Imperfect history
I can believe t hat Peter Brock once raced a BMW and a Ford. I can even cope with the news that he a lso built a limited edition Ford Falcon. But please, please tell me t hat he never tried to f log Lada cars. My mates reckon he did, but I say it’s t he beer ta lk ing. Tell me it aint so. Mark Everett, Geelong, VIC. BAD NEWS, Mark, on two levels. First bit of bad news is that P Brock did, indeed, sell Lada road cars to unsuspecting Australians. Second bit of bad news: You’re mates were right.
Yep, the Peter Brock story post the Holden divorce of 1987 makes for some remarkable reading. With Holden giving PB the flick over the Energy Polariser (and, arguably, other stuff, but the Polariser was the last straw) Brock sank to some serious retail depths as he tried to keep his business alive and his racing on track.
The first sin (for the purists) was to race a BMW M3 and then a Ford Sierra, as alternatives to the Holdens with which he had made his name. Most of us could deal with that, but what came next was truly surreal. See, before, where the HDT road-car business had funded the racing, Brock suddenly found himself without a means of keeping the race team alive and active. So Brocky dusted off the slide-rule and designed a Brock-mobile version of the then-new Ford Falcon EA.
Called the B8, the Falcon got a body kit, some wheels and a performance exhaust to lift power to a claimed 164kW from the 3.9-litre six. The Ford badge was bad enough, but in 1989, The Brock Organisation (as it was then known) became a partner to the importer of Lada cars in Australia. As well as developing a Brock version of the Lada Samara (with retuned suspension no less) the Brock team did a lot of rectification work to the cars, necessary
to make them a saleable commodity outside of Russia (which was still the USSR, remember). But the idea was half-arsed and the end result not even that good, and the venture was done and dusted after just a few months.
How many Brock Ladas were sold? Not sure, but you do see the odd one come up for sale every now and then. And it’d have to be a genuine Brock Samara because, let ’s face it, who the hell would bother faking one? Actually, don’t answer that.
My favourite Brock Lada story happened at the press launch of the Brock-modified version, held in Melbourne. The editor of the magazine
I was working for at the time attended and was in a Brock Samara with PB in the jump seat, telling my editor what a great transformation had been wrought on the little Lada. Which might have washed had my editor not straight-lined a roundabout and torn the giblets out of the thing mid-sentence. Laugh? We nearly…