Wow, brilliant photos there Lindsay. The Yellow Pages Walkinshaw Commodore was Peter McLeod. Great looking car it was too, though suffered with issues throughout the event.
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Wow, brilliant photos there Lindsay. The Yellow Pages Walkinshaw Commodore was Peter McLeod. Great looking car it was too, though suffered with issues throughout the event.
New South Wales I think Lindsay. He raced in Group C for several years, best known for racing a very successful Mazda RX7 sponsored by Slick-50. Great looking car, as all his cars were. It was yellow and black. He ran a Commodore in the early years of Group A from 1985, and was drafted into the Holden Dealer Team at last moment in 1987 to drive the teams second car, #10, alongside Jon Crooke, which Peter Brock and David Parsons jumped into when the 05 car broke early. The #10 HDT car was later declared the race winner after finishing third on the road when the Eggenberger RS500s were disqualified.
He ran this Walkinshaw Commodore for a short time, but then stopped racing.
I had forgotten about Brockie jumping in the second car in 87.I remember him and Larry Perkins doing it in 84 in the John Harvey car but then I always liked the group C cars more.
David Oxton's Sierra At Wigram .Wasn't this the car that Paul Radisich raced and won the championship with in England?Attachment 23937Attachment 23938
Trevor Crowes BMW.I think Jim Richards and Tony Longhurst came 4th at Bathurst in this car in 85Attachment 23939Attachment 23940
I love that car, and in those colours. Looks fantastic! Lindsay it was Andy Rouse who raced this car in the BTCC in 1985 and won the championship before it made its way to NZ. Rouse shared the car with David Oxton in a couple of events before Oxton took it over for the NZ series. Great looking car, but was ultimately a little disappointing.
This car is still MIA I believe?
Steve - love TRS, have been reading it from the UK for a while, finally thought I might be able to add something useful…
Andrew Bagnall and I did a deal to buy the ex-Andy Rouse car and a Datapost Escort RS1600 turbo for the 1986 NZ season. We also arranged for Paul Radisich to return to UK F3 in 1986 with Murray Taylor. THe Ford was a German-market Merkur that Andy had built into a winning car. Ran 2.3L Pinto turbocharged, very effective but nothing on the RS500s about to come out. We did the deal directly with Stuart Turner at Ford, so I guess they must have owned the car, not Andy. David Oxton drove mainly, sharing with Andy on the longer events. Bags and I ran the Escort in the long races as well. Merkur wasn't as successful as we had hoped, believe it went to Australia after that, but not sure….
Despite some great races and good podiums, Paul never won the UK championship but he did of course win the 1994 (Monza) and 1995 (Donnington) Touring Car World Cups with the Ford Mondeo. I was sharing his (small, motel!) room with him at Monza and it was a real thrill to hear the NZ anthem played over the circuit - bettered only by the dinner that evening when the whole room rose and applauded him as we walked in. Monza grid had 14 current or ex F1 drivers all in Super Tourers, so he did pretty well!
Very sorry to read the sad news re Dave McKinney - great bloke.
Rob Whitehouse
Hi Rob, fantastic first post! Many thanks, its great to have you here.
Thanks for the info on the Sierra. I'm pretty certain its first NZ race was the 1986 Wellington Street Race, where Rouse and Oxton shared the car. Rouse put it on pole, but it suffered a mechanical problem early on. They would have driven the car together at the Pukekohe 500km race the following weekend as well. Then Rouse would have headed back home and Oxton drove the car on his own throughout the remaining NZ touring car events.
At some stage, the car ended up with Mark Petch, and he took it to Australia. He entered it at Bathurst in 1986, and Robbie Francevic was one of the drivers, having fallen out with the Volvo Team Australia after winning the '86 Australian Touring Car Championship in a 240T. Leo Leonard was the other driver. They qualified 21st, but were out of the race after 27 laps. From there, the trail seems to dry up. It didn't race in NZ the following season, and it doesn't appear to have raced in Aus again. It just sort of quietly disappeared.
Like you say Rob, it wasn't as successful as you'd hoped, but it was still a significant car, having won the 1985 BTCC. And, furthermore, it was a lovely looking car.
Frosty, know what you mean but not cars fault, the car did not put the engine together, and they were still pretty experimental back then and different parts than available for some other outfits.
It was a nice looking car and had finished a couple of races in BTCC. so was right at some stage,
to be fair to Volvo Robbie had a fall out with the team manager, not the maker. Team manager John Sheppard was notorious for being a "my way or the highway" bloke and butted heads with Robbie on the direction the car was being developed and tested. Robbie wanted to be involved with both but team manager John Sheppard saw him as "just a driver" and refused to involve him, Robbie was so passionate about it he left the team after one race when the car didnt show up at the track until just before the end of qualifying and wasnt set up and he had to get dispensation to start at the rear of the grid
As for the Petch XR4T, it had a habit of popping off rockers (not breaking them, though it did break one in the race itself) at Bathurst, Rouse had built the engine with a 6500RPM redline but the only gearing available had the car doing 7200 down conrod!
Jon Crooke is still around and going strong. Here's his most recent venture, following on from the "Hyperstimulator"......
http://www.hyperracer.com/index.html
Attachment 25411
levels raceway, late 80's
I see Mark Petch has just purchased this car. This is not the Belgian GTM car he owned in 1985 that won the Wellington Street Race, but rather the second car that came on board in 1986 as part of the Volvo Dealer Team, and driven by John Bowe.
His Facebook posting reads:
"After a lot of investigation and negotiation I am very pleased to have been able to purchase John Bowe's GpA, Australian Touring Car Championship Volvo 240T that has been the subject matter on my timeline below.
"The car has an incredible history and is not the only surviving RAS Factory Volvo team car, but also the very last Volvo Factory "Works" GpA 240T car built. The car was assembled in Australia by the Australian Volvo Dealer Team, by key team mechanic Geoff Grech [who went on to become the Team manager at HRT] and a young fabricator, name unknown, who fabricated the first Chrome Moly roll cage ever run in a Volvo Works car in place of the Factory cars previously used Aluminium tube bolted together roll-cage.
"The car was finished only the day before the 1986 Sandown 500 Endurance race, were it DNF'd as it also did a month later at Bathurst when John was running in second place. All three AVDT cars including my own car that helped Robbie Francevic to the ATC Championship win in 1986 were returned to Sweden, when Volvo pulled out of GpA racing, In privateers hand's the car was immediately successful and dominate the 1987 Swedish Touring Car Championship driven by Peggen Andersson.
"The car went on to compete in many other races by various other drivers, including Sweden's famed Ulf Granberg. The car was purchased by Knud Knud E. Sørensen a Danish driver, who had just started to race, and against the later crop of cars such as the Ford Cosworth RS 500's it proved less than competitive. It was sold to another Danish aspiring racing driver who lived in Spain were it disappeared for 14 years, before being advertised for sale in 2009 when, Thor Rustad's a Norwegian, purchased the car and stripped it down to bare metal and commenced at 6 year long, 2,476 Hour, complete rebuild of the car to as new condition, 100% period correct to when the car was last raced by John Bowe and Alfi Costanzo at Bathurst in 1986".
Attachment 31698
Nice. Hope we can see it at the Festival in January.
Ok, I'm picking at straws here but Mark Petch is wrong, Car 44 never got to the dizzy heights of position 2. It did reach position 3 on lap 42 and then pitted falling to position 7, worked it's way up to position 6 (it was having an entertaining dice with johnson in the mustang) just before it fell away into obscurity on lap 55, thanks to the rear aluminium trailing arms failing
Here is a transcript of the Official Lap Charts, taken from Bill Tuckey's 1986 book of the race
http://imageshack.com/a/img903/2796/edfpbk.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img910/1161/kt0uRr.jpg
You sure that's the right chart Jim? What you typed doesn't line up with that chart. It also shows cars in positions 60, 87, 91, 96 etc. Its only a 55 car grid.
You must be reading it wrong, those are Car numbers not positions. Across is no of laps, down is position on the track. For instance, Car 2, The Chickadee Commodore, led until lap 37 where Alan Grice pitted, putting car 05 in the lead for 2 laps, then Brock pitted, putting Gary Scott in car 15 into the lead for two laps before Gricey regained the lead.
On the completion of the first lap car 44 was in position 9, where it continually climbed the leader board swapping places with Johnson in car 17 for several laps
Sorry my mistake, I thought the vertical column was car number on the left rather than race position.
An interesting piece of the history of Group A is how the cost quickly escalated. In 1984 when CAMS announced Australia would be adopting Group A for 1985, part of their reasoning was the cost would be lower and the privateers would stand a better chance. This proved to be folly. In 1984 the cost of building a good Group C commodore was between 45-60k, in 1986 the cost of building (or buying a customer car) a commodore was 80k. In 1990 when asked about the progress in building the Nissan GTR, Gibson replied "you are looking at possibly the first half a million dollar group a race car"
Here is an interesting pic, it shows just what it takes to win Bathurst in Group A. Grice went to Bathurst in 1986 with no less than FIVE spare Roadways (read Les Small) built spare engines! yes FIVE! Now you think about it, in 1986 a customer Group A engine sold for between 15-20k from the likes of the HDT, Perkins and Roadways. That's a serious investment!
http://imageshack.com/a/img910/681/lQUzgr.jpg
And the cost of the current cars???
millions Oldfart! Like CAMS, the founders of V8Supercars promised it was going to be cheaper and simpler than what Group A had become. That sooned turned into a farce when they started issuing "licences" to build a car/field a team, locking out the real privateers and once a year Sunday drivers. Then they became a corporation and went high tech/high media profile.
One part of the history of Group A was it was supposed to be by the book and no special favours or considerations granted, aka what was destroying Group C. Group A in Europe was a dogs dinner, all the major teams cheated, most had gentlemen agreements bewteen each other to look the other way. Australia was by the book for the first two years, who can forget the arguement in pit lane between one team and the scrutineers over whether the tyre width could be measured with the car on jacks or on the ground. technically the team was right, the tyre could be measured with no weight, but the scrutinners insisted it couldnt be, and that year that team went into hardies heroes and the race with undersized rubber. Interestingly that same race Grice stuck by his guns and ran with the tyres measured legal off the ground, but illegal on the ground, yet no protests were made and the officials did nothing. There were many interesting points of contention in group a, dozens in fact, here is one you may not have heard of. The Shell cars were a running dual actuator bypass valve on their RS500s, whereas a single actuator was homologated. The dual was from the previous Cosworth, not the RS500. Several teams protested, including the Colin Bond Caltex team. DJR successfully argued the actuator was an "accessory" and hence "free". After that decision most teams started using the dual actuator system, including Bond. But to take it to an extreme, at one major race Bond argued that the turbo was an "accessory" when his turbo rotor was picked up as non-standard in pre-scrutineering, and hence "free"! lol, the cheek!
more on how the rules were being "INTERPRETATED" (flaunted!). The FIA Group A regs stated that aerodynamic aids and body panels were not to be "adjustable". In 1989 Allan Moffat turned up at Sandown with the front bumper/spoiler visibly at a different angle to the norm. When challenged by a non sierra team, the scrutineers declared it was just differences in panel fit tolerances that could be expected from a mass produced car! Hence the Sierra teams were given a green light to flaunt the rules. The other teams quickly followed suit. It was found by angling the rear downwards downforce was slightly enhanced. It got so bad that some teams were running the bumper with the rear a good inch down from where it was supposed to be. In 1991 they started to bring the whole bumper forward as well!
Here is a pic showing at top what the bumper is supposed to look like when fitted correctly, middle how it looks "adjusted" downwards and lower "adjusted" forwards
http://imageshack.com/a/img910/4210/SBiugs.jpg
The Petch Sierra at Pukekohe in 1990. Drivers were Brancatelli and Gravett.
Attachment 34879
Robbie Ker, Bob Jones VL Commodore. Pukekohe 1990Attachment 34883
Of course, such statements helped build credibility for the amount of money he asked (and got) from the sponsors...Quote:
Originally posted by jimdigris
An interesting piece of the history of Group A is how the cost quickly escalated..... In 1990 when asked about the progress in building the Nissan GTR, Gibson replied "you are looking at possibly the first half a million dollar group a race car".....
And it would approach truth if you counted in some of the overall development work on the model by the makers. To build a car, and then a second car, sees the build price come down each time.
I also agree that there must have been some pretty handsome 'fat' in the engine costs, they were fairly ordinary engines though meticulously machined and assembled.
I must admit that I never heard either of those stories, but I wasn't all that close to the game by 1986...Quote:
Originally posted by jimdigris
One part of the history of Group A was it was supposed to be by the book and no special favours or considerations granted, aka what was destroying Group C. Group A in Europe was a dogs dinner, all the major teams cheated, most had gentlemen agreements bewteen each other to look the other way. Australia was by the book for the first two years, who can forget the arguement in pit lane between one team and the scrutineers over whether the tyre width could be measured with the car on jacks or on the ground. technically the team was right, the tyre could be measured with no weight, but the scrutinners insisted it couldnt be, and that year that team went into hardies heroes and the race with undersized rubber. Interestingly that same race Grice stuck by his guns and ran with the tyres measured legal off the ground, but illegal on the ground, yet no protests were made and the officials did nothing. There were many interesting points of contention in group a, dozens in fact, here is one you may not have heard of. The Shell cars were a running dual actuator bypass valve on their RS500s, whereas a single actuator was homologated. The dual was from the previous Cosworth, not the RS500. Several teams protested, including the Colin Bond Caltex team. DJR successfully argued the actuator was an "accessory" and hence "free". After that decision most teams started using the dual actuator system, including Bond. But to take it to an extreme, at one major race Bond argued that the turbo was an "accessory" when his turbo rotor was picked up as non-standard in pre-scrutineering, and hence "free"! lol, the cheek!
I was there, however, for the post-race press conference after the Eggenberger car had 'won' at Bathurst. Brock was casual, even though the 'press' pushed him hard trying to get some sort of negative comment about the fuel issue (a sample of the fuel at one stop had come up funny).
He simply got into explaining that those cars had knock sensors and it wouldn't have made any great difference to them...
Of course, the pursuit of the inner guard alteration case was carried on with vigour and they justly outed the Sierras for that. It shows that you're right about that European agreement.
Remember, too, the Masterton car with the numberplate flapping to allow more air into the radiator?
And back a bit further, I understand that at least one of the Ron Hodgson Torana A9Xs had some work done (rack location?) to reduce bump steer.
From the FIA archives in the Jaguar XJS homologation papers. They show the details when ol Tom pulled the scam of the decade homologating the pre-may type heads despite them being long out of production. "May" type heads were restrictive and designed for swirl to get better fuel consumption, great for the then fuel crisis times but not ideal for racing. When ol tom got this "erratum" through his jags jumped from 390 to 460HP. As the rules at the time said parts like heads had to be the currently fitted to the road going car how the heck did FIA rubber stamp it? Note the visible difference in combustion chamber design and the port size difference!
Attachment 39665