V8SC: The dinosaurs that roared

When Holden and Ford were given the green light in the early 1990s to be the only manufacturers in the Australian Touring Car Championship, critics – a minority – painted it as though dinosaurs had come alive. They saw the Commodores and Falcons with pushrod 5.0-litre V8 engines as old-fashioned petrol guzzlers in a motoring and motorsport world that was changing rapidly, with emphasis on fuel consumption, care for the environment and technology.

But Mike Raymond, a sports heavyweight at Channel Seven, and Tom Smith, motorsport manager at series sponsor Shell, knew these were the cars Australian fans wanted to see racing. The Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) favoured a more worldly 2.0-litre concept… Briefly there was both.

But, if the motorsport public have become accustomed to some tall stories from V8 Supercar administrator Tony Cochrane over the past 16 years, nothing topped the prediction of BMW Australia’s ex-chief Ron Meatchem in the mid-1990s – that 2.0-litre racing was so much the way of the new world, it would become bigger than the Olympic Games. The BMWs, Audis and others were soon gone from Aussie tracks.

The V8s thrived initially but then, in a sense, hit a wall. A marketing wall. The teams and even the drivers, were trying to run the show, but it had got stuck in neutral.

Cochrane, ex International Management Group, arrived on the scene, christened them V8 Supercars (V8SC) and came to be seen as a saviour. Last December he was admitted to the V8SC Hall of Fame as he transitions from executive chairman to an advisory role, still with five per cent ownership.

For a very modest outlay (little more than $50,000), Cochrane somehow got control of the show and elbowed CAMS out of the way, other than as the sporting authority. He ensured full grids of cars and added more races, most notably Adelaide’s Clipsal 500 on a shortened version of the city’s parklands grand prix circuit.

Shell had prided itself on backing a national championship but Cochrane took it places it had never been – Canberra (ignominiously), Darwin and Townsville, even suburban Sydney (controversially) in recent years. And overseas – to New Zealand, initially with great success (at Pukekohe, where the series will return this year after the financial fiasco at Hamilton), to China (once) and the Middle East, where the race fees were great but the attendances the opposite.

Despite the internationalisation of the category – including foreign guest drivers at the Gold Coast since Indy’s demise, and a Texas round on this year’s calendar – it remains peculiarly Australian. The Holden-Ford, red-blue rivalry has endured, even though the large car sales of the two manufacturers have dwindled over the two decades, and the interest and input of the factories in the sport commensurately.

There are those who resent that thist year’s Car of the Future rules have opened the door to Nissan again, to customer Mercedes-Benz AMGs, and other marques if they choose to pop a 5.0-litre V8 (not necessarily pushrod) in, and a bodyshell over, a generic chassis.

Cochrane and his cohorts became fond of saying that, over time, this sport had become more about teams than badges for the fans. For the record, though, there have been 568 races in the past 20 years, with Holden winning 350 and Ford 218. Holden claimed 11 championships and Ford nine.

At Bathurst, where the annual October 1000km race remains the crown jewel of each season, there have been 15 Holden victories in that time and five for Ford.

There was no Bathurst victory for Glenn Seton, but he was the era’s pacesetter, winning two championships in Falcons, while the modern incarnation of the team he founded hasn’t conquered either in almost a decade as the Ford factory team.

Mark Skaife (and his then team owner Fred Gibson) didn’t favour the 5.0-litre idea at first but added a title in 1994 in a Commodore to the two he had won in Nissan’s Godzilla, then another three when he joined Holden Racing Team.

HRT owner Tom Walkinshaw hit troubled waters in Europe and suddenly Skaife found himself owning the team. It came with lots of headaches that affected his driving and brought a premature end to his career, although he had more enduro success as a part-timer and remains prominent wearing many, perhaps too many, hats.

Dick Johnson won Bathurst in ’94 with John Bowe, who then took the championship the next year. Later Johnson went through the financial wringer, yet his team won another championship in 2010 with James Courtney - but has since battled new and acute pain.

Like Skaife and Johnson, Craig Lowndes has been one of the constants on the scene, apart from a year in Europe in his youth. Without a title since the three he won in the late 1990s, and overshadowed on the track by Skaife when they were HRT teammates in the early 2000s, Lowndes is the most recognisable and popular face in V8SC, virtually a clone of his idol and mentor, the late Peter Brock.

Four Bathurst wins in the past four years have helped all that.

There was the Marcos Ambrose era with Stone Brothers and Ford which yielded two titles, and Russell Ingall jagged another, before the turns of Rick Kelly and Garth Tander for HSV Dealer Team – an offshoot of HRT.

Larry Perkins was once the most prolific builder of V8 racing sedans and won two more Bathursts in this era, but never a championship, and has now bowed out of the sport.

In the early years of the 20-year V8 'war' parity between the makes was a buzzword, with occasional tweaks to keep them even, but in the end it became survival of the fittest – and that has been the Triple Eight Race Engineering team of Roland Dane.

Somewhat like Canadian Allan Moffat more than 40 years ago, Dane forewent Britain to operate in Australia and he has done it better than any other team owner – and with both Fords and Holdens. He’s chalked almost countless wins, including five Bathursts, and team championships.

In Dane’s machinery, Jamie Whincup, a driver unwanted seven years ago and still not 30, has won four titles in five years, four Bathursts, and consistently outshone Lowndes.

Certainly there are many more races than in the old touring car days, but a strong case can be made for Whincup being the best sedan racer in Australian history. While not the personality of Brock or Lowndes, or a few before them, Whincup has become the most brilliant star in the show.

And it has been quite a show, even if the appetite for it, in television terms, hasn’t been what it was in Brock’s heyday or even a decade ago. There was been an uptick in the audience lasts year, but not enough for Seven to race in to renew the contract for a bigger bundle of money, or for Ten to grab it back and become “The Home of Motorsport” again.

But perhaps, in the big picture, things will be brighter, contrary to those who wanted to keep it just red and blue, with the arrival of other makes. Like it or not, that’s going to be V8 Supercar racing in the future.