Adventures with Brocky: tales from Peter Brock’s PR chief

As Peter Brock’s public relations manager during Brock’s spell with the Holden Racing Team in the 1990s, Paul ‘Wally’ Weissel got to know the Great Man better than most. In this series, Wally recalls some of the fun from his time living with and managing the legend – the hilarious hijinks that were an inevitable part of life on the road with Brocky…

Riding passenger with Brocky

As everyone knows, Peter Brock is a legend in Australian motorsport. Many of his fans would’ve paid heaps (or even given up various appendages) to sit alongside him in a race car. As Brocky’s PR minder, I was more fortunate than most and got to ride in the passenger’s seat with the Great Man on a number of occasions.

But let me tell you, some of those rides in the number two seat were anything but ‘ordinary’!

One that springs to mind – and one which shows how times have changed – was in the mid-1980s in the lead up to the Sandown 500. Back then, there was a designated ‘Media Day’ – usually on the Thursday before the race weekend – where media types (TV and radio reporters and the print journos) would get a lap or two in the passenger’s seat of the race car and then report on their experience. It was all about trying to promote the event – and it must have worked because some of the crowds back then were huge!

At that stage, I was working as a sports journalist for Melbourne’s FOX FM radio station, so I was one of the reporters out there at Sandown that day to do the hot lap with Brock. As well as interviewing PB out of the HDT Commodore, I also wanted to take a portable tape recorder with me inside during my hot lap to record the sounds of the car – which I thought would work well on radio. I got the nod from Graeme ‘Mort’ Brown that I was on the list and waited… and waited… and waited. Something to do with Brock being the ‘Man’ and everyone wanted a lap with him. The way it worked with these things was that TV came first, followed by the newspaper guys, with us radio types bringing up the rear.

Now if anyone has managed to be lucky enough to win/beg/buy a ride in a Supercar in recent years, you’ll know that before being strapped in, you had to squeeze into a very hot (and possibly very sweaty) triple-layer racing suit, don a helmet and wear appropriate footwear. It used to amaze me the number of women who would turn up for a ride in my time at the Holden Racing Team in a dress or skirt, with open toe sandals or even high heels! Really?

On this day at Sandown in the mid-80s however, it was jeans, polo shirt and runners – no fireproof suits and I can’t even remember if we had to wear a helmet!

The #05 HDT Commodore duly rumbled down pit lane to a stop; one victim got out and the next – me – got in. My seat was a standard passenger’s seat out of a VK Commodore road car! No doubt it had been rounded up from a corner of the HDT workshop and loosely

bolted in for the day. The other thing was that there was no seat belt! So here’s me sitting in/ on a Commodore road car seat, no seat belt, no helmet, left hand trying to hold on to the roll cage and the right hand trying to hold onto the cassette recorder and microphone!

A quick “G’day Wal!” from Brock and the VK’s loud pedal is pushed to the oor (60km/h pit lane speed limits? I don’t think so!) and with its arse wiggling and rear tyres lighting up, the Commodore res out onto the main straight. Hard on the brakes at the rst corner, the recorder and microphone slide straight out of my hands and into the foot well! Trying to hold on to the roll cage with one hand while trying to retrieve the recording gear with the other, I didn’t see the turn 2-3-4 combo coming up because my head is under the dashboard…

Somehow I manage to get it all together as we head up the back straight. My feet are holding the recorder up against the rewall, while the microphone is now wedged under my bum (I’m sure on playback later they were engine noises I heard…) and I now have left AND right hands holding onto the bar work as Brock aims the car into the superfast esses before Dandenong Road Corner.

All too soon the lap was over, but the interview with PB worked well on air the next day – complete with the growling roar of a thundering V8 in the background!

The back streets of Port Melbourne

In my (much) younger days I was able to nally buy a ‘proper’ car: a VK SS Brock Commodore. Lordy Lord, was that thing fun! I was still working at Melbourne’s FOX FM at the time, and I drove it to Bathurst for that year’s 1000km race. I remember during that trip, somewhere in the back-blocks of NSW, a mere speck I could see in the rear vision mirror behind me was growing very large – very quickly! Turned out to be a similarly equipped Brock/Holden fanatic from Adelaide and those two HDT Commodores really boogied in tandem on their way to motorsport’s Holy Grail!

Anyway, I digress… Unfortunately somebody decided that they needed my beautiful white

VK SS more than me and I woke up on the Tuesday after returning from Bathurst, with my wife asking where the Commodore was. Where it was, wasn’t where I’d left it the night prior and the one ‘proper’ car I thought I’d have in my life, was forever gone!

Not being ush with cash, after the insurance payout I still didn’t have enough to purchase a replacement new Brock Commodore. A bit of background here: about this time we had

– or were working towards – a World Touring Car Championship and manufacturers had to produce something like 5000 models of a

particular model, to enable them to homologate a special run of 500 racing editions (the Ford Sierra RS500 springs to mind). Holden’s problem was the 5000 aspect; how could you make 5000 Commodores with HDTmassaged heads AND a manual gearbox! Simple: slot the engines and gearboxes in any model Commodore across the range.

Some diligent searching allowed me to nd a second hand Holden Calais along the St Kilda Road Magic Mile of Motors. It was a Calais with the HDT engine mods and a manual gearbox and bugger-all kilometres, if you don’t mind!

It was around 1986/87 and FOX FM had just signed an agreement for its signage to be on the HDT VK racing Commodores. Because of that, my association with Brocky and John ‘Slug’ Harvey grew and the boys looked after me pricewise on fully HDT-ising the Calais, into a Director.

Aero kit, HDT suspension, Momo colourcoded wheels, exhaust, badging and carrying the “Cedar” colour right through (instead of the bottom half being a silver/aluminium colour), made for a sensational and fairly unique Holden Commodore (below left).

Coming up to Christmas in 1986, I got a call from PB suggesting I head down to HDT’s Bertie St, Port Melbourne, headquarters for a sausage and a beer – and he wanted to t a new invention of his to my car.

Intrigued (as well as hungry/thirsty) I headed off to a Holden rev-heads heaven where Brock said grab a beer and something to eat, while taking the keys and disappearing down the back of the complex for an hour or so.

A couple of beers and a steak sanga later, Brock pulls up and says ‘get in!’ As we pulled out of the driveway, he explained that he’d tted an ‘Energy Polarizer’ to my Calais Director (complete with rear window sticker to align the energy in the car) and….FLOORED IT!

I did not think it was possible to travel through the back streets of Port Melbourne THAT fast! I

saw 160km/h on the speedo a couple of times; he blew past cars at warp speed (and I think a

re engine at one stage) and power slid through corners. At one stage we were going parallel to the West Gate Freeway – and were going FASTER than the cars on the freeway!

At no stage was I worried (apart from the possibility of having my car impounded by the law), but enjoyed watching The Master at work with his black eyes unblinking.

After it was over, we pulled back in the driveway of HDT and came to a stop.

“Well Wal,” said Brock, “how much better is your car now?”

“Dunno Brock! I’ve never driven round the back streets of Port Melbourne at 160 kay before so I’ve nothing to compare it to! But, I’ll take your word for it.”

It was time for another beer… and a good lie down!

Mobil 1/Round Australia Trial Commodore

It was 1995 and I’d only just started working as a part time PR/Media contractor with the Holden Racing Team. HRT’s primary sponsor was Mobil, so when the multi-national oil giant decided to sponsor the ’95 Round Australia Trial, Mobil brought me on board to help out with the liaison between the George Shepheard-run trio of VR Commodores and the media.

Once more in an effort to promote the event, there was going to be another ‘let’s-put-themedia-types-in-the-racing-car’ day alongside Peter Brock. However, instead of tootling around either the Lakeside or Surfers Paradise tracks, someone had a brilliant idea to stage it at the Mt Coot-Tha Quarry. The quarry was only a few kilometres from the Brisbane CBD, so it was very close to the media.

Being now on the team side of things now and not part of the media, it was my job to work out just who went into the passenger seat next to Brock in order of importance and urgency. As mentioned earlier, the natural order of priority with these things meant that the TV gurus always went rst, because the sponsors’ image would be splashed across the TV news that night nationally (which in turn made for a happy sponsor). Newspaper guys and their photographers were next, due to their ability to feature more happy snaps prominently in the national dailies the next day.

These seemed to take forever because the picture-takers would ask for ‘just one more shot,’ and ‘can I be in (or out) of the car?,’ or ‘can I hang from a tree/rock/upside down?’ and on and on it went until nally there were no more people waiting behind me for their turn and all was quiet.

Brock and I waved farewell to the last of the media and were sitting quietly relaxing until it was pack up time. PB turned to me and asked if I’d ever been in a rally car. With a distracted ‘no,’ I continued packing up my bits and pieces until it was time to go.

Brock immediately pops up, those black eyes of his quickly becoming pin-pricks of focus as he says to me ‘get in!.’ The Master had a new victim to terrorise!

The circuit we had laid out at Mt Coot-Tha began at the top of the quarry and headed down a dirt track, then up and into the quarry proper before following the lanes down to the bottom. After strapping on a helmet and myself into the VR’s passenger seat (thankfully a racing bucket, not the road car variety one – times had changed since the ‘80s!), Brock grinned and launched the Commodore.

For a V6, this Holden had some mumbo and we took off down the track, spitting dust and gravel behind us. A dip in the track – a small creek actually – was rapidly approaching and I was waiting for Brock to ease up, brake and down-change. Nope! Full noise at the creek crossing and I’m waiting for the top of the shocks to spear through bonnet.

The Commodore sailed across with not even a thump from the front end, so good was the rally suspension put in by George Shepheard’s team.

From there it was back up to the quarry’s rim and it was quite disconcerting to look out the front windscreen and see sky, then to look across to see PB looking past me out the passenger window to see where he was going. On the rare occasions we were straight, all I could see were what appeared to be toy-sized gravel trucks a long way below us.

So different was this experience from the circuit laps that I was familiar with, that I was actually convinced I was going to die... However, by time we got to the bottom (realising then that they weren’t Matchbox trucks at all) I was starting to enjoy the experience. After a bit of circle work, PB oored it out of the quarry and back to the top.

Quite remarkable! How rally drivers do that for a living, I’ll never know.

I did not think it was possible to travel through the back streets of Port Melbourne THAT fast! I saw 160km/h on the speedo a couple of times; he blew past cars at warp speed and power slid through corners.