HRT Walky
It took an eternity for one of TWR’s racing VL development mules to grid up on a racetrack, but once it started it just kept on racing. In fact, it’s still winning today in historic Group A competition.
The early Walkinshaw ‘test mule’ Commodore Group A SV that’s still racing today.
The Holden Racing Team’s victory at Bathurst in 1990 with the unfavoured ‘Walkinshaw’ Commodore VL Group A SV will forever remain one of the greatest upsets in the history of The Great Race. The road that led to that popular victory at Mount Panorama was a particularly long and bumpy one, with the new-for-1988 fuel-injected ‘Batmobile’ having been on the racing scene for just over two years before it nally reached the summit of the greatest mountain in Aussie motorsport.
A handful of cars – including the Bathurstwinning car itself – had been the pioneers for that program. One of the vehicles that helped make the development gains that eventually resulted in that famous win was the 1989 Bathurst HRT Commodore driven by Neil Crompton and Win Percy. This car lives on today in Historic Group A competition in the Heritage Touring Cars category in the hands of Norm Mogg.
It’s a car that, like so many ‘Walkinshaw’ Commodores, actually started as a carburettored ’87-spec VL that was later upgraded and updated to the wild bodywork and fuel-injected engine.
In fact, when Tom Walkinshaw Racing rst bolted together this chassis (its rst fully TWRbuilt Commodore VL, given the rst TWR car was an ex-Mobil HDT European championship car) from an Australian-supplied bodyshell and parts in early 1987, no one could have imagined it would take two and a half years for it to line up on the grid in a competitive race!
Painted in the blue and yellow of Herbie Clips, this was one of two Commodores produced by TWR in England and one of three the out t had during its time with the V8-powered Holdens.
The ‘Team Tom’ Commodore spent its time in 1987 and 1988 testing without lining up on the grid for an actual race, before eventually being sent to Australia for a planned, though not eventuated, assault on the 1989 Australian Touring Car Championship.
Again, this car, chassis TWR 022, did plenty of testing in the hands of Win Percy and Neil Crompton, but the factory Commodores failed to appear at any of the sprint rounds as the turbo Ford Sierras and Nissan Skylines blitzed any privateer brave enough to turn up in a V8 Holden.
“The excitement of a factory Holden drive quickly gave way to utter dismay and heartbreak in 1989 when we didn’t go racing as planned,” recalls Crompton. “To this day I never got to the bottom of it. I would regularly meet with (HSV and HRT boss) John Crennan, (the late) Rob McEniry (Holden Sales and Marketing Manager) and I even ew to the UK to see Tom.”
Eventually there was a decision; Holden needed to get back onto the track for the allimportant endurance races to round out 1989, so TWR 022 was called up for the Sandown
“I knew LP quite well from the early HDT days when I would hang around the shop in North Melbourne and from my television work. I was quite in awe of his achievements, but as a ‘boss’ he terrified me!” - Crompton on Perkins
500 when Larry Perkins was again contracted to prepare and run the Holden SV Racing Team (re-labelled as the ‘Holden Racing Team’) on behalf of HSV and Holden at Sandown, Bathurst and Adelaide.
The 022 chassis was distinguishable from the brand new Perkins-built car it ran alongside at Sandown and Bathurst that year by the holes in the plenum chamber below the bottom of the front windscreen. These holes are a major feature of the car over its entire competition life and still remain there at the time of publication.
Prior to Sandown, the car was rebuilt by Perkins’ team and featured a fueling system with re ll and ducting in the rear quarter panels, rather than through the rear number plate section (as featured on the TWR 023 chassis built originally in 1988), or through the top of the boot (as per the early ’87 TWR Commodores).
Also gone were the single centre-lock wheel nuts used by TWR, replaced with the familiar Perkins ve-stud arrangement.
Perkins himself was at the wheel when the rebuilt car – complete in white and black livery with Holden Racing Team signage but minus a racing number on the door – was shaken down at Calder Park in Melbourne on the eve of the endurance races.
So in September 1989, well over two years after it had rst hit a racetrack at Monza in Italy in early ’87, TWR 022 nally made its racing debut in the 500-kilometre endurance race at Sandown with Neil Crompton and former Roadways driver Steve Harrington as pilots of the #7 Holden.
It also marked the very rst ever time the HRT banner appeared in an Australian touring car race.
The car was nished just a week prior to Sandown, so a sixth place nish, coupled with a runner-up result for the sister car, was actually solid stuff. However, the car’s pilot Crompton today looks back at how intimidated he was at the time by Perkins.
“I knew LP quite well from the early HDT days when I would hang around the shop in North Melbourne and from my television work,” recalls Crompton. “I was quite in awe of his achievements, but as a ‘boss’ he terri ed me!”
There was a driver shuffle for Bathurst with Percy moved into sharing TWR 022 with Crompton and Harrington bounced into a reserve driver role. He didn’t get behind the wheel at all during practice and never again drove for the team. Percy and Crompton ran hard and reliably all day but they were no match for the turbo Sierras and Skylines and nished a few laps behind in seventh place.
“I’d left Brock, picked the wrong horse and lost all the momentum,” recalls Crompton. “Add the fact that the Ford Sierra and then the Nissan GT-R were beginning to set new benchmarks for pace and I knew I had made a major mistake. Con dence drained and wracked with self doubt after watching the circus sail on in the ’89 championship without me, I drove poorly in the ’89 enduros.”
As Crompton pondered his form and what lay ahead for he and his dream Holden factory gig heading into 1990, TWR 022’s active racing life as a HRT car in Australia came to an immediate end and its next travel destination was quite a surprise and the last place anyone would have expected a Holden Commodore VL racecar to land.
Immediately after Bathurst 1989 the TWR 022 Commodore was sent to Indonesia for Tommy Suharto (real name Hutomo Mandala Putra), the car-mad youngest son of the then-president, to race in local competition in South-East Asia.
Perkins and HRT team manager John Harvey travelled north to supervise the car’s rst outing, with Suharto claiming a win in Malaysia before crashing on a wet warm-up lap in another race.
The car had to be sent back to Perkins in Melbourne for repairs before it then took victory at the Indonesian Grand Prix, still running in a base HRT black and white livery, though with the words ‘Holden Racing Team’ changed to ‘Holden Racing Indonesia’.
“He didn’t drive it too bad!” recalls Harvey. “He wasn’t the quickest bloke on the track, it was the rst time he’d stepped in it – I am sure Larry made plenty of dollars in the time afterwards though with crash repairs!”
Suharto brought the car back to Australia in 1990 with eyes on competing in the Tooheys 1000 at Bathurst. Some track time in the nal
Australian Touring Car Championship round at Oran Park was suggested to Suharto as a good warm-up for the Great Race, though he crashed and was parked for race day – and never made it to the Mountain, though the car did.
The Commodore was then purchased by John Lusty, who raced it at the Sandown 500, Tooheys 1000 (retiring after 66 laps with engine problems) and Nissan 500 at Eastern Creek alongside Bernie Stack.
Queenslander privateer Warren Jonsson was next to buy the car and competed in both Lakeside Australian Touring Car Championship rounds in 1991 before tackling the Tooheys 1000 at Bathurst with brother Graham as co-driver. The duo nished a very credible 11th overall.
The Commodore went on to make two more starts at Bathurst in Jonsson’s hands with the late Des Wall, nishing 16th in the rain-soaked 1992 race and 13th in 1993 after the car was reliveried in green and yellow colours.
George Ayoub purchased the car in 1994 and raced it at the Sandown 500 and then Bathurst alongside Mike Conway and Kevin Heffernan, who had transferred into the Group Motor Sport entry after his Price Attack Commodore crashed and caught re in practice. The trio was the last classi ed nisher placed 26th overall.
Sydney privateer Mike Conway acquired the car and it was used for parts for an ex-Peter Brock Mobil VP Commodore he and fellow
privateer Bob Jones were piecing together.
Current owner Mogg came along and purchased it and he’s largely been racing it ever since, rstly in Sport Sedans and now in the popular Heritage Touring Cars category for Historic Group A and C touring cars.
Given cars in the category must run in original livery, it has been returned to the 1989 Bathurst HRT Percy/Crompton colours and has appeared at a range of circuits around the country.
“We didn’t know the heritage of the car at the time,” says Mogg.
“It was at Amaroo Park in a workshop when I went and looked at it. It was incomplete. Mike Conway had bought it and it was being stored there. It was being shipped to Bob Jones’ in Melbourne, who took the pieces off that were needed for Mike’s VP.
“My friend Dave Harding said I should buy the Commodore. I said we were a low budget racing operation and couldn’t afford it. He pestered me until I went up to look at it. As soon as I saw it, I said ‘Yes’. If it weren’t for his persistence we wouldn’t have this car today.
“We had done the deal before the car went down to Melbourne, so we already knew what parts were going to be taken from it. We drove down to Bob’s to pick it up and bring it back.
“We knew by the logbook it was a Perkins/HRT car but that’s all we knew. We really didn’t care back then, we just wanted to go racing! It took us a while, about four years, to get it back together.
“We rang Larry and he asked what we needed. We said we didn’t know and would tell him what we had! He was good with us. I used to go to Bathurst and get some parts from him and collect them. He helped us quite a bit.”
Finding a way to fund racing the ex-HRT Commodore also provided a boost to his business too.
“In the 1990s we didn’t have the money to go racing,” Mogg recalls. “At the time we had a big-sized job on the go that needed the help of a recruitment company to help us staff it. It was a light bulb moment – our company needed that service and we needed to fund the racecar, so we started our own recruitment company to fund the racecar!
“We never expected it to be successful. But as long as we could earn enough money to put fuel in and tyres on the car that would be ne – and it worked! Where there’s passion you become resourceful!”
The Commodore underwent a massive rebuild after it was hit from behind at Phillip Island in 2007 but, despite initially being thought of as a throwaway, it was repaired within four months and back on the track, where it has remained ever since. It hasn’t been just making up the numbers, either. At its most recent start (at the time of writing), at the 2018 Muscle Cars Masters, the car won three of the four races it contested.
This HRT Holden may have only started two races with the familiar ‘lion and helmet’ logo on its anks, but it will forever remain part of the historic debut of the Holden Racing Team – one of the most prominent banners and brands in Australian touring car history – and also part of the development pathway to one of its greatest victories at Bathurst in 1990.