Quote:
Originally Posted by anthony81901
Larry was not particularly keen on letting Tom drive, but he was the boss. Despite being briefed on the rev limit, Walkinshaw chose to ignore, but still circulated 2 seconds a lap slower than Denny Hulme had in his stint. When the car expired in the last stint it was in a race winning position, running second behind Tony Longhurst who was about to make a long stop for pads and with Tomas Mezera having to do the final stint.
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IIRC, that run at Bathurst in '88 was Walkinshaw's last race as a driver, and he would have been a bit ring-rusty, not having raced regularly since the Rover ETCC programme finished at the end of the '86 season.
After that, as I recall he did the Fuji touring car race and part of the Nissan-Mobil 500 in NZ (just Wellington I think) with the XJS over the winter of 1986/7, and had a run at the Nurburgring WTCC round in '87 in the rarely-seen VL, then nothing until the three appearances with the VL Batmobile in the second half of '88- Birmingham BTCC, Silverstone TT and Bathurst.
That's little more than half-a-dozen races (and one of those he never actually raced, just qualified) in the last two years of his career as a driver- You can see one reason Perkins was less-than-keen about the idea of Walkinshaw driving