Steve Normoyle

This year’s Bathurst 1000 was Holden’s last Great Race. While ZB Commodores will race into 2021 in Supercars, Holden won’t be a part of it. By then, for all intents and purposes, Holden will cease to exist. The end for Holden also means the end of what has been an unbroken presence in racing (even if for some years it was an unofficial involvement) for more than half a century. That’s a remarkable record not just in Australia but in motorsport across the globe. Is there another manufacturer anywhere that’s stayed in touring car racing continuously for longer than that?

Along the journey there have been so many glorious moments on the Mountain. Of course, so much of that is intertwined with Peter Brock and his nine victories, the one man who’ll remain forever synonymous with Holden and Bathurst.

But the greatest Holden Bathurst win of them all didn’t involve the King of the Mountain.

The victory for the Holden Racing Team with Win Percy and Allan Grice in 1990 was an enormous achievement on so many levels.

Consider what they were up against. The VL Commodore Group A SV, the ‘Walkinshaw,’ had from its race debut in 1988 until the end of the following year shown itself to be the least competitive Holden ever in touring car racing. Against their Ford Sierra RS500 turbo opposition, the VLs were underpowered and overweight.

And outnumbered: just the two HRT cars and the Larry Perkins entry against a dozen Sierras and the new twin-turbo Nissan GT-R.

And the HRT would be starting the 1990 season from scratch – in a bare workshop, in fact. With Perkins and TWR having parted ways at the end of 1989, the HRT had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Even by the opening round of the ATCC, the team was still operating out of what was basically an empty shed. The driver knew none of the tracks other than Sandown and Bathurst; the crew was almost completely all-new; the chassis engineer was an openwheeler man with no previous experience in professional touring car racing. On the face of it, it was a recipe for failure.

At least, though, they wouldn’t be labouring under the pressure of high expectation. At Bathurst the previous year the fastest Holden in qualifying wasn’t even in the top 10.

In the race the two HRT

Commodores nished sixth and seventh, three laps down – with neither car making any unscheduled pitstops!

The reality of the 1989 race was that the

Commodores were just making up the numbers.

And yet… the team Percy had chosen gelled remarkably quickly. Engine man Rob Benson (a TWR veteran dating back to the Group A Jaguars and Rovers) was dedicated and capable, and it turned out that the openwheeler guy Percy employed as the workshop foreman/chassis engineer, Wally Storey, did know what he was doing.

It was 30 years ago and yet it seems just like yesterday. I remember it vividly, because at the time I was a (much younger) reporter for Racing

Car News, covering the support categories on the ATCC calendar. So I saw each round live, and I remember being surprised at how competitive Percy – and Perkins – were given what had gone down the year before.

As it happened, RCN had arranged for their cub reporter (yours truly) to join the HRT crew in the pits at the Sandown 500 – they wanted me to write an inside story for the magazine on what it was like to work in a touring car race team.

While additional personnel was something the HRT actually did need in 1990 (at the Symmons Plains ATCC round, for example, the crew consisted of just three mechanics plus Benson and Storey) – I was of little use for anything other than mundane tasks like cleaning parts and stacking tyres. Jobs where I couldn’t cause any trouble…

I was scheduled to help with the tyre change at the rst pitstop, which I confess I wasn’t looking forward to – this being an area where I might really cause some dramas! It never came to that, though, because a brake failure bunkered Percy in the turn one sandtrap.

I remember the sense of gloom among the crew that day. The brake issue was completely unexpected, they had no idea what caused it – and Bathurst was three weeks away.

Before the brakes went, though, the car had actually looked pretty ash. Everything they’d done in the ATCC had been working up to this point: with new spec tyres, wider wheels, more power from the 5.0-litre V8 and all the chassis tweaks they’d been developing through the sprints, the Sandown car represented a big leap forward.

At Bathurst that year I was one of the reporters for the The Great Race yearbook. The HRT was one of the teams I was covering for the book, so I was keeping a close eye on them. I remember thinking on the Saturday afternoon that from what I could see they were going to be a lot more of a threat on race day than anyone was expecting.

But even then, against all those Sierras and the Nissan, I never thought they had any chance of actually winning it.