First published in the April 1980 issue of Wheels magazine, Australia’s best car mag since 1953. Subscribe here and gain access to 12 issues for $109 plus online access to every Wheels issue since 1953.

It was in the middle of the Esses plummeting down into Dandenong Road corner at Sandown Park that I realised that Peter Brock had finally lost his marbles. He was definitely going to kill us both. There was no other explanation. I was in the left-hand seat of the A9X MHDT Torana in which he won Bathurst and I had just a helmet and no seat harness – able only to brace myself against odd bits of the roll cage.

It was the occasion of the last appearance of the Torana on an Australian circuit. It was the Friday practice before the December Sandown meeting, and everyone had gone home. There we were, under grey Melbourne skies, the bellow of the five-litre V8 echoing down the huge empty stand, saying goodbye to the last of the grunty little cars since 1970 had honed the developing skills of a whole generation of Australian race drivers.

1

It was the Bathurst car, the car that had run away and hidden from the rest of the field to give Brock his fourth mountain title. It was still fully race-prepared as it wasn’t racing at Sandown but on the following Tuesday was due on boat for New Zealand for its last ever race appearance at Bay Park Raceway near Tauranga. The Marlboro Holden Dealer Team to all intents and purposes had run its last Australian race at the end of an incredible decade.

After half a dozen laps beside Brock I was to take the car out myself. I put in five laps before it ran out of petrol and Bruce Nowacki arrived with the trailer. We rolled it on, a little sadly; not only had I been the only Australian journalist to drive a MHDT Torana in something approaching anger I had, funnily enough, been the last driver to run it on an Australian circuit. I do not know what is going to happen to the car. I hope, like Phar Lap, they put the heart in a glass case and stuff the hide and put it on display for future generations to see.

Track-testing a serious race car doesn’t happen to journalists too often. It helps to be over 40, greying, cautious, and to have done some racing; all that applied to me, as well as the fact that I had done many race-time laps beside drivers like Frank Matich and lan Geoghegan and track-tested full-blown sedan racers like Geoghegan’s second Mustang and Peter Manton’s last and fastest Mini-Cooper, as well as more than half a dozen others.

This was not a day to play silly buggers; after all, what journalist would like to go down in history as the man who wrecked the last Bathurst Torana four days before it was due to be shipped off for its last race meeting?

1

That sort of proviso doesn’t worry one overmuch. When you’re track testing a race car you’re not out to beat the incumbent’s fastest time. You are trying only to get it around quickly enough to start it singing its wild song in a key which will convey to you some of the sound and fury of a device designed entirely to get around a piece of road in the shortest possible time.

We used up the first 20 minutes to finish photography for a Playboy article I was writing on how Brock drives Sandown, corner by corner. Enough has been written and filmed on this tea-drinking Vegemite freak born 35 years ago into a Melbourne family with a long history of motor sport involvement to release me from the task of telling you his background. Yet it was still remarkable to see once again how this most relaxed and amiable of men underwent a change once he slid into the A9X for these last laps of Sandown. The already-black eyes changed, growing even blacker, shining, the pupils contracting noticeably. They are the only visible sign of the remarkable way Brock pumps up his concentration to quite extraordinary levels.

He tugs twice on the adjustment strap of the six-point harness to lock himself in even tighter, rolls his red-mittened hands twice around the stock A9X wheel, and blips the throttle twice.

Inside, the car is remarkably stock, remarkably tidy. There is a hand-fashioned dash, with a tachometer centre and smaller dials around, and the only hand-made touch is the way the gearlever sticks out of a hole cut in the floor. The floor is bare metal – required by regs when you fit mufflers. The rest of the car is stock, even the rear vision mirror. I check the roll cage, jamming the left foot onto a vertical, the right against the floor, my left hand onto a horizontal above the window and my right to the crossbar in the middle.

Brock mouths something, but through the helmets it doesn’t make sense, and then we are away.

1

After the total blind terror of that first half lap, after we descend under the bridge and down into the esses through a red mist of shock, I just remind myself to remind myself that I had done all this before and it serves little to watch the road. Instead, you must observe the man at his work.

Brock sits closer to the wheel than you expect, He says this is because he has to put a lot of shoulder and arm into the car. His left hand is looser than the right, which is rolled tight around the rim, a bit like Brabham’s clenched grip. It is his right hand that does the work.

Out of Dandenong Road and through the Causeway and – zip! – under the Dunlop Bridge and down the straight, jiggling across to the right before the brake markers. The surprise was the ferocity of the braking. The red foot snaps onto the centre pedal and just absolutely mashes it into the floor, so hard that my legs bow and my locked left elbow bends under the force.

You don’t watch his apex because you’re waiting for the power to come on and it does, far earlier than expected, full noise all the way to the absolute edge, and snap into top and then mash on the brakes and blip-change-blip-change. The engine bangs away in backfire, and your left-hand corner is millimetres off the inside rail before you realise he has full hammer on again and cocked the left hand up for some opposite as the car runs right to the outside Armco and we pull third and then top just after the right-hand kink where Lex Davison went off and was killed by the running rail.

The slightly uphill back straight is patched and lumpy, and your helmet bangs the roll bar as you shift your backside in the stock Torana seat for a better grip. Brock backs off ever so slightly as we flash under the bridge and you jab your finger at the tacho that says 7200 in top – something like 225 km/h with that gearing and then he slams the nose down again under brakes and nips third and immediately rears the car forward again under full shout and then down again into second for Dandenong.

We ran most of our laps a little over 1:12. The most remarkable thing about it all was that everywhere – everywhere – he had that car in precisely the same place at exactly the right millisecond. His computer dialled it all in, tiny chip by tiny chip, moments before your brain registered that something needed to be done, and yet the car was always in transition between full power on and that gut-squashing braking and quick snaps between gears.

1

Not once in those six laps did Brock get the car off balance; not once did he have to correct a single action wrongly taken. This is what makes the man the despair of his opponents. They can cut across the grass and cock wheels up on the ripple strips and leave their braking until they can’t see through the orange mist of terror, but there he is, still in front, still absolutely, perfectly, inevitably trembling on that fine hair-trigger without even picking up a puff of dust from the verge.

Brock stopped the Torana and turned it off. It was my chance. The seat had to go back and the harness re-adjusted for my much-larger frame, and as he was strapping me in I said: “Pete I’ll stay under five grand.”

He said: “Don’t stupid: She doesn’t start working until five. Give it heaps, but don’t use more than seven.”

Seven. I should get so lucky. The confidence eroded further as the A9X refused to start for me, and after a couple of attempted push-starts Brock got back in and got the hot engine firing and held a foot on the throttle as I clambered back in and locked the harness.

“You’ll find the brakes need bit of hard work now”, he yelled into my helmet. “Use them up once or twice before giving them the big ask.”

Go away, mad child, I said to myself. It’s all right for you. I have heard all these awful stories about how different slicks are to the treaded race tyres I last used in anger.

1

I found first, got the whole outfit rolling, picked up second, went through Peters Corner (now called People Trust Holden, I think) and hit it.

That, in itself, was one of the single pure moments of my life. I was expecting a rough, harsh, rebellious answer. I got a swiftly-rising parabola of delight.

Third, top, hard down, check tacho… 6500 at the bridge, Christ, what did he say about the brakes?… brake for third, full down again, brake, heel-and-toe feels just right, keep it out long and wide and straight and late for Dandenong Road and pick up the late apex and boot it again and oh-my-darling-lovely we came out of Dandenong Road in full wild yell in second with that marvellous toy in opposite lock as sweet and as nice as the best Ferrari. I had expected a terrified cat on polished linoleum and I was riding a moon rocket that had recognised me as a great lover, a maestro, a born killer of black bulls.

Edge to edge through the Causeway, laughing with your right cheek as we brush the Dunlop Bridge on the way through, and down the main straight the hard-edged blare of the V8 comes back off the huge stands so well that you think automatically of the mob rising with their Carna Torana banners until you check tacho and think that 7200 is enough because Bruce Nowack is standing near Dunlop Bridge biting his nails. So instead of slamming it down on brakes you back off, pop-pop, and gently lift third and go easy under Repco Bridge to hit the floor again past the pits just before you remember that brakes don’t always work and this is where Lex Davison went straight ahead with the Galaxie and ended up teetering over the dam.

It just got better, and nicer, and sweeter. I still can’t quite cope with the easy way this wonderful car reeled off those laps with never a hint of vice. Mind you, driving that sweet car, as Brock did, at 1:12 around Sandown is in another dimension: but by comparison to, say. Pete Geoghegan’s racing Mustang of 10 years ago the A9X has made heroes out of ordinary mortals.

What else do I tell you? I drove it with palm and fingertips, through precise steering: the brakes were a bit vague until you asked more and more of them; the engine felt like it would rev through the roof without complaint and it was quieter inside than you expected. It was probably very good that the thing started to miss and then ran out of fuel. Not only did we have to get out of Sandown before they slammed the gates shut at six o’clock, but I certainly would have gone faster and faster until I exceeded my blurred limits of skill and done something absolutely stupid. When I got out the seat was wet and I realised how hot it had become inside. There are no extra air ducts and half the driver’s window is covered by a perspex shield.

1

The difference between that Torana and the race cars of 10 years ago is really not all that large. Brock and I both drove the 1969 Holden Dealer Team Monaro around Bathurst, and both felt it was a strong, tough, sweet car. The real change has been in the behaviour of the animal when you ask it the big question under brakes or on a corner exit at full chat. Ten years ago you had to balance the car along a wider edge: the edge was just as sharp, but it was wider.

You could take it a long way out along the disaster line and still struggle back; I have the feeling that to get the Torana right on the lip of death you would have to be that much more measured and precise, even though it is probably easier to drive it a thousand kilometres at Bathurst than it was for Fatty Geoghegan to arm-wrestle his Mustang around for 25 laps and a memorable lap record of 2:28 or thereabouts as he did in that last Bathurst race for the big tourers.

And so we put it on the trailer, and I found myself patting it a lot, a kind of gentle stroking. I did it knowing that the Commodores will be even sweeter and nicer to drive, and probably that little bit faster which means that the edge will become even narrower.

The next morning, on the toilet, things felt strange and different. I came up with a handful of toilet paper deeply stained with blood. It was, my doctor told me, the result of tremendous stress on the big end. It stopped that evening, but it was a lesson in G-forces.

Anatomy of a winner

The man who has done more than anyone else towards the continued success and development of the Marlboro Holden Dealer Team and the Torana over the last eight years is a blonde, toothy mechanic called Bruce Nowacki.

Nowacki, now 32 and chief wrench on the Brock team that emerged from the debris of GMH’s withdrawal from motor racing at the end of last vear came into the team in 1972, under the tutorship of Harry Firth. It was here, with the Torana XU-1, that began the long process of refinement and development of a normal street sedan into the fine racing tool it eventually became.

1

Nowacki is almost laconic on the subject of what went into the A9X to make it run like it did.

“There’s not really much more you can do,” he said. “There weren’t any magic tricks or secrets. We were on the dyno all the time, changing cam profiles and timing to find a few extra horsepower, but even if those cars had continued for another year they wouldn’t have changed much at all.”

You get the impression that most of the top half-dozen racing Toranas ran almost the same modifications and had about the same horsepower. The only real difference was probably in drivers, quality of preparation, and the effectiveness of the latest demon tyres, depending on who was your tyre sponsor.

But despite what you might have heard in the eternal public bar lie-telling championships, the MHDT didn’t have an open door into the GMH engineering department. If anything, they complained that the engineers really weren’t terribly interested because they were too busy with their own developmental work.

The best engines ever to go into the MHDT Toranas developed between 285 kW and 290 kW and about 475 Nm of torque. Said Nowacki: “Sometimes Brockie would have 10 horsepower more than Harves and sometimes it was the other way around, but it all seemed to even-out on the track.”

The team built all its own engines in the MDT’s North Melbourne headquarters, including the cylinder head work. They entrusted the machining and balancing only to Brian Sampson, that sometimes-underrated veteran driver who backed up Brock so well for their 1975 Hardie-Ferodo win.

At any time the team would have the two engines in their cars plus spares, although for Bathurst they always had four dynoed engines plus two more back in Melbourne ready to go into a box for airfreighting if needed. They never were.

1

They built strong engines. They haven’t blown a V8 in racing since the V8s first appeared in the Torana. The few engine problems they have had were minor electrical, in carburetion or seal failure. The worst DNF when both cars broke the front driveshaft in the gearbox within a few laps of each other in Adelaide last year, was their only gearbox failure in three years. Even now they don’t know what caused it. “It might have been a combination of some special tyres we were trying – they had super bite – plus the shape of the circuit. We just don’t know,” Nowacki says.

One of the factors that makes the engines so smooth and sharp are the Weber carburettors – 481DFs that have been in use now for about two years. Before them the Holleys made the engines lumpy and a little cranky, and the fuel consumption was never good.

If the engines have any fussiness it is in timing. Nowacki said that timing is absolutely critical, because even a couple of degrees out means big horsepower losses.

They generally allocated a working week to building up a brand new engine from scratch, including machining timing and the dyno work. “We could build one overnight if we had to”, Nowacki says, “but we’ve never had to.”

A period of brake pad knock-off caused by the rear axle flexing was fixed with the new floating rear axle that was a running modification, and overall the 1979 car was the end result of careful, continuous sorting since 1974. “We should have had the A9X in 1974,” Nowacki says now. “The first cars never had decent four-wheel discs or the good gearbox or the good rear axle.”

1

The rest of the Torana is really remarkably standard A9X. The regs allow wheel arch flares (homologated) and the 10-inch Californian Joengblood wheels. Incidentally, the wheel shrouds that appeared on the Brock car for the “Hardies Heroes” qualifying practice session at Bathurst last October were then team manager John Sheppard’s idea. They were made up by Allan Standfield, who has been an aluminium-bending wizard for most of us care to remember. He made all the trick alloy bits on the Toranas, like air boxes for the carburettors, the dash panel that fits over the top of the standard dash and the dry break fuel systems.

Because of the touring car regulations, the inside of the MHDT Toranas is just about standard. Main differences include the nicely-built roll cage, Scheel driver’s seat, and the removal of the carpeting. The new dash holds an 8000 rpm tachometer, and gauges for oil pressure, water temperature and fuel.

The entire car is really very simple in concept for a race car that goes so hard so easily. Even the fuel gauge has three progressive gradations to “Empty” painted on its face in uneven red lines. “We calibrate it by running it dry on the track and filling up the car one gallon at a time until it’s full,” says Nowacki.

It seems to work okay. On their first stop at Bathurst last year they went further than anyone else and yet came in with only three gallons left in the tank.

It’s simplistic answers like that that remind you again of the touch of Harry Firth, whose solutions to problems were often crude, generally highly novel, and, more often than not, stunningly effective. You can see his signature all over the car; it’s like being able to identify the work of a master painter or a composer without knowing who did it. “Have a simple answer for everything”, runs the old proverb. “It is difficult to kill a cockroach with a cannon.”