25 March: Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

Dick Johnson bumped his win rate for the year up to 66% in the Australian Touring Car Championship's grand return to Phillip Island. Even better, teammate John Bowe was right behind him at the flag to pull off a formation finish, so for a moment things almost looked like they were returning to the old days. In reality, though we didn't know it yet, it was the end of one era and the dawn of another.

Hello, Old Friend
The bald fact was that by the time the Group A stars assembled for the race meeting on Thursday, Phillip Island had not seen a touring car in thirteen long years. It had been scheduled to host the finale of the 1978 season – the McEwan Spanners 250 – but that event had been moved to Bob Jane's Calder Park at the last minute, leaving the 1977 Ready Plan Insurance 500k the unheralded send-off to one of the true greats of Australian racing. The reason behind the move had been the bugbear that plagued the track from its very beginnings: problems with the tarmac itself.

The old bridge in 1949 (source).

See, Phillip Island is an island, so when the track was first built in 1956 there were only two ways to get there – a rather weedy ferry service connecting Stony Point to the greater metropolis of Cowes, or an even weedier wooden suspension bridge stretching from San Remo to Newhaven – a structure that dated back to 1948. That made the whole place rather inaccessible, despite being only a two-hour drive from Melbourne, so any racetrack built there had to do what the inaccessible parts of Australia did for road surfacing in those days – primitive cold-mix bitumen. The precise rationale for this decision is debated to this day: some say the equipment needed to lay proper hot-mix was too heavy to get across the bridge or onto the ferry. Some say the island was just too far from the nearest mixing plant for proper hot-mix to be practicable. Still others speculated that because the Phillip Island Auto Racing Club (PIARC), the track's owners, had financed the whole thing out of member donations, cold-mix was just the best they could afford.

Whatever the truth, the folly of cold-mix was laid bare when the Armstrong 500 (forerunner to today's Bathurst 1000) came to town in 1960. A grid of forty-plus production cars on skinny pizza-cutter wheels pounding around for 167 laps proved more than the brittle track surface could take, and in three 500s the track was reduced to rubble three times. The Armstrong 500 was forced to find a new home and, bankrupted, in 1967 PIARC sold the complex to Len Lukey of Lukey Mufflers fame (and also 1959 Australian Drivers' Champion and a great early rival of Jack Brabham). Lukey patched it up and carried on hosting races for the next decade, running it alongside his other track at Hume Weir, but after Lukey's death in 1978 the passion behind the project went cold. The family didn't see the point of endlessly shelling out for roadworks just to hold a motor race, and by the time the 1980s arrived, big-time racing was seemingly over for good. The land reverted back to sheep grazing, with the derelict race control tower the only hint of its past greatness.

Source

But then in 1984, local businessman Fergus Cameron bought the facility for $800,000, with big plans to reopen – plans which immediately stalled over questions of rebuilding and long-term leases. Happily however, while the suits were arguing over the details, a certain Wayne Gardner, the "Wollongong Whiz", emerged into world motorcycle racing and lit a fire under the whole project. Gardner won three races in 1986, then the FIM 500cc World Championship in 1987, and it seemed the whole of Australia discovered motorcycle racing at the same time. Local enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and politicians sniffed an opportunity, and as early as January 1987 plans were in the works to stage Australia's first Motorcycle Grand Prix in 1989. Thanks to the delays however, there were serious question marks over whether the circuit could be made ready in time, as the surface and facilities were seriously dilapidated, with sheep still grazing on the grass that had grown through the potholes.

Riding to the rescue came the creator of the Adelaide street circuit that was now hosting the Australian Grand Prix, Bob Barnard.

I built the Adelaide street circuit for the first Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix in 1985, and in 1986 I started looking at the rise of Wayne Gardner as a possible 500cc champion. That's when I began thinking about staging a 500cc Grand Prix here. I knew that the only circuit that could host it was Phillip Island, since I raced historic cars there when we had to scrape the sheep droppings off it before going racing... – Bob Barnard, Australian Muscle Car #89

A meeting with Fergus Cameron in 1987 created a company called Barfield to oversee rebuilding of the track and infrastructure. Barnard owned 50% of Barfield and Cameron another substantial stake, with Barnard also winning provisional rights to the Grand Prix, subject to the circuit being successfully homologated. Barnard played an incredible game, doing dozens of byzantine deals with governments, sponsors, TV networks and dozens of other interested parties, with loyalties and agendas changing constantly. At the eleventh hour Bob Jane threw Calder Park into the mix as an alternative, which could have torpedoed the whole project, but Barnard kept his head and saw it all through to completion – albeit at a massive cost. Barfield would be declared insolvent by 1991 and the lease would revert back to its original owners, but by then the business case had been proven and the Island was back with a vengeance.

The reworked circuit that emerged in late 1988 was barely any different from the 1956-1978 version. The run into what is now Honda Corner had been shortened by some 150 metres to create some runoff area before the fence (which couldn't be moved because there was a dam behind it), and MG Corner had been flattened slightly so that the overall length was now 4.45 rather than the old 4.82km. Compared to the butchery inflicted on some circuits brought into the modern age, however, such modifications barely amounted to a haircut, and the character of the circuit was unchanged.

There wasn't enough run-off [behind Honda] because of the dam wall on the outside of the corner and the wall itself would leak, which obviously affected the stability of the track. The way Honda Corner turned out was pretty good, and has become one of the key passing points on the track.

The other change we made was to MG. [Yamaha technical director] Warren Willing told me that the existing configuration would've meant that a 500 GP bike geared for 140km/h in first gear wouldn't make it through a race because the clutch couldn't take it. We raised MG corner 15 feet to lessen the dip into it, and we made it a bit more open so the bikes could roll through without having to slip the clutch on the exit. Keeping the integrity of the original layout was important and the changes were kept to a minimum. – Bob Barnard, AMC #89

And of course, with the local council having built a proper steel-and-concrete bridge to replace the old wooden bridge back in 1971, it also got the high-quality hot-mix surface it had always deserved. With a world-class surface to match its world-class layout, the 1989 Swan Premium Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix proved an absolute triumph, attracting 90,000 fans trackside and a TV audience of some 300 million – and sticking to the script, Wayne Gardner ran a sensational race to claim the first victory in his home country.

Now, in 1990, it was touring car racing's turn.

Under New Management
That this was a grand re-opening for Phillip Island was borne out by the massive 40-car entry list, which attracted drivers from three distinct backgrounds – the full-time professionals, the weekend warriors from Melbourne, and their opposite numbers from Sydney. It was the Sydney drivers that really gave it away: Terry Finnigan was there with his #27 Foodtown Commodore, Toyota drivers Mike Conway and Dennis Rogers were there to drive Corolla FX-GTs in the small-car class, and even Steve Reed was there to helm the #32 Lansvale Smash Repairs Commodore. The Lansvale team usually confined themselves to the Sydney venues (Amaroo and Oran Park, plus the big dance just over the mountains at Bathurst), of which Reed's job was to specialise in Oran Park. That he was interstate today when in theory he'd have to be back at work on Monday morning hinted at some serious appearance money on offer.

There was also Matt Wacker's rather attractive #42 Walky. Yellow is an underappreciated colour for racecars.

Mark Skaife was also there, having been marked absent from the Symmons Plains round. Skaife's main job right now was not to race but to get the new R32 Skyline sorted and ship-shape, and testing a car as high-tech as the R32 while race-prepping two HR31s would've stretched even the Gibson team's vast resources. But Phillip Island was right in the Melbourne-based outfit's backyard, and – probably a bigger consideration than we realise today – Skaife was also contesting the Formula Holden race being held the same day, which was actually Round 1 of the 1990 Australian Drivers' Championship. Essentially, this was a series for hand-me-down Formula 3000 cars powered by tuned-up versions of the new VN Commodore's 3.8-litre V6, and guest commentator (and former Australian Drivers' Champion himself) John Bowe noted, "Last time I drove an open-wheeler was at the Grand Prix meeting in Adelaide in '86, and I must admit to getting itchy feet occasionally. But when I see them go off the end of the main straight here flat in fifth gear, I decide I've done the right thing..."

In the end, oil pressure issues sidelined Skaife, leaving him unable to qualify and so to contest only the Formula Holden race, but he was far from the only driver pulling double duty this weekend.* Longtime Toyota Team Australia pairing John Smith and Drew Price were both attempting the double, and Smith unexpectedly revealed there was a risk involved when he had "an almighty off" in the warm-up session that completely destroyed his Ralt. Luckily he emerged unharmed, and that he bounced back from his visit to the medical centre to take the next start in his Supra said everything you needed to know about your average racing driver...

Also on the Formula Holden grid? Channel Seven commentator Neil Crompton, who no doubt would've been pulling double duty if only Brock or Percy'd had a car to spare. (Source)

Another who had an impressive accident was Win Percy, who all but wrote off his #16 Walky in practice on Friday. Now in their third meeting together, the new Holden Racing Team was finally starting to gel, which was just as well now that Percy had just handed them an emergency rebuild.

At Phillip Island I hit oil on the Friday and stuffed the front of the car. I went back home to Melbourne thinking that was the end of the weekend. They literally gutted the car overnight and took it to a local body shop and they phoned me to come back for qualifying. It was ready to run! The initial small group of men were unbelievable buddies.

I remember when I started with Tom he offered me a drive full-time in 1980. He said, "You can drive well and the boys like you," meaning, that the boys get on with you as much as you are a good driver and I think that's what made our team so good at HRT. We had guys who could work together through all hours and could be happy in each other's company. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

In that qualifying session Percy could only manage 9th with a lap of 1:40.43, which wasn't too bad when they were ahead of nine turbo cars, but still slightly annoying when it was two places behind the rival Walky of Larry Perkins, who was half a second faster. Pole of course had gone to a Sierra, but it was the #25 Benson & Hedges car of Tony Longhurst that took that coveted grid spot, with a scorching 1:39.03 lap. The DJR winning machines we were used to seeing at the front were in fact only on the second row, meaning the front row was completed by the #30 Peter Jackson car of Glenn Seton – an impressive achievement for what was still basically a father-and-son team, even if it was made up of experienced professionals financed by Big Tobacco.

Against such opposition, that there were any Commodores at all in the top ten spoke volumes of Percy and Perkins' car preparation, talent and balls. But in truth, there was a clear difference between the best in the country and the second tier, as between Gregg Hansford's 11th-place ANZ Sierra and Kevin Waldock's similar Playscape machine was a vast, gaping, 1.3-second gap (1:40.67 vs 1:42.04). The difference could've come down to a number of things – engine tune, chassis balance, and given the long corners of the track itself, experience and confidence would've counted for a lot. But much of it no doubt also came down, yet again, to tyres.

After qualifying on Saturday, with two of their bitterest rivals starting ahead of them, there were none but long faces over in the Dick Johnson Racing garage. As noted, the Shell team ran on Dunlops, and at Phillip Island that should've been a huge advantage – although the Nissan team had done some of their testing here, it was nothing compared to the massive test session Dunlop had conducted with the Nissan/Lola Group C and Dome Formula 3000 teams back in January (it turned out it was cheaper to fly to Australia for testing than it was to hire Suzuka at $5,000 an hour!). With everything they'd learned, Dunlop had apparently decided the Island presented some special challenges that would require a unique compound when the tourers came back in March, and they duly scuttled back to the factory to cook up the rubber they thought they'd need. Problem was, when those tyres netted them only 3rd and 4th on the grid and didn't seemed to have worked at any point during the previous two days, both DJR and Dunlop were sure they'd got it wrong.

They needn't have worried.

Oh Yes, I'm the Great Pretender...
The race boiled down to a contest between those who had it and those who did not. There was no hiding at Phillip Island, you really did have to have it all – power, grip, and a well-balanced chassis underneath you. If you didn't have all that, you wouldn't have the confidence to get on the power early enough and lose speed all down the following straight. More than anything, with downforce more of an afterthought on these cars, you needed a set of tyres that you could lean on lap after lap without worrying too much about wear. With the circuit dominated by the four high-speed left-handers at the Southern Loop, Siberia, Lukey Heights and the unnamed final turn onto pit straight, the right-hand set especially were in for a caning, and the race would surely go to whoever could maximise both mid-corner speed and tyre life. Problem was, those two things were mutually exclusive...

As they raised the green flag for the start, everyone had a bit of a creep on the line, but no penalties were enacted – I suppose it was a case of, "If everyone cheats, it's like no-one did." When they finally waved the green, Seton got away smoothly and into a car-length early lead, but Longhurst bogged down off the line and found himself swamped by both the Shell Sierras.

The pack behaved themselves through Turn 1 but couldn't get through the Southern Loop without incident. Exactly what happened is unknown – the broadcast never showed a replay – but at some point Peter Brock copped a hit from behind and got turned around, finishing up facing the wrong way with his rear bumper hanging loose. That left him staring down the barrel of all the Corollas and Commodores that made up the rear of the grid coming straight at him – it only would’ve taken one driver not paying full attention to end in a colossal accident. Thankfully it never came, and after a quick spin-turn Brock was touring back to the pits for repairs, the first of many, many visits to the pits for him today.

So who had hit him? You tell me. It might've been coincidence, but Ray Lintott's #12 Valvoline Sierra was seen with matching right-front corner damage. The front-left of Steve Reed's Lansvale Smash Repairs Commodore was also severely damaged, limping back to the pits on three wheels with the front-left tyre gone. There was no shortage of suspects for the crime, the problem was narrowing down the list. Whoever it was, when he got back to pit lane Brock's mechanics plugged in the air jack and removed the damaged bumper within seconds, then stood back and released their man, who gunned it out of the pits like he’d just seen the bailiffs coming for him.

Through the opening laps the order was Seton, Johnson, Longhurst, Bowe and then – incredibly – Win Percy in the #16 HRT Walky. The factory Holden had made up some grid spots in that opening bingle, sure, but since then he'd passed Alan Jones – a frontrunning Sierra! – on actual pace. Admittedly it was early days yet, but for the moment he was keeping up with the very best. Unfortunately, just as the Holden fans started to get excited we saw that the front chin spoiler had come loose and was dragging on the tarmac. The overnight rush job to put the car back together had come back to haunt them, and every fan's fingers crossed in the hope they wouldn't see a mechanical black flag as a result.

Four minutes in and with tyres now up to temp, it seemed Seton's early advantage was going away, the front pack separated by just 2.6 seconds overall. Johnson was easing up on him but Tony Longhurst was easing up onto them both, and under braking into the new Honda Corner on lap 3, Longhurst pulled off the move of the race as he nipped under Johnson at the last possible moment, then rotated the yellow car and smoothly powered away. Johnson had no choice but to let him go, sit back and watch as he then criss-crossed to the inside and took the racing line off Seton into Siberia immediately after, taking the race lead. Johnson followed him through, relegating Seton to 3rd in two corners – which only got worse when John Bowe also took a spot, following him through the scary rise at Lukey Heights then outbraking him down the hill into MG. That stoked our worst fears, that Seton might have a problem, and the fear was confirmed when even Win Percy caught him up and had a go at passing at Honda on the following lap. "Yeah, Seton's car's got a shocking miss by the sound of it," said Neil Crompton, after listening to the blue Sierra as it passed the commentary box.

By the start of lap 6, Seton was in the pits with his bonnet up, smartly-dressed team mechanics swarming over the machine to unplug wires and unscrew spark plugs. Pitlane reporter Cameron Williams took advantage of this enforced inactivity to shove a microphone in Seton's face and get the story. Seton did his best impression of Zeno, but it was clear he was upset.

Seton: Yeah, it's missing up at high revs, from six thousand on. And, um...that's the way it goes...

Williams: After a good start how do you feel about this? Because this could've been the best result of the championship so far for you.

Seton: I'm disappointed. The car was going so well and I reckoned we could really win this race, but mechanical problems bring us down.

Williams: A lot of people are interested in the tyre battle going on out there, what's the track performing like?

Seton: Well the track's pretty good. There's a little bit of oil on a few places, but the track's in good condition. I think it'll be very hard on tyres by the end of the race, but I think Yokohamas will win the race anyway.

Williams: Will you try and get back out?

Seton: Yeah, we'll put new plugs in it and hopefully that's all it was.

With a new set of plugs fitted Seton eventually rejoined, but he was too many laps down to be a contender after that.

At the front, Tony Longhurst was all business. Already lapping the small-class cars, Tony drove it hard to get by them through what would one day be called Stoner Corner, even getting his inside wheels into the dust. Experience shining through, there – take a calculated risk to nip past the traffic, then press on to make a gap while the opposition was stuck behind them. If only his teammate could've been so tactical: Jonesy tried dive-bombing John Bowe into Siberia and got it badly wrong, nosing Bowe into a spin and putting them both onto the grass (though thankfully, not the wall). Both got going without any apparent damage, Bowe ahead of Jones, but in the meantime Perkins and Richards both sliced between them at full racing speed, so it had been a costly mistake. Jonesy never got so close again. It also left Win Percy running in 3rd place – a potential podium in only the team’s third appearance! – with Perkins 4th. For the first time in a long time, Holden fans had something to cheer about.

Nearly 20 minutes in and there was no time to take a breath: while the commentary team took a moment to show us a replay of the start, Dick Johnson finally caught up to and then passed Tony Longhurst to take a race lead he would never lose. At the same moment, Brock returned to the pits to have his rear tyres seen to, putting him permanently out of contention for any real result. Worse, when he was next seen at full speed he was dragging a TV camera cable behind him, having snagged it on his trip through pit lane. The operator of Camera Nine was apparently shaken, but not stirred. Inevitably, Brock was shown a mechanical black flag, meaning he'd have to return to the pits yet again to have the cable cleared, meaning his goose was now cooked several times over: the rest of his race would consist mainly of return trips to pit lane to have one problem or another seen to, so regularly he might as well've crossed out the "05 Mobil" on his doors and replaced it with, "901 Frankston".

25 out of 50 minutes down, and the question of tyre life started to see some answers. Win Percy pitted for a new set of fronts, though that wasn't such a shock when his front spoiler was hanging loose and flapping in the breeze. Without the usual front-end downforce, Percy would've been dealing with a persistent understeer problem, crippling at a circuit like this where dialling in just the right entry speed was key to fast lap times. That he'd made it up to 3rd place, despite that, spoke of awesome commitment and no small amount of talent. If only he could've kept it up to the finish: instead, he rejoined 13th.

Another lap, and with a 4-second gap between Johnson and Longhurst, Tony at last gave in and headed to the pits for fresh rubber. Perkins shrugged and followed suit: having run as high as 4th, dying tyres had seen him slip back to 9th, and after his stop he rejoined behind Percy. The pretenders had put on a valiant show, but they'd made the mistake of calling the Johnson team's bluff, and it had turned out to be no bluff: Johnson and Bowe, now 1st and 2nd, really were just that fast, and they really were planning to run the whole race without stopping.

And with that awful realisation setting in, the third of the three who really had it – albeit not as much – made his presence known. Tyre life now saw Jim Richards edge upon Alan Jones and ultimately pass him on lap 20. An extra hundred horsepower wasn't worth anything if you couldn't get it to the ground, and as at Symmons Plains, Jonesy's tyres were now absolutely shot. Richo always was easy on his machinery, and that – plus experience of Phillip Island in the 1970s, no doubt – put him at a distinct advantage, especially in such a balanced, well-sorted car as the Skyline. That the race was being held on the track where the Nissan team had done most of their recent testing probably didn't hurt, either. By the time they got back to the home straight Jim was 2.2 seconds down the road from Jonesy, a huge margin to pull out in less than a lap – a clear sign the Sierras had driven too hard and melted their tyres. Defeated, Jones signalled he'd be pitting on the following lap: he rejoined 11th.

In a move that would’ve pleased the bosses at Clayton no end, Jim even came up and put a lap on John Smith in the arch-rival #15 Toyota Supra Turbo. This also, in a way, showed how right Fred Gibson was not to debut the R32 too early – the new Skyline was was in the same weight class as the Supra and was mostly 2WD and turbocharged as well, so this arguably showed where the new Skyline would run if they didn’t get it running at full capacity. Even so, with the pressure from Japan to start racing the R32 mounting, and Gibson was a brave man to still be telling them no.

With the race now definitely going Johnson's way, Mike Raymond dialled up Dick for one of those in-car chats that dazzled the Americans, picking up just as he applied the power through Siberia.

Johnson: G'day Mike. Siberia's a long way away, pal, I think you've got your wires crossed there.

Raymond: Well someone said earlier it was that warm here the penguins had taken their dinner suits off.

Johnson: Yeah, she's a bit hot. I'll tell you what, the penguins, if you've ever had a look at them, look like rats standing up with a dinner suit on!

Okay, then. (Source.)

Raymond: I'm not gonna touch that with a barge pole, Johnson. Mate everything looks pretty good, you've played a great waiting game here and you’ve got a 1-2 set up. Any problem with tyres?

Johnson: Not at the moment, but I'm just trying to look after them so we don't have a bit of a problem later on. That's the biggest problem, is being able to look after what you've got.

Raymond: Well I think it's obvious to everyone the championship this year is far more competitive. When it comes down to putting it all together, really, the Johnson Shell team have been able to do it two races in a row, very very adequately?

Johnson: Yeah, we're not there yet Mike. I might be a great optimist, but I'll tell you what, I've been there and done that before.

Raymond: Well this must seem a breeze [compared to] where you're bound for next weekend?

Johnson: Yeah, you're not wrong! It's a little bit different over there, with the good ol' boys...

Raymond: So where are you off to, Dick? To Darlington isn't it?

Johnson: Yeah, Darlington. The place where they've got that famous word, the Darlington Stripe. I hope I don’t end up with one.

Raymond: Well, looks pretty good at this stage, Johnny Bowe settling in behind you. We'll come back and talk to you a little later, let you get back on with the job.

Johnson: Thanks, Mike.

With some 40 of the 50 minutes now behind them, there was no doubt the tyres on the blood-red Shell Sierras were less than fresh, but it was also true they had a sizeable 27.6-second gap back to Jim Richards in 3rd. And with Bowe behind to act as his tail-gunner, Johnson wouldn't have to push very hard even if Richards did catch up. They could afford to just stroke it along to the finish, cruise and collect – champagne and silverware please, then feet up!

In fact, with two minutes remaining the only drama came when Murray Carter abruptly headed for the pits, and never made it. The unsponsored blue Sierra stopped in the pit lane entry with smoke billowing from the engine bay, an under-bonnet fire having started. Carter alighted and walked away looking more frustrated than alarmed, as the team and the emergency crews converged to deal with it (tellingly, the Carter team mechanics got there faster than the circuit firefighters...).

Ultimately though, the Shell Sierras crossed the start/finish line for the 30th and final time line astern, both Johnson and Bowe waving to the crowd in triumph as they greeted the chequered flag. Behind them Richards took 3rd after a spirited and highly professional drive, with Colin Bond 4th and Gregg Hansford 5th, both more by surviving than driving. DJR had claimed their first 1-2 in some time, and it seemed the big Dick was back on track to claim that unprecedented sixth championship, with 52 points now putting him at the head of the table. His sidekick Bowe was 2nd with 42, though Jim Richards – the man who could take it all off them – was a quiet 3rd with 36. Despite strong early showings, Longhurst and Seton languished on 12 and 10 points respectively, behind even Peter Brock's static 23. It was only a shame both Seton and Brock had been taken out for silly reasons so early in the day – it would've been interesting to see where their Bridgestones and Yokohamas might have put them by race's end.

In fact, though nobody knew it then, this was to be Dick Johnson's final ATCC round victory. Although he still had heat wins in his future, not to mention his third and arguably greatest victory at the Mountain, never again would he wear the victor's laurels for a round overall. The close of the 1980s was the end of the era of Johnson, of George Fury, of Brock and Moffat; the coming of Phillip Island heralded the beginning of the era of Seton, Ingall, Lowndes and Skaife. The 1980s were done; the 1990s were just beginning.

*And another name of note name in the Formula Holden ranks? Richard Davison, son of the late beloved Lex Davison and father of future V8 stars Alex and Will Davison. That's one family up there with the Andrettis and Unsers.

11 March: Tyre Terror in Tassie

Dick Johnson found the groove again in Round 2 of the ATCC, held deep within the map of Tassie. On a power circuit like Symmons Plains the event was always going to be a Sierra benefit, but with so many Sierras on the grid nowadays it wasn't at all clear which of them was going to come out on top. The result ultimately came down to the black art of the modern racing industry – the tyres.

Symmons Says
1990 actually marked the 30th anniversary of Symmons Plains Raceway. Carved out of a corner of the Youl estate near Launceston, with its two-storey Georgian brick home dating back to 1839, the permanent Symmons Plains circuit had replaced the discontinued once-a-year Longford road course, which by the late 1960s had become too dangerous (or too unprofitable) to be Tasmania's racing tentpole. Despite being a regular fixture on the schedule since then, Symmons had rather been robbed of memorable title-deciding moments after the 1969 and 1970 seasons, when it had been moved from the season finale to the curtain-raiser, or close to it. The reason was the same as why NASCAR only holds its Michigan rounds in June or July: latitude.

The Apple Isle was and is a revhead paradise, home to the brilliantly laid-out (but club-level only) Baskerville Raceway, the miniature Stelvio of Jacob's Ladder, and other wondrous bits of tarmac that in a couple of years would be hosting the Targa Tasmania... but you just couldn't ask an interstate audience to sit trackside in Tassie any day outside high summer. Two centuries of careful inbreeding might've made the hardy Taswegians able to bear the bitter cold, enough to lend their support to club- and state-level meetings and various other weekend warriors, but if you wanted to hold a national-level race that could attract visitors from the mainland (or the North Island, as they sardonically call us) to boost your economy... yeah, mid-March really was your cut-off. Any date after that, and the slightest breeze would pick up a hint of the snow likely settling on the hilltops to the south and leave your patrons hugging themselves trying to get the feeling back in their fingers, or forming a grumbling queue in front of the tea urn at the chip van (coffee stands were an innovation the 90’s were yet to bring).

So although the circuit was nevertheless a stringent test of skill, the history of Symmons was one of mostly-forgotten duels, race results that merely chipped in a few early points to drivers who would later be fighting over the championship. A shame, and less than it deserved, but that’s how it would be in 1990 as well.

Tassie Time Trials
The combination of long straights and highly boostable Cosworth engines meant qualifying was always going to be a Sierra party, and so it turned out: nine of the top ten qualifiers, including the fastest six, were all driving Fords. Fastest of them all was Peter Brock, a tenth faster than his pole last year with a lap of 55.86 seconds, thanks to a special relationship with his tyre partners at Bridgestone. Rule changes for the year meant ultra-sticky qualifying tyres could no longer be used, but such was the pace of development that even on race tyres (and with the extra 80kg of ballast on board), records could still fall only a year after they were set.

Things have changed since 1989. We arrived here very wet behind the ears as far as Sierras were concerned, however 12 months down the track we're now doing better than the qualifying times we did last year on race tyres. The interesting thing is that the field is so close... – Peter Brock

He wasn't wrong: although good for pole, his lap had been barely five hundredths of a second faster than Tony Longhurst in P2, and only three-quarters of a second faster than teammate Andrew Miedecke, who was almost certainly given leftover practice tyres and a B-spec car made from spare parts. Longhurst of course had the benefit of driving chassis TLR2, a car with the steering wheel on the left at a circuit with mostly left-hand turns, but he was probably running an engine tuned with the latest tips from Wolf Racing in Germany, not the Rouse engine Brocky was using. He was also, like the Johnson machines, running on Dunlop tyres rather than Bridgestones. It was a sign of how intense the competition was that all had qualified so close together, as despite the wildly different technical backgrounds the gap from Brock's 1st to Gregg Hansford's 10th place in the Eggenberger car was less than 1.4 seconds. But the real shock was Jim Richards in the works Skyline, who was right among them in 7th, the sole interloper in the top ten.

We've been pleasantly surprised in practice so far that we're so close to them. And although we're 7th on the grid, there's only about half- to three-quarters of a second difference between the first seven or eight cars. That, to us, is very important, because it means we are competitive with the Sierras on this track where we thought we wouldn't be. – Jim Richards

Indeed, to be in the middle of the Sierra pack in qualifying was to be sitting pretty on race pace...

Rubber's Racin'
The car at the centre of events for the 1990 Symmons round was this one.

Well, not this one, the sister car just like it.

I don't know that this photo wasn't taken at Symmons Plains, so I'll post it here. If you know better, the comment box is below.

Brock's Sierra was a little different from the others on the grid. For one, he was about the only man in Australia still relying on Andy Rouse for parts and tuning chips – everyone else'd had a gutful of the bastard long ago. For another, if you choose to watch the video below, you'll notice frequent puffs of oil smoke from the #05's exhaust even when it's not in trouble. This was likely because of its unique exhaust layout, which exited from the rear of the car rather than under the door. After a chat with long-time Brock mechanic John Heckrath, the V8 Sleuth revealed this exhaust layout had been fitted purely because Brock didn’t like the noise, to the point that even wore noise-cancelling earphones during the races! The team only used this exhaust layout in the sprint rounds, as it was said to drain excessive oil out of the engine. Which, watching the footage, you can see every time Brock lifts off the throttle.

And of course, the third difference was that Brock's cars ran on Bridgestone tyres rather than the Dunlops of the Longhurst and Johnson teams, or the Yokohamas of Seton's team. Having proved supreme in qualifying, the Bridgestones would remain supreme for 35 of the 50 minutes on Sunday. Unfortunately, as they say, it's the last lap that you have to lead, not the first...

At the start they all got away in a huge cloud of smoke – most of it from Alan Jones – but Brocky got that much further away and barrelled into Turn 1 in the lead, leaving the yellow-team train on the outside rail behind him, and the red-team train on the inside. Longhurst then out-dragged Dick down the back straight to take 2nd place, but Jonesy had a problem right at the start, generating an enormous cloud of smoke and touring around his opening lap to pit and see the doctor. It emerged, after the commentators had a quick consult with team manager Frank Gardner, that Jonesy had blown the left-rear tyre on the starting line and needed a replacement. He rejoined, but at the back of the field, a lap down.

At the front, however, the pace was searing, Brock's first flying lap a 56.8, compared to the 55.9 he'd done the day before. On cold tyres with full fuel, that was a pretty solid effort. Despite that, Longhurst was the man who was on a mission, pushing his car hard trying to catch the Mobil #05 ahead of him. Behind the lead trio was a modest gap, then John Bowe, Glenn Seton, Andrew Miedecke and finally Jim Richards, first non-Sierra in 7th.

After ten minutes of racing, Brock was 3.4 seconds up the road and gone: Longhurst's early charge was over, his mind now on the much more patient (but prowling nevertheless) Dick Johnson behind him. Tony in fact had a problem: after the first ad break, the telecast returned to show a replay of Tony being passed by Dick in Turn 6, following which he slowed dramatically. He shortly returned to garage (not even stopping in pit lane) and retired with 11 laps on the board, his engine ruined.

We started off nicely and I got past Dick. [But] when I was in behind Peter the water temp was starting to come up a little bit, it was up to about a hundred and ten. I thought, "I better just back off a little bit," so I dropped 500 revs, and that's when Dick was catching me. So I thought, "Little bit of a problem here with the water temperature," and then it suddenly went off the clock. Obviously it's split a bore, or blown a head gasket. – Tony Longhurst

That left the Shell cars 2nd and 3rd, Glenn Seton 4th, Miedecke 5th and Richo 6th. Two laps later and the gap from Brock to Johnson was 3.1 seconds, and that despite Brocky visibly driving the nuts off his car – slight brake lock-ups, little wiggles as the applied the power, nothing completely out of control but pushing his luck nevertheless. Some of that was oil dropped by Longhurst (Dick complained his windscreen needed a wash after Tony's blow-up), but some of it was just Peter milking it for all it was worth. Five laps later and the gap was down to 2.0 seconds – a lap later it was back out to 2.3, hinting that Johnson was biding his time, but two laps after that it had see-sawed back down to 1.8, then 1.6. This tug-o-war was only going to end one way.

As a side note, there was also Glenn Seton, who'd lost the top of his gearstick leaving him to change without it! James Hunt had virtually crucified himself trying that at Silverstone, so hopefully Glenn would have an easier day of it. At least he’d made the right choice of Yokohamas this time...

30 minutes into the 50-minute race, Alan Jones stopped for another set of tyres, and with those fitted he went on a rampage. Racing with anyone and everyone, he even managed to unlap himself from Brock and thus get back onto the lead lap – spectacularly, by going around the outside into the Brambles Hairpin.

Tough day for Tony, one car out within 10 minutes, the other irrelevant literally on the starting line.

That, in retrospect, was a moment loaded with significance. With 15 minutes remaining in the race, Peter’s tyres were dying. The gap to Johnson was now 0.8 seconds, and shrinking.

For a moment Brock had breathing space, as both he and Johnson came up to lap Larry Perkins and Johnson was held up for a full lap, but then Dick came roaring back and was right on Peter's bumper along the front straight after the pits. And there into Brambles, something happened. Brocky's rear was suddenly enveloped in a cloud of smoke that rivalled Jonesy's at the start, and the back end was skating all through the Hairpin – so bad in fact that Johnson tapped him in the middle of the turn, leaving him squirming for traction as they departed down the straight. The next time around they were much neater, but there was no hiding that the Mobil Sierra was skating a bit, completely out of grip at the rear. Another touch through Turn 7 was a love tap, no biggie between drivers with this much history together. Another lap and this time Johnson pulled the classic manoeuvre: he got a tow down the long back straight, pulled out of the slipstream onto the inside line, then applied the brake a split-second later than Brock to take the lead by sheer track position. All very chess-like and, because it was Brocky, clean. 44 minutes into a 50-minute race, and Johnson was finally leading.

The interest in the final minutes was provided by Seton trying to find a way past John Bowe. As a Tasmanian Bowe would've loved nothing better than to win in front of his home crowd, but it wasn't going to be this year. Indeed, he had his hands full just keeping the young and future Ford Hero behind him! Some heart-stoppers came when they went three-wide into Brambles while lapping Larry Perkins, and Bowe shortly thereafter had a lock up into Turn 6. All very stirring stuff.

But in truth this race was done. Johnson wound out the final laps to take the win, with Brock a distant 2nd, Bowe a comfortable 3rd, Seton a fighting 4th and Andrew Miedecke a lonely 5th. Colin Bond in the #8 Caltex Sierra made it a Ford 1-2-3-4-5-6. Only then came Amaroo winner Jim Richards as the only works Nissan driver of the weekend. Win Percy, meanwhile, brought the #16 Walky home in 9th place, last man on the lead lap but first of the Commodores, scoring the first-ever points for HRT.

Post-race, with just the TV interviews to get through, Dick told us about what we expected:

Dick Johnson: The main thing that we're really concentrating on is really setting up our car for a distance rather than for one lap. And this sort of proves it, because the last few races we’ve basically had to play the waiting game to a certain extent – it's just like the pursuer and the pursue-ee, you know? But I was really trying, and ol' Pete there... a couple of times I just sort of rubbed bumper bars with him, and he got a bit sideways up the hairpin. But that’s what it's all about, because I'd never intentionally run into anyone, and we got a damn good race!

Channel Seven's Cameron Williams: It seems already that the racing should be closer this year. That has to be good for the championship?

Johnson: Well that’s the name of the game, because I think I’m last in the horsepower race at the moment, to be quite honest!

At this point Brock chipped in, and although his comment was hard to make out over all the other speakers, it sounded like a cheeky, "You don’t wanna swap, do you?" The needle between these two never stopped: in his interview a moment earlier, Brock had extended his congratulations to "George and Graeme Brown and all the boys" rather than Dick himself – Graeme Brown of course being better known as Mort, Brock's old team manager in their Holden Dealer Team days, now managing Dick Johnson Racing instead. Not to be outdone, upon being awarded the victor's ribbon Dick served him one back with one of the subtlest Johnson-isms ever.

Thanks very much indeed. I'd like to congratulate Peter, because he gave us a fairly hard sort of a race. It was a good race; early in the piece Tony was spewing out a fair bit of oil on us, unfortunately he had a problem, otherwise it would've been a three-way dice. Thanks to Shell and to all the other people, and especially Dunlop for our tyres [emphasis mine].

The way Brocky snapped back around, blinked and then flashed a shit-eating grin said the message had got through loud and clear.

All told, after two rounds the ATCC points table had Brock and Bowe equal 1st on 27 points, Jim Richards 3rd on 24, Johnson now 4th on 23. It was shaping up to be an intensely competitive season of tintop racing...

25 February: Running in the '90s

So the 1980s were over. The decade of cocaine, Wall Street traders in suspenders and turbo monsters had finally ended, and in its place came a new decade that would give us political correctness, Silverchair, a second crossing for Sydney harbour, the Recession We Had To Have, and a mass shooting that would transform us into the go-to example for gun control across the entire world. In due time it would also give us 5.0-litre V8s, but in the opening weeks of 1990 all that was in the future; the start of the 90's looked an awful lot like the end of the 80's.

Unable to afford to run his own team any more, Andrew Miedecke sold his Oxo Sierras and took a deal to drive for Peter Brock's outfit instead. 1990 would be his final year in the series.

The funny thing is that if you asked the average racing fan to summarise the 1990 season, they'd probably mutter something to the tune of, "...start of Godzilla domination..." and leave it at that. But in fact, in the early races of 1990 that car hadn't even arrived, and when it did it was far from dominant, almost crippled by the teething troubles inevitable in such a high-tech machine. In reality, 1990 was a cracking season that saw four different ATCC winners in three different cars, producing an intense arm-wrestle for the championship and, later in the year, an against-all-odds victory at Bathurst for one of the great underdogs...

1990 was in fact one of the great forgotten seasons of Australian racing, and it deserves a closer look.

Kick-Off at Amaroo
Dick Johnson Racing emerged from the 80's as the powerhouse of Australian racing. From the incident with the rock at the start of the decade, Dick had come out with two Bathursts, five championships, a solid relationship with a major sponsor in Shell and undisputed status as the Ford Hero. The team could be forgiven for entering the new decade with a spring in their step, and the expectation that Dick was about to clinch an unprecedented sixth championship that would at last break the record set by Big Pete Geoghegan in the 1960s. But this was the 1990s, and things were to change quickly.

Qualifying at Amaroo Park was disturbed by rain that dried up towards the end of the session, which shuffled the grid to a startling degree. Defending champ Johnson found himself starting from a lowly 13th, only 0.18 seconds faster than John Faulkner in one of Toyota Team Australia's Corolla FX-GTs! Happily though, John Bowe had timed his run exactly right and managed to secure 2nd place on the grid, beaten only by Alan Jones in the second of the Bensen & Hedges team Sierras. 52.14 seconds to get around the tight 1.9km Sydney autodrome – in the wet! – was quite an achievement in a car that delivered its power like a light switch. At last home from his overseas tour for good, Jonesy was a deserving polesitter.

I haven't been able to find the full race on YouTube, but there is this highlights reel, which isn't ideal but it's better than nothing.

At the start, Bowe and Jones virtually cancelled each other out. Determined to beat each other off the line, both former open-wheel aces gave it too much throttle and bogged down with limitless wheelspin. From 4th on the grid, just behind them, Jim Richards made a start that was both clean and aggressive and simply drove around the outside of them up Bitupave Hill, taking the lead. He would not be headed again.

It was here that the rule changes for 1990 started to make themselves felt. To try and balance the obvious performance gap between the Sierra RS500s and everything else on the track, the sport's rulemakers had adjusted the turbo parity formula. The old x1.4 engine capacity multiplier clearly wasn't enough, so they'd raised it... to x1.8.

Multiplying by 2 or 3 would've been more realistic, but there we were: the effect on track was to lift the minimum weight of the Sierras from 1,100kg to 1,185, a small but significant difference for a machine that was already very marginal on its tyres. With the ATCC having switched to a TV-friendly single 50-minute race format, championship race distances had increased from as little as 80km to as much as 150, making tyre life a real priority – in a sport when planned pit stops in sprint races were still uncommon.

That was music to the ears of the lads over at Gibson Motorsport. Although this race had been planned as the debut of the new Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R, delays just getting it running had forced them to dust off their older HR31s for a third season on the front lines, and the new weight limits could've been tailor-made for the little Japanese coupé. In all the time they'd been racing it, Gibson had never got the GTS-R under 1,180kg, so an extra 5kg of ballast to meet their new limit of 1,185 wasn't going to change a damn thing. Add in that their driver was New Zealand's Jim Richards, master of his machinery in all conditions and a man known for being remarkably gentle on tyres and brakes, and the factory Nissan team was in with a serious chance this year.

Gibson also got into the customer-car business, Chris Lambden upgrading from his ex-Brock VL Commodore to a GTS-R Skyline. The Nissan wasn't cheap, but given you got full technical support from the works team including fully prepared and maintained engines, you arguably got a lot for your money.

Richards knew it, and made the most of it by wresting the race lead away from the Sierras on lap 1. Bowe didn't let him get away, running him ragged in the early phase of the race, but by half-distance he was running out of rear tyres and clipped the pit wall with the rear quarter panel, and was lucky to get away without a puncture or other damage. Bowe was never really in the hunt after that, and eventually had to settle for 2nd place, 8.2 seconds behind Richo. 3rd went to the boss, Dick Johnson, who did well to claw his way past ten other cars around the bogan Monaco of Amaroo – but even that was a bit lucky, as second Nissan team driver Mark Skaife had been in the hunt for that spot car until an engine management bug had sidelined him on lap 7. 4th went to Tony Longhurst in the lead Benson & Hedges Sierra, which was a solid result but not really enough on the track where he and his mentor Frank Gardner did all their testing. About the only consolation was that it gave him a nice 8-point head start for this year's AMSCAR series (of which this race was a round, doubling as the ATCC season-opener), but given he'd ultimately win it 80 points to Colin Bond's 49, even that didn't really matter much.

Jonesy meanwhile just couldn't find the pace he'd had in qualifying and finished a lowly 8th – behind the two Mobil Sierras of Peter Brock and Andrew Miedecke, and the ANZ Sierra of Gregg Hansford, but ahead of Colin Bond in the Caltex Sierra, another driver who'd been caught out by the weather in qualifying. Glenn Seton meanwhile had crashed his Peter Jackson Sierra in practice and had to take the start in his second car, but a poor tyre choice led to a mid-race pit stop for a fresh set of Yokohamas that dialled him out of contention. But the prize for weird moment of the race came when Larry Perkins was shown a mechanical black flag for – of all things – making too much noise in his #11 Walkinshaw Commodore! Sydney's urban sprawl was well out of hand by this time and, like a gigantic amoeba, the suburbs were closing around the iconic Amaroo Park circuit. For some reason, homeowners that had known there was a racetrack nearby when they signed the mortgage papers were given priority over a local business that had been in operation for decades, so noise limits were serious business for the embattled Amaroo owners. The track would sadly see its final race before the decade was out.

I'll keep saying it: if Laguna Seca goes under, we're bulldozing Augusta. You've been warned.

The Lion Cub
It only appears in the video above for a few seconds, but the car at the heart of the real story of the 1989/90 off season comes at the 3:54 mark. That car was the #16 Walkinshaw Commodore driven by Britain's Win Percy, and it represented the maiden outing of an all-new entity – the Holden Racing Team. HRT was here.

Source

Yes, there'd been a Holden Racing Team since 1988, but that wasn't the Holden Racing Team. The real thing had been delayed for two years while Tom Walkinshaw busied himself setting up Holden Special Vehicles, a much bigger and more important arm of the Holden company than a piddling racing team. But by 1990 HSV was established and washing its own face, and it was finally time to put a Holden works team on the grid. Their first instinct was to offer the job to the man who'd already been doing it for two years, Larry Perkins.

After '88, [HSV boss John] Crennan and Walkinshaw made an offer that meant I would have to forget about Perkins Engineering and come totally under their wing to become the race side of HRT. But, at the end of the day, we didn't do a deal, which was probably the best thing, as I'm an independent sort of a guy and, as Walkinshaw is a similar type of person, we arguably might not have gotten on too well.

So, after two years of contractually running as HRT, I bowed out and concentrated on my own business and its further development. – Larry Perkins, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Nothing daunted, Tom instead founded a whole new branch of TWR to run one of his Walkinshaw Commodores (with Holden factory support) as HRT. Since he was busy being the head of the company back in Britain, however, he needed someone on the ground in Australia doing the actual legwork of putting the team together. That someone would be his loyal deputy, Win Percy, who he'd have to convince to move from the U.K. to Melbourne to take the job. Tom made the call to his old Jaguar and Rover teammate just as he was about to board a plane back to the colonies.

One day Tom phoned me at home and I was a day away from going to New Zealand to do Wellington and Pukekohe for Fred Gibson and the Nissan works team. He offered me a deal to run the works Holden team for the next year. I said that Larry was quite capable of running it and that I didn’t fit. I said to Tom to let Larry get on with it because he had the workshops and the staff and he was difficult for me to work with and that I didn’t think he would take to me. So I said, “No thank you,” to Tom.

But Tom wanted to be more in charge. The one thing he did say was “I won’t interfere with you,” and he kept emphasising that. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Walkinshaw met Percy at Heathrow and talked him around. Perkins was no longer involved; it would all be Percy’s show as manager and lead driver. Walkinshaw got his man.

He wrote on a piece of paper all of the details and the numbers and I said I would need to phone my wife Rosemary from Heathrow Airport and if she would agree to come with me, then I’d probably like to give it a go and that’s what we did! – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

Percy thought the deal was only for one year; he didn’t want to drop out of the European scene for too long and be forgotten, so he rode off thinking it would only be a twelve-month jaunt. Getting HRT off the ground was a huge job, and Percy landed in Australia with little more than a list of names and phone numbers and a short 49-day deadline to the first round on 25 February. He brought over compatriot engineer Ken Page and they built the team from the ground up, leasing an empty factory in outer suburban Ferntree Gully and pulling together a talented and dedicated team under workshop manager and chief engineer Walley Storey, and former TWR engine-builder Rob Benson.

I came out on the 7th of January with Ken Page, one of Tom’s long-term employees, and he stayed with me until Amaroo. But I got to 278 Ferntree Gully Road where there was supposed to be workshops, cars and lots of spares and there was nothing! There was one old body shell that the axle tore out of of the rear of at Bathurst in 1988, and Larry had been allowed to keep some things from stock, use them and supposedly put them back...

So I phoned Rob Benson, who was working in America and tempted him to come over as my engine man. I explained what I was up to and, as we always had a good relationship with the Rovers and Jaguars, he came back to Melbourne.

The other guy I had got to know through Neil Crompton was Walley Storey. I phoned Walley and asked him to come to work with me as I could do with an engineer/workshop manager. He said he had his own business in Sydney and it was an engineering company. It was a leased premises but he owned all of the equipment so I asked him for a price for him and his equipment. We literally agreed on the phone and transported his stuff down.

So I had an engineer, a basic tool shop, an engine man and then I found Martyn Bellars who used to work for TWR and was a very good mechanic. I’d met Dave McDermott and I got him to come and work and that’s how we started. We built a car up for the first race at Amaroo. Australia closes down in January so it really was a scramble, but we made it. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

They made the surprising decision to opt for a Zytek engine management system instead of the locally-designed Motec. The team also slowly replaced Perkins Engineering parts with TWR-spec equipment on the VL. But the challenges never abated.

Typical Tom, I had only been there ten days and I had a fax from him while I was scrambling around trying to build a car and a team. He knocked 40% off the budget that we’d shook hands on in December! I had to go to Telecom MobileNet, Castrol, Parkroyal Hotels and Holden and I had to secure the budget that had been proposed anyway. For some reason it had been shaved quite dramatically. – Win Percy, Holden Racing Team: 20th Anniversary

It was touch-and-go whether the team would have a car ready in time for Amaroo, but they did: from handshake deal to a race-ready car in under fifty days! Unfortunately the car remained a Commodore, and Amaroo Park remained Amaroo Park, tight and winding and with no length of straight to put massive horsepower to work. No Holden, no matter how much factory support was behind it, was going to be fast here, and Percy put in a qualifying lap of only 54.52 seconds – putting him back in the 16th starting place. In the race he might've thought about putting the big V8's linear power delivery to work once the turbos started lunching their tyres, but Amaroo punished the weight of the Holden even more severely than the newer, heavier breed of Sierra: Percy ultimately finished 14th, having been forced to make a pit stop for fresh tyres.

Source

Just finishing a debut race without mechanical dramas might have counted as an achievement to some, but this was a crew of hard-bitten professionals, and they knew what racing was about. "Racing compares one product with another," said Tom Walkinshaw. "For me that means winning; there’s no point in going racing to be beaten. We've got a chance to win some races with the new car, to show that Holden is as good as anything in the race." In fact, it was already clear that the Walky would need a lot more assistance to start winning sprint races like this, and in time Tom's voice would be one of a cacophony calling for the end of Group A.

Colour Our World Blackened

Note: This post was updated in January 2024, after I cleaned out my old phone and found some long-forgotten photos and screenshots from that time. I've marked them out as new additions, not because I think anyone will care, just on the principle of not being my own Ministry of Truth.

...A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd
For those rebellious, here thir Prison ordain'd
In utter darkness, and thir portion set
As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n
As from the Center thrice to th' utmost Pole.
O how unlike the place from whence they fell!

– John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 61-75

Own work, not for media use.

The fires plaguing my country became real to me only slowly. When they first flared up it was honestly little more than a calendar marker, like the Grand Final when you don't follow the footy – "Oh, that time of year, is it?" They didn't really kick into gear until mid-December, when in the lead-up to Christmas I was working graveyard shifts at one of my two current workplaces. Around 4am I got a phone call from the usual graveyard guy, telling me that as a volunteer firefighter he'd been called up to go and fight the Braidwood fire north of Canberra. I wrote down the details he gave me and, when the site manager came in to start work a few hours later, I told them that I'd probably just picked up a couple of extra shifts. Sure enough, when I came in the following night my five graveyards in seven nights had become seven of nine (insert TNG joke here). Nine days of night was pretty tough, so thirty must be a killer. But that was how the fires began for me, covering extra shifts so a coworker could go fight one of them.

During those nights the smoke arrived. It was fairly gentle at first, as we suspected it was coming from one of the big fires near Canberra, 150km to the east of us. Some days thinner, some days thicker, so that the morning sun dawned ruby red as it leapt from the horizon, but always it was coming from far away. At the same time, the smoke hasn't left since...

On 21 December, a fire started in the Common just south of town, a patch of scrubland set aside for mountain bikers, bushwalkers and other incorrigible outdoorsy types. It was established that it started from yet another car that had been stolen, taken for a joyride and then torched in the scrub – there had been literally dozens of instances of this in the last 12 months, and the public mood these days is that if they found the guilty party the police wouldn't be getting involved. You could hang, draw and quarter the culprits in the main street and five thousand people would swear they didn't see a thing. Anyway, it seemed this time the person(s) responsible finally overdid it, because it was a hot day with some winds; a day with a Total Fire Ban in place. Sure enough, the Common went up like a dry tissue, a 50-hectare patch ultimately being destroyed only a few hundred metres from the town. The firies got it under control without much hassle though, and despite its proximity to the town was never rated above Watch & Act (i.e. yellow, one above Advice (blue) but below Emergency (red)).

Just over a week later – probably New Years' Eve 2019, if my old rosters are any guide – it was even hotter but muggier, as mild storms were forecast. Sure enough, a small, isolated thunderstorm developed southwest of town, and I pithily took to Facebook to wonder whether this storm would douse the still-smoldering embers of the Common fire, or give us dry lightning strikes and start a new one? Me and my big mouth...

Own work, not for media use.

The strike that started it landed somewhere south of Ellerslie Nature Reserve. That's where it first appeared on the RFS maps; my first news of it came on my way home from work, when I stopped in at my second store en route to pick up my roster. A local man filling his Pajero saw me as I was crossing the forecourt, saw my work shirt and called out, asking if I'd mind taking his cash and paying on his behalf, because his mate had a fire on his property that needed fighting. I said sure, took the money, paid the man’s bill, got my roster and thought no more of it; at the time it was just a grass fire, no bigger than the one on the Common, but much further from town. Not a huge deal.

It got bigger. Over the following days it grew from 50 hectares, to 100, to 1,000. The smoke started to get noticeable, chafing the throat and stinging the eyes. By New Year's Day it was 5,000 hectares, and that night it kicked into overdrive: coming home from work that night, the sky to the south was one huge red glow, like Frodo and Sam's first view of Mordor. It was incredible. By the time I got up the next day, the fire had burnt out 25,000 hectares and was becoming a major threat to Laurel Hill, Batlow and Tumbarumba. I kept the app open at work that night and watched with disbelief as the fire tracked straight between Tumba and Batlow. By the time it reached the end of that run it had grown to 125,000 hectares.

New Year's Eve I'd served 642 customers, and New Year's Day I did another 580 or so, most of them evacuees from Batemans Bay. For these two days the smoke was thick and white and powdery, and the constant traffic through our doors meant it was as bad inside as it was out; I'm still coughing and speaking with a croaky voice because of it. I tried to pick up a mask from one of the local hardware stores but they were understandably all out, and the business I work for wasn't quick enough to provide them, so I just had to suck it up for now.

By now we were getting nervous, as weather reports were warning Saturday, 4 January, would be a horror fire day: 46 degrees and blowing a gale, mostly strong easterlies. Batlow would be right in the firing line; and since the fire had steadily crept north through Ellerslie Nature Reserve and up towards the main road, Adelong was in danger as well. On Thursday, 2 January, a couple of hours before work, I got a broadcast text ordering that Batlow be evacuated: that threw a switch in my head, and I started loading up my car, just in case.

Fire spread prediction map for 4 Jan 2020 (added Jan 2024).

It's quite a thing, going through your home and deciding what you want to take with you and what can be fed directly into an incinerator. I was glad I now drive a Falcon instead of the old Corolla, I was able to fit so much more of my stuff – all of my books for starters (made easier because the landlord's been renovating, so I'd had my stuff boxed up for over a year awaiting the order to move anyway. Like the soldiers of 1914, I was told I'd be out before Christmas; as in 1914, they weren't specific about which one...). I was able to save most of what mattered to me, but even so I had to leave two crucial things behind: a bookshelf that was bequeathed to me by my Nan, and my beloved Peavey bass amp, which belonged to the father of the Von Trapps of my home town. If you were going to practice music in that town in those days, you were doing it in their garage, where everything was already set up. They sold me the amp my first year of uni, after the dad (an ambulance officer by trade) did his back in and wasn't allowed to sling a bass guitar over his shoulder anymore; he knocked $100 off the $400 asking price because I was a student. So I've owned that amp since I was 19, and been using it since I was 16. They're only things, sure, but they're things with immense sentimental value to me, and they're simply not replaceable. But they were also too big to fit in an already crammed Falcon.

(One person cutely asked if my car would struggle on the hills loaded up with so much stuff; the answer was "sort of", as it had to change down going up one of the steeper ones. There's nothing like a Barra turbo.)

Friday, 3 January passed uneventfully, the calm before the storm. Then Saturday came, and an hour or so after I awoke (I sleep late because I work late, so just before midday), the winds picked up outside, and almost simultaneously the fire was upgraded to Emergency status. I was already packed and ready to go, so there was no point staying in Tumut: I posted to FB that I was pulling out and heading into work a couple of hours early, so no-one needed to wonder where I was. It meant a 10-hour shift, but that was okay; like everyone else I was in a bit of a state, so a place with unending menial tasks to do was perfect. I have far too much imagination, so the worst thing you can do to me is leave me alone with it.

That afternoon, around 3pm, we started getting power surges and blackouts that interfered with our computers and fuel pumps. Officially this had nothing to do with the fire, but the RFS map showed the black area had reached the Tumut 1 power station at Talbingo, so that claim seemed like an obvious and pointless lie. For about three hours we struggled with a backroom server that couldn't keep up and pumps that wouldn't run because they needed electricity to function. People would have to settle for however much fuel they got before the power dropped out again... or none, depending on the breaks. We could only put through sales by noting down manually what people were buying, adding it up with a calculator and taking it in cash. It's a point of professional pride that my cash variance at the end of that night was only $2 – a $2 coin that I found on the floor about halfway through the night and wasn't sure if it was from my till.

Own work, not for media use. (Added Jan 2024)

I fully expected Batlow and Adelong to've been erased from the earth by the time I finished that evening – the firies had been giving us the full Batlow Delenda Est, warning that this area "will not be defensible" – but apparently only 8 houses were lost that day, along with both the town's small independent petrol stations. The footage of that going up is not quite Bay-esque, but it stands out even among most bushfire footage. I remember we met the owners of one of those petrol stations a few years ago they came knocking at my store asking various questions about our procedures, which was really suspicious until we realised who they were. Once the penny dropped we gently explained we were part of a franchise, not an independent like them, so even if we could discuss our procedures ours would be different from theirs. Apparently no-one was there by the time the fire caught up, but around 5pm on that horror Friday I was told "the Batlow servo" had exploded, right when we were battling with the power surges. Those two gents were the first thing I thought of.

Own work, not for media use.

Anyway, as absurd as it felt to head back towards the fire to sleep, my bed was back in Tumut so that's where I had to go. Thankfully by then the conditions had calmed down a bit and the fire was back to Watch & Act status. I can't say I slept well, thanks to the smoke and the calls to reduce electricity usage as the Talbingo power stations that supply half the state were temporarily out of commission; I really could've used some air con as it was still 37 degrees at midnight, but I figured as a single guy living alone, I was expendable. If me being a bit hot meant a hospital somewhere could keep the lights on, then that was probably a fair trade. I found a temporary solution by opening up all my doors and windows and sleeping in front of the open front door, letting the slowly-cooling night air wash over me, but around 2am the smoke arrived in force and I had to close it all up tight again.

The smoke the next day gave us a dark, orange day with air quality twice as bad as Beijing, apparently... but Tumut was still here. Adelong was still here, despite the fire reaching the cemetery on the outskirts of the town; and Batlow was mostly still here, despite losing several buildings and one man's life, as he volunteered to help defend his mate's home. And in the end, this too did pass. By 10 January the road to Batlow was open again, so I took it, and got the photos you see here. I didn't go into the town itself because I didn't want to photograph the ruins of someone's house, but I didn't need to, these were enough. I'm not sure how many houses were lost, but it was surprisingly few, and the orchards that power the town are mostly still standing. The firies must've brought their A-game, that's all I can say. And given it's now looking the fire might not reach Bondo State Forest either, the local economy might just limp through this.

Fires Near Me screenshot. Note that the long axis was created basically in one single night. (Added Jan 2024.)

I promise I'm not fishing for sympathy, because I need none and deserve less. I am NOT a victim of the fire: I haven't lost a damn thing. My car has been emptied again, and I gave my house the best clean it's had since I moved in while it was an empty shell. But the experience has still left a mark on me. I've been through the trauma of triaging my belongings and making the decision to run while I was still ahead of it, and had a glimpse of how quickly it all breaks down when the expensive and fragile infrastructure that defines a First World country collapses. (Hint: if you're heading into a fire area, get your petrol and/or diesel well before you arrive, because the local stations might not be able to supply you. And of course, in the absence of electricity, you'll need lots of fuel to run your generator, won't you? The Catch-22 will murder you if you're not thinking ahead.)

Own work, not for media use.

More than anything though, I feel like I’ve had a glimpse of our future, of the world of Climate Change. As I write this we've got several days of soaking, slow-moving rain storms forecast to move through the area, and the firies are telling us the blaze is more or less out... but there are still six weeks left of this godforsaken summer. And even if nothing else happens, there'll always be next summer. This will keep happening, and we'll always have not quite recovered from the last disaster when the next arrives, unless we make a decision to invest in the future rather than giving ourselves a tax holiday. So rather than just putting up some signs thanking the firies, would you all mind voting for MPs that will actually fund them? I've been telling people for years that you can't feed hungry children with a budget surplus, but now maybe we've got a version that will actually sink in: you can't fight a bushfire with a budget surplus.

So choose. Either vote green, or vote black. The future is what you make it.

End of the Line: Adelaide & Fuji

With Bathurst done for the year, there was only one major event left on the 1989 calendar: the Yokohama Cup, this year's Australian Grand Prix support race. As usual booked in on the streets of Adelaide, for the first time the event was being held with a multi-race format, giving the tourers one race on Saturday afternoon, then another one on Sunday morning before the Formula 1 superstars did their thing. Both were scheduled to be 15-lap, 55km sprints, but the racing and weather gods would have a thing or two to say about how these well-laid plans panned out in reality...

Tony Longhurst, no idea where, or when.

Yokohama Cup – Race 1
Saturday 4 November dawned with a bad case of déjà vu for the teams – it was another burning hot day on the streets of Adelaide, just like the one they'd endured in 1988. As was now expected, the prominent TV coverage had enticed a sizeable grid of 33 starters, a mix of the full-time professionals and the keen weekenders from the AMSCAR series in Sydney. A standout on the grid though was Phil Ward in the Mercedes 190E Cosworth, a car which had been rolled at Bathurst last year but since been repaired and was now sponsored by the not-for-profit Heart Foundation, with a love heart around the #8 on the doors.

Peter Brock was starting from pole, with Tony Longhurst alongside on the front row. Both got good starts and made it into the first turn okay, but in that first-turn chicane Brock used a bit too much of the throttle and pitched himself into a wild tankslapper. Longhurst stuck his nose in to try and get past but Brock held the place, while further back Mark Skaife's #12 Nissan Skyline took a hit to the side from Win Percy's HSV Commodore, who was barging his way through. That flicked Skaife nose-first into the wall at the first corner, and although he emerged from the car okay, that was the end of his race.

Down the long Brabham Straight the order was Brock, Longhurst, Seton, Miedecke, the two Dick Johnson cars, and then Colin Bond – Sierras filling all places from P1 to P7! (8th, and therefore first of the non-Sierra runners, was one of the HSV Commodores, which was some comfort to the parochial crowd in the grandstands.) The early running was enlivened by a scrap between Colin Bond and Glenn Seton in evenly-matched Sierras, although that came to an end heading into the final hairpin, where Bondy got a bit too brave with the brake pedal. He locked up the rears and pitched himself into a spin that ended in the middle of the road, just outside the apex of the hairpin. That was off the racing line, so it seemed like the rest of the field would get through okay... all except Win Percy, who rammed the Sierra with the nose of his own #16 HSV Commodore, shoving Bond off the track and into the sand, and breaking off the left-hand corner of the Walky’s aero face. Percy really was having a rough day, and was spreading it far and wide.

Then poor Andrew Miedecke was seen off the track, his Kenwood car stereo-backed #6 Sierra sporting a dislodged rear bumper, suggesting he'd taken a hit from behind – and, oh yeah, the car was on fire. More déjà vu – he'd already lost a car to a fire after a bad accident at the Lakeside ATCC round earlier in the year, and with his finances precarious he could ill afford to lose another. It took the attending marshals a few moments to realise there were actually flames licking from the underside of the car, but once they did the extinguishers came out and the incident was over before it could really begin. If all that wasn't enough, Bond was being shown a mechanical black flag for having bodywork dangling after the shunt with Percy... but before that could make any real difference the red flags came out and the session was stopped completely.

It emerged a shunt between the #53 Peter Doulman BMW (class winner at Bathurst a couple of weeks ago) and another car had completely blocked the road. Replays revealed that Doulman had tried to go up the inside of Lawrie Nelson's #29 Mustang at the Dequetteville Hairpin, but Lawrie either hadn't seen him, or decided to shut the door, or Doulman just hadn't left himself enough room to finish braking. Whatever the cause, the result was the front-left corner of the BMW making contact with the right side of the Mustang and jumping upwards, clambering over the Mustang in frightening fashion. Doulman's left-rear tyre actually left skid marks on Nelson's A-pillar and bonnet (and no doubt Nelson left some more in the Mustang's seat). Just behind, the #52 BMW was lucky to see the clash coming and avoid it, but Doulman ended up battered and bruised on the outside of the corner, with Nelson hot and bothered on the opposite side. All drivers emerged unharmed, but with this impromptu chicane now in place the stewards wisely stopped the race to clear the cars.

This was no mere yellow-flag safety car, everyone went straight back to the pits to prepare for a proper restart. This was declared a new but shortened race (9 laps instead of the originally scheduled 15), so they gridded up again in the order they'd started the first race, not the order they'd worked out in the four laps they'd managed on track. That meant there were a few empty grid spots as some failed to take the new start: Miedecke's car was fire-damaged; Nelson, Doulman and Skaife had crash damage; Bowe had suffered an engine failure. Colin Bond, however, rejoined after hacking off all the bodywork that had been ruined in the collision with Win Percy; without that fouling on the wheels, he was ready to go again.

The second start was like the first, with Brock, Longhurst and Seton all getting away smartly. Dick Johnson however – starting with an unobstructed view after the two cars ahead of him had both been taken out – got a lousy start and found himself being swamped from behind by Percy's fast-starting HSV Commodore. Into the braking zone the light Sierra had the edge, and Johnson stayed ahead, but it was ugly and messy; Johnson got into a tank-slapper like Brock's, while no-one less than Jim Richards was forced over the ripple strips in his quest to avoid a major pile-up. Forcing nearly 30 cars through that opening chicane seemed a recipe for madness every time.

Around the first lap it was once again Brock leading, Longhurst chasing, with Seton 3rd and Johnson 4th. Behind Johnson, Percy was reaping the benefits of his aggressive start and was running 5th, ahead of the two remaining Skylines of Jim Richards and George Fury. Down the Brabham Straight Brock had to go defensive, keeping to the right to defend the inside line from Tony Longhurst. Both went very deep on the brakes but Brocky made a slight mistake on the exit, dipping a wheel into the dust on the outside of the hairpin. To Longhurst, that was an invitation on an embossed card: he got alongside through Turn 13 but Brock hung it out on the tyres in glorious fashion, keeping his speed up and getting him out of the turn ahead. Then out of Turn 14 Longhurst was a tad too aggressive with the power button and got a hint of a tank-slapper, forcing him to lift and concede the place.

Through the next few laps the top four were still tied together, drafting and defending along the Brabham Straight, but with Brock just barely eking out some distance as the laps counted down. Then, out of nowhere, Johnson made his move. In the commentary box, guest commentator Alan Jones had opined that Johnson had been getting into the turns too aggressively and thereby losing out on the exit; it seems Dick had been listening, because with the race half over he finally got the run out of Brewery Corner just right and set himself up with a speed advantage all the way down Brabham Straight. Both Longhurst and Seton went defensive, but there was nothing they could do about it: Dick simply drove straight past them, stood on the brake pedal at just the right moment and tipped the car into the hairpin, having gone from 4th to 2nd in one move.

As if his day couldn't get any better, then Brocky went into Turn 4 on the East Terrace too hot, lost the back end and spun; that was him done and dusted. Dick had gone from 4th to 1st in the space of half a lap and, feeling cocky, he was now throwing the car into the turns and steering it on the throttle in exactly the style you couldn't with a turbo, mostly just for the fun of it.

A tad more circumspection might have been warranted: although Seton soon headed for the pits with a problem, Tony Longhurst was still in the hunt and trying to reel Johnson in, the dethroned Bathurst champion chasing down the reigning one, even though it seemed a hopeless cause. But in motor racing the rule is to always apply pressure, you never know... and sure enough, with just one lap to go, Dick finally overdid it and lost the rear heading into the quick left-right complex at Turn 7. He kept the Sierra's whaletail off the wall – barely – but embarrassingly ended up facing the wrong way as Longhurst and Brock blasted by. Game over. With only a lap and a half to the flag, there wasn't time to get back in the race, so that's how they finished: Longhurst took the win, with Brock 2nd. Win Percy was a solid 3rd for Holden – legacy of that demon start – with Richards 4th, Bond 5th, Fury 6th and Johnson a chastened 7th.

There'd been no smoke puffs to indicate a brake lock-up, so it seemed Johnson had simply been caught out by creeping temps at the rear. Interviewed by Barry Sheene as he walked back to his pit bay, a jubilant Tony Longhurst confirmed that this had been the case:

The front brakes were fading on everyone else's car. I was tempted to wind it to the front, but you could see Brock and Dick locking up at the rear so I just left my balance how it was. And eventually that's why everyone was spinning off the track, their back brakes were locking up because of the heat.

Tell me Frank Gardner wouldn't have been proud of that!

Yokohama Cup – Race 2
The second race on Sunday morning revealed why the previous afternoon had been so hot – there'd been rain on the way. Apparently it was dry in the early morning, but sometime around 11:00am a good soaking rain started to pelt down, and by the time the Group A cars headed to the grid the puddles were deep and plentiful.

Despite that, Sunday's race turned out to be the more straightforward of the two. This time both Longhurst and Brock bogged down at the start, but once again Win Percy got away smartly in the Commodore, only to be completely eclipsed by Richards making a blinding start, zipping between the two Sierras on the pit straight and into the chicane in P1. Around the first lap Richo led with Longhurst chasing, a small gap to Colin Bond 3rd in the Caltex Sierra, then Brock in the Mobil version, then Johnson and Grice in the FAI Commodore. George Fury didn't have it so good, trailing a bumper bar halfway around lap 1 suggesting someone had rammed him from behind – for which he was given a mechanical black flag. Not the farewell he'd have wanted from touring car racing, but no-one leaves through the front door in this business – well, almost no-one, but more on that in a moment...

Down into the final corner Bondy got a run on Longhurst and dive-bombed into the hairpin alongside him, driving on tippy-toes. Both got through without contact, and having taken a wider, faster line out of the turn Longhurst got a better drive back onto the straight and stayed in 2nd – but both were having trouble dealing with Jim Richards right now. Perfectly happy in the conditions, the New Zealander had that Skyline absolutely hooked up and was perfectly happy to kick the tail out under boost. Today he was driving more like George Fury than George Fury, in fact.

Through Turn 9 onto Jones Straight, Richards climbed over the kerbs and Colin Bond had a mad moment with yet another tankslapper, but Longhurst kept his composure, hinting at what was to come next. Having patiently got his tyres and brakes up to temperature, by lap 2 Longhurst was able to follow Richards through Brewery Corner for the first time, and from there it was just a matter of planting his foot and waiting. On a long straight like the Brabham, there was absolutely nothing Richards in a 345 kW Nissan could do to hold back a 410 kW Ford. Imperiously, Longhurst moved across and took the line off Richards, swept through the hairpin and resumed the march, now firmly in the lead.

The difference in body language between Bond and Longhurst was instructive; Frank Gardner of course preferred softer setups that let the tyres live, which could've explained why the yellow #25 looked so controllable and the red and white #6 looked like a fish dropped on the floor. All the same, sheer talent and experience meant Bond was able to pull the same move at the hairpin on Richards as he had on Longhurst a lap earlier, and this time he made it stick – albeit with a minor love-tap mid-corner. A lap later and Dick Johnson was able to pull off the same trick, with even more aggressive contact made: Richards' grandstanding hadn't amounted to much in the end.

The windscreen wipers remained on because the spray hung in the air with the concrete walls hemming it in, but the rain had stopped. The track wasn't really drying, but it wasn't getting any wetter either, not that it would've mattered in a race this short. Further back, Grice was at his fabulous best trying to catch Brock, sliding the big FAI Commodore out of the turns, forcing that primitive rear suspension to live with the grunt of a 5.0-litre race-tuned V8. After very nearly getting past at the hairpin, he kept the pressure on and got it done at Turn 4. Despite frustrating levels of wheelspin, however, Brock kept the fight alive and repassed him two laps later.

By the finish Longhurst had hit his rhythm and was driving with beautifully controlled oversteer, an astoundingly difficult thing to do on a wet track in a car where the difference between 100 and 400 kW was only 1,000rpm. Clearly at the end of an entire year in this car, his right foot was perfectly calibrated to driving it and he was reaping the benefits. On the final lap, using the crude stopwatch/YouTube timing method, it seems Bond was roughly 2.5 seconds behind, too far back to think of winning the race. Longhurst had done this one pretty easily, just cruising and collecting. Bond battled on but 2nd was all he could expect today; Johnson had risen to 3rd and continued to close, but just ran out of laps.

So Tony Longhurst had won both races, in very different conditions, demonstrating mastery of the streets of Adelaide and taking home the Yokohama Cup (despite his team actually running on Dunlops). Why had he been so good over this sort of distance? Another theory, take it or leave it – because that year Tony had also won the James Hardie Building Products AMSCAR series, whose lucrative prize money made it the series any Sydney-based team built their schedule around. This year there had been four rounds, all of them (except the first, which was also Amaroo Park's ATCC round) extremely short, sharp sprints of 5-15 laps only. In this pressure-cooker environment, getting off the line and nailing in every lap perfectly was crucial, and the driver simply had to be on it from the first lap to the last. Despite fierce resistance from Brian Callaghan's yellow Walkinshaw Commodore and Colin Bond's Caltex Sierra, Longhurst had managed to win eight consecutive races spread across three rounds – basically every AMSCAR race except the shared ATCC opener. Short, multiple-race formats were very familiar territory for Tony, as they were to Colin Bond, who'd been at the pointy end of both races despite the setbacks. Tony had won the AMSCAR title for the third time, of what would ultimately be a record five, so taking the Adelaide GP support races as well was just the icing on the cake.

How we first saw it.

With hindsight, however, the really significant moment of the broadcast had come during the red flag period on Saturday, when the commentators pointed out that this was (intended to be, at least) the last outing for Nissan's HR31 Skyline. The replacement R32 had been homologated and was being used as the Clerk of the Course car this weekend, looking sumptuous in a deep ruby red paint. "It's quite a business," said an impressed Alan Jones. "Four-wheel drive, four-wheel steer, thirty-two valve, twin-turbo... a little bit heavy, but they seem to think they can get the horsepower into it that'll make it really competitive. Certainly a beautiful-looking car..."

Godzilla was coming.

InterTEC 500

I retired from driving after Klaus Niedzwiedz and I won the Fuji 500 in Japan, held a few days after I turned 50. – Allan Moffat, AMC #77

One of the few who hadn't been in Adelaide, however, was Bathurst runner-up Allan Moffat. He'd instead taken his #9 car – the older one, which had contested Bathurst in 1988 and been the team tortoise this year – to race in the InterTEC 500 at Fuji Speedway, season finale for the All-Japan Touring Car Championship. It was Japan's most important touring car race, and to help out he'd brought along the winner of the last two events, star Eggenberger driver Klaus Niedzwiedz. In his final appearance as a professional racing driver, the man who'd been the first to win Bathurst driving solo would in fact be nothing more than a co-driver. If ever there was a sign of how much times change, this was it.

As an end-of-year treat, a celebration of our expected great Bathurst victory, I'd accepted an invitation for Klaus and myself to enter the Fuji InterTEC 500, the final round of Japan's touring-car title. Klaus had won the race the previous two years. It was to be held on the weekend of 10-12 November 1989, my 50th birthday. I requested racing number 39, the year of my birth. It was a nuance lost on just about everyone and I wasn't making it known.

Mount Fuji Raceway is one of the fastest and, for some, most fearsome circuits in the world. Certainly it is among the top ten. It sits beneath Japan’s tallest mountain, Fuji san, at 3,776 metres a perfectly symmetrical cone-shaped active volcano whose peak is under snow most of the year.

The race track was built in 1963, initially to attract NASCAR-style racing to Japan. They built a banked corner, the Daiichi Banking, and it had a habit of killing people.

After the final double fatality of several, they abandoned it, although even today you can walk over the back of the track behind turn one and stand on its near-vertical ellipse, just as you do at Monza.

Fuji is renowned for two things: the never-ending right-hand corner onto the main straight, 300R, where 300 stands for the radius of the corner in metres – an extraordinary length; and the straight itself, which is an engine-bursting 1.5 kilometres long.

Just as Mount Fuji is one of Japan’s sacred mountains – in Shinto mythology the permanent residence of the primordial God of the Universe – so Fuji Raceway is a place to be approached with reverence.

The six-heat Japanese championship had been decided by the final round. Masahiro Hasemi, who’d come 10th in the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix in the short-lived Kojima F1 car owned by a local banana-importing baron, had already claimed the first of ultimately three touring-car titles in a Nissan Skyline GT-R [sic – in 1989 it was still the GTS-R, just like in Australia].

So there was nothing to play for, except glory. The Japanese pushed their Skylines and Supras well past the limit. By three-quarter distance Hasemi had blown up and so had pole-man Kazuyoshi Hoshino.

Klaus and I pummelled our way to the lead, establishing an almost one-minute gap on the Toyota Supra of Masanori Sekiya, who a few years later would become the first Japanese to win Le Mans. (He loves the place so much he flew his fiancée over there so they could be married at the track.)

You cannot discount these fellows. They are fast, talented and fearless. The guy running 3rd, Keiichi Tsuchiya, has now, in his sixties, re-established himself as the Drift King, the undisputed global superstar of tyre-shredding sideways racing.

Sekiya and Tsuchiya got caught up in their own battle for 2nd, which gave us some relief.

Late that afternoon, we took the chequered flag in 1st place at an average speed of 156.9km/h.

When you stand on the podium, peeking just around the corner of the grandstand, opposite your left is Mount Fuji. It's a surreal sight.

I told no-one, made no announcements and blew no trumpets. But that day, the anniversary of my 50th year on this earth, I retired from professional race driving. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

Allan's determination never to be a 50-year-old racing driver went deep. Johnson and Brock would cheerfully brush past this barrier, but for Moffat the aversion was strong thanks to experiences in his youth – experiences the purely Australia-focused youngsters could never have had.

In my youth, as a young driver in America when I was based in Detroit, Goodyear took me under their wing. And on two occasions I was invited by the head of racing to go down to Indianapolis for the month of May. Not to do anything, just to soak it all up.

There was a misconception that it's a race, but Indy was really a war between Goodyear and Firestone. And for the whole month of May, not just one weekend like Bathurst.

So 33 cars started the race, and all the top teams had two cars. They would get them "into the show," as they called it, on the first weekend. They would still have two spare cars, and brought them out as money earners on the second weekend of qualifying.

So I saw a bunch of old guys, some past Indy champions and some not-quite-top brass, and they needed the pitcrew to help lift them into the cars. Then I saw about four guys helping this old guy get into the car, and the scariest thing I ever saw in my life was they were holding his hands and placing them on the wheel. They needed to do that because he had been in a big fire and his hands were all burned, and when they healed he had them set so he could hold a steering wheel.

It burned me. I said I would never be a 50-year-old race driver. I would have only been 26 or 27 at the time, so it was a long-term plan. – Allan Moffat, AMC #79