how much they're paid, which you totally should). And there's certainly nothing wrong with being a chiropractor, as anyone with a bad back will jump to tell you. But – and it's a big, round, Kardashian but – a chiropractor is not a medical doctor. Having completed five years of university-based education, an Australian chiropractor is entitled to introduce themselves as "Dr," but they're a doctor in the same way you can be a Doctor of Geology or Philosophy. They're healthcare professionals, and they can fill out the excuse form when you chuck a sickie, and they're way, way more qualified than Dr Phil, but they definitely don't have medical degrees. And when they're former schoolteachers with heads full of New Age nonsense, you have to ask serious questions about whether you want them fiddling with your spine. Try this little excerpt from Brock's '86 Spa campaign:

I had just had a road accident in Australia, and I had some serious whiplash. Dr Feelgood noticed this and offered to work on me. He decided that he did not have enough energy to fix me, so he got his wife and Brock’s wife to join hands so that he would have the healing power of three people! – David Segal, motoring journalist turned HDT press officer, Motor Sport article Thunder without the storm, July 2005

Despite all that, Dowker seems to've been pretty good as a chiropractor, and his initial prescriptions for Peter were sensibleness itself: Brock was put on a strict vegetarian diet and ordered to knock off the fags and booze. It's a sign of how worried he was that the thirty-a-day Marlboro man and borderline alcoholic actually complied, but the results were phenomenal. Brock bounced back in record time, emerging fitter and livelier than ever.

But quietly, just to his closest friends, Brock admitted that Dowker had also performed an exorcism to get rid of the ghost of Jacky Loiseau. And the light of his miraculous recovery, Brock seemingly came to believe it was this, rather than the health regime, that had made the difference, and started seeing things Dowker's way. And so the weirdness started.

1985: Perkins Pulls the Pin
The next sign that something was rotten in Bertie Street came when Larry Perkins made a shock exit from the Holden Dealer Team in mid-1985. He diplomatically told the 12 July edition of Auto Action:

My job, as far as I was concerned, was one-hundred percent centred around preparing the two team cars. That’s what I enjoy doing, and that’s all I really wanted to do. Now, it’s Peter’s team, he owns it, and so he is quite entitled to decide how it is run. I guess it’s fair to say we disagreed a little on the way things might be in the future, so in the end it seemed like the best thing for me to leave.

And co-drive for Dick Johnson at that year's Bathurst

Behind the scenes, however, the rumours were rather more sinister. As part of his New Age spirituality Dowker believed in the healing power of crystals, saying the right one would keep out "negative influences." Brock had been wearing one around his neck for a while now, and Bev had long been swinging hers over meals. Guests at their home were told crystals were used to purify the water in their swimming pool and spa (along with, one hopes, chlorine). Employees at HDT Special Vehicles started fitting them to the engine dyno, and eventually the engines themselves.

The whole thing started some three or four years before it hit the headlines. My first indication that there was something, well, not odd, but just a bit different, was people dangling crystals into cups of tea and over meals. I thought, "What's going on here?" and so did a few other people. We thought it was harmless; if people wanted to believe in crystals for whatever reason, who cares? Then it developed a bit further than that. The first indication I had that it was having some influence on the racing team was I think Larry and Neil Burns found crystals either strapped to, or located on, the engine dyno and/or on the engines themselves. – John Harvey, Wayne Webster's Peter Brock: How Good Is This!

It was only a short, slippery slope from there to something more sophisticated, and soon a smallish box was being attached to the racecars – the infamous Energy Polarizer.

It was Brock's longtime publicist Tim Pemberton who came up with the name, tongue stuck firmly in cheek, but it was seized upon by the boss who exclaimed, "You’re fucking right! Of course, that’s what it is! That’s it... Polarizer, Polarizer!"

I was practising for a touring-car round of the Sandown 500 and I was just at the end of the back straight, and I lifted off the throttle and went for the brakes to head down through the esses when I felt something bang my foot. I knew it was metal and my first reaction was that one of the mechanics had left a screwdriver or spanner or something in the car, and it had come through as I drove around the circuit, and ended up rolling into the cockpit area. I had a quick look and couldn't see it, but I knew something was down there and I wasn't going to take a risk so I just backed off, cruised along and headed for the pits. – John Harvey, Wayne Webster's Peter Brock: How Good Is This!

The item was a Polarizer. This was not harmless: this was a loose object in the cockpit, and if it had gotten wedged under the brake pedal the results could've been disastrous. "Everyone had a bit of a laugh about it," said Harvey, "but that was the first I was aware that they were being secretly put into the race cars." This is why Perkins had abandoned ship: allegedly he'd found one fitted to the Commodore he’d raced at Lakeside. According to his contract, Perkins was in charge of the HDT racecar preparation and had final say on what was fitted to the cars, so Brock was actually in breach of contract. Larry called Peter out on the whole thing, telling him he was out of his mind and doing considerable damage to everyone’s image – and was sacked for his trouble. He signed on to co-drive for Dick Johnson instead, keeping him employed while he worked to set up his own Perkins Engineering team, which had debuted late in 1986.

Building PE 001

If it had stayed there, it would've been a footnote to Brock's career – costing him the services of one of the best engineers in the business, but not much more. But Brock wasn't content to restrict his Polarizer to the racecars alone. As the proprietor of a road car business, he had the opportunity to sell them to the general public as well – and that opened up vast new opportunities for legal problems that would cost him a lot more than Larry Perkins.

1986: Talking to a Brock Wall
In March 1986, HDT Special Vehicles started marketing a road car with the Energy Polarizer fitted. Holden was paying their advertising bills through agency McCann-Erickson, and this one used the slogan: "Body by Holden, Soul by Brock" (another of Pemberton's). Now Holden had to act. Senior engineer Ray Borrett decided to cut open a Polarizer and found nothing more than four magnets wrapped in tinfoil embedded in epoxy resin – likely made by Bev herself using stuff from the family home in Eltham. Brock had been insisting, "It’s a magic cure – it makes a shithouse car good," but if so nobody had a clue how it was supposed to work. Holden made repeated demands to explain what the Polarizer did, and Brock finally issued a statement... one which didn’t clarify matters much.

They called it "A.B.A. energy" in the release, but later they dropped the pretense and openly called it orgone energy, an established pseudoscientific concept from the 1930s, very big in feral circles. If you feel like taking a swan dive into that particular cesspool, you can start with the Wikipedia page, which defines orgone as "a massless, omnipresent substance similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than inert matter." No mention of whether it surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together, but if so it wouldn't be surprising. If it had been fitted to an X-Wing or TIE fighter I have no doubt the Energy Polarizer would've been immensely effective, but here in the real world of just the four fundamental forces, it meant Australia was having to ask whether Peter Brock was, in fact, stark raving mad.

But the clanger of all time was when Peter said, "to effect the best possible performance from the Polarizer, it is recommended that all cars fitted with the Polarizer have 22 psi tyre pressure." Our partners at that stage, Bridgestone, had a heart attack and wondered how the hell they were going to get out of that. Here they were sponsoring Peter Brock, and here’s Peter Brock and his Polarizer claiming that you must run your car on 22 psi, which is pretty close to flat. – John Harvey, Wayne Webster’s Peter Brock: How Good Is This!

Slug was being level-headed about it, but Skippy gave us a sterling example of Ben Carson Syndrome when he commented: "Peter was saying you could run your road cars with 17 psi of pressure. But you would pull the tyres off their rims in the carpark! [But] Dr Eric Dowker was a very good physio and he helped my back. As for the crystals, well I believe they do work. Look at what Holden has now with magnetic suspension?"

David Parsons, on his suspension settings

That opened the floodgates: soon everyone seemed to have a mate who worked at Bertie Street, and rumours about the Polarizer flew thick and fast. It had to be fitted to the engine bay to the millimetre, they said, and couldn’t be swapped from one vehicle to another. Six hours of driving time were needed for the best results. It even had to be "introduced" to the car – you would leave it on the bench for a hour, then sit it on the right-front guard for 45 minutes, then finally attach it to the firewall – although sceptics in the crew just laughed and bolted it straight on. The "printed circuitry" was allegedly just a piece of paper with the words "go fast, handle great," written on it, having been shrunk down to virtual microprint by HDT secretary Debbie Thiessen, by reducing the photocopy 50 times over. Brock sent one to the CSIRO for testing; they sent it back, replying they didn’t have the equipment. The controversy attracted the attention of the Australian Sceptics Society, who investigated the affair and promptly awarded Peter their Bent Spoon award for "the year’s one supreme example of pseudo-science."

In the Sun Herald article, Brock is quoted as saying that his device "improves performance handling and ride comfort as well as producing better economy and less component wear." A very impressive gadget if the claims are true.

When asked to describe how the device achieves these remarkable results, Brock is quoted as saying "The Energy Polarizer is a transmitter that emits a signal [that is] neither electric nor magnetic nor is it a radio wave or X-ray.” (Mr Brock seems to be unaware that all of these are forms of electromagnetic energy.) He further claims "It’s a form of energy called orgone energy" and goes on "British medicos are using a derivative of it to produce body scans" (in this he seems to be referring to Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI, which certainly uses electromagnetic energy, a great deal of it, and not orgone energy which does not appear to exist).

Mr Brock is also quoted as saying "We haven’t altered molecular structure but realigned the molecules into an almost crystalline layout" and "Inside my Polarizer, among other things, you’ve got magnetic energy acting on a crystal which causes the transmission of a high frequency wave which in fact is orgone energy. When the car is fully charged with orgone energy, the molecules are all nicely aligned and you can feel it working better."

When the journalist put it to Brock that his claims seem to challenge the laws of physics, Brock admits "physics doesn’t recognise that this energy exists or that it can do these things" and "the laws of physics are going to have to be re-written..."

Australian Skeptics therefore believes that, in light if these facts, there is no reason to believe that the Brock Energy Polarizer has any effect whatsoever on the performance of a motor vehicle. Australian Skeptics will always be willing to take part in testing of this or similar devices and will publish the results of the tests, whatever they reveal. In the absence of any properly conducted tests, we would strongly advise anyone contemplating the purchase of a device that makes its claims based on "energies unknown to science" to save their money.

We also believe that there has never been a more worthy recipient of our Bent Spoon award. – Barry Williams, The Second Coming: Australian Skeptics Magazine 1986-1990

It got worse. Contrary to corporate policy, Brock also approached General Motors in Detroit looking for approval, and was granted access to GM's massive Milford Proving Ground in rural Michigan, where the Polarizer was put through its paces on a truck. He would've preferred a car, but didn't have the clout in the U.S. to make a demand like that. He came back claiming the Polarizer had passed GM testing (it hadn't) and that the company was considering making it standard fit on all GM products (they weren't). Holden went from uneasy to a full-on panic attack. These devices were being fitted to Holden vehicles, and Holden was on the hook to warrant them. Given the outrageous claims Brock was making about their effects, all it would take was one customer without a sense of humour to bring it all tumbling down. "Everybody was a Peter Brock supporter," said John Harvey, "but if somebody bought a Holden with a Polarizer fitted, then claimed it didn't work, and then decided to sue Holden, Holden didn't really have a leg to stand on."

In October 1986, Holden wrote to Brock and Dowker proposing a series of tests at Lang Lang, the huge Holden proving ground just off the road to Phillip Island. Brock and Dowker agreed, but after four days of testing the results showed the Polarizer made zero difference. "So they did the test and found absolutely no performance gain in any area whatsoever and decided they wouldn’t endorse it," said Harvey.

I had it out with Peter many times over that issue, and I told him straight, "Mate, I don't believe in the Polarizer. I've tested it, the same as a lot of people have, and you have. You claim it makes a hell of a difference to the cars, and I cannot find any change in the area of the car's performance – none whatsoever." – John Harvey, Wayne Webster’s Peter Brock: How Good Is This!

Brock's old friend Grant Steers, then acting as liaison between Bertie Street and Fisherman's Bend, watched in horror as both sides geared up for war. "I wasn't going to put my career on the line over the Polarizer so I said to Brock, 'Wake up to yourself or you and I are parting ways.'" Brock fired him and refused to speak to him again. Before long he was refusing to put his signature anywhere on the Group A version of the new VL Commodore unless you got the Plus Pack – which of course came with a mandatory Polarizer. No Polarizer, no signature; put up or shut up. As a result, the Brock signature only appeared on the Plus Pack cars, about 173 of the 500-strong production run.

Source

Holden called in their solicitors to warn that they had an enforceable contract with HDT, but Brock was putting them in a major Catch-22: accepting legal culpability for the Polarizer, or being seen as a corporate giant crushing the underdog. And Peter played the underdog card for all it was worth. He threatened to take the matter to the federal government, saying, "Some boys in Canberra would take a very dim view of a big American company trying to stop an Australian manufacturer having a go." On 12 November Holden released a statement, warning: "Holden Motor Company does not approve or accept any responsibility for the fitment to Holden vehicles of the attachment described as an Energy Polarizer." In December they went even further, issuing a "letter of understanding" actively banning the fitment and promotion of the device on any Holden motor vehicle. Brock and Dowker got around it by forming an independent company, Peri Integration Systems, which they made responsible for final detailing of HDT products including fitment of the Polarizer. Brock just wasn't going to be told on this – and in February 1987, while he was still basking in the glow of the Wellington win, it all came to a head.

1987: The Pot Boils Over
Despite all the publicity, it wasn't the Energy Polarizer that split up Holden and Peter Brock; that just set the temperature in the room. The real issue came at a black-tie function (Polarizer sceptics need not apply) held on 20 February 1987, where Brock pulled a United Nations flag (tellingly, not an Australian flag) off his new HDT Director, a car that was presented as co-designed by Eric Dowker, not even featuring the Holden name. It cost $55,000, a hefty sum in Australia's pre-mining boom dollars, roughly equivalent to $125,000 now. It was the most extreme makeover HDT had ever given a car, with very little of the donor VL visible through the extravagant bodykit. It was to come with your choice of 4.9-litre V8 or, if you had the cash, a special 5.6-litre "Stroker" version of the engine. With 196 kW even the 4.9 would accelerate from 0 to 100 in just 6.9 seconds and on to a top speed of 242km/h, covering the standing quarter in less than 15 seconds. Brock was clearly proud of his new creation, and was openly speaking of 5,000 orders in the States, which was grossly ambitious when he was struggling to lift HDT production to 1,500 a year for the local market.

Unfortunately, the Director wasn't just the best car HDT had ever made, it was also the dodgiest. Holden's first notice of the car came when Brock started handing out invitations to the launch party, and it turned out he had good reason to keep it secret: the Director was due to feature optional semi-trailing arm rear suspension, sourced from the Opel Senator in Germany. In this it was well ahead of the curve, as IRS wouldn't be seen on a Commodore again until the VT model in 1997, but it had been fitted without Engineering Department approval, which raised serious questions about its conformity with Australian Design Rules, as well as Holden's warranty and insurance liability. Holden told Brock to delay the launch and let them have the prototype so they could undertake the necessary ADR testing. Brock never handed over the car.

Having been sprung on Holden, the Director was heading to market with no warranty, no insurance and no compliance plate. It hadn't even been put through basic crash testing. The Director simply could not legally be sold anywhere in the world – and Peter was determined to sell it. Cue the infamous news footage of the turquoise green Director rotating on a plinth behind the tuxedo-clad Brock, as the General's greatest soldier publicly signed his own death warrant.

I worked pretty hard to salvage it, and there was always the hope that it might happen. I'd done everything I possibly could to try and get Peter to change his mind, to no avail, and the warning bells had been ringing for some time. I'm not really sure if Peter was fully aware that Holden were going to pull the pin. For some reason maybe he thought in the back of his mind that they'd go along with it, or change their tune or something, but there was no doubt in my mind that they were about to pull the pin. They had no option. – John Harvey, Wayne Webster’s Peter Brock: How Good Is This!

Forewarned, the day before the Director's launch Holden had issued a press release severing their ties with Brock and HDT Special Vehicles permanently. Brock's part in the $10 million a year business was over, with between 9 and 12 Directors completed. Most had IRS, but probably not all.

The Holden Motor Company, together with members of the Australian Holden Dealer Council, today announced with regret that business relations with Peter Brock and HDT will be concluded. The decision was taken after many months of attempts to salvage the situation which ultimately failed as no common ground could be reached between Peter Brock, Holden and the dealers involved... The difficulties... revolve around a variety of significant concerns, including a device called the Energy Polarizer. Of particular concern are plans by HDT to launch a product which Holden has not been given sufficient opportunity to review.

"I’ve got to say," Harvey went on, "that they did everything right all the way through. For the last two years they explained their position to Peter, they tried to get him to mend his ways. A lot of people said, 'Oh, Holden gave Peter the arse' – they tried for two years to change his thinking, to save that business, and he didn’t. He just let it go."

Source (ftr, the Bowden's website is awesome and full of incredible cars, go check them out)

Harvey had no option but to resign as a director of HDT Special Vehicles, at last delivering a shock sizeable enough to get through to Peter. He tried to woo Harvey back, but it was too late. On the morning of 25 February, Peter arrived at the Bertie Street workshop with a few confused workers milling around and no management. Almost out of friends, Peter had to rely on his brothers Lewis and Phil, and was fortunate that he also had Alan Gow, who had a razor-sharp business brain and – more importantly – an independent income thanks to a stake in property development. That meant he could afford to work for the salary Peter could afford to pay him, which was nothing. Peter was deeper in the shit than he ever realised.

Peter had no more than a nodding acquaintance with business. He knew that business was a vehicle to enable him to go racing and to do road cars, but he had absolutely no idea on business, and he didn’t pretend to. He left it to others to handle that side of it for him. He never signed a cheque. To be honest, I don’t know that he was even a signatory to the bank account. I don’t think he even had a key to the premises! I walked into a massive mess. According to Peter at the time, it was only a blip in his business career, but he actually had no idea of how serious the situation was, mainly because he wasn’t involved that much in the business, but also – probably more importantly – because he didn’t want to know. Peter lived in a bubble and things just used to wash over him... In hindsight, perhaps it was denial. – Alan Gow, Wayne Webster’s Peter Brock: How Good Is This!

There was very little in the way of cash reserves, for although HDT had seen considerable gross turnover neither the road cars nor the racing team had ever been especially profitable. The Brock name still sold cars, but the transporters full of virgin Commodores would no longer be arriving from the Elizabeth plant in Adelaide. Forced to buy donor cars like any other tuner, Brock went on to roll out such lesser lights as the Group 3 Signature, the Designer Series, the Bathurst and Bathurst Aero, as well as aftermarket "Sport by HDT" kits made available to those on a budget, but that too was about to be undermined by a new deal between Holden and Tom Walkinshaw. He didn't even have Marlboro sponsorship anymore, having given Phillip Morris the flick when he went cold turkey at the end of 1984. Just a week out from Round 1 of the ATCC at Calder Park, all he had left was a modest trickle of Mobil sponsorship, and with that alone it was going to take a miracle to make the grid in 1987.

HDT's Kiwi Swansong

We won the Wellington 500 two years in a row and after the first year I got out of the car and asked Peter why we had waited 20 years to pair up. – Allan Moffat, AMC #78

After a character-building 1986, the Mobil Holden Dealer Team came roaring out of the blocks in 1987 with victory in the Nissan Mobil 500 on the streets of Wellington. It was the second time the pairing of Peter Brock and Allan Moffat had won the New Zealand race in as many years, and even better, 2nd place had gone to their teammates John Harvey and Neal Lowe, marking HDT's first 1-2 finish since the Big Bangers at Bathurst in 1984. Unfortunately, history would record that it was also HDT's final win as the factory team.

Source

The Streets of Wellington
Although only three years old, by 1987 the Wellington 500 had come along by leaps and bounds to become the second-biggest touring car race in the region, attracting a sizeable contingent of European cars and drivers (who certainly didn't show up for Sandown). As such, this year it had a joint Australian/New Zealand commentary team (including aspiring race driver, Neil Crompton, and full-time Peter Griffon cosplayer, Mike Raymond), to be carried live and in full by TVNZ and Australia's Channel Seven. All four hours of it, live.

The race's growing stature also shed some light on the mystery of last year's "South Pacific Touring Car Championship." This it seemed had been organised as a trans-Tasman grudge match to encourage more of the Aussie teams to make the trip to East Bondi, and maybe take part in the Wellington race while they were over there. The calendar apparently looked something like this:

19.10.86 – Calder Park, Aus.
26.10.86 – Streets of Adelaide, Aus.
30.11.86 – Manfeild Autocourse, NZ.
07.12.86 – Bay Park Raceway, NZ.
14.12.86 – Pukekohe Park, NZ.

By the time the tour made it across the Tasman it had been branded the Simpson Appliances South Pacific Touring Car Championship, and the NZ rounds had virtually replaced the New Zealand national championship (which also counted the Nissan Mobil double-header at Wellington and Pukekohe). However, the series was a complete failure as none of the Kiwi teams bothered attending the Australian rounds, and none of the Australians bothered with the New Zealand rounds either. The title of South Pacific Touring Car Champion went to '86 Bathurst winner Allan Grice, who did it simply by earning points in every round (driving both Commodores and, intriguingly, Nissan Skylines – an early hint of how Gricey would be spending 1988). Glen McIntyre did better in the NZ leg of the tour, and so was crowned New Zealand champion.

The irony was that although the South Pacific series was a failure, the race it was meant to prop up was a runaway success. They were now calling it "the Monaco of the South Pacific," which was a bit rich when the Kiwis still did nothing to conceal its port-city origins. It was more like Long Beach, quite an eyesore in places, but the hills rising behind the city and the crystalline waters of the Harbour went a long way toward making up for it. The circuit had been lengthened slightly this year, probably to comply with the FIA minimum for World Championship events, by extending the run along Cable Street to the Hurd Street Loop (unfortunately, Wellington has since built things like the Museum of New Zealand in the way, so it's impossible to follow the complete layout today). It was still quite a slow circuit, with a mixture of very slow and very fast corners lined by the ever-present Armco, and as a public road the surface was still very bumpy (with a particularly vicious bump right on the entry to the Northern Hairpin – several of the cars were lifting their front wheels off the ground over that one).

Source: Wikipedia

What's also sometimes forgotten is that there were two Wellington 500s in 1987, one in January and one in October. The Wellington race had joined the World Touring Car Championship calendar, and to make the logistics suit the European teams they had to schedule it right alongside Bathurst and Mt Fuji. That meant moving the race to late October, which left the Strathmore Group, the race's organisers, with a quandary – do they hold off on their January date and go nearly two years without holding a race? Or do they give in to their blue balls and have two races in the same year? With the race now profitable, that was an easy decision.

It's the January event that's remembered here in Australia, mostly because it was won by an Australian car and Australian drivers. And because those drivers were Peter Brock and Allan Moffat, with twelve Bathurst victories between them, we tend to assume it was all pretty inevitable. It's only when you watch the full race on YouTube that you realise it wasn't like that at all. The track was brutal, the opposition was impressive and the luck was entirely reserved for one car and two drivers. This was a day when every team seemed cursed – except one.

Hot & Hard: Race Day
As per FIA regulations, the race was set for 500km or 4 hours, whichever came first. It was a race of high attrition, 42 cars taking the start and just 14 making it to the finish, the wicked Armco barriers and unexpectedly high temperatures taking a heavy toll on stressed cars and wilting drivers. George Fury, lead driver for the Peter Jackson Nissan team owned by Fred Gibson, had put his factory(-ish) Skyline on pole with a time of 1:33.93, according to the TV commentary at least (TouringCarRacing.net lists different times, but their info is often unreliable, qualifying times not corresponding to grid positions and whatnot. So we'll go with what the TV says). Peter Brock had qualified in P2 with a time of 1:34.18, only a quarter of a second slower: for comparison, a blink takes about a third of a second. That's pretty tight for cars from different manufacturers, with different engine configurations, on different tyres, and it must've pleased the sponsors no end: for the Nissan Mobil 500, the car on pole was a Nissan, and the car starting 2nd was backed by Mobil.

Photo via The Roaring Season, which has to be one of the best, most informed and most civil online forums out there, even if they're only interested in New Zealand. Go check them out.

The race began with a rolling start at 1:00pm, in preparation for the WTCC races coming up later in the year. This suited the turbo Skyline of Fury just fine. The Albury ewe farmer rocketed off into an early lead, chased hard by Armin Hahne in the #52 Jaguar XJS of Tom Walkinshaw Racing. This was actually the same car that had won Bathurst in 1985; after a gap year in 1986 while "Uncle Tom" had run his Rovers instead, they'd been brought out for one last dance in the Fuji 500. That should've been their last race, as their homologation papers ran out at the end of 1986, but the Strathmore Group proved so keen to have them in their race that they granted an extension and paid for the cars to be flown over to New Zealand instead. So Tom himself was driving the #51, with relief from his faithful lieutenant Win Percy, while #52 – the Bathurst winner – had been reunited with its driver Armin Hahne, with co-driving to come from New Zealand's 1967 F1 World Champion, Denny Hulme.

In the early laps, Hahne wasn't showing it much mercy, flogging the XJS for all it was worth to keep up with Fury – and Fury was vanishing into the distance nevertheless. The gap grew from 2 seconds, to 7, to 20, and then he was out of sight and gone. This was one of the great drives of all time, because we already know the DR30 was a nightmare to drive, twitchy and understeering going into a corner, prone to snap oversteer one the way out, and cursed with way, way more power than the primitive suspension and narrow tyres could really handle. The last place you'd want to drive it was a narrow, bumpy street circuit, where precision was everything and you had to time the arrival of the boost in all those slow corners – yet Fury made it look as docile as an MX-5. For an "amateur" driver, he really was absurdly talented.

I can't find out for certain, because Gibson Motorsport seems not to release chassis numbers much, but I'd put money on the car being the team's first DR30, as driven by Fury in the 1986 ATCC. They'd built a new car for Bathurst, and its stiffer rollcage design meant the setups Fury had developed didn't transfer across, and he was out-qualified and out-raced that year. It makes sense that they'd save their newer cars for the ATCC and risk the old one on a non-championship race like this, which would explain by George Fury was suddenly back on his game. But then again, apparently only two teams had tested over the off-season, and they were Gibson Motorsport and Perkins Engineering. Make of that what you will.

Finally we can use this image in its proper context.

Behind them, however, the carnage started as early as lap 3. Coming through the right-hand sweeper before the bridge, the driver of the #4 U-Bix Copiers Volvo, Gary Croft, touched a barrier and broke the centre-lock nut holding on his front wheel. In the ensuing crash he collected Graeme Bowkett in the #15 Nu-Look Windows Skyline. Wellington continued its vendetta against Bowkett and co-driver Kent Baigent: they'd won the race in '85 only to have it taken away from them by an official decision, then crashed out in the early laps in '86. Now history had repeated, and through no fault of their own. Bowkett's Skyline was left up against the Armco, pointing in the wrong direction looking like it had been punched on the nose, steam hissing from a cracked radiator. Croft was able to limp back to the pits and carry on, but for Bowkett and Baigent, the day was done. The marshals were left to dodge the traffic as they levered it up against the barrier, as far out of the way as the track would allow, leading the commentators to augur that when the Europeans came over later in the year, maybe they'd bring this innovation called a "Safety Car" with them!

Photo actually taken a week later at Pukekohe, for the second of the two Nissan Mobil series races, but nevertheless... No idea where they sourced the car, but they were later part of "Team Nissan Racing NZ," which was seemingly affiliated with Nissan New Zealand, and kits from Omori weren't especially hard to source (Image credit: it was sitting on Photobucket and I hope no-one minds.)

The next green bottle to fall was Allan Grice, the hero of Bathurst '86. His #2 Canam Construction Commodore, a Roadways-built example he'd debuted at the Adelaide GP support race and since sold to co-driver Graeme Cameron, vanished from the TV coverage on lap 7 and wasn't noticed until we saw the car parked behind an advertising board, as if it was embarrassed. Gricey arrived back in the pits – on foot – to tell Neil Crompton:

Grice: Broke a tailshaft, right in the middle of the spline. The old story – we've never ever done that before, and it was a new one also.

Crompo: Was it likely to've come out of the accident on the last day [of practice]?

Grice: I suppose you've gotta in the end put it down to that, you'll never ever know, but one of the two thumps it's taken has probably put some sort of a hairline crack in there I guess. But it hasn't happened to us before. It used to be our weak link, and like all weak links we fixed it up so well that we started to regard it as our strong point!

The next victim was Andrew Miedecke's #1 Sierra XR4 Ti, which was seen trundling down the back straight with a lot of smoke coming from the right-rear wheel arch. It was looking like it was make the pits under its own steam, but boy was it going to lose some time doing it, and the repairs looked extensive – the right-rear wheel was sticking out at the wrong angle. This car was Andy Rouse's 1985 BTCC championship-winner, which had been brought over for the '86 race by David Oxton and made its Australian debut at Surfers Paradise. It was now getting a bit long in the tooth and, being Andy Rouse's handiwork, had a long history of breakdowns. The car kept going, but it was in and out of the pits all afternoon, so it was never a threat again.

Chasing Tony Longhurst's BMW 325i

With the race now an hour old, fuel strategy started to become a factor. The notoriously thirsty Jags were likely to require three stops to make the full distance. The Commodores would need two, and the really efficient cars, like the BMWs, could probably do it with just one. The real wild card was Fury's Skyline, which was faster than a Jag, its tyres a little worse for wear, but showing no signs that it would run out of fuel anytime soon. Such a preposterously fast car couldn't possibly go the full four hours on just one stop, could it? Time would have to tell.

In the meantime the Jags were clearly running out of steam, and headed for the pits even earlier than their expected early stops, not for fuel, but for tyres. It seemed Tom Walkinshaw had been caught out by the weather: expecting more Kiwi chill and drizzle, Uncle Tom had fitted his cars with special kevlar-belted soft-compound Dunlops to give his big cats the spring they needed for the slippery streets (and fuelling the rumours that his Jaguars needed bespoke tyres for their modified wheel wells...). Instead, January 25 was a bright summer day, several of the European drivers were wilting in the heat (Tom himself was wearing a cool suit), and the big, one-and-a-half-tonne V12 Jags had completely worn out their special tyres. Coming in for fresh rubber and driver changes, the mechanics fitted harder compounds to compensate, but without the extra grip the Jaguars couldn't maintain their lap times. And then, when Denny Hulme got in for his stint, a problem with the right-front wheel gun meant he tried to set off before the wheel was properly affixed. They lifted the car again for another go and this time got it screwed on right, but the mistake cost him 15 valuable seconds. This sort of thing proved HDT and Gibson Motorsport wise in sticking to old-fashioned five-stud wheels – their wheels stayed on, and since refuelling was the thing that took the longest anyway, they didn't really lose any time in the pits.

Denny's misfortune promoted the train of Commodores behind him by one place each, although at the front George Fury was now 30 seconds in the lead and still running away. Ten minutes later however, on lap 47, Graeme Crosby pitted as well. It was perhaps a little early, but his car – an ex-HDT Commodore with a Les Small engine, dressed in the signage of Wang Computers – was right at the edge of its fuel window, so it didn't seem too suspicious. Maybe he'd just been running very hard? Then we realised co-driver Wayne Wilkinson was making no attempt to hop in. Instead the bonnet was lifted, and hearts sank.

Croz: We appear to have a fairly hot-running engine – the problem being that when you're following somebody really close, you've got no cooling because of the amount of air that they drag behind you [sic]. So it's impossible to follow real close, and the crash damage did we got [on Saturday] we think we might've blocked a bit of the filter, so that's really where we are.

Crompo: Perhaps loosened something up in the cooling system which has now floated back in and caused an overheating problem?

Croz: Oh that's too technical! We just don't have enough cooling going to the engine. Oil temperature's running about 145, which is about 20 to 25 too much. Water temperature's about a 120, which is about 20 too much, 25 too much.

Again, photographed at Pukekohe the week after

So that was it for the Wang car (...steady...). Mind you, at this point you wouldn't have picked Moffat and Brock to win it either. Starting from P2, Brocky had almost immediately dropped back behind Hahne's Jag, then the rival Commodores of Graeme Crosby and Larry Perkins – and then even his own teammate, John Harvey. This wasn't how Peter Brock won his races – Evan Green in particular liked to speak of the "Brock Crush," his habit of running hard in the first hour to make the bastards chase him, then backing off and letting them break down trying to catch up. It seemed impossible that his VK wouldn't be the fastest on the track, so seeing him falling back, the commentary team were forced to conclude that he had a problem.

In fact, as we found out an hour and twenty minutes into the race, Brock had simply been running to a predetermined plan. It's likely he knew the weight of the Commodore would eat his tyres if he wasn't careful, so he decided it was better to save the fireworks for later in the day, when the temperatures dropped off. Seeing the hares in his mirror – Crosby, Grice, Hahne – he probably decided it would be better to pull over and let them go than end up in their accidents. It was only when he pitted to refuel and hand over to Moffat that he learned there was still ample tread on his tyres, so he could've gone faster quite easily. Moffat no doubt filed that information away. The Commodore actually wasn't a bad bet for this sort of race: despite their weight and power, they actually handled quite well.

And then – just before the two-hour mark – George Fury finally made his scheduled pit stop as well. Four tyres were changed, fuel was sluiced in, and a 21-year-old Glenn Seton hopped in for his half of the race. And yet... the car didn't speed away. As the fuel went in, a mechanic sprayed the windscreen with cleaning agent, and then the bonnet was lifted and more mechanics peered in and started arguing with each other. Disaster.

Neil Crompton: As you can well see, the George Fury/Glenn Seton Nissan is in the pits and they've been in there so far for 55 seconds. They're working on the front of the car because it appears to be overheating quite a lot. As I look down the side of the car it's covered in glycol, which is the cooling fluid that's used on these cars to run them at very very cool temperatures – in the turbo areas of these cars they get up to something like 100,000rpm, and temperatures of 900 degrees C, so you can imagine that they really have to work at keeping them cool.

Andrew Bartley is at the front of the car, he's one of the top men in the team, and the rest of the Peter Jackson crew are working frantically. 1 minute and 27 seconds in the pits, and that will definitely mean they're going to drastically lose that lead they worked so hard for in the early laps.

Fred Gibson is walking up to the side of the car to have a word with Glenn Seton to keep him informed, because he will need to know what kind of problems the car has, and is now just mounting the drink bottle for Glenn. But this is a very long and slow stop for the Nissan, 1:51.

It's interesting that the car had no problems before they came to the pits and I just wonder whether when they lost momentum, they actually caused an overheating problem?

Just as I look under the front of the car, it appears as though the fan belt has flicked off. I don't know if that's absolutely true, but they're working frantically on it. 2 minutes and 15 seconds, and Crowe I should imagine [sic – it was still Jim Richards] has gone into the lead in car number 31, the driver who shared with Tony Longhurst in the 1986 event now leads the Nissan Mobil 500 around the streets of Wellington. They're still working on the front of the Nissan, 2 minutes and 35 seconds down. Fred Gibson peering in the front of the car, Bo Seton at the front of the car – he's the father of Glenn. Oh, this is a drastic stuff. George Fury's disgusted, he's walked away to the back of the pit area, and look at this, as the car now gushes steam out of the front of the radiator...

Fury later told that the fan belt had broken around the back of the course, on the very lap he was scheduled to come in. Five minutes and 21 seconds in, and the crew admitted defeat, closed the bonnet and pushed the car around to the rear of the pits. Fury's magnificent drive had netted him nothing; Seton never even left his pit box. From a virtually certain win to a DNF in half a lap. It could be a cruel sport sometimes.

Fury's retirement blew the game wide open. Now in the lead was Jim Richards in the #31 Archibalds BMW 635 CSi, whose black and gold paint scheme gave it away as an ex-JPS Team car. Looking through the back window, the distinctive X-shaped roll cage marked it out as the third of the three 635s built by Frank Gardner's crew in their Terrey Hills workshop in Sydney (the first two had a single diagononal bar in this position). This was the car in which Richards had won the Lusty-Allison Winton Roundup last year, but which had just been sold to his Wellington co-driver, New Zealand's Trevor Crowe. Since the John Player team were busy screwing together brand-new cars for 1987, clearing workshop space was a priority.

Dick Johnson had planned to run his Greens-Tuf Mustang a final time, but a shunt in practice meant he never saw the grid. His presence was marked only by the two Pinepac Mustangs of the Anderson brothers, who ran customer DJR engines.

But although he had a nice gap over 2nd place – the #10 Sunday Star Sierra of Neville Crichton, an ex-Eggenberger car which had been co-driver Steve Soper's ride for the second half of the '86 ETCC – Gentleman Jim was actually out of sequence, due to make a pit stop very soon. A flurry of pit action saw Uncle Tom get back in the #51 Jag, and then Richards pulled in and handed the Archibalds BMW over to Trevor Crowe for the 2-hour run to the flag. That promoted Steve Soper to the race lead, although Allan Moffat was right behind him and disputing it.

But before they sorted anything out, the race took another casualty in the form of David "Skippy" Parsons, who'd taken over the #11 Enzed Commodore on behalf of Larry Perkins. This car was almost certainly PE 002, the second Commodore ever built by Larry under his own Perkins Engineering banner, on the logic that PE 001 had been sold after the GP support race the previous year. Interestingly, both Perkins and Parsons (by day a Tasmanian dairy farmer) had once been members of HDT, but they were going to be in no position to threaten their former colleagues today. Parsons came into pit lane with panel damage, two flat tyres and far too much front toe-in, suggesting something had bent in the steering.

Parsons: Just a lot of rubbish and what-have-you, and just slipped and just clipped the Armco by about a couple of inches on one side. Just beamed me straight into the other side. Couldn't do anything about it.

At the time Perkins was just another owner-driver, far from a wealthy man – this car in fact belonged to Colin Giltrap, a bigwhig NZ car dealer who'd previously backed his foray to Europe and Formula 1 in the 1970s. Perkins had settled on the racing number 11 on the logic that in the absence of the cheapest and easiest number to paint – the #1, reserved for the reigning champion – the next easiest and cheapest must be a pair of ones! That kind of thrift was second nature to him, so he could be forgiven for walking slowly around the car with his hands in his pockets, surveying the damage with an expression that would've curdled new milk.

Soper's time in the lead didn't last much longer. Soon the #10 Sierra was back in the pits, collapsed on the left-hand side with a front wheel missing. The rush to fit a replacement didn’t go as planned, as the thread had probably been damaged as the wheel was wrenched free (if it hadn’t been the source of the problem in the first place). Either way, they had to make multiple attempts to get the wheel on, and the car spent four minutes sitting still. Its race too was over.

So, with 2½ hours and 84 laps gone, it was now a straight fight between the Brock/Moffat Commodore and the Richards/Crowe BMW, the only cars still on the lead lap. The sinister black Beamer was 47.85 seconds down, it was true, but the Commodore still had to make another pit stop. HDT could be expected to change the tyres and top up the tanks in less than 45 seconds, so it was the gap that mattered – and Allan Moffat now had the hammer down.

As the laps ticked away the HDT crew chewed their nails nervously, made ready to bring Moffat in and put the boss back in the car for the run to the flag, mentally rehearsed to do even better than the 35-second stop they'd managed the first time around, and then... The last green bottle fell, and it was Trevor Crowe, who failed to come past the start/finish line on lap 98.

Crompo: Trevor, what happened?

Crowe: We're not sure, we think it's the clutch, it could be a halfshaft universal. It's just lost all drive, won't go in any of the gears. Tried them all. Had no warning at all. The car really did feel good before that, you know it was running perfectly, we still had a lot of brakes, I was just conserving tyres with full tanks, waiting for a bit of a burst later on – once the petrol level goes down, you can give it a bit more. So, cruising along, it’s just one of those things. Second year in a row!

Crompo: You're the unluckiest driver of the last two Nissan Mobil 500s, recalling last year when you and Tony [Longhurst] pushed the leaders along. In fact it was the same team you were pushing! And then again you get three-quarters of the way this year and ditch it at the last moment?

Crowe: Yeah well, it's disappointing, but it is motor racing – it's an old phrase, but it's quite right. You've really gotta be there at the finish. It's been a bit of a problem, the BMWs with the clutch is... you know Jim lost one in Adelaide in a good position, it's just something that seems to go on them. But, you know, we've enjoyed our weekend and look forward to next week.

Crompo: You gave it your best shot. Good luck next week at Pukekohe.

The clutch was indeed a suspect part in the 635, built for Europe's rolling starts; the combination of Wellington's slow corners, the car's tall gearing and the unexpected heat of January had just proved more than it could take. Frank Gardner and Jim Richards could only hope their new car was built to take a bit more abuse.

The loss of Richards and Crowe was a huge bone to HDT, but that didn't mean the pressure was off completely. After a lacklustre middle of the race, the Jags suddenly came roaring back, Walkinshaw pitting shortly before 4:00pm to put Win Percy back in for one last kamikaze stint. They weren't winning, and no matter what happened this was the XJS's last race, so there was absolutely nothing to be lost if they stuck it in the wall. Percy did up his belts, slammed shut the door and took off to drive the stint of his life.

Their timing however cost Hahne dearly. Hahne had not been kind to his Pussy, pushing his to the ragged edge, locking up under brakes and getting sideways onto the bridge – he had worn his rear tyres right out. Indeed, it emerged later that he had a slow puncture in the left-rear. He'd asked to pit, but was rebuffed because at that moment Walkinshaw was in the box, leaving him to complete another lap with the tyre going down. It was a lap too far: the next time around, Hahne lost it again at the Bridge and ended up facing the wrong way – the first we knew was the vision of the marshals pushing the car backwards, putting it alongside the Bowkett Skyline that had been there since lap 3. Tom looked angsty, hovering around the pits with his race suit undone for ventilation, showing off his boxer's physique, but he didn't say a word. Not to worry – with the WTCC coming up, the rumours were already swirling that he’d be running Holden Commodores. There’d been a number of quiet visits to Melbourne, for one thing; for another, it was understood by some that he’d already taken delivery of a planeload of parts...

Neal Lowe had spent the last hour or so trying to find a way past Glen McIntyre in the #7 State Coal BMW. This car was being leased from Charlie O'Brien, which means it was probably his Bumper 2 Bumper car from 1986, which would make it the JPS Team's second car from 1985. It was being leased to the State Coal team (which, interestingly, had the same livery as the #8 Goldair car even though it had a different sponsor, implying they were a team. The Goldair entry however was the ex-Frank Sytner car from 1985. One wonders if it had power steering yet...). Although the fourth of HDT's four drivers – co-driver to their second car – it was Lowe who managed to find a way past McIntyre after almost an hour of on-track brawling. Neither had been silly enough to risk a touch with the wall for 3rd place.

Crowe's retirement turned 3rd place into 2nd, putting HDT into an enviable 1-2 position. But unfortunately, as with the Moffat/Crowe duel, the Commodore had to stop again, and the BMW didn't. Lowe lost the place when he brought the #3 back to the pits for its final fuel and driver change. Prime driver John "Slug" Harvey jumped back in and did up his belts in the knowledge that it was all up to him to make up the 14-second deficit before the clock ran out.

In fact, with nearly an hour in hand, it turned out that yes he could – Slug made his move on the back straight with half an hour to go, outbraking McIntyre into the tight chicane behind the houses. Mobil HDT were too wise to count their chickens, but it was nice to have nothing left to overcome but the clock.

Or so they thought – like lightning out of a blue sky, suddenly the last surviving Jaguar was back. Win Percy was under orders to fang it, because if the Jaguars couldn't win their final race, they should at least have the fastest lap. Thing was, he was so fast that with fifteen minutes to go, Percy came upon John Harvey and started harassing him for position! Coming out of the Northern Hairpin he was in Slug’s door mirrors, ducking and diving for a way past, and through the tight funnel onto Jervois Quay both got baulked by an Alfa Romeo GTV6. That set them up for a straight drag down the long back straight, and sure enough, Percy's V12 won it, pulling up for the narrow kink with P2 in his back pocket.

Of course Brock was 2 minutes and 10 seconds up the road, so P2 was probably as good as he was going to do today, but it was still a heroic effort. But you can probably guess what happened next. Yep, just a lap later, the big cat slowed with a problem, as we were treated to the vision of Percy touring back to the pits with the normally-lithe XJS sounding like a cement mixer. This was not a small failure. The Walkinshaw team had given it everything, but in the end, it just wasn't enough. Percy got a round of applause as he alighted from the car anyway, and disappeared out the back to find himself a well-earned drink.

That might've been the end of the contest, but it wasn't quite the end of the race. Like Odysseus, HDT had worn through every other team's life strands, and finally clear the pit crew hung out the sign for a formation finish. All pretty routine, except that in a bizarre final act the Mobil cars toured past the finish line in a formation the Roulettes would've been proud of... and the chequered flag wasn't shown to them. They'd have to complete another lap.

That wouldn't have been too weird, except that while the HDT cars had been slowing down for their formation finish, Glen McIntyre had caught back up. Sitting behind a pair of slow-moving Mobil Commodores, McIntyre too had missed that the chequered flag hadn't yet flown, and so missed out on a chance to spoil HDT's party. So it was that Peter Brock won the race, then realised he hadn't, and committed to another lap with Slug by his side, shadowed by a McIntyre who also thought Brock had won the race, only to find out that he hadn't, and didn't realise his mistake until he had. Confusing? You bet! Just imagine how hard McIntyre was kicking himself as Moffat and Brock were handed the trophy!

Check out the marbles off-line.

Verdict
The first race of 1987 had been an eventful one, a retirement party for the first generation of Group A machinery. Jaguar, BMW, Holden, Ford, Volvo, Nissan, Rover, Alfa Romeo, Toyota... the WTCC was coming up, and once it came we would never see such a variety of badges on the track again. Wellington that January day marked the end of the good old days of Group A. There were great cars and some great drives still to come, but this was perhaps the last time we'd see the ruleset actually function as it was meant to.

And the Mobil Holden Dealer Team? The slam-dunk 1-2 finish was a microcosm of the organisation under Peter Brock's leadership, their excellence in driving and flawless pitwork offset by a single damning fact – they were driving VK-model Commodores, not the newer VL. The VL Commodore SS Group A really should've been on track for Bathurst 1986, and that it wasn't said a lot about Brock's abilities as a manager and product planner. No wonder Holden were losing patience and beginning a dalliance with Tom Walkinshaw: he missed a deadline as crucial as Bathurst, for the second year in a row, despite the free donor cars and generous parts subsidies that came with his status as Holden's official factory team.

So wouldn't you know it, as January became February, that's exactly what he was about to lose...