Quote:
Originally Posted by Jesper OH
Thank you for sheading some more light into the dealings of Grice in 1985 and the other recent contributions, racer69. I was thinking along the lines that a Group C Commodore would make it hard for a Group A Commodore to compare favorable, for a racer like Grice.
Roadways has always puzzled me a bit regarding ownership. It was/is a tarmac industry? sponsoring a race team where the son of the company, Steve Harrington, was the driver, cars being prepared by Les Small and with Allan Grice doing a lot of testing and driving. At some point I think Roadways was used to describe the Small/Grice partnership - ca. 1986/1987 - without really getting into details of who was leading who. Only one thing seemed to be consistent and that was where Grice raced, Small was managing.
Jesper
|
Peter Brock was also pretty anti-Group A to start with, took him a while to be convinced about it all too.
Then there were the likes of Frank Gardner and Dick Johnson who were very pro-Group A
Regarding Roadways, i'll give a very unofficial history. They started off by sponsoring the Gown-Hindhaugh Torana team in the late-70s which ran drivers like Garth Wigston, Wayne Negus and Charlie O'Brien (this same team won Bathurst in 1975 with Peter Brock & Brian Sampson, before Roadways was involved)
After Bruce Hindhaugh died in late-1980, the team was seemingly taken over by Roadways and Ian Harrington, as you said with his son Steve doing the driving. In 1983 the team received big money backing and Grice joined the team in a second car, and i think this is when Les Small joined the team too. At the end of the year the STP backing was lost, and the team wound up. From there Small started "Roadways Racing Services" to build and prepare cars. This consisted of running a car in the 1984 ATCC for Steve Harrington (and limited appearances for a 2nd car for Grice).
Roadways built the '86 ETCC cars, and were effectively the entrant (although it ran under the ANMR name)... they ran the VL for Grice in the 1987 ATCC (after their plans for a Nissan WTCC program fell through), and were going to run Percy in the 1988 ATCC until he got the Nissan call-up for the ETCC. As far as i know it all wound down after 1989.. though by then the team was entering cars under the ICL banner.... (as i said, very unofficial
)