Article: Tru-Blu

[Steve Holmes]

Johnson may have just missed out on the top spot in Hardies-Heroes, but when the clock struck 9.30am, and the flag dropped, the Queenslander absolutely erupted off the line, and was already several car lengths in front by the time he reached Hell Corner, and began climbing the mountain for the first time. Bartlett got swamped at the start, and dropped behind Brock, Grice, and Harvey by the time he got to turn one, but he powered back to third heading up Mountain Straight. As Johnson said in The Unforgiving Minute, “I got to the top at around Reid Park and there was nothing in the mirror. Mate, I couldn’t hear the engine. This is true. All I could hear was the crowd. That was the best feeling of my life. There were Ford flags everywhere, and they were going ape. I don’t think I’ll ever match that feeling again – it had been a long time since they had seen a Ford that far in front on the first lap at Bathurst. That really made me feel good and I went down through the Esses like a dart and through the (Forrest’s) Elbow and I’ve pulled top gear and looked in the mirror and they’re just coming through Forrest’s. I thought, well, at least there’s a grand for the first lap leader”.

Brock set off after Johnson, and actually clawed back some of the deficit, but then the blue Falcon began to draw away, and Brock came under attack from the flying Bartlett.

Peter Brock was a gifted race car driver, make no doubt. He was at his most successful during the Group C years of 1973 – 1984, when touring cars still possessed a great many road car parts, and when a driver couldn’t just hammer on his car all day and expect it to reach the finish. These road car parts didn’t respond well in racing conditions. Brock had the innate ability to be scintillatingly fast, lap after lap, but somehow conserve his machinery. So while his rivals found their cars falling to bits around them as they tried desperately to keep up with him, Brock just knocked out fast lap after fast lap, and eventually wore everyone into the ground.

In New Zealand driver Jim Richards, Brock had a Bathurst co-driver who was equally as gifted, and the pair won this race three times together. Combined with the best car in the field, and the most funding, this was a formidable partnership. This was best demonstrated at Bathurst 1979, when, among the walking-wounded, Brock, who was six laps ahead of the second placed car, broke the lap record on the final lap, after 1000 gruelling kilometres. But here, in the early laps of Bathurst in 1980, he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of one of the hidings he’d become accustomed to dishing out to others, as he tried desperately to keep pace with the flying Queenslander in the big blue Ford, who, outside of the racing fraternity, and his native Queensland, nobody had ever heard of.

By lap 15, Johnson was killing them. He was 30 seconds in front and in a rhythm, and already easing back on the revs to conserve the big 351 for the long-haul. Bartlett was in the pits with his rear brakes on fire, while Grice had moved ahead of Brock. Trying desperately to stay in touch, up over Reid Park, Brock went sailing straight into the Gary Rowe/Geoff Wade Gemini, clobbering it with such force the little Isuzu was plunged into a series of barrel-rolls. Had Brock held a comfortable lead, with the race under control, perhaps he would have waited a little longer to lap the little Gemini, perhaps not, but suddenly he was in a world of trouble. He stormed back the pits, steam pouring from the front of the Commodore, pieces of bodywork going every which-way, and his crew set to work. They thought he’d holed the radiator, but in fact the water was only coming from the overflow tank, and he gunned it back out on the track, with an air-bag still jammed under the car.

Just as Brock exited the pits, Johnson swooped through Hell Corner and began climbing Mountain Straight for the 17^th time and saw the rear of the HDT machine right in front of him. He got on the radio to wife Jilly, asking, “Whose that in front of me, is it Harvey?” Just as she was replying, he shot past, saw Brocks #05 on the door, and put him a lap down. And so here he was, a lap ahead of his biggest rival, and nearly 40sec ahead of the second placed car, and full of self-belief that this could be it!

For years and years, Bathursts solution for collecting broken cars scattered around the race track was to have teams of breakdown crews driving around the track in flat-deck Quick-Lift trucks, collecting the carcases and returning them to the pits as the rest of the cars raced by at full racing speed. For any international driver it must have been mind-boggling, but the teamwork and communication between the truck drivers and flag marshalls was well-drilled, and the race drivers knew what to expect.

Having just lapped Brock, and feeling on top of the world, Johnson ripped into The Cutting, and a flaggie warned him of a truck ahead, which he spotted as he exited. Then, just as he was about to go by the truck, he spotted a large rock on the track which the Quick-Lift had stopped next to, in order to collect it. “The truck had stopped to pick up the rock, which was a dumb move, in retrospect. They should have either seen it earlier or gone on further and sent somebody back to pick it up – not parked beside it. But that’s neither here nor there. I had the choice of hitting the truck sideways, or doing a wall of death up the bank. I thought about straddling the rock, but that would just take out the front end, or the fuel tank”. Bare in mind, this was all happening at over 140kph. “So I flicked it right and went at the bank but I got the rock with the left front wheel. That broke the wheel and flattened the tyre, and the load change then blew the back tyre as well. The car went straight across the road at 45 degrees and rode straight up the fence like that. I thought, we could be going over here. It ran along the top of the fence, and the next minute it crashed down and stopped… dead”.

And that was it. Johnson was out. Brock went by moments later, clicked it into gear, and set off to haul in those ahead of him. At the end of the day, Brock and Richards stood on the top step of the podium once again.