[GTRMagic]

Originally Posted by eduardo1

Just to give context to all of this - there's several phases to this thing with McKay. He's an excellent, experienced and often entertaining motoring writer. Aside from his column, his feature writing for magazines is first class - the sort of thing Phelps and most internet-raised journos today couldn't hope to do.

He's also a very handy driver and competed at Bathurst several times pre-97.

When the split came for the Bathursts - he definitely took sides with the 2L. He saw them as the future and the V8s as on the way out.

To digress slightly - he was half right. He foresaw (as did many) the demise of the Commodore and the Falcon and with the entrenched attitude and regulations of 'must be V8 Ford & Holden' back then, it was not an unrealistic scenario to envisage the accompanying demise of the series, replaced by international imports.

But, V8s prevailed because 2L weren't popular enough to be sustainable and the V8s evolved to survive.

But the antipathy from then on was less V8 v 2L - it was between Cochrane and McKay.

I've written on this forum before that McKay got a rough deal from V8s, but that there came a point when he was so incessantly negative about them that I could see why they wouldn't bother trying to appease him.

It was very personal between TC & PM - a lot more so behind the scenes than it was in print, with many slanderous statements going both ways.

But PM was and is a motoring and motorsport journo first up and he loves the sport and the event. He had a mutual hatred with TC so it was a poisonous atmosphere.

But when TC left, PM let up on the criticisms, was back in the fold and it's all happy families. Criticisms by him are less frequent, more reasoned and also better received by V8s. Because TC, for all his smarts, was rather Trump-like when it came to receiving any criticism. He went for the jugular, regardless of how reasonable the critique was.

Agree..