Bob Morris’ recollections:

SYMMONS PLAINS

Probably the hardest race that year was Symmons Plains. Brocky and I were side by side into the hairpin, I’m on the inside and he’s on the outside and he just tried to chop me off, basically. But I didn’t give way, so we hit each other in the rst corner of the second lap of the championship! That sort of set the tone…

SANDOWN

The other thing he (Brock) had was John Harvey as a backup. At Sandown, Peter and I had a big dust up, and I think his tyres went off – I was able to keep him under enough pressure for his tyres to go off, but in doing that my tyres had gone off too. Next minute Harvey’s there, and he’s giving me heaps of trouble. Then he tries to go round the outside of me at the end of the back straight. So we had a bit of a touch, and he came off second best. At Wanneroo that year they also had Wayne Negus – so three cars against us!

ADELAIDE

Isaid to Molloy, ‘Look, the only way we’re going to beat this guy is to have a car we can drive at the end of the race. The tyres are going to be shot, so we need to soften it up, so we can have it good at the end’. So we did our pre-race testing on the tyres that we

nished our last race with and that’s how we set it up for that last race, on softer settings so that it was as driveable as we could make it on worn tyres. As a result, the car wasn’t fantastic at the start, but was still good enough for me to put some pressure on him.

On that banked oval at Adelaide, you were generating a lot of force into the tyres. But you had no choice but to press on through the banking, because it led onto the straight, and if you were slow onto the straight, you’d get overtaken. So what happened was that, just as we’d hoped, Peter’s tyres started to go off faster than mine, and I was able to get a faster run off the banking and pass him down the straight. My tyres were shot too – I remember it was like driving on liquorice! – so his must have been very bad.

TWO CARS

We had a different approach. Ron Missen was still spannering the cars, but we had Peter Molloy as the team manager and chief engineer that year and he had vast experience with a lot of other drivers and tactics and things like that.

I think the fundamental difference was that Ron Hodgson put more effort behind it in terms of money, which allowed us to run two cars. It was the rst time we had ever run two cars.

We had a budget that allowed us to try things, we had a good test programme for our engines and Ronnie Missen had all the experience of building the cars so he knew what broke and what didn’t. Ronny’s experience at putting the cars together played a huge part. Also I think because, we had less down-time because we rotated the two cars, we didn’t have any major crashes or accidents at all during the year so we didn’t get out of step.

And that’s the key thing; if you’re in step and you keep ahead of the game then you have a chance, but if you have an accident and you’ve only got one car then you lose valuable testing time or your rushing to catch up all the time.

You know, we were able to go to a race wherever it was, the mechanics would y home on Sunday night and be working on the car that was in the workshop and have it ready for testing just as the other car arrived home and was ready to be pulled down so we could always go testing in the other car, a freshly prepared car, three days after a race. It also gave me great con dence as a driver knowing that if I did damage one, there was always the other car ready and waiting to go.