Mille Milligrams

Well, this is embarrassing.

I'd planned a grand finish to my series on the 1986 Australian Touring Car Championship, but you know what? The Castrol Grand Finale, at Oran Park, doesn't seem to be on YouTube. Suffice to say George Fury won the race, but Robbie Francevic stroked home to a 6th-place finish, taking the points he needed to clinch the title, 217 points to 212. He wasn't the first New Zealander to win the title, but he was the first non-resident (he still lived in Auckland and commuted to every race and test session) and, at 44 years, 9 months and 25 days, he was the oldest champion ever.

So let's talk about the 1955 Mille Miglia instead.

If you don't know the story, the short version goes like this: the Mille Miglia was a sports car race run like a single enormous tarmac rally on the roads of northern Italy – an immense housand-mile thrash (hence the name), over 12 hours of driving for the pros and almost 24 for the amateurs. The 1955 running had a record 521 entries, covering everything from Le Mans-spec Ferraris and Maseratis capable of 300km/h, to tiny 247cc BMW Isetta and Fiat Topolino bubble cars, hilarious three-wheelers that this year had been given a category of their own. Only in Italy…

Thankfully, all 521 entries didn't take the green flag together and surge into one massive pile-up at the first turn. Instead, they left at 30- or 60-second intervals, with the numbers on the doors telling the spectators lining the route what time each car had left the starting ramp in Brescia. The relevant car to our story was #722, indicating a start time of 7:22am – almost ten hours after the slowest competitors had departed.

It was called the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, but it had nothing to do with the Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing, the world's first supercar. The SLR in fact stood for Sport Leicht-Rennen, or Sport-Light Racing, and it was a dedicated racing car, a Grand Prix W196 with an open-top roadster bodyshell draped over the top. Its teammate, #658, was to be driven by the Grand Old Master himself, Juan Manuel Fangio; our #722 was to be driven by his protege, a 25-year-old Stirling Moss.

As noted above, for most people the Mille Miglia meant a full day and night at the wheel, so taking a second driver was essential to make it to the finish. But this year they were no longer mandatory, so neither Mercedes carried one. Fangio, attempting his fourth Mille Miglia, elected to drive without relief, so the other side of the cockpit was just sort of covered off, turning the SLR into a makeshift single-seater. Moss, however, didn't the route nearly as well as Fangio, so he elected to take Denis Jenkinson, today the doyen of motoring journalists and a legend in his own right, as navigator. It was a shrewd move: going over the route minutely, the pair made pace notes for every corner, every straight, noting speeds, distances, gears – all written on a continuous five-and-a-half metre roll of paper, housed inside an alloy container with a perspex window. Today pace notes are perfectly normal, but in 1955 this was revolutionary stuff, a real game-changer. Unfortunately in the deafening slipstream of an open-top sports car going 270km/h, speech was impossible, so they worked out a system of hand signals instead. Moss and Jenks had to trust each other completely.

The result was astounding: car 722 became the first to defy the conventional wisdom that "whoever leads at Rome doesn't go on to win." Instead, they covered the thousand miles in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, to beat Fangio to the chequered flag by 32 minutes. Their average speed of 157.3km/h smashed the previous record by 15km/h, and established a record that would never be beaten. If you'd like to know more, here's a pretty good write-up of the whole event. It was genuinely heroic stuff.

But I want to focus on a tidbit that is very rarely mentioned, funnily enough – that Moss apparently took one of Fangio's notorious "little pills" just before the race. The nature of Fangio's pills has been much-discussed over the decades, some suggesting they were full of cocaine, others guessing it was the native Argentinian pick-up yerba mate, a caffeine-packed leaf usually made into a tea. Moss admits he doesn't know what was in his, but the little he has said is interesting:

Just ahead of the start Fangio gave me some pills to keep me awake. I have no idea what was in them but they certainly worked. At the time all the other drivers were taking them. To keep awake they used Dexedrine and Benzedrine, especially in rallies. They weren’t considered drugs then. The object was simply to keep awake, like wartime bomber crews. I'm not sure what was in the ones Fangio gave me but certainly today they would have been a banned substance.

It’s worth noting that after the win, Moss spent the evening driving his girlfriend Katie Molson to Munich for breakfast en route to lunch with the Mercedes brass in Stuttgart, and then driving home via the cross-channel ferry – all without sleeping. It probably wasn't No-Doz.

The most specific guess today is that it was something called Dynavis, an amphetamine – speed to you and me. But he's right, they weren't considered drugs back then. Benzedrine and Dexedrine were available over the counter, not becoming prescription-only until the following year (or 1965 in the States), and even then they were so popular the doctors were prescribing them in the millions. They were given to housewives as an appetite suppressant – gotta keep a trim figure for hubby, even after a dinner of steak and mash – and black market versions were popular with truckies on long-haul overnight trips.

A big part of the reason they weren't considered drugs is because the world was being run by the generation that fought WWII – only a decade in the past then, closer than September 11 is to us – who basically spent the whole war on the stuff. The British army handed out 70 million speed pills over the course of the war: the Soviets called theirs vint, the Japanese shabu, and the Germans, who made the best stuff, Pervitin. They put it in chocolate bars to hand out to their tankers and aircrews. The Soviets made a point of looting the stuff every chance they got, and the War Nerd reckons the West German economy missed a huge market opportunity there after the war: "They should have gotten Col. Klink to build on the brand identification they’d won on the Eastern Front and sell the stuff to the Warsaw Pact nations with some slogan like, 'The stuff that made Stalingrad fun!'"

Speed is good in situations like that, where you need to stay alert and keep your morale up through long, miserable hours. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find that my great-uncle, who I've written about before, would've failed a urine test the night he died. Many of the side-effects of speed wouldn't been such a big deal on the flight to Trappes – repeating simple acts, like pointing your guns all over the sky, or elevated body temps so you don't notice the minus-forty draft wafting through your bones because you had to remove the central glass panel to stop it icing up. Or even the general hostility and paranoia – paranoia's a very, very desirable trait in a tail gunner. Certainly you don't want the relaxed, mellow bastard who tells you to relaaax, maaan, it'll be fiiiine.

Keep all this in mind next time you see an ad about our ice "epidemic." Ice is methamphetamine, a water-soluble version of speed, and the same stern, unsmiling hypocrites that are so upset about our terrible ice habit will hand the stuff out for free if they've got a war to win. I'm telling you, if China actually makes a move for those godforsaken little islands our backyard labs will suddenly get government funding. I haven't seen Breaking Bad, so I imagine I was the last one to know this, but I was flabbergasted to discover how easy it is to make. The ingredients, though vile, are amazingly common – hydrochloric acid, lithium, acetone, red phosphorous, anhydrous ammonia... so buy some batteries, matches, nail polish remover and a bottle of bleach, and you're most of the way there. Only the pseudoephedrine is even slightly controlled – buy too many boxes of Sudafed at once and you'll end up on  a watch list somewhere – but after Googling "how to make ice" and images of IEDs, I'm probably on several already.

Of course, knowing the basic ingredients is one thing, knowing how to combine them, in what order and in what amounts, is another altogether. That's a real skill set, one I don't have and don't intend to acquire, Mr Lowly Underpaid AFP Agent. And since most of the above ingredients are toxic and/or explosive if you combine them wrong, trial-and-error probably isn't the best way to learn. But I'm no longer surprised a high school chemistry teacher like Walter White knew what to do, and had the clean glassware available to do it.

Heh, funny thought, one of the people in my jobseeker class a few years ago had a master's in chemical engineering and found out, too late, that her degree actually priced her out of the job market. Imagine if she'd been diagnosed with Walter White's inoperable lung cancer; she could probably cook up something that would make ice look like your grandmother's chamomile tea. Is that really someone you want to piss off by calling her as a welfare queen?

That's a serious question, by the way, because the real reason I bring it up is this arsehole:

At first I split my sides at the thought of a truckie – a truckie! – scowling his disapproval of substance abuse, like an Andrew Bolt profile pic. Take notes Alanis, we've got your irony right here! But then I just sighed. Another spin on the old "dole bludgers are on drugs" merry-go-round. Having been long-term unemployed I try to defend these where I can, and when pushed a lot of my friends will admit, "Yeah, I know it's not all of them..."

But it's not not all of them. It's effectively none of them. It's a number so small it rounds down to zero. Apparently New Zealand brought in a scheme whereby they strip welfare recipients of half their payments if they fail a job-required drug test or refuse to submit to one. It's been decried as a waste of time and money, because out of 8,000 people sent for drug testing, only 22 failed, or refused to be tested. Apparently, then, Kiwis are using drugs on a massive, massive scale, because in the U.S. they need to test over seventeen times that many people to catch 22.

Luckily for the Americans, their Supreme Court decided this violated their 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches, so mandatory drug testing is now officially unconstitutional. But Australia, I fear, can't be relied on to be that level-headed about it. Dole bludgers are an infallible rage-button among the rednecks in this country, and one the Coalition loves to push. Any time they need a DISTRACTION CARNIFEX, out comes the slander about those on the bottom rung.

But facts are facts. Do you know who's using ice? Truly? People with jobs. About 2.5% of Australians overall have used it in the last year – about half a million people – but that spikes to 4-6% in the hospitality, mining and finance industries. Which, if you'd just stop to think about it, makes perfect sense, because drugs are A) really fucking expensive, and B) really handy for getting through long, late-night shifts. Nobody depending on a Centrelink payment can possibly afford ice (and if they can, then their money isn't coming from Centrelink. More likely they're cooking the stuff in the first place, in which case leave them alone, they're making a valuable contribution to the economy. The black economy, admittedly, but you think cash stops circulating just because it's been spent on something illegal?). But when you're on a long night of making beds and sweeping floors, or digging holes for our Chinese overlords, or trying to make a profit on a machine-dominated ASX, a quick hit of meth can really help.

But isn't the stuff dangerous and addictive? Well, yeah, it overloads the pleasure centre in your brain and, like your Weight Watchers aunt with the bathroom scales, your brain's constantly adjusting the zero. Get used to meth and lesser pleasures like a nice cup of coffee, or a delicious meal, or great sex, will just never really touch you again. That's assuming you don't have a heart attack in the "tweaking" stage, when new users spend 3-5 days constantly taking more to keep the high going. So there are short-term gains and a long-term price, but that's not news. We humans have been failing that test for ten thousand years, as everything from the average smoker to climate change denial shows, and Christ, even water has an LD50.

But that's what happens when you can't go to the pharmacy and buy Dex over the counter. Declare something illegal, and all you've done is pushed it into the black economy where nobody can regulate it anymore. You've  done jack about reducing demand, which means ultimately, you've done jack about reducing supply as well. And as the War Nerd tells us, "what y’all call 'the horrors of drugs' aren’t drug horrors at all. They’re the horrors of Prohibition." Manufacture speed in clean, liable factories under the eye of government watchdogs and the result is, "the white picket-fence days, the whole Eisenhower-grin stuff. It helps if you remember those lean, smiling bores..."

Or the achievements of your heroes.

On This Day... the Lusty-Allison Winton Roundup

Round 9 of the Australian Touring Car Championship for 1986, the Lusty-Allison Winton Roundup at Winton Motor Raceway. Ocker name, but at least it wasn't named after Motorcraft.

Winton is a smallish club circuit in the middle of the Hume wasteland between Melbourne and Albury-Wodonga. And I do mean "wasteland": it was in this landscape (albeit a bit further south) that George Miller filmed the original Mad Max back in 1979. No, not the one with the Lord Humungus, the one before that with Immortan Joe as the bad guy, except he was called Toecutter back then.

No joke, same guy.

If you haven't seen it, don't expect much in the way of production values – it's basically a student film Miller financed himself – but in my opinion it's worth the price of admission just for that opening Nightrider scene. Even then Miller knew what he was doing, crafting some genuine tension on what would've been the catering budget for a real movie. And as for that ending... well, let's just say the Saw franchise owes him a big cheque.

Anyway, Winton. It had only joined the calendar the previous year, and the only date they could get was really early in February, aka right at the peak of summer. In his book, Dick Johnson put it like this:

The flies were relentless. Swarming, they darted across my face, catching nothing but the sweat on my brow as the heat burnt my skin through the suit. The stinking hot breeze blew dust everywhere, although it didn’t deter the black plague of pests. I began sneezing uncontrollably, my body shuddering with each sneeze, which was enough to shake the flies off for a moment.

Welcome to Winton in summer: flies, 40-degree days and filthy pollen-laden winds.

After that, for 1986 they rescheduled for June, putting the race in the first month of winter. I can't imagine that made it much more popular – there's not a lot of frost out here because it's too dry, but it still gets pretty frigid at night. You'd have to be pretty keen to camp, and Winton itself is just a rural town, way too small to for mass hotelling. Today not a few elect to stay in Melbourne or Wodonga, but that still set you up for a couple of hours' commute each way. Ergo, by the time it returned to the calendar after a year off in '87, they'd compromised and put the race on in early autumn, finally making it feasible to attend.

The circuit itself wasn't have the long version we know today – see the long loop off to the left in the top photo? That wasn't there in 1986, so they just used the smaller circuit to the right, what we now call the Club Circuit. As you can see, it's the very definition of tight and twisty. In-car commentary from Dick Johnson revealed he had the lowest diff Ford would supply, and even then he wasn't getting into top gear. He even gave one of those trademark Dick one-liners: "It’s like Robert de Castella running a marathon around his clothes line!" – referring to the Aussie marathon champion, who a month after this race would go on to win his second gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.

The Commodores loved their long straights and sweeping bends, so they were all thumbs at this place, which partly explained why Graham Lusty qualified dead last. It must've been embarrassing, because his business Lusty Engineering were the ones that had stumped up the cash to hold the race. Today Lusty Engineering still makes semi trailers, and you can see their logo on the side of some of the log trucks around here. Owning a business like that allows a man to dabble in expensive hobbies, and Graham Lusty was a keen amateur racer, even sharing a Commodore with his brother Ken at Bathurst last year. There the Commodore had made sense; here at Winton, not so much. Graeme Crosby was fighting tyre wear all race long, even Peter Brock struggled to get a lap time, and Graham Lusty qualified in last place for his own race. Oh dear.

Free plug, because I support anyone who supports motor racing.

So, what car would you want to be driving at a circuit like this? Top marks go to those who answered, "an Alfa, a Corolla or one of the BMWs." If you said "anything turbocharged," go stand in the corner. The lack of straights made power pretty much irrelevant, especially laggy power, and the tight corners favoured cars with grip and handling – and with their undersized tyres, Group A cars never had much grip. So sure enough, Colin Bond had himself some fun and flung the Alfa Romeo GTV6 around like it was the last race he'd ever have, and the BMWs did well too. In their unwieldy turbo cars, Robbie Francevic collected a few more points, but so did George Fury, setting up a decider in the final round at Oran Park. But the shock of the day was that the race was won by Gary Scott in one of the Nissan Skylines – his first win in the ATCC.

Scott was once more filling in for Glenn Seton, getting some handy acclimatisation ahead of co-driver duties at Bathurst, and I have a theory about why he won. I'm guessing that Scott drove the Skyline like Ayrton Senna drove his Toleman at Monaco in '84, treating it like a naturally-aspirated car and changing up just before the engine hit boost. If that was the case, the 2-litre engine probably would've been enough, and it would explain how he was able to make the tyres last, and hey, maybe even the handling wasn't so bad when the chassis wasn't being swamped by the turbo. If that's how he did it, full credit to him; it was a brilliant drive either way.

But it didn't stand. Post-race scrutineering revealed that he’d been running unhomologated
front brake callipers; the paperwork had been submitted, but they hadn’t been approved and signed off yet. So, heartbreakingly, Scott was disqualified from what would prove to be the only ATCC race he’d ever win. Instead it went to the man who'd finished second – Jim Richards in the #1 BMW 635. It could be a cruel sport sometimes.

Spotlight Car: the BMW 635 CSi

Hero-to-zero is a pretty common story in motorsport. Win the championship this year, and it's hard to keep yourself and your crew motivated to stay ahead next year. Human nature is to get complacent and relax, and meanwhile defeat has your rivals all fired up and while you're busy celebrating they leapfrog you. For JPS Team BMW and lead driver Jim Richards, it was especially painful: in 1985 they'd won 11 out of 15 major touring car races, including six in a row, to take Jimmy's first driver's title and BMW's first manufacturer's title. By contrast, in 1986 Winton would be their only victory all year, and even it had come from the steward's office on a technicality.

It would be hard to accuse any team run by Frank Gardner of getting complacent, but they were overtaken nevertheless. Gardner was a actually hugely impressive driver in his own right, a fact many Aussies don't appreciate because he peaked 20,000km away in the U.K., where he won the British Saloon Car Championship (as it was then known) three times – twice for Ford factory team Alan Mann Racing, in 1967 and 1968, and then again in 1973 in a Chevy Camaro Z28.

Even in those days he was renowned for his severe, some say humourless, demeanour, but despite his Bullshit-Free Zone mentality, or probably because of it, he was unmatched as a driving instructor.

When he took over management of Allan Grice's Craven Mild team, it took a prickly character like Gricey about five minutes to say "fuck this" and throw in the towel. But under Gardner's direction the team grew and matured, switching to Imperial Tobacco's other brand John Player, and hired Jim Richards to drive – and Gentleman Jim was a much more laidback character than Grice. Jim needed no lessons in how to drive, so Gardner ended up attracting other promising young talents like Garry Rogers (today one of the biggest team owners in V8 Supercars – sorry, Supercars) and former water-skiing champ Tony Longhurst. Both were young talents wise enough to park their ego, shut up and listen.

So, no doubt about it, Gardner ran a tight ship and would not have tolerated his people relaxing their guard; the real problem was that the BMW 635 was just getting old. It had been homologated on the older 5,000-model rule, and now it was racing against hot Evo specials homologated on the smaller 500-model rule – most notably the Volvo and the HDT Commodore. It had been successful in 1985 because it had effectively stolen a march on the rest of the grid. Where Group A had forced everyone else to start virtually from scratch, JPS Team BMW had simply removed the flares and put the old engine back in.

See, the BMW 635 had come about when BMW lowered the engine from their M1 supercar into the body of a standard 6-series sedan. If you don't know what that means, the M1 was the basis for greatet one-make series of all time, Procar, which supported the European F1 season in 1979 and 1980. Half the grid were German sports and touring car drivers, the other half F1 superstars. Under their right foot, one of the great engine notes of all time. Awesome ensued.

Putting that engine into an ordinary sedan was going to make it pretty special. Only two ever raced in Aussie Group C, and the first was an ex-Group 2 touring car imported from Europe. By the time they got around to buying the second, for the 1984 season, Group A had taken over in Europe so under the skin it was basically a Group A car. Which was good news for Gardner's team: BMW had taken no chances with Group A, working with tuning specialists Alpina and Schnitzer Motorsport to develop a "kit" for the 635 that would turn it into an all-out Group A racer. It was this lavish support programme that Gardner was able to dip into,sourcing Getrag 5-speed gearboxes with a vast choice of gear sets and diff ratios, AP four-pot brakes, 17x8 BBS centre-lock wheels (an advantge no-one else had at first), and engine, drivetrain and suspension components especially designed for the rigours of competition.

The local Group C rules allowed Gardner's team to fit fatter tyres, so they took molds of the old car's wheel flares to recreate them on the new car, and they were led up the garden path a little bit by trying to fit a more powerful 24-valve engine... but then 1985 rolled around, and they were able to remove all that junk. What was left was the proven Schnitzer/Alpina package, with the lighter 2-valve version of the 3.5-litre Procar engine with around 220 kW at 7,000rpm. With that they just steamrolled the 1985 ATCC, winning 7 out of 10 rounds (including six in a row, from Symmons Plains to Amaroo Park) – then steamrolled the endurance season as well, winning 4 out of 5 of those. The only major scalp they missed was Bathurst, thanks to the Walkinshaw Jags; if they'd bothered to turn up to the Formula 1 support race, no doubt they'd've won that as well.

By mid-1986, however, the team had sold off its title-winning car to Jim Keogh (who gave it a lush burgundy paint scheme, see above), and built an all-new car for Jimmy to drive, and it was this machine in which he won the Lusty-Allison Winton Roundup. It's a testament to how well the other teams had got it all together that this car was actually faster than the '85 car, yet was soundly beaten for most of the year.

The 1986 car was faster and nicer than the 1985 version, but you are talking minute details. In Group A our cars had a [German] Matter aluminium rollcage that bolted in, but the 1986 car’s cage was probably welded in and chromoly or steel. You couldn’t feel any difference from that alone, it was one of a number of things that made it quicker. It wasn’t as good a car for starts because it was made for rolling starts and had a tiny little clutch and a light flywheel, so it was hard to get off the line. And because the engines were tuned for maximum performance they weren’t much good below 2,500rpm. But it was a great car once you got going… You had to drive them hard though! A lot of engine weight was forward of the front axle so I think we had to run really heavy front springs, nearly 200lb I think from memory. The 1986 car was the best 635 I ever drove.

Today the car is part of the Bowden Collection in Queensland, and that arch-collector has a page on it here, which is worth a read. If you're interested in the broader saga of the 635 in Australian touring cars, Mark Oastler has a similarly worthy article here (you'll need a Shannons Club login, but once again it's worth it. Oastler's articles are solid gold). The 1985 car, though? Today it belongs to Kiwi enthusiast Peter Sturgeon, who's returned it to its unique 1984 Group C specification, rather than its title-winning Group A spec. Why? Because Group A cars grow on trees, especially BMWs, but the 24-valve car that raced in Australia, that's unique. It's been restored well – better than original, according to Richards – and the sound apparently gives all the goosebumps. Best of all, when it hits the track nowadays, it's in Jimmy's own hands. Aww, yes.

#FakeTradie

Recently saw this.

Twitter immediately cacked itself at the idea of a tradie supporting negative gearing and the big banks, and rightfully so.

Me, I immediately thought of this:

So it's official. If we get any kind of headline-grabbing international emergency between now and 2 July, it's because Malcolm Turnbull fucked a girl scout.

On This Day... Motorcraft 100 With A Vengeance

Round 8 of the 1986 Australian Touring Car Championship, the third race of the year to be called the Motorcraft 100. Ford's Parts & Services division, Motorcraft had really shelled out on the races this year, probably because they had lots of spare budget to go around after not having to support any of the teams. The only Ford in the field was Dick Johnson's Mustang, and the only Motorcraft parts on that were the stickers that read, "Motorcraft." Despite  that, it ended up being the race of the year.

It was Lakeside Boogaloo.

Lakeside, just north of the Queensland capital of Brisbane, lies on the shores of Lake Kurwongbah, a fact that has influenced the sport on a few occasions – at least one championship meeting had to be rescheduled when heavy rains caused the lake to burst its banks and left certain corners underwater. That minor handicap aside, the Lakeside circuit is a fabulous place to go racing, almost Australia's answer to Brands Hatch. Fast and technical, it has the same swooping, up-hill-and-down-dale feel as its U.K. cousin, with the same blind corners that ask a driver to line their car up with a turn they can't see and keep their foot in it right the way through. Bathurst, of course, towers above everything so high that today's V8 drivers joke that the real question is, "What's your second favourite track?" But if you do ask them that, all the guys over a certain age will tend to answer, "Lakeside."

It was also Dick Johnson's home track – as a child in the late 50's he used to ride his bicycle out there to watch the races. When he finally got a racing car of his own, a clapped-out Humpy Holden, he won his first-ever start there – then didn't win another race for almost a decade. Although he eventually found his form when he returned to the path of righteousness with Ford, the fact remained that nobody knew Lakeside's secrets better than Johnson. Put him on home tarmac, and he could still embarrass the best right up until his retirement in 1997.

So, a circuit for the brave, experienced or just seriously lacking in self-preservation, and the starting grid showed a little of each. The top five were covered by less than a second, with pole falling to the experienced Peter Brock at 56.8 seconds, thanks to endless miles in the car this year (in both Europe and Australia), and a return to Pirelli and their sticky specialist qualifying tyres. Second, starting from the front row for the eighth time in eight races, was George Fury in the #30 Peter Jackson Skyline, only two-tenths slower than Brock. Third went to the #15 Skyline, today driven by Gary Scott, who'd been given a ride in Glenn Seton's car to give him some practice ahead of his co-driving duties in the upcoming endurance season.

But Robbie Francevic, the championship leader? He was starting dead last. Assigned the new Eggenberger-built Volvo 240T, he'd managed to qualify only 10th before the engine blew up, seemingly leaving him to twiddle his thumbs for the rest of the weekend. But John Bowe, who'd qualified a hugely impressive 5th, was having none of that: knowing his place in the team, he generously stepped down and handed his car over to Robbie to race and keep his title hopes alive. The catch was, because he hadn't set a qualifying time in that car, he'd have to start from the back of the grid. Oh joy.

A pre-race interview, shown during the broadcast, revealed Francevic's state of mind:

What a circuit to pick! Here I am going to have to go smashing my way through everybody, because Lakeside is the worst to pass on! With 35 laps I just ain’t got the time to wait around. Here I am with all these slower cars, and they can be a second a lap slower than me and nowhere to pass them. Unfortunately I can’t be polite with them, and I’m going to have to just muscle my way past!

16 cars in 35 laps: that was his challenge this mild June day. Remember way back at the start of this series, how I said Francevic's championship year played out a lot like Jenson Button's? Well put your phone on silent, grab a beer and sit back to watch this one, because this one was Francevic's Brazil.

It became a race of tyre strategy: both title contenders, Francevic and Fury, had opted for Dunlop's experimental D12 tyres, which nobody was sure could last 100km around here. Given they were the softest compound Dunlop had ever offered, it seemed unlikely, but Francevic had nothing to lose. Fury, starting from pole, had everything to lose but apparently fancied a gamble – or maybe he just thought he'd better cover off his main championship rival.

In the event, Brock's race had been ruined straight away when Fury got ahead of him off the start line. That left him stuck behind both Fury and Graeme Crosby, whose tyres died within ten laps and forced both into tyre conservation mode and held him up for about a third of the race – effectively ruining his strategy. Brock had deliberately opted for Pirelli D3s, the hardest compound they offered, so he had the tyres to drive hard all race long. But stuck behind those trying the soft-rubber trick, he couldn't use them.

Despite that, about halfway through the race Brock managed to elbow Croz aside, and set off after Fury – which forced the Nissan driver to start driving like he meant it again, putting more strain on his tyres. But then, at about two-thirds distance, came the moment that defined the race.

Earlier on Garry Willmington, running a private Jaguar XJS, had pulled over and lifted the bonnet of his Jag to fix some obscure thing that had gone wrong (in the commentary box, Mike Raymond joked that he was putting more oil in it). He rejoined several laps down – completely legally, as no-one else had touched the car – but because he was driving a broken car built with church change he wasn't what you'd call fast, and it wasn't too long before the leaders came up to lap him. George Fury got by without much hassle, but Brock was badly held up and that gave Gary Scott ideas. Down the hill they came three-wide, a heart-stopping moment as Brock's Commodore squirmed violently trying to get its power down. They all made it through unscathed, but Fury now had a nice gap back to Brock and Gary Scott to act as his tail-gunner – he was free to nurse the tyres and win as he pleased. Game, set and match to George Fury, taking another 1-2 for Nissan.

And Francevic? Well, with ten laps to the flag Dick Johnson pitted for a new left-front tyre, leaving the Volvo driver free to inherit 4th place. Yep, 16th to 4th in 25 laps. In fact, he'd overtaken five cars before the first corner! Sure, they were mostly tiddler class cars or weekend warriors out for a laugh, but it wasn't like he was waiting around for them to say, "after you." And it all could have ended in tears when, ten laps from home, Tony Longhurst overcooked it into the Karussell and forced the following Jim Richards into a spin to avoid him, leaving Robbie to drive right between them with literal inches to spare! Sang froid in pursuit of the silverware? That's what championships are made of.

And the car, let's not forget, was the old left-hand drive one he had started the year in, which wasn't exactly young anymore. It had already been through a full ETCC season when it began its career in Oceania, and it had done nearly two full ATCC seasons, two Wellington street races, numerous Aussie enduros and a Bathurst 1000 since then. John Bowe estimated it now had 40,000km on its overworked odometer, equivalent to nearly half a million in the real world. GTM Engineering, you built good cars.

So, at the end of the day, George Fury had closed right up with 158 championship points – but Robbie Francevic, with his excellent recovery drive, had stretched his total out to 179. There were two rounds to go.

Spotlight Car: Jaguar XJS
Let's take a closer look at that troublesome Jag.

Garry Willmington had been a presence in the local touring car scene for about a decade, usually in second-hand Falcons – it had largely been Willmington who homologated the XD Falcon back in 1979, transferring all the racing internals from his XC Hardtop into an XD bodyshell and taking photos to send to CAMS for their paperwork. In the process he'd managed a bit of sleight of hand, slipping a ridiculously low minimum weight past the rulemakers and turning what would've been an okay car into a rocketship. It was Willmington's performances in his XD rocketship that had tempted Dick Johnson back into the sport in 1980 – if Willmington's doing that well, Dick said to himself, what might I be doing?

A second-rate driver, then, but some top-shelf grey matter. The real blockage in the s-bend of his career was a shortage of money – he just never attracted the kind of major sponsor that Brock, Johnson, Fury, Seton and Richards all made their BFFs. That left him running on his own wallet, and it showed. Back at the start of 1985, with the arrival of Group A, Willmington thought the Jaguar XJS was the car to have – in 1984 it had just finished tearing up the racetracks of Europe with Tom Walkinshaw Racing. That roll had continued into '85 as well, as TWR switched to the Rover SD1 in Europe, freeing the Jags to ship Down Under for that year's James Hardie 1000 – which they won.

Those cars, however, had started life as special bodyshells walked down the production line especially for TWR, stamped out in thinner-gauge steel and devoid of any unnecessary brackets or trimmings. They'd then been fastidiously put together by TWR's experienced mechanics, using only the finest heavy-duty competitions parts, including a finely-tuned version of the 5.3-litre Jaguar V12 producing close to 400 kW – which they needed, because they sat in the highest tier of the rules and were slapped with the full 1,400kg weight penalty. The Jag was a winning proposition, but you needed a full crew of mechanics, wheelbarrows of cash and a special relationship with the factory to get the most out of them.

Willmington's operation was nothing like that. He'd built his XJS with his own hands, in his Garry Willmington Performance workshop in Sydney, starting from a second-hand car – meaning forget the Jaguar badge, the original had been built by British Leyland. The problem with that was explained by James May in S04E06 of Top Gear.

You see, in all its 21 years in production, Jaguar never made a good one. In the beginning, it was built by work-shy Lefties who spent more time standing around a brazier than they did loosely screwing your new car together, so it broke down all the time. In fact, early XJS's were so bad that when British Leyland offered them to their senior managers as company cars, even they said no.

I'll show you where Jaguar went wrong: this is a suspension bush, and it's made out of a really rubbish rubber so it completely mucks up the feel of the car. This is an electrical connector; now there are hundreds of these on the XJS and they're of a really poor quality, so after five or six years they all corrode and whole car dies. And it's the same all over the place: the door seals let water in so the doors rust from the inside, the engine components are built down to a price and strangle all the power. Jaguar had the recipe for a perfect shepherd's pie... and then made it with dog meat.

This is what Willmington had bought – one of James May's Grandfather Clocks – so it really didn't matter what he did with it, it was always going to be junk. Stuff like suspension components, replacement disc brakes and general racecar paraphernalia could be sourced locally, but upgrading the engine was an impossibility, because it was a fine example of British engineering. You know how it goes: the Germans design something clever and then build it fastidiously using parts far stronger than they need to be; the Japanese design something as simple as it can be, but not a bit simpler, and then finesse it for the next ten years so it works even better. The British way, however, is to design something unfathomably overcomplicated and then engineer the hell out of it until it works (barely). Hence the old joke that if your Jag's not leaking oil, it must be out of oil – a high-pressure system with badly-designed PCV opened up so many possibilities. Hence also the traditional Jag owner's story of first time they lifted the bonnet and saw that engine – all those tubes and wires running everywhere...!

Oh sure, it delivered oodles of power – 180 kW in an era when 5-litre American V8s were struggling to break 90 – but you paid for it in swearing, because it absolutely never worked. If you overheated it even slightly it dropped valve seats, which required the whole cylinder be removed and repaired, if they hadn't wrecked the engine outright. The rubber fuel lines were prone to cracking and leaking fuel onto the hot engine, where it would sort of catch fire. The Marelli ignition rotor would fail, cutting the spark to one bank – which wasn't so bad on a racing car, as it would only lead to major power loss, but on the road car it would fill the catalytic converter with unburned fuel and explode.

But the one that really hit Willmington was that over the course of its 21-year life the engine was rehashed almost annually, and the components often weren't interchangeable – if you wanted to source parts, you'd better know exactly what year it was made. Just blueprinting and balancing the damn thing would've been a big ask.

To his credit, Willmington gave it a good go, racing the thing for two whole seasons. At Bathurst in '85 he even got a chance to race against Tom Walkinshaw's offerings, and it was here the penny dropped and he realised the difference between a TWR Jaguar, and the one allowed in the rules. The fuel tank in the TWR cars was illegally large, with the car passing scrutineering by having the driver blow up a bladder on the cooldown lap – long speculated, but now a documented fact, as Gossy's winning car has been found and restored and the illegal tank removed before it could go Historics racing. Allegedly they also unpicked spot welds on the firewall so they could move the engine back, Trans-Am style, and modified the wheel housings to give more tyre clearance and called it "the snow-chain option" – then did the same to a road car, so if the scrutineers had questions Tom could point them to the one in the car park. Tellingly, when Willmington asked Walkinshaw if he could have a set of his special custom-made Dunlop race tyres, Walkinshaw told him to sod off. It may be that he just didn't have them to spare, or didn't believe in helping a competitor – or maybe he knew they'd rub on Willmington's guards and reveal his secret.

But finally and most importantly, Willmington didn't have anything like the power of the TWR Jags. The V12 had originally been homologated with the HE or "High-Efficiency" May-type heads, Introduced in 1981 because the Jag's fuel consumption was better expressed in gallons per mile, engineer Michael May's new heads used a high tumble-swirl design to improve mid-range power and give dramatically better fuel consumption, at the cost of strangling the engine at higher revs. Since racing engines are all about the top end, Walkinshaw had bullied the FIA into letting him used the older head design on his cars, sending fuel consumption through the roof but allowing his engines to make power right up to 7,500rpm. CAMS, as we'd learn in just over a year's time, enforced the rules very strictly so there was approximately zero-point-zero chance of Willmington being allowed to do the same. Even if he'd done a real hall-of-fame job tuning the engine, he still would've only been racing with as much power as TWR prior to the head change – 270 kW, probably less.

No wonder he was only a backmarker. Fortunately, the XJS's 5-year homologation papers ran out at the end of 1986, saving anyone else from repeating his mistake. In the meantime... at least he was having a go.

On This Day... the Coca-Cola Cup

Round 7 of the 1986 Australian Touring Car Championship, the Coca-Cola Cup at Calder Park Raceway.

Not actually relevant, but look how many people there use to be!

Not to be confused with the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, of course, although the connections are more than skin-deep. Calder is owned by tyre magnate and four-time touring car champion Bob Jane, and in 1986 he was right in the middle of his hugely ambitious $54 million plan to expand the north Melbourne venue with the upcoming NASCAR-style Thunderdome – built by buying the plans for Charlotte Motor Speedway and snipping 320 metres off the straights to create a 24-degree, 1.1-mile mini-me.

In June of '86, however, the bulldozers were still piling up the dirt and the only part of the renovations that had been finished was the road course. The old Calder, which dated back to 1962, cut short the lap with a hard-right about halfway down the front straight (the tarmac is still there and can be seen from the air). It continued through a few dinky little corners to end with the long sweeping right that today is used as a pit entrance, great for seeing the drivers get their drift on, but sadly clipped off in the rebuild. Jane extended the front straight until it was almost a kilometre long, bringing the total lap length up to 2.4km, then added a fast chicane and, best of all, a small hill for the right-left complex at Turns 3 and 4. They might not count as elevation changes to a Spa fan, but that hill become one of the most fun and distinctive parts of the circuit – which goes to show how featureless the original had been. The jury didn't have to deliberate for long before agreeing Jane had improved Calder Park by a huge margin, adding some interest where there hadn't been much before.

The Coca-Cola Cup, the new circuit's first major race, was where George Fury finally stepped up and proved he could take this championship away from Robbie Francevic, taking a decisive win just as Francevic stumbled.

In qualifying Fury took pole with a time of 1:01.23, his Peter Jackson Skyline half a second faster than the Holden Dealer Team's John Harvey – immensely impressive when HDT had been testing his #3 Commodore here instead of racing at Surfers the week before. HDT were gearing up to head overseas to compete in the Spa 24 Hours, which I've covered before, so Harvey's well-sorted suspension went a long way to explaining how he could qualify ahead of the boss. On the other hand, the gaps behind Harvey were miniscule – Harvey was just 0.09 seconds ahead of Graeme Crosby's Systime Commodore, who had just 0.01 over Francevic, who in turn was only 0.10 ahead of John Bowe in the second Volvo, who himself was just 0.02 ahead of Glenn Seton in the second Peter Jackson Skyline, with another 0.02 back to Peter Brock. For reference, blinking takes about 0.3 of a second, a whole ad break compared to those gaps – a sneeze and the whole grid could've been completely rearranged. Only after Brock did we get a decent-sized gap back to Jim Richards and Dick Johnson, and we already knew what their excuse would be.

The race that followed was dramatic and exciting, Fury battling Harvey in the early laps and pressuring him into using up his brakes too early, which the heavy Commodore could ill-afford. Crosby likewise had brake problems but was sanguine about it, and gave us a handy insight into the cost of racing in the 80's when he cheerfully pointed out that Brock running into him at Surfers Paradise had saved him $1,300 on a new set of tyres (just over $3,000 today). Since the Holden dealer network had been unable to provide Croz with new mudguards to replace the ones Brock'd broken at Surfers, Brock had been a good Samaritan and loaned him a set free of charge, which was a fine gesture when he was prepping for a trip to Spa and spare parts were at a premium.

Then we had Glenn Seton driving like a madman and overtaking his team leader to lead an ATCC race for the first time, showing what a spectacular talent he was even at that age. Then he either hit some oil or made the inevitable rookie mistake, depending on who you believe, and spun off again. Finally John Bowe, an old head on young shoulders, got out of conservation mode just as Fury went into it, and with the sudden speed differential he too led the race. And since he'd led at Wanneroo without the pressure going to his head, nobody was expecting him to crack now. Bowe was on track for his first ATCC win, ready to avenge his disappointment at Wanneroo... until with just two laps to the flag, the Volvo coughed. The fuel tank had not been filled for such a performance and was now almost dry. Bowe had to drop the revs right down to make the finish, allowing Fury to make up his 3-second deficit in an instant and pass him for the win. Adding insult to misery, Seton passed him just before the finish line as well, dropping him to third and handing Nissan a 1-2.

But the crucial moment of the race had come much sooner, almost as soon as the green flag had waved, as Robbie Francevic parked his Volvo at the side of the road with thick white smoke pouring from the exhaust, its day done after only a couple of laps. It seemed what the new Eggenberger-built Volvo had gained in speed it had lost in reliability. Fury had gained a perfect 28-point swing on the championship title, his 130 points now within striking distance of Francevic's 159, with three rounds and 84 points still to go. Seton's last-minute lunge had given him a 10-point cushion over Bowe, 65 to 55, while HDT drivers Brock and Harvey were level on 61.

Spotlight Car: Alfa Romeo GTV6
Colin Bond was not a name often brought up in the Group A era, more associated with Group C. Ironically, he's probably best known for a second-place finish, the crucial second half of the crushing Ford 1-2 at Bathurst, 1977. Like George Fury, he'd probably rather you remembered his achievements in rallying, taking home the ARC trophy in 1971, '72 and '74. Despite his considerable ability, though, he won the Great Race only once, in 1969, and won the championship only once as well, in 1975.

That 1975 experience must've stayed with him, because it was notable for very nearly becoming the greatest upset in ATCC history. Thanks to the class system and some incredible driving, the series was nearly won by Christine Gibson in a four-cylinder Alfa Romeo 2000 GTV. While five months pregnant! Fast forward to the early 80's, and, sweet irony, Bond had bought an Alfa Romeo dealership under the local franchise, Network Alfa. It was just good business, therefore, to race an Alfa in touring cars, take advantage of his access to discounted parts, and promote his business at the same time. The instrument of choice was the Alfetta GTV6.

In racecar design it doesn't get more elemental than, "small car, big engine," and that's exactly what Alfa had done in 1980 when it was time to facelift their Type 116 Alfetta. Creating a new performance version was as simple as shoehorning in the 2,492cc SOHC V6 from the Alfa 6 executive sedan, with Bosch L-Jetronic fuel injection in place of the Dell'Orto carburettors and a small bulge in the bonnet to leave room for the intakes – that's right, Alfa were sporting a Power Bulge long before FPV were sock-stuffing.

The combination was electric, and Bondy's first GTV6 was an ex-Group 3E Series Production car raced in early 1984, converted in Bond's own workshop for the 1984 endurance season, which allowed Group A cars as a separate class. This car became Bond's mount for the 1985 ATCC, in a distinctive yellow livery despite a not-often-remembered sponsorship deal with Montrose Wines. That season Bond also had a teammate, 1980 Formula 1 World Champion Alan Jones, who was having one of his periodic "retirements" at home in Australia. To provide a car for him, they'd bought a second car from Belgian outfit Luigi Racing, built in European left-hand drive. In true racing driver fashion, Bond claimed this newer car for himself and put the Ignis Fridges logo on its bonnet and the #26 on its doors, fobbing the old ex-Series Production car on Jones and giving it the #27 (I'd love to have heard what Jonesy said when he was given the same racing number as his old nemesis, Gilles Villeneuve!).

Winton, Rnd 1 of the ATCC. No TV footage of this race seems to exist, Channel Seven choosing to cover a Davis Cup match that ran overtime instead!

The pair raced throughout the '85 ATCC before Jonesy buggered off back to Europe mid-year for an F1 comeback with the Beatrice/Haas/Lola F1 team (the less said about which, the better). Bond hired ex-motorcycle racer Gregg Hansford to be his co-driver for the enduros, but that still left him with with a spare car, so he sold the ex-Series Production car to Sydney exotic car specialists The Toy Shop. Both cars appeared at Bathurst, The Toy Shop filling in as Network Alfa's second entry, then attended the Surfers Paradise enduro... where Bondy's Ignis Fridges car was written off in a catastrophic early-lap shunt. Bond was forced to commandeer The Toy Shop car to enter the season-ending Adelaide Grand Prix support race.

For 1986, Bond took whatever was salvageable from the Ignis car and put it all into a new bodyshell, this time building it in right-hand drive and, in a moment of hope for the future, opted for the racing #75. This made sense because the Alfa Romeo 75 was in the pipeline, but delays meant Bond wouldn't see it in 1986, nor even for most of 1987. So it was the rebuilt GTV6 he was driving in 1986, including the upcoming endurance season with Peter Fitzgerald as his co-driver, and sadly it is the only Colin Bond Racing Alfetta to survive today – like the LHD Luigi car, the ex-Series Production car was written off in a shunt.

At a Historics meeting in 2005.

It was a brilliant little car to drive, eager and full of sizzle. In race tune it was worth about 160 kW, which was combined with a homologation weight of just over 1,000kg, and some pretty good suspension – double-wishbones and torsion bars at the front, de Dion tubes and a Watt's link at the rear. Not quite state-of-the-art, even in the 80's, but a de Dion system does keep bodyroll from influencing wheel camber, and under most conditions works as well as proper IRS. Certainly it was better than the Rover we looked at a couple of weeks ago, and as for the Commodore... well, once you considered fuel loads, the Alfa took the starter's orders nearly half a tonne lighter than the Aussie.

The problem was that it also had only half an engine, in a country full of power circuits, which the new front straight at Calder hadn't done much to cure. It was a class car only, and it couldn't dominate Class B (under 3-litres) like it should've because the system hadn't yet caught up to reality. According to the rulebook, it was racing against the Volvo 240T and Skyline DR30, both of which were winning races outright with turbo assistance. Bond's only real competition should've come from Tony Longhurst's BMW 325i; the rest, driving the odd Mazda RX-7 or Mitsubishi Starion, weren't even in the same league. Instead, you have to say, he got a bit shafted. It'd be nice to say things got better with the 75, but... well, that's a story for another day.

But the GTV6 will always be associated with Calder Park for me, not because of 1986, but because of 1985. In last year's Eurovox Trophy race, Alan Jones had put in one of the most heroic drives of his whole career to finish 4th, ahead of a slew of Commodores, a BMW 635 and his own boss Bondy. It's often said that Australians don't realise just how good Jonesy really was in his day, because his day was mostly spent on the other side of the world.

But for this one day, in a Eurotrash buzz-box with half an engine, he left us in no doubt.

On This Day... "Missing"

I callously let the 70th anniversary of D-Day slide a couple of years ago, because really, D-Day, Americans, nothing to do with Australians yeah? Or so I thought. I'd completely forgotten about this handsome bastard.

His name was Flight Sergeant Neville Lloyd Sorensen, and on this day in 1944, the Lancaster on which he served was shot down. There were no survivors.

Although I wouldn't be born for another 40 years, he was my great-uncle. And nothing brings the reality of this stuff home like when it happens to family.

He joined the Royal Australian Air Force in late 1941, passed the flying course at Nerrandera and so was sent to Saskatoon, Sasketchwan, in mid-1942 for bomber training. There he flunked the pilot's course and so re-trained as an air gunner, which is how he saw active service, starting with the historic 115 Squadron of the RAF in late 1943.

115 Sqn is still around actually, today as a training unit, but in 1944 it was at the forefront of Churchill's vision for a flatter Germany, equipped with Mk.I Lancasters. Although I haven't been able to find out exactly which turret he manned, family tradition is that he was a tail gunner, or an "Arse-end Charlie" as they called them, put in charge of a Frazer-Nash FN121 hydraulically-operated turret mounting four .303 Browning machine guns – the same guns that the Spitfire had already shown weren't punchy enough to take down the armoured German warplanes. But the feeble defenses weren't what really raised the hairs on my neck, it was the escape system. The way the turret was designed, once you were in, you couldn't leave until you returned to base. If the order came to abandon ship, you had to open the turret doors behind you, fumble for and clip on your parachute, rotate the turret 90 degrees, and then fall out backwards, like a scuba diver.

It was a job that took considerable sang-froid, as this excerpt from Bomber Command Museum makes clear:

The gun turret of a Bomber Command aircraft during a night operation was the coldest, loneliest, place in the sky. Whereas other crew-members enjoyed some comfort from the proximity of others in the forward section of the aircraft, the mid-upper gunner spent the trip suspended on a canvas sling seat, his lower body in the draughty fuselage and his head and shoulders in the plexiglass dome. The rear gunner was even more removed from his fellow crewmembers and any heating system. Suspended in space at the extreme end of the fuselage, "Arse-end Charlie" was subject to the most violent movements of the aircraft. Squeezed into the cramped metal and perspex cupola, the rear gunner had so little leg space that some had to place their flying boots into the turret before climbing in themselves...

When operating on night operations at low temperatures the air gunner's view was often restricted by frost forming on the plexiglass. It became common, despite the added discomfort, for gunners to remove the centre panel of glass to ensure good visibility. So with temperatures at 20,000 feet reaching -40 degrees, frostbite was a regular occurrence.

The general unpleasantness of the role is brought home by another veteran's memoirs, outlined in a story by the Daily Mail:

The Anson took off for the Bristol Channel, where shooting practice would be carried out. The object of the flight was for the three new gunners to each fire 200 rounds of ammunition at a target drogue being towed by a single-engined Martinet aircraft. At a height of 5,000ft, with the Anson rising and sinking at irregular intervals, the instructor called the first gunner to the mid-upper turret. He quickly rattled off his rounds and in the process filled the fuselage with cordite fumes which, mixed with the other smells, produced a nauseating stench, doing nothing to help my stomach, my sweating or my headache.

The second boy only worsened the situation. It was with some reluctance that I left my seat to try my hand at this shooting lark.

After struggling to lever myself up into the turret I found myself sitting in the smallest smoke-filled sauna ever seen. My head was stuck up in the Perspex dome like a light bulb in an upturned goldfish bowl. Sweat dripped from my nose.

I had no room to move my foot, let alone my body.

"Commence firing in your own time," the instructor commanded.

I discovered that when the hand grips were twisted towards me, the guns elevated and down went the seat; twist them away, down went the guns and up went the seat. A seesaw, no less. The combination of this, the motion of the plane, the stench and the heat turned me green.

I squeezed the triggers of the guns to get the whole performance over with as quickly as possible. The turret vibrated, the deafening noise drowned the drone of the engines. Cordite fumes invaded my nostrils until I could hardly breathe. 

Cordite hasn't been used since WWII, but it was made from the same stuff as nail polish remover, so it must've been pretty nauseating. Further down, there's a vivid description of actual operations as they bomb Frankfurt.

A sharpish turn, followed by a levelling off, brought us in direct line with the target, the last leg of our route. After some 15 minutes I rotated my turret to face forward and could not believe what I saw.

Hundreds of beams were searching the sky for a victim, but what staggered me most was the flak.

The sky in front was one mass of bursting shells, never-ending flashes covering the whole of Frankfurt. Surely it was impossible to fly through such a ring of metal without being hit?

In this virtual daylight we could see scores of bombers sweeping across the city, then, to my amazement, a Ju 88 night fighter appeared not 100 yards away. "Ju 88, port side down. See it, Russ?" came Gib's urgent voice.

"Got it," I answered, swinging my sight just in front of the enemy's nose. The fighter was flying a parallel course and never wavered.

We were well aware that our .303-calibre weapons were as pop-guns compared to his lethal cannon, but somehow he had not seen us in the flickering light.

"Let sleeping dogs lie," I said. "We'll watch to see if he makes a move."

He slid underneath us, the dials in his cockpit glowing turquoise. Whipping my head over to the starboard side, I heaved a sigh of relief as he reappeared and drifted away, oblivious that he had stopped my heart from beating for a full two minutes.

"Bomb doors open," called Brick. Wherever I looked, a searing flash appeared every few seconds, followed by a greyish ball of smoke.

The Lanc shuddered time and again, rising and falling as she ploughed on. I could hear nothing of those exploding shells, but the smell of cordite was strong.

Up went the port wing alarmingly as a shell exploded below it. "Blast it," shouted Brick. "Hold the bloody thing steady. Left, left. Beautiful. Hold it. Bombs gone."

The Lanc lifted appreciably as the load and she parted company. We flew straight and level for a minute to allow the camera in the bomb bay to take its photographs, then Brick called: "Bomb doors closed, nose down and home James."

Neville flew seven missions like that – Chambly, Le Mans, Dortmund, Duisburg, Aachen, that sort of thing. Seven long, icy, noisy, exhausting missions, too tensed up to be bored, eyes peering into inky deep blue of the night sky, hoping like hell they were well-adjusted enough to see the shadowy outline of a Luftwaffe night fighter closing in before its guns opened up.

The primary role of the air gunner was not to shoot down enemy aircraft. Rather it was to perform the role of a lookout. After hours of staring into the blackness, his shouting into the intercom of, "Corkscrew port now!" would have the pilot instantly begin a series of violent evasive maneuvers, throwing the heavy bomber around the sky. Generally if an enemy fighter pilot knew he had been seen, no attempt would be made to follow the bomber through its gyrations. Rather he would seek out another aircraft, hopeful that it might have a less alert air gunner. Many air gunners completed their tour of operations without firing a single shot in anger. (Bomber Command Museum)

The "corkscrew" manoeuvre was a hard left or right bank with a sharp descent, so that the aircraft described a corkscrew path through the sky. The reason the German night fighters wouldn't try to follow was because the "Lichtenstein" radar they used could only see a cone 60 degrees wide, a fact the British were well aware of because a Bf 110 crew had mistakenly followed the wrong beacon one night and landed at an RAF base instead of their own in France. The machinery had been carefully disassembled and scrutinised by the Allies, discovering the 60-degree weakness that gave the bomber crews a crucial joker to play: with a sharp enough turn you could leave their scopes and escape.

Except when you didn't.

Neville's last flight, in a Lancaster with the tail number LL956, took off from Witchford, East Cambridgeshire, at four minutes past midnight on 1 June 1944. The targets that night were the west railway marshalling yards at Trappes, which for some reason I always assumed was in Germany, but turn out to be just west of Paris. A tough target: probably not especially well-defended, but I remember the Nuclear Warfare 101 essay remarking, "Believe me railway marshalling yards are a whirling son of a bitch to take down. They are virtually invulnerable to airbursts; we have to groundburst a blast directly on the yard." And that's with a nuclear warhead. With conventional iron bombs, you just have to do the sums, work out how many planes you need to send, and then trust to probability. Bomber Command sent 219 aircraft against Trappes that night – 125 Lancasters, 86 Halifaxes and 8 Mosquitos. The raid was a success, but four Lancasters were lost. Including LL956.

The culprit was a Messerschmitt Bf 110, a twin-engined heavy fighter, what Göring had called a Zerstörer or destroyer (literally after a naval destroyer). A classic piece of pre-war theorising that turned out to be wrong, the concept had been that only a bigger plane with space for more fuel would have the range to fly into enemy airspace and wrest control of the sky from them, hence the beefy twin-engine design and two- (or three-) man crew. Their intended mission was to accompany Luftwaffe bombers and engage and destroy any short-range interceptors sent up to interfere. This they did okay from Poland to France, but once up against the Spitfire their day was done – couldn't turn, couldn't climb, couldn't run. You were better off taking a short-ranged but more nimble airframe like the 109 and giving it external fuel tanks, which is more or less what we do to this day.

So instead they were converted to night fighters by fitting them with radar operated by the second crew member, who also reloaded the Schräge Musik rear guns, if any, and operated the radio (though he wasn't called the Funkmeister, I was disappointed to learn – there, my first awful German pun, enjoy it). Busiest man in the air, certainly, and key to their operations. Night interception sounds more like submarine fighting than air battles – vectoring in on instructions from your radarman, seeking the weapon of mass destruction hiding in the black... or conversely, trying to stay hidden in the black while knowing all along there's nothing between you and the predators, holding fire until fired upon because muzzle flashes were like blood in the water...

If Neville really was Arse-end Charlie on that flight, then he'd have been the first to die, hosed out by MG FF 20mm cannon so the German pilot could saddle up on the bomber and shoot it down without further trouble. Exactly who that pilot was we don't know, but it's been narrowed down to either Hauptmann (equivalent to Captain) Hubert Rauth or Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) Ernst-Georg Drünkler. I'm amazed and grateful our historians have got it even that specific. At the time, Rauth was flying for Nachtjagdgeschwader 4 (one of those German Franken-words; "Night Hunter Wing 4," usually abbreviated NJG4), while Drünkler was Staffelkapitän (squadron-leader) of a Staffel of NJG5 (1st or 13th, my sources differ). If it was Rauth, it was one of 31 confirmed kills over the course of the war. If it was Drünkler, then it was his 11th victory on his way to a total of 47, 45 of them at night. Both survived the war (Drünkler dying in 1997, Rauth in 2005) with an impressive set of decorations for bravery, both including the Knight's Cross, the second-highest medal an airman could earn – and the highest was given only once, to Göring himself, so arguably it was never earned at all.

On the left, Drünkler; on the right, Rauth.

True aerial warriors, then, flying in defence of their homeland, however insane its current leadership. And that night, only 72 years ago, one of them fired the rounds that catapulted my great-uncle and six others into eternity. The wreck crashed at Rambouillet, south south-west of Paris, and the Germans were only able to identify two of them before burial. Then, of course, the Allies landed at Normandy and re-opened ground fighting in western Europe, and the Germans suddenly had other things to think about. As a result, the flight log, which I've seen with my own eyes, lists all six of his previous missions, complete with very British details about rounds fired etc, and then thumps you in the gut with the words "Trappes" and "Missing." Neville's mother, father and sole remaining brother – my grandfather – didn't receive confirmation that he really was dead for another two years. Only once the war was over did the authorities have the luxury of investigating each individual plane crash, confirming that the dead truly were lost, and interring the remains in Dreux Communal Cemetery.

And that was the story of him, over at 21.

That's the real tragedy to me nowadays. I used to get annoyed whenever anyone said, "they lost their lives," or "they gave their lives," because it sounded like a euphemism, which with regard to war is another word for lying. Say what really happened, I thought: they were killed! But now I'm not so sure. As a kid I thought 21 sounded like a ripe old age, but now, about to turn 31, the idea turns my heart to jelly. Being killed is nothing compared to losing your life, to never even having it in the first place; that's too awful for words. Twenty-fucking-one. No wife alternately nagging and adorable, no kids making endless noise until they suddenly go quiet and make you suspicious, no chance to take over dad's gardening business and take it to the next level, or strike out with a new idea to become your own man. He never got to see man land on the Moon, or celebrate the Olympic Games in Melbourne, or see the dawn of the atomic age, or threaten me with a spade at a family get-together like that time grandpa did... none of that. Not ever.

Instead he joined the Air Force, probably thinking it was his duty or a chance to get out and do something grand, and from the stories of the last war, that it was the best option. But the truth was you were probably better off in the infantry this time around; fully half of Arther Harris's aircrew ended up on the butcher's bill, 44.4% of them dead, another 7% wounded in some capacity. That's what happens when you combine the survival rates for Air Crash Investigations and Saving Private Ryan, I suppose. I'm pretty sure only the shtrafniki could match that kind of death rate.

And all for five-eights of fuck-all, as far as I can tell. Neither Bomber Command nor the 8th Air Force really did much to swing the war. The factories they bombed were usually back up to capacity within a fortnight. Railway lines? Ask the boys repairing them today how hard they are to fix. You might crash a train, but only if you timed it right. No, the main contribution of the bombing campaign was that every 88 stacked outside Berlin firing flak at bombers was one less to point at Stalin's T-34s in the east. Seems awfully expensive relative the benefits. I suppose no matter what era, war is cruelty and you can't refine it.

But you're not gone as long as someone remembers.
(Up the back, behind the dweeb with the glasses, with the deeply impressed facial expression)