Super Cooper
It’s appropriate that Brad Jones’ Cooper Tools Commodore VL will soon be a museum piece, as it played a important part in BJR’s and the Thunderdome’s racing history.
Brad Jones’ Commodore VL AUSCAR resurfaced and restored.
Brad Jones often cops jibes about being the ‘King of Albury’ but in the late 1980s and early-to-mid ‘90s it would have been fair to have handed him a crown and sceptre and bow down before him as the ‘King of the Thunderdome’.
A ve-time AUSCAR champion on the banks of the Calder Park Thunderdome, Jones and brother Kim were dominant in the locallydeveloped category at the venue owned and run by his godfather, Bob Jane.
Over the years they not only claimed multiple titles in the homegrown AUSCAR category but also graduated to also become champs in the local NASCAR category with a booming V8 Chevrolet Lumina.
But it was the arrival of AUSCAR in the late 1980s that provided the brothers with the chance to really make a name for themselves. It was an exciting time, with elds quickly growing as teams raced to put together suitable equipment. Brad
and Kim were no different, though what became their Cooper Tools VL Commodore, the car that won them their rst AUSCAR crown, started its life in rather unglamorous circumstances.
“We’d been running production cars for a long time and I felt like we’d done everything there was to do there,” recalls Brad to AMC.
“AUSCAR was pretty exciting and I won’t lie, the money was a big drawcard for us. It seemed like the right progression for us in terms of being able to afford it. We didn’t know much about oval racing at all. I don’t think I’d even watched a race on TV to be honest. But when you’re at that point in your life you tend to think you’re bulletproof, we gured it was a few corners and some tarmac and we’d be ne.
“We bought the car off a guy in Sydney. It was a half-built AUSCAR when we bought it that had started life as a burnt-out road car.
“It had been a six-cylinder auto and that caused us a heap of problems with cross members and such while bolting it together in the middle of the night.
“We ended up getting Arch McMurray to build the engine from Brock’s (team). I’d known Brock for a little while, (Neil) Crompton had driven for him in BMWs and I got to know Brock quite well, so Arch organised for us to nish the car off at Above: Brad Jones’ all-conquering Commodore AUSCAR, now restored to its original late ‘80s glory. Bertie Street (Brock’s race team workshop in Port Melbourne).
“Brock was unbelievably helpful. The car had a cross member out of an auto and we didn’t have another one, so they helped us out with it. We worked day and night to complete the build on the Saturday and went straight into practice at the Thunderdome.”
Adds Kim: “The engine had been built, but all the valves were stuck. The paint he had painted the engine with had stuck the valves. When we
brought it home my wife asked if we were taking it to the tip! It had melted the carpets to the floor in the fire when it had been burnt and he’d just painted over them!
“He never raced it. It was just a pile of bolts. The best thing we did was finish it at Brock’s workshop. Anytime we wanted something, ‘Mort’ (Brock team manager Graeme Brown) would send us upstairs for parts and whatever we needed.”
Originally the Jones boys’ VL Commodore was painted green, sporting the now-familiar-to-BJR #8.
“Green was the colour I had on my first Formula Ford and I just liked green,” says Brad. “I figured that since we didn’t have any sponsors we’d paint it green, it was as simple as that! And eight was the lowest number available to us as a single digit.
“I wanted to take up the least amount of space on the car so we could sell sponsorship and eight was the smallest number, so we took it. It was great for us and something that has stuck with me and the team for a long time (it’s now run on Nick Percat’s BJR Commodore Supercar).
“I tried to get it when I went into Supercars (in 2000), but I couldn’t. So when it became available (for 2009), I grabbed it. It was a very good number for us in NASCAR and AUSCAR.”
Jones’ first race in the VL Commodore came in August 1988, the same weekend none other than Brock made his Thunderdome AUSCAR debut in a Mobil Falcon XF. The lad from Albury and his crew quickly learnt they had a lot to learn.
“The first lap on the Thunderdome I did in that car was in practice bedding in brakes and it didn’t stop at all!” he says. “The first few laps were quite eye openers! I remember we qualified in the top part of the lower half of the field in qualifying.
“In the race we were so out of sorts we didn’t even realise how you jacked the car up in the pit stops. We put the trolley jack under the diff and then under the cross member to change the front tyres. We got into trouble and quickly learnt we needed to jack it up at the side.
“What I quickly learnt is that you’d think only having two corners on the track would make it not very difficult. But that was where you gained all the speed. With the AUSCAR there was not much to adjust; little things made a lot of difference. You had to chase the car up and down the track to get it to handle.
“Like anything, when you’re at your maximum in them and they’re setup right they’re good, but when they were bad, they were really bad. It was a steep learning curve but we took to it pretty well, did a lot of testing and made the most of what we learnt.
“I spun it a few times in my first race and learnt a lot, then after that I won the next one…”
And win indeed he did, sweeping home from 13th on the grid to win the Goodyear AUSCAR 200 at the Thunderdome in late October ’88 with backing from Holden dealer Alan Mance.
“For the second race Bob Jane got Alan Mance to put a bit of money in and Bob put some in too. We painted the car orange and won the race,” says Jones.
Then the wins really started rolling, Brad returning for the December meeting to win the two-race final round and, therefore, he had two round wins in a row and was looking pretty good to grab the $50,000 bonus that had been put on offer to anyone that could win three in a row. Or so he and his team thought… “They had put up a $50K bonus if you could win three rounds in a row,” recalls Jones. “We won the last two rounds and we were pretty pumped at the thought of getting after the 50 grand. Then we were told that it had to be three on the trot within a season and not across the seasons.
“So then we won the first two of the next season (his 1989/90 championship-winning season) and they took the bonus away – and we won the third…”
The next round back on the ‘Dome came with complications given Jones was driving a Mobil
Sierra for Brock in the Australian Touring Car Championship on the same March weekend at Symmons Plains. A quick plane trip and chopper ride xed that and he started rear of grid and nished third, crucial points for his title quest. “As soon as qualifying had nished in Tasmania I jumped in a little twin-engine plane with Jim Richards and, from memory, Terri Sawyer too. The pilot picked us up, we got a chopper to the track and landed just before my AUSCAR race was due to start. It was a mad panic, but I got in, ended up third, waited for Richo’s NASCAR race to nish and ew back into Tasmania sometime really, really late after midnight!”
The 1989/90 season went into break for winter and red up the week after Bathurst in October with Jones sealing another win, this time carrying the familiar colours of Cooper Tools for the rst time.
“Cooper Tools had a base in Albury and an American company owned them,” recalls Jones. “George the MD of the time loved the concept when we sold it to him and then away we went. We did a race, they loved it, we won, we did another one then they signed on for a couple of years.
“They were a great group of people and it was
“What I quickly learnt is that you’d think only having two corners on the track would make it not very difficult. But that was where you gained all the speed. With the AUSCAR there was not much to adjust; little things made a lot of difference. You had to chase the car up and down the track to get it to handle.”
their rst real motorsport experience in Australia. We took one of our Cooper Tools VN racecars to America after I won the championship, ran it at Charlotte as a demo and took it on a trailer to their head office.”
Engine problems blunted Jones’ efforts in the December ’89 event on the ‘Dome but he blitzed the eld on the short oval at Adelaide International Raceway in January 1990, taking pole and all four heat wins to seal overall victory.
A ding-dong ght with Steve Harrington in March (where Jones started from the rear of grid after tapping the wall on his qualifying run) was decided in Harrington’s favour, with Jones nishing second. That proved to be the last time the VL ran in the Jones boys hands as they updated to a new VN for the nal round in May, where a 13th place landed Brad his rst AUSCAR crown.
But the car that started them on their way in AUSCAR racing lived on, sold to former Superkart and HQ racer Bruce Williams for his rst full season assault on the series in 1990/91.
Running in a familiar red livery though with the
#9, Williams quickly came to grips with his new stead, clocking up a fourth, eighth and third in the rst three rounds held on the Thunderdome before trekking north for the inaugural Gold Coast Indy event in March 1991 where he wound up eighth in the race that counted for points on the Sunday.
Scoring the new backing of Bendix Mintex was a boon for the Ballarat-based racer for the nal round on the Thunderdome in April 1991. However, it all turned to muck in the rst of two 50-lap heats when he ploughed into the spun John Faulkner, ending his season with a smash.
He and his team had just won the Best Presented Car and Team Award just prior to the race too, the failure to nish meaning that Charlie O’Brien pipped Williams for the AUSCAR Rookie of the Year Award. Williams nished the series fourth.
This was the last appearance for Williams in the VL, which was repaired after the crash and placed up for sale given he had a new VN Commodore for the 1991/92 season.
Calder Park announced for 1991/92 a new Sportsman class for superseded AUSCAR Commodores and Falcons would be created.
The class was given the green light at the December 1, 1991, meeting at Calder, with Commodores moving to the 253 cubic-inch V8 engine. It was this category that Williams aimed the sale of his VL Commodore at, advertising it in Auto Action for $15,000 as a rolling chassis in October 1991. It was bought by Neville Blight for his move into the Sportsman category.
“I got it off Bruce pretty much when the Sportsman series started, maybe a race or two after they got it up and going,” Blight recalled a few years back.
“I bought it as a roller from Bruce. He kept the engine, I took the car and dropped a 253 into it and away we went. We had to run a blade spoiler on it too, rather than the original boot mould VL spoiler it ran in AUSCAR racing, but that was about all we had to do.
“Guys like Matthew White and Nathan Pretty were starting in it then. I never put much into it. I just got in and drove and ran in the mid-pack. I didn’t do too much homework!”
The car sat in Blight’s shed for over a decade after racing at the Thunderdome came to a halt. Eventually he sold it, 2013, with new owner Dean Montgomery adding the car to his growing collection.
It has been returned to its familiar red livery with #8 and Cooper Tools markings and now sits among Montgomery’s impressive stable of cars that will ll the space in his new Warrnambool Motor Museum, which will hopefully open in 2019.
It serves as a reminder of an amazing period of racing at the Calder Park Thunderdome and the car that did the heavy lifting in the rst of the Jones brothers’ ve AUSCAR title wins.