Guts and glory at HRT
I n 1993 Grech began the most fruitful and rewarding period of his career, a decade that started in the doldrums and reached incredible heights before imploding under nancial circumstances well out of his control.
When he joined HRT, the Holden factory team was in trouble. It was not competitive, and Wayne Gardner was at loggerheads with team boss John Crennan. The former bike champ soon departed, as did team manager Neal Lowe and chief engineer Wally Storey. Grech was able to make his mark.
“Initially there was so much work because the cars were in such a bad state,” Grech recalls. “Some of the stuff that was done previously was the most unusual engineering of racecars I’ve ever seen. Bizarre stuff. The team was a shambles.”
Grech reorganised the place, made staff changes and contracted engineering ace Ron Harrop to return the cars to basics, using proven components to make them “reliable and raceable”. Meanwhile, Crennan recruited Brock for 1994, bringing him back into the Holden factory fold after seven years in the wilderness.
The revitalised team made an immediate impact, with Brock scoring HRT’s maiden round win at Eastern Creek and taking third in the series. But Grech was keen to nd a new talent to take HRT into the future. And so, under a cloak of secrecy, he stuck his neck out and tested 19-year-old Craig Lowndes at Calder. It was a revelation. Within a few laps he was matching the regular drivers’ times, and “we knew that the future was in Craig.”
Lowndes made a sensational start to his touring car career in 1994, setting HRT’s fastest lap in the Sandown 500 and scoring an amazing second at Bathurst with Brad Jones after battling winner Bowe for the lead. He only did the enduros the following year – when both cars blew engines at Bathurst, to Holden’s embarrassment.
“We nearly lost the factory deal, but (Holden marketing chief) Kevin Wale gave us a reprieve at the last minute, because we’d only had two years of a three-year plan.
“Until he gave us the reprieve, that was it – Tom was going to go down to a one-car operation and it was going to be the HSV Racing Team. It was dire straits, and I guess my head was on the chopping block. Tom was probably adamant to get rid of me, but John dug his heels in and backed me, and we never looked back.”
Lowndes joined full-time in 1996 and scored an incredible triple – the touring car crown, Sandown 500 and the Bathurst 1000.
“We nally got rid of the black cloud that was the early ’90s and it got back to be the people’s factory team, like the old Marlboro HDT days where the team was popular, where the fans loved it.
“When Craig came on board, the girls lined up for autographs and people bubbled at having a young guy there. Everyone was cheering for Craig, and Brock, and at the start I think Brock really enjoyed being the father gure.”
But Brock became alienated, kept busy doing promotional work while Lowndes went testing. In 1997 he retired, somewhat dismayed. Testing allowed Lowndes to use the tyres better and Brock thought the team favoured him. Does Grech feel the criticism was warranted?
“Yes it was. But Craig was young and we saw an opportunity. And his feedback in testing was tremendous. At that stage, to be fair to Peter, data acquisition was starting to come in and I think he found it hard to work with young engineers. We were the rst to put actual degreed engineers into a race team – young people like Chris Dyer, who went on to be Michael Schumacher’s engineer at Ferrari, and Richard Hollway.
“Being as young as I was as a team manager and having Craig just jump in and win race after race, you start to forget about the other driver. So I didn’t handle that with Brock all that well. I should have involved Peter more, but I was probably a little bit, dare I say it, besotted by Craig and his performance.”
Skaife replaced Brock, but when Craig suddenly returned after a year in Europe he just picked up where he left off and won the championships in 1998 and ’99, and Skaife won in 2000. Grech said it was amazing to see two great champions push one another to a higher level.
Then Lowndes became disenchanted with his longterm Walkinshaw management deal and, with Brock encouraging him, quit Holden and went to Ford.
“That was tough for me, and the stress really damaged my personal life. I had a young family and I was under the pump, I was a director of TWR, I was on the TEGA and AVESCO boards and working a lot of hours, then this on top of it… It sort of did break me a little bit in the end, not to the point of anything serious like depression, but it hurt me because in the early days it was Craig and I and the team, and to see it come to an end earlier than it should have, you feel gutted.”
Yet the team went on to even greater success, with successive championship/ Bathurst doubles in 2001-02. Then, in early 2003, the TWR world collapsed into receivership. It was, Grech said, the most shattering thing that ever happened to him.
“When the receivers were called in, we’d just had the best year, won the championship, won Bathurst, HSV was smoking, the pro t was out of control, it was a great business, I’d done a long-term deal with John and we had the biggest plans…”
Months of meetings followed and Skaife ultimately took over the HRT operation while Jeff was forced into heading up the newly created Holden Motorsport, which now employed HRT’s 83 staff and contracted their services back to the team. HRT went into a slump.
“Then in 2005 I got a call from Tom and nearly dropped the phone. He’d reinvented himself and still had HSV. We caught up over breakfast and I told him HMS wasn’t working, which I probably shouldn’t have. So he went into Holden with a solution and they basically gifted him HMS, and Mark went absolutely off the dial at me.”
It wasn’t a good outcome for Grech either, because Walkinshaw brought in his own manager, Craig Wilson, and Jeff was soon out of a job.
“I got screwed over with the job and money, so I was absolutely lthy.”