Q&A

AMC: How did you get started at HDT?

Jeff Grech: I was working at HDT Special Vehicles and one day ‘LP’ (Larry Perkins) walked past and just said, ‘Hey, cock, what are you doing on the weekend? Do you want to come away to Sydney with the race team?’

After that I helped out after hours and I was over at a bench measuring a pad with a micrometer when LP came up and said, ‘Hey, cock, where did you learn to do that?’ I told him Dad used to have an engineering shop. He asked if I could work a lathe and gave me something to do, just as a test. ‘Is that what you want?’ He said, ‘Yeah. Do you want to work here full-time?’ I said I’d love to. AMC: Winning Bathurst rst up must have been a huge thrill.

JG: The best day of my life. Bathurst to me is the Holy Grail. A lot of my motivation going there was probably from LP because all year you prepped the car for Bathurst; it was just his whole focus with development. Group C cars were pretty basic, but we did some innovative little things, and it was all centred on, would it be faster at Bathurst and would it last. AMC: What was the Nissan GT-R period like?

JG: You’d go to the track in the morning and we’d be giggling about how far we were going to win by today! It broke Australian motorsport in the end.

AMC: You were reunited with Brock at HRT in 1994, but you were now the boss. How did that work? JG: I’d left him when I was just a kid really, and then I’m the team manager and he’s now just the driver. I did respect Brock, but I was very wary of all the shenanigans that had gone on over the years, because I’d known all the blokes who had worked through when the shit hit the fan and he lost Holden. He started talking about making changes to the car, and I had to tell him, “Brock, just clearly understand mate, we’re running the car, you’re driving it. Just give us the feedback and we’ll engineer it. Sorry, that’s how it’s going to be.” That was hard for him initially, but I think he enjoyed the time with us. AMC: It didn’t end all that well, though, with a seemingly premature retirement. JG: Brock felt left out of it, and I probably didn’t handle it all that well to be honest. AMC: What happened with Craig? Why did that turn bad? JG: Probably a little bit my fault again. I don’t think I handled it too well in 2000 when he was negotiating with Ford. We knew about it, and we had a lot of developments still going on. We probably shouldn’t have, but we then shut him out of testing. I blame myself, but it’s a natural thing for a race team to do because you’re protective of your performance. I live with that every day; both Brock and Craig. I’m just fortunate that Craig and I have reconciled.

AMC: You’ve worked with some of the great touring car drivers of all time. Can you compare them?

JG: Brock and Richo had slightly different styles but were equally good. But Brock could just rag the car and get a lap from nowhere, and you’d know he could never do it again. I don’t know what he did, held his breath or something, but he’d bang this lap out and you’d be checking the stopwatch to see if it was real.

Mark was a champion the way he drove, and the way he performed was very unique around his era. He didn’t try to be an engineer, but he understood getting the partnership with the engineer right, and getting the car the best. He worked very hard.

Craig could also just bang a lap – not just out of thin air but lap after lap. From day one you could de nitely see he was quick and a natural. When we rst put him in the car, in just three or four laps he was down to what Brock and Tomas (Mezera) were doing, and it was like, ‘Where did that come from?’ The joy on my face to see a young bloke crack around Calder doing that… everyone was grinning.