05 Saved from high above
This is the rather unusual life story of a Brock Holden Bathurst pole-sitter and championship race-winner. Incredibly, this worst ever performing #05 Holden on the Mount still managed to play a memorable part in one of Perfect Pete’s Great Race victories – and will soon return to the racetrack. Not bad for a car that once spent several years sitting on a dealership’s roof.
Bee er front-disc brakes and solid-top strutmountings (rather than bushes) were some of the technical changes beneath the bodywork of Brock’s red and white racer for the ’83 Bathurst race too.
This car – understood to have been the fth Group C speci cation Commodore built by the HDT – debuted in the traditional lead-up race, the Castrol 400 enduro at Sandown in September 1983. Brock led the race early but the new car broke an aluminum front hub adaptor, cutting the brake line. In one sense, this was a fortunate turn of events for Brock, who seemingly always led a charmed life on the track.
You see, while the HDT boss was forced to retire the #05 car, he simply took over teammate
John Harvey’s #25 car to nish third. But he was later disquali ed because he had not quali ed in car #25. This sequence of frustrating events had a silver lining for Brock: the HDT had learnt a valuable lesson heading to Bathurst and made sure all of the paperwork was in order should the need to swap cars arise again!
The annual Mount Panorama classic began with wet weather in practice that turned ne as the days ticked by. Brock and Nissan’s George Fury engaged in a ght for pole position, resolved in favour of the Commodore pilot by just over 1.2-seconds in the ‘Hardies Heroes’ top 10 shootout. Our feature car also provided a ride for a Ford hero that day. Many will remember Dick Johnson’s massive shunt at Forrest’s Elbow during the shootout that year that destroyed his Greens-Tuf XE Falcon. Often overlooked is the fact that Brock collected a dazed Johnson in car #05 and ferried him back to the pitlane prior to commencing his own, eventual, pole position lap.
To this day, Johnson has no memory of that taxi ride in the #05 Commodore, which remains – as far as we know – the only time Brock and Johnson shared a car at Bathurst!
While Johnson’s team revamped the Andrew Harris Falcon for race day, Brock’s pole-sitting car was carefully fettled for the race, with #05 installed as a red hot favourite by the bookies for the win the following day.
Sure enough, Brock took off into the distance in #05 when the race started. He sprinted away from the eld in the early laps and set up a handy margin back to the chasing pack – until disaster struck. Engine failure with just eight laps completed sent him to pitlane in a plume of smoke. It was a crushing blow for Brock’s legion of fans, who were unaccustomed to seeing their hero retire his car from the big race. Indeed, only once previously in his 14 starts in the event to that point, had he failed to nish. Even then, 1974, his Torana had completed no fewer than 118 laps, almost three-quarters of the race distance. All was not lost for Brock that day, though. The ‘driver cross-entering’ rule was one that had been in the race regulations at Bathurst for a few years but had rarely been used. Having learnt from their Sandown struggles, this time everything was in place for Brock and co-driver Larry Perkins to jump across and take over the team’s second ‘Special Mild’-liveried #25 Commodore from John Harvey.
The very same chassis had won the race in 1982 and when called upon again to lead the ght in ’83, moved its way back up the leaderboard. History records that it went on to score a somewhat controversial win. It may have taken two cars and three drivers to beat Bathurst and the rest of the eld, but Brock had his seventh victory in the race.
After its failure at Bathurst, the red and white #05 Commodore was wheeled back out for further events to round out ’83. Brock took pole for the Surfers 300 enduro and led for more than a third of the distance until diff problems sidelined him. He and this car then nished second to George Fury’s Bluebird in the non-championship touring car race supporting the Australian Grand Prix at Calder before Brock rounded out the season nicely with a dominant win in the Hume Guardrail 300 at Adelaide International Raceway, starting from pole and leading all 125 laps to score victory.
Brock retained the same car for 1984, though an attack on the Le Mans 24 Hour sportscar race in France (and the preceding Silverstone 1000) mid-season ultimately meant he was unable to really challenge for the Australian Touring Car Championship.
Victories in the opening two rounds at Sandown and Symmons Plains gave ‘The King’ the maximum possible points haul to begin the ATCC, although missing two rounds (where teammate John Harvey took over the #05 car) put paid to his title chances.
Brock nished second at Wanneroo before Harvey took over for Surfers (the event where he ran off the road in the same incident that sent Allan Moffat’s Mazda into a trackside tree stump) and Brock returned for Oran Park, where the car broke a tailshaft while running up front.
Harvey nished ninth at Lakeside in June (the weekend Brock and Perkins were competing at Le Mans) before Brock returned to take back the car and nish second to Allan Grice in the nal ATCC round at Adelaide International Raceway.
The HDT operation were at-chat putting together the pair of ‘Big Banger’ VK Commodores for the big 1984 enduros, however the car they would replace did have a couple more races left in it in the early rounds of the Australian Endurance Championship. Somewhat ttingly, its last two races were as hapless as its rst two, rounding out a pretty ordinary and often bizarre 12 months as HDT’s lead car.
Another example was when Brock drove solo in the Silastic 300 at Amaroo and crashed out when he understeered into the rock wall at pit entry when coming back in to change from slicks to wets in the slippery conditions. He hit right under the press box and suggested – perhaps with tongue rmly in cheek – that it was the soapy washing-up water from the press box drain that caused the ‘off.’
The car’s nal race appearance with the HDT followed in the 1984 Valvoline 250 at Oran Park on August 19, though with Harvey and David Parsons at the helm to get their eye in prior to Sandown and Bathurst. They failed to nish with gearbox problems.
The #05 Commodore was retired from racing and used for promotional duties afterwards, including turning laps for TV and media at the unveiling of the new pit entry at Mount Panorama in mid-’84 (with a VK-like front end slapped on the front of it!). Somewhat surprisingly, the car wasn’t sold or leased by a team for the last Bathurst 1000 contested by Group C machines. Instead it was sold to a Holden dealer in Greensborough, Melbourne. Oddly, it was displayed on the dealership’s roof for many years (in #25 Special Mild livery as carried to victory by Brock, Perkins and Harvey in 1983 at Bathurst – the car being painted as such for promotional reasons) until being rescued by long-time Brock car collector Peter Champion.
“I was staying with Brocky one weekend and he was telling me about the car on the roof of the dealership,” recalls Champion. “It was night time, we jumped in the car and we drove down there. And we’re looking up at it on the roof. Brocky said, ‘I’ll make a call in the morning and we’ll come down’. And we did. They got a ladder out and we’ve gone up on the roof, Peter Brock, myself and the manager of the dealership.
“The dealer said it was the Bathurst-winning car, the #25 car. Brocky said it wasn’t the #25 car. And I knew it wasn’t the Bathurst-winning car because I already owned it!
“Brocky said to the dealer that it was the #05 car. The driver’s seat and steering wheel had been stolen out of it, and it didn’t have the proper wheels on it. He wanted $10,000 for the car. Brock said it was de nitely the #05 car and the guy got the shits and hunted us off the roof – he wouldn’t sell it to me then!
“Within a month of that happening, a guy by the name of Brad Young bought the car. He rang me and said he had the #05 Bathurst car and he thought I should have it. I paid him $10,500 for it. So we bought it and we restored it.”
The car then became part of Champion’s collection of Brock cars (it made a return to Bathurst in 2003, where it was forced to have its Marlboro signage covered up) initially in Yeppoon and then from 2015 at Dreamworld on the Gold Coast as part of its recently-closed ‘Brock’s Garage’ display.
Champion sold his collection recently and, as reported in AMC issue #103, it’s planned for this car to make a return to racing in the Heritage Touring Car class in the hands of George Nakas. How many rooftop display cars have survived being out in the elements for extended periods to return to the road or track – much less a geniune #05 ex-Peter Brock racecar?
We still shake our heads to think that this piece of Bathurst history had been sitting on a dealership roof out in the weather – and get a giggle out of the thought of Brocky and Champion being shooed off during their rooftop escapade while inspecting it!
While it didn’t actually deliver Brock his seventh Bathurst victory, it certainly got the ball rolling…