A Familar Sight: Peter Brock's Mobil Commodore on its way to victory in round two of the 1985 Australian Touring Car Championship at Sandown.
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6:00 AM Fri 24 February, 2012
Source: BigPond Sport
TODAY we kick-off some stories that you’ll see during the course of the year that wind the clock back on a particular day in championship history.
Twenty-seven years ago today on February 24, 1985, Peter Brock took his #05 Mobil Holden Dealer Team Commodore to an historic win in Sandown’s second round of that year’s Australian Touring Car Championship.
It was the ATCC debut of the new Group A VK Commodore – which had missed the first round at Winton – and a debut that came with something of a surprise victory against the established BMWs.
Could you imagine today a team missing the first round of the championship so they could focus on getting ready and prepared in full?!
Brock won the 25-lap ‘Pye Audio Touring Car Race’, held on the longer, 3.9-kilometre infield Sandown layout, which had been completed in September of the year prior.
He led home Jim Richards’ eventual championship-winning JPS BMW 635 by 1.7s, with Dick Johnson’s Mustang further back in third to round out the podium.
Alan Jones was fourth in one of Colin Bond’s Alfa Romeo GTV6s (and would later in the year leave the team to return to Formula 1 with the ill-fated Beatrice-Haas squad), with Kiwi Neville Crichton fifth in the second JPS BMW.
This was the first year of international Group A regulations in Australia, meaning everyone was still finding their feet with new cars and rules.
This round also saw the debut of Robbie Francevic in the Volvo 240 Turbo.
The Kiwi would win the 1985 crown, but on this day at Sandown the new Swedish car would up sixth and last car on the lead lap.
There were certainly some weird and wonderful cars that made it onto the grid.
Some old Group C cars, namely a Triumph Dolomite and Ford Escort, were ‘Group A-ised’ to join the grid of 22, while a road-going, stock-standard BMW 323i driven by Iain Thomson failed to finish.
Its fastest lap time of 2m29.5s compared to Brock’s fastest lap of the race of 1m54.9s – only 35-odd seconds! Brock must have thought there were 50 BMWs in the race such would have been the rate at which the 323i was lapped!
The point score of the time was also different.
For example, because he also scored class points, the under three-litre Alfa of Jones scored 20 points for finishing fourth overall, the same score earned by Johnson’s Mustang in finishing outright third!
No wonder the point scores used to cause all sorts of headaches in those days!
Remember, if you want to read more about the 50-plus year history of the Australian Touring Car Championship and V8 Supercars Championship, Chevron Publishing’s recently released official history book is the perfect ‘must-have’ book.
Click here for more details and to purchase.
