Brock, Perkins, Johnson etc in this era?

[Pro Racer]

since we are discussing who is the best Aussie touring car driver and it's hard to gauge due to the different era's they are from with cars and competition.

have a question along similar lines (which i know would be just as hard if not harder to answer) how would the guys like Brock, Perkins, Johnson, Jane, Bond, Geoghan etc go in todays cars with todays drivers? would they be just as great, better or what?

[Rob Bailey]

Originally Posted by Pro Racer

since we are discussing who is the best Aussie touring car driver and it's hard to gauge due to the different era's they are from with cars and competition.

have a question along similar lines (which i know would be just as hard if not harder to answer) how would the guys like Brock, Perkins, Johnson, Jane, Bond, Geoghan etc go in todays cars with todays drivers? would they be just as great, better or what?

Like a good footballer they would fit into any time frame,just as the current lot would be guns in the aboves time frame,imagine Lowndes in a Boss 302 or Tander in a A9X.

[jezz]

they would still have been standouts, however the win ratios might have been a bit lower.

[Amaroo Park]

I have always thought that the current era would be a great fit for Alan Grice. Gricey was always a tough, hard racer as proved over the years and particulary in Europe in the late 80's

[Graz]

Class always shines through whatever the era so they'd be top drivers no doubt. Would they be allowed to be the straight talking characters they were in their day in this sterile, pc, corporate era though?

[MPA]

Originally Posted by Graz

Class always shines through whatever the era so they'd be top drivers no doubt. Would they be allowed to be the straight talking characters they were in their day in this sterile, pc, corporate era though?

True that.

Who could imagine a lead driver missing a couple of rounds to go race a sports car at Le Mans these days.

[V8 Fireworks]

They obviously mostly have raced against the more seasoned current drivers. I don't think there would be much difference at all.

The level at the top of the ATCC has always been very high, perhaps the spread down to the backmarkers is just fractionally decreasing season on season, but the level at the front has not changed in my opinion, lap 1 at bathurst in a A9X was obviously driven just as hard as lap 1 at bathurst in a supercar.

[GTRMagic]

Originally Posted by Amaroo Park

I have always thought that the current era would be a great fit for Alan Grice. Gricey was always a tough, hard racer as proved over the years and particulary in Europe in the late 80's

I agree... if Mr Grice had equipment that was bulletproof reliable, equipment developed with significantly more funds available to him back in the Group C and international Group A days... he would be fantastic to watch...

[Henry]

I concur with the remarks viz Grice: he really came into his own with the globalisztion of touring car racing in the Group A era, when everybody had a go at the Euros... and realised that the guns were following a similar doctrine to the one Gricey had been employing here for years... a visionary that Grice, no wonder he ended up in politics!

The hierachy is not dissimilar in the present day, to any other: there are a mere handful of truly top-shelf operators... a further smattering of handy steerers who merely need a little bit of luck to shine on them at the right time to pick up the money... and then a heap of blokes who've never gone so fast in their life, and who are there to chew through a pile of cash that someone's thrown at them...

Perhaps the wins mightn't have been so prolific for any of the given heroes in a modern parallel universe - and of course some of those who suffered under the dominion of the Moffat/Brock/Johnson reigns would have come up smiling more broadly too... but the current system of 400 races throughout the years seems intent of rewriting the histories in favour of the modern era...

[racer69]

Originally Posted by Henry

I concur with the remarks viz Grice: he really came into his own with the globalisztion of touring car racing in the Group A era, when everybody had a go at the Euros... and realised that the guns were following a similar doctrine to the one Gricey had been employing here for years... a visionary that Grice, no wonder he ended up in politics!

An ironic part of that being Grice was originally skeptical about the move to Group A

[Amaroo Park]

I don't think there would have been many of the locals with the exception of Frank Gardner who would have been very happy about the rules. The differences in cost of building Group C to Group A was apparently HUGE

[Henry]

Originally Posted by Amaroo Park

I don't think there would have been many of the locals with the exception of Frank Gardner who would have been very happy about the rules. The differences in cost of building Group C to Group A was apparently HUGE

The cost of having your multi-squintillion-dollar car made redundant every couple of seasons was one of the dramas that people had with Group A... ferinstants, Dick Johnson's swap from the XE to the Mustang (which he knew was going to be a bit less than optimal from the get-go, but the XR4 Merkur/Sierra wasn't really a good option either) to the Sierra RS, to a mid-year upgrade to the RS500... Nissan had to do it a bumber of times.... at least there were some carryovers in the Commodores (although some of the stuff wasn't... ask Tom Walkinshaw about VK steering racks in VLs....)

[eduardo1]

True, but it's not that different to now - the teams have to update their vehicles every couple of years regardless and they're half-million dollar cars now. The number of transferable bits would be more now, but even so...

No doubt the best of any era would be very good in every era. The big difference is that there are so many top teams now, pariticularly in the past decade.

Before the mid-90s, there was rarely more than 2 or 3 teams (and often only 1 car from those teams) that were genuinely, equally competitive at a time.

[Amaroo Park]

Difference now is there is far more money in the sport than there was then and according to numbers I have heard and been told over the years it would cost around $50000 to build a competive Group C car in 84 and around $120000 to build a competive Group A car for 85.

[racer69]

One thing to consider though is what alternative was there post-1984. Group C was at a dead end, apart from Group A what else was there, Group E?

[Falcadore]

There seems to be a continal push to dump on Group A as being bad idea, when at its peak it was brining more manufacturers into the sport than any other era of racing, and papers over just how diabolically bad Group C had become.

Racer is right. The Group C grids towards the end had shrunk markedly, had dropped to just seven ATCC rounds, and the promising enduro grids of 1984 were more about use it or lose it.

A great many Group C cars did get converted to Group A remember, many Commodores, some Capris and Geminis too. It brought a great many New Zealand teams here, New Zealand had been racing Group A for a few years by then.

In Group A while Fords disappeared from the privateers ranks BMWs flooded grids, 3 series as well as 6 series, Volvo, Mitsubishi, Alfa Romeo, Nissan became much more user friendly with Skylines finding their way into privateers hands where the Bluebirds were seen as impossible to run away from the factory.

Yes we lost Mazda, but the RX-7 was about as alien a touring car as it could, more so then even the Porsche 911s of 1969/70, and were a completely fictional concoction to boot, using engine and drivetrain combinations completely foreign to road-going examples.

If the 1993 V8 Touring Cars 'rescued' Australia from the evils of Group A, then people are in denial of how bad 1984 was.

[Falcadore]

Back more on topic, while Peter Brock is one of the best racing drivers we have ever produced it is beyond a doubt that he also had the most protected career of any driver in domestic racing history.

Apart from a period in the late 70s when he bounced from Gown-Hindhaugh (later to morph into Roadways) to Bill Patterson's dealer team, but there were times when Brock's Holden Dealer Team was the only professional racing team in the country and right up until his first retirement he was the holder of the most coveted seat in racing at the time, Holden Racing Team.

But then again, if you are Fangio, the best teams fight to have you and you attract the best sponsorship.

[Amaroo Park]

For my point of view Group A was and is my favorite category of touring cars for the reasons mention previously in this thread. I think some minor rule adjustments and it would have been close to perfect. Ultimately they where trying to get parity racing and they did get it pretty close

[Bimmerhead]

Originally Posted by Amaroo Park

For my point of view Group A was and is my favorite category of touring cars for the reasons mention previously in this thread. I think some minor rule adjustments and it would have been close to perfect. Ultimately they where trying to get parity racing and they did get it pretty close

Would have to agree...much better than watching taxi silhouettes

[Henry]

Falcadore raises a number of valid points: and yeah, for mine, at least the early Group A seasons were as exciting as one could hope for, and it was really the developing sophistication in homologation artistry that maimed the category... but it had also done-for Series Production and Group C in similar fashion, in not-too-dissimilar timeframes in the past as well... historically it would seem that any change in the fundamental regulations brings at least a couple of years of intense and exciting racing, as witnessed by the relative chaos and mayhem of the 1985 and 1993 seasons, within the realm of my memory anyway...

Still, to further comment on the topic at hand, the Brocks, Johnsons, Perkinses et al, all competed quite successfully in the earliest iteration of the current category, each racking up wins - some more significant than others... and none could have been said to have been at the absolute height of their powers at the time either... speaks volumes in my opinion, of how they'd fare in 2009...

[PhaseIII]

I remember the first time I saw 'Gricey' (the 'Cessnock Pastrycook') race - I was at Amaroo Park, sitting on the hillside, above the short straight before the final corner:
He appeared out of 'Honda' doing 360's on his roof!!!

Ahhhh.... those were the days!!!!!

[Forda]

Originally Posted by Falcadore

Back more on topic, while Peter Brock is one of the best racing drivers we have ever produced it is beyond a doubt that he also had the most protected career of any driver in domestic racing history.

Apart from a period in the late 70s when he bounced from Gown-Hindhaugh (later to morph into Roadways) to Bill Patterson's dealer team, but there were times when Brock's Holden Dealer Team was the only professional racing team in the country and right up until his first retirement he was the holder of the most coveted seat in racing at the time, Holden Racing Team.

But then again, if you are Fangio, the best teams fight to have you and you attract the best sponsorship.

Very true; however, how many 'racers' these days would put their family homes on the line for absolute success; as did Brock, Moffat, Johnson, et al did?

[Forda]

Originally Posted by Falcadore

Back more on topic, while Peter Brock is one of the best racing drivers we have ever produced it is beyond a doubt that he also had the most protected career of any driver in domestic racing history.

Apart from a period in the late 70s when he bounced from Gown-Hindhaugh (later to morph into Roadways) to Bill Patterson's dealer team, but there were times when Brock's Holden Dealer Team was the only professional racing team in the country and right up until his first retirement he was the holder of the most coveted seat in racing at the time, Holden Racing Team.

But then again, if you are Fangio, the best teams fight to have you and you attract the best sponsorship.

Also, it must be remembered that Brock himself saved the Holden Racing Team, literally, from extinction; by way of his Mobil sponsorship.

A Pity really, that HRT have squandered their once primary sponsorship deal