by Alan Jones
When we talk about compromised race cars being modified for a task, the Sierra was a perfect example. It was under-tyred and over-powered, which is fine in itself, because everyone else in a Sierra was in the same boat and that was the car to have. Strangely it proved OK on some tight tracks, I got pole at Amaroo in 1990 with one, so while you could keep the tyres going it was fine everywhere.
The tracks we did race on that year were an interesting mix … Bathurst is long and fast and the bit over the top is quite challenging – you needed power and Colin’s Sierra had plenty of that. Wellington was a street race, so it had all those close walls and the like, and the weather was just something else. I remember being bloody cold in Wellington, and having my overalls on while lying down inside a sleeping bag in a caravan just to warm up. This was at the circuit and I was just freezing and thinking how can anyone live here?
The last race for us was at Pukekohe, a challenging and fast track. There was a bump in the first corner, which was interesting in one of those things. I don’t mind bumps actually, it gives tracks a bit of character and leaves a bit more to the driver. There was also a good bump at turn 1 at Lakeside, a terrible bump right through it that you had to be wary of when you went through there in a touring car. I won a round there with Dick Johnson right up my backside, and that bump would unsettle that car every time and if you were going flat out you only just had enough time to settle it for the right-hander straight after it. When you are being pushed, you had to be especially careful.
We also did Sandown for the 500 which was a traditional lead-in to Bathurst, but this wasn’t part of any Championship. I was meant to drive there with Colin, but we split a bore in the engine during the warm-up and we retired that car before the start. To get laps in, I was then moved into the team’s other car, but it didn’t last long enough for me to get a steer.
At Bathurst we had good speed, but then Tom Walkinshaw protested all the Australian-built Sierras, ours included, and we had to pull the car and engine to bits for the protest. After pulling apart the good engine, we were forced to run the spare and that was noticeably down on power, Bondy reckoned at the time it was 50 horsepower less than the engine we wanted to race. The others cars were similarly hampered, so Tom got his way in a very distasteful manner. Tony Longhurst went on to win the race and we finished in third. We were disqualified a month later and then reinstated a month further down the track.
We backed up that podium with a fourth at Wellington and then we had a retirement at Pukekohe after qualifying in third. The points system in use was what they called a Double Can-Am, which meant you got points for where you finished in your class as well as the race, and that meant we ended up losing the Championship to a class car.
The next year I joined the Benson & Hedges Racing team for the endurance races and then turned that into a full-time drive for 1990. At Sandown and Bathurst I was to drive the team’s second car with Denny Hulme, but at Bathurst Tony Longhurst joined us after his car expired early in the race. In those days with cross-entering, you could actually race in two cars during the same race. Brock got two of his wins there that way.
The team was really Tony’s even though Frank Gardner was there and running it. I’ll tell you this for nothing, and I know Frank is dead now, but there are few people in this world that are as fantastic self-promoters as Frank was. He was great for the one-liners and the jokes and all that sort of stuff, and he was quite a cunning businessman. He always made sure he was at the right place at the right time. He knew where his bread was buttered. If you had, for instance, a Tony Longhurst alongside you with a wallet the size of his father’s, or Paul Morris with Terry beside him, you knew who was going to get looked after the best. Frank knew that is where his future lay more than Alan Jones who was just there collecting money.
It was a well-structured team and it had, I believe, pretty good sponsorship from Benson & Hedges. Frank was very good at getting on with the right people, a bit like Graham Hill. He had a great relationship with Ron Meatchem at BMW, which saw Ron in our pits on a regular basis even though we were running Fords, but Frank had a plan there.
Tony was good fun. I quite enjoyed his company and enjoyed driving in the team with him. As a teammate, he was bloody quick: I knew if I was outpacing him I was doing well. He was probably a little mad too.
In my Formula One days I didn’t have much to do with my teammates, I was there to do a job and that was it. Touring car racing was a little different for me; it mattered, but not to the same degree. I’d go out to dinner with Tony; I don’t remember doing that with Carlos or Clay except when I had to.
I started out my Australian Touring Car Championship career with a pole at the most unlikely of venues for that car, Amaroo Park Raceway, which was little more than a go-kart track. My old Azusa kart would have been better suited to that track. I didn’t really enjoy it – it was all stop, start, and a goat track with a little hill, built among rocks out the back of Dural in the north of Sydney. It is a luxury housing estate now.
I got eighth overall in my first outing and was steady for the next few rounds. I got my first podium in the series at Winton, another track that wasn’t much fun. Our cars had plenty of power, perhaps more than anyone else, so we generally qualified well before struggling to keep the rear tyres alive during the races.
I missed Lakeside and then had two retirements in the final three rounds, which reminded me of the Beatrice days. Although I didn’t go into a race wondering which lap it would break, there was a chance we’d do the distance, but we did go in knowing the tyres would go off.
I think in many ways the endurance races of 1990 were a write-off because it was already decided we were racing BMWs in 1991, which I was quite looking forward to. Both the team cars failed to finish at Bathurst, which is what happens when you stop stocking the shelves with the latest bits. I did get my first run in the Top 10 Shootout, which is a single qualifying lap for each of the drivers who qualified in the Top 10. I didn’t mind the Shootout. I liked the build-up and the fact that you couldn’t make a mistake. If you gamble a bit and lock a wheel or put a wheel on the dirt and lose one or two-tenths you might be buggered, but if it comes off you could be on pole. You’ve got to try for the perfect lap, of which there’s no such thing … so you are really just trying to get as close to that as possible.
I was pretty sure my car was the one getting the lesser equipment. It wasn’t as fast as Tony’s but that was OK, he was putting up the money and I knew where we were headed and I felt that was going to be a much more enjoyable place for me. I would enjoy my money a lot more if I was enjoying the racing too, not that I was getting that much really, but it was OK.
The compromises bothered me though. With the Sierra, you could melt your rear tyres in a lap or two if you weren’t gentle enough with the throttle, so a lot of the time you were not racing at all, rather you were just hanging in to finish, after racing for just a few laps at the start. The BMW M3 promised a very different experience; while we were not going to have the power of the Sierras, we were going to have a car that handled really well, had great brakes and wasn’t going to melt rubber every time you powered out of a corner. I was very much looking forward to 1991.
I was quite comfortable in the team despite the presence of Frank, and that was good for me at that stage of my career and life. In some ways that was more important than the equipment I was getting. I wanted to be comfortable in my surrounds and friendly with the people I was with. I took that very much into account.
The BMWs were ex-Schnitzer and were left with us after the Wellington street race in New Zealand. They were upgraded to the latest spec with slightly bigger engines and revised aero. It was a lot more forgiving and a bit like the GTV Alfa. You could go to somewhere like Lakeside that really required handling and just wait for their tyres to start going off a little bit on the Sierras. Then the little BM would start chewing at them.
But things were changing in Group A: the Sierra was no longer the ca
r to have, the weapon of choice was now the Nissan GT-R – or Godzilla as it was dubbed by local journalist Mike Jacobson. This car was built to the very edge of the rules: turbo, four-wheel-drive … everything you wanted or needed to dominate … and they did. I didn’t have a clue how it even worked, but I appreciated the fact that the Nissan had a major advantage over everybody else. That’s the car you wanted to be in, particularly in the wet, but I think we had the next best thing.
As the season went on, it was clear they were going to win and for the rest it was a different battle. We won the non-Nissan battle. The format for the season didn’t suit us as much as one longer race, so we had I think three races a weekend where points were collected and they were added up to determine a winner.
Gentleman Jim Richards won four of the first five rounds from his teammate Mark Skaife, who won the other one. ‘Gentleman Jim’ – what a load of shit that is. He’s far from a bloody gentleman, let me tell you. He’s certainly not a gentleman on the track. Tony was the first guy to beat them all season in round 6 at the Amaroo Park goat track, and then he won again at Lakeside. He was the only round winner for the year that wasn’t Richards or Skaife. He also finished as the first of the non-Nissans three times.
I did that in the final round, with a satisfying second at Oran Park. Skaife won that day and Richards had a DNF, which he knew he could afford and still win the title with a silly drop-your-worst-round point system. Skaife actually got more points than Richards over the season but finished second when the points were adjusted. Tony was third in the series and I was fourth, although when I dropped my worst score I was on the same points as Glenn Seton.
The Sandown 500 had a slimmed-down field and I finished second there with Peter Fitzgerald, again to a Nissan GT-R, but not Skaife or Richards, just to prove how good the car was. The main team didn’t even front up, so Mark Gibbs and Rohan Onslow were there to win by six laps. ‘Who?’ I hear you ask. And that is my point: it was a great race car.
At Bathurst it was decided to pair Tony and me – and our car broke. The car was terrific across the top and down through the chase, but on the big long straights we were just eaten alive, and we needed everything to go our way to have a chance. We were running as high as third in the early stages and we were on target for a really good result when I got a puncture going up Mountain Straight. I had to limp around almost an entire lap with the tyre shredding itself, which caused a bit of damage to the bodywork and the suspension. We lost ground, fought our way back to fourth – then the car shut down on me and that was it with 25 laps to run. The team’s other car came home fourth and maybe we could have finished second, but that’s motor racing.
We did the New Zealand races again and Tony was leading at half distance in the car I was sharing with him at the Wellington 500 when he got clipped by John Sax, who he was lapping. The car hit two walls and the second hit was so hard Tony cracked his helmet on the concrete wall. It was a pretty scary incident, and Tony was theoretically OK, but many think he was never the same driver after that.
The next season, 1992, I switched camps after the championship and drove for Glenn Seton Racing in the endurance races, which was more about looking into the 1993 season given Group A was getting the boot and a new formula for V8 Holdens and Fords was coming in. Aside from the fact that Paul Morris was now nosing into the BMW team with pocket loads of cash, I felt Seton was better prepared for the new era and that all made sense.
The 1992 championship itself was not that much fun. CAMS had lumped both our cars and the Nissans with extra weight to slow us down, and it killed us. The Nissans dominated the series again, but the Sierras and Commodores were closer. Lakeside was again our best weekend with Tony first and me third, and aside from another podium for me at Oran Park, that was pretty much it for season highlights.
During Easter they ran the second ever Bathurst 12-Hour race for production cars. BMW entered an M5 for Tony, Neville Crichton and me and we came home second behind a Mazda RX-7. The M5 was such an easy car to drive there, I think I turned the radio on at one stage. It felt even better because I was no longer enjoying the other part of my racing.
Joining Glenn’s team was such a good move for me. Both his dad, Bo, and he were terrific to work with. The whole team was really nice and even Ken Potter and Kerrie Godfrey from Philip Morris, who was sponsoring the team with the Peter Jackson brand, were great. They all put on a really professional show.
Mike Raymond, who was a little more than just a commentator at Seven, helped me get that drive. I think he suggested to them that I would be a good bloke to come and join them. I was talking to him on a plane on the way back from Perth and I think I’d probably had enough of Frank at that stage and let it be known. Getting right back to the start of this book, it’s called working the paddock, only this time I was working the plane. Then we teed up a meeting and I ended up with Glenn.
All the bloody fans were horrified that I was switching cars, especially mid-season. But I was attuned to Europe, where it didn’t matter at all. Many of the race fans were really not that bright when it came to this sort of thing. I didn’t care what they thought – as I have made clear, I went racing for myself. Fortune was planned; fame was a side effect.
Glenn’s team was a good set-up. For Glenn’s sake, there is no doubt it would have been easier to have it run by someone other than himself, but it wasn’t and it made no difference to me. I was given a good car and a great place to go racing from. He is genuinely a nice man, Glenn. How he got on with me I don’t know.
For my first race with the new team we ran the 1993 Spec Falcon rather than the Sierra, which we could also have run, but Glenn was keen to get as many laps in the car as possible before the next season began. We were allowed to run these cars – which a few years later were rebranded as V8 Supercars – in the endurance races. So we raced the Falcon at Sandown and Bathurst. Looking to the future was what attracted me there in the first place, so I thought this was good.
We had retirements in both races, but the potential was clear. At Bathurst Glenn was the fastest qualifier in a 93 car and there were a few running them. We made it just past half distance of the full-length race, but this is the 92 Bathurst where the big storm hit and most of the field, including the eventual winners, Jim Richards and Mark Skaife, ended up crashed into a wall or buried in a sand trap. The crowd was incensed that a crashed Nissan could win, and they gave it to Jim, who lashed back with the famous ‘you’re all a pack of arseholes’ line.
The 1993 season was structured in an interesting way. After qualifying there was a thing called the Peter Jackson Dash, where we pulled our starting positions out of a hat and then raced to decide the first three rows of the grid. Then we had the 2-litre cars race, then the 5-litre cars and then a big race for all of us, and the way the points worked was so complex I didn’t bother trying to work it out. I just went racing.
Amaroo Park was the season-opener, and Tony was still allowed to run his M3s during the season so I thought they had the box seat. I was wrong. The new cars dominated, and by that I mean both Falcons and Commodores. Glenn had a good weekend and mine was OK. At Symmons Plains my car was really good and I won both my heat and the final and had enough points to be the overall winner for the weekend.
I won’t say it was like winning my first grand prix, because it wasn’t, but it was very satisfying to finally win in a touring car in Australia. Again, the Holdens were up the front of the field and the first six spots for the weekend were evenly spread. Glenn won the next round at Phillip Island and I didn’t even make the Dash, but the Falcons were pretty good here and I raced into second place in the final race and had third overall, so this was the first time Glenn and I were on the podium together.
After Phillip Island I went back to Bathurst for the 12-Hour race, this time in a works Mazda RX-7 with Garry Waldon. Allan Horsley at Mazda had put together the team as he did the previous year. He also worked on the homologation for the car and made sure it was a poten
tial winner. He did an excellent job running them. The bloody race started at four or five in the morning and by the end of the twelve hours I had my first Bathurst win. Unfortunately it isn’t the one the race fans in Australia covet, but it was a win. Charlie O’Brien was in the team’s other car with Gregg Hansford, and they finished second with a couple of laps less than us.
Back into touring cars and Lakeside was all mine, and I won the Dash (I drew pole out of the envelope and made my famous comment, ‘I’d rather be lucky than good,’ which hung around with me for a while) and the Final to get the win for the round. I could have won the heat as well, but I got out of shape over the bump leading into the second turn and that let Dick Johnson through. Then Glenn started his winning streak, I got a couple of podiums during that run of Glenn’s but the Holdens were still there and Tony was back in the game after he reduced the weight of the M3.
So with Glenn winning the third, fifth, sixth and seventh round of the series and me winning at Symmons Plains and Lakeside in the second and fourth rounds, we won six rounds in a row. Now comes the politics. I had not really paid much attention, but there were little lobby groups and whingers all over the place.
The Holden teams had started complaining about our Falcons, saying we had some sort of advantage. They were better at this game than Glenn and Dick Johnson, who was leading the other competitive Falcon team. So what happened was if you spent enough time complaining instead of working on your car, you could get the rule-makers to help you out. They killed our car mid-season. We lost some of the front undertray and the Holdens were given some other little tricks to boost them.
The effect for us was immediate, we lost speed and we lost front downforce, which meant we started to work the front tyres too hard. The Holden teams eventually got on top of their changes and the pendulum swung the other way. Glenn put on just enough points to win the title and I was second, but no-one was listening to us about what they’d done to our cars. After Glenn’s win at Mallala, no Falcon saw the podium again in the championship. That tells a story in itself.