Brock accident investigation report released - cause of death announced as 'crashing car into tree'
By the way, did anyone find out whether the tree was stamped with a Ford part number?
OK, for those waiting for the inevitable hypocrisy of The Weak slagging off the Crocodile Munter for going off and getting himself killed pointlessly, only to pull a handbrake turn and go easy on Brocky for doing the same thing one Weak later... It's not the same thing. Brock is (was) 61, his kids are grown up, there's no two-year-olds tottering around Chateau Brock asking when Daddy is coming home. Once your kids have left home, they can look after themselves; you don't owe anyone anything. And attention media outlets of the nation: enough mentioning Brock and Irwin in the same sentence already. The Bradman of Australian motorsport (hyperbole courtesy Sky News) versus a novelty croc-wrestling sideshow act in khaki Ruggers? As Barry Sheene would have put it: Do me a faaayver.
Not sure why David Reyne from Getaway was worth painting a dodgy picture of, but nevermind
Dropping off the twig does wonders for one's legacy, as we've previously observed with guys like Ayrton Senna; all the regrettable and forgettable stuff gets shoved under the carpet and hurriedly trodden on to give the impression of smooth unimpeded floor coverings. However, that's the stuff which is really interesting - so in this spirit The Weak would like to present the following:
Peter Geoffrey Brock: Mad, bad and dodgy
In a testimony to responsible parenting, Brock learned to drive as a 7 year old, perched on a fruit case in the driver's seat of the farm truck. His old man, aside from farming, was the local Holden dealer, and supplied the fifteen or so early model Holdens which Brock managed to destroy once he'd actually been given his licence. On his national service up in Wagga, Brock found both an Austin A30 bodyshell and a wrecked then-current HD Holden, and hit upon the idea of bolting the overpowered 179ci six into the spindly Austin in order to give him something to go racing in (in the then burgeoning sports sedan class). Trouble was that Brock didn't actually know how to weld. He started at the back of the car and learned as he went, with the result being that by the time he reached the front of the car, he knew how to weld. This may explain the rather 'flexible' attitude to cornering which the device exhibited on hitting the track. And the fact that it appeared to be unstitching itself arse-first as he proceeded around Sandown.
The infamous Holden-powered A30, as built by Chook Shed Race Engineering Ltd
Despite or perhaps because of this, within two years the new Holden Dealer Team had decided to put Brock in one of their fearsome GTS350 Monaros for the 1969 Bathurst 500 (miles). He finished third on debut. Brock was made a full-time HDT driver and went on to win the '500' in 1972 (in its last incarnation as such before being metricified and lengthened to 1000km) single-handedly in the six-cylinder Torana XU1, holding off the V8 Falcons in the damp conditions.
Throughout the 70s Brock was pretty much the Warney of motorsport (Warney circa the mid-90s before he got fat and went bald, of course). Young, brash and cocky, in the society pages as much as the sports pages, sinking vast quantities of piss, smoking cigarettes, living off hamburgers and Coke, banging lots of gorgeous women (including a brief marriage to Miss Australia), and winning. Lots. He even had the audacity to flip off the works Holden team and go it alone as a privateer for a couple of years, winning his second Bathurst crown in 1975 in the V8 Torana L34.
And here's a picture (as Pate Biscuit would have said. C'mon, some of you fuckers have to remember the Big Gig. Ah fuck yers.)
Returning to the HDT (which he later took over as his own team), he then proceeded to dominate like noone before or since. Between 1978 and 1984 Brock won six Bathurst 1000s in seven years. With Jim Richards he won 1978 and 1979 in the Torana A9X (the latter winning by six laps, setting the fastest lap of the race on the last lap just because he could) and 1980 in the new Commodore; Dick Johnson won in 1981 after a pileup blocked the track and the race was stopped; then Brock teamed up with Larry Perkins to win 1982, 1983 (in his backup car) and 1984. The introduction of the international 'Group A' touring car regulations meant all the Euros came down with their Jaguars, BMWs and turbocharged Ford Sierras in coming years, but Brock managed one more win in 1987 after the leading Euro Sierras were thrown out for running on rocket fuel and having tyres an inch wider than everyone else.
That marked the end of Brock's magic run on the mountain - he was a full-time race driver for another 10 years but never again won the big race. However it wasn't really rule changes or increased competition that buggered him up - it was his own stupid bloody self.You see, in the late 70s when he was at the height of his heroism, living the life any man would give their least functional love spud to enjoy (i.e. winning Bathurst/sinking piss/banging Miss Australias/living on vast quantities of barbequed animal product et al), Brocky met a chick called Bev. She was into New Age shit - crystals, auras, veganism. And Brocky gave up all the cool shit which we've just outlined - particularly alcohol, tobacco and dead animal extract - in order to keep her happy. Anyone else see where this is going?
Fast forward to the heady mid-1980s, greed being good and all that. By now Brock, aside from his racing duties, has managed to build up a business around making Brock HDT performance Commodores for the road - basically what HSV went on to do in later years - and he and Holden are getting on very well, particularly as the new 'Group A' rules mean you need to make and sell 500 roadworthy examples of the car you want to race. Things went well until Brock started bolting onto aforesaid performance Commodores something called an 'Energy Polariser.' This was a box of crystals, mirrors and bullshit which Brock claimed would suppress the car's disharmonic vibrations, realign its chakras, optimise its aura, and would generally cause Cosmically Good Shit to occur. To which General Motors Holden, local offshoot of one of the world's biggest corporations and not really a company predisposed to new age beliefs, said "Okaaaaayyy... but there's one slight problem. See that Holden badge on there? That means we're supposed to provide our customers with some kind of warranty that this thing does what it's supposed to. Otherwise we can, kinda, get sued and shit if someone's Brock Commodore doesn't have a correctly aligned aura with respect to the direction of travel. So can we have this Energy Fertiliser thing checked out in the lab?" To which Brock's response was a hearty "Hell no" and furthermore that if Holden wanted him to remove the box of goodies from the new HDT VL Group A then he'd be removing his signature from the thing as well.
And it all went downhill from there.
The rights to the lucrative HDT cars business ended up in the courts, and the VL Commodore in which Brock won Bathurst 1987 had no Holden signage on it whatsoever. By 1988 Brock's team were running BMW M3s. One year later, to the astonishment and disgust of most of Australian motorsport, Brock had jumped on the turbo Sierra bandwagon; the Holden dealer's son, winner of nine Bathursts, nine Sandown 500s and three Australian touring car championships for Holden, was driving a Ford. Grown men wept in the streets. Mostly owners of Brock HDT Commodores who were seeing their resale value plunge faster than the '87 stock market.
Brock's journey from national hero to shambolic joke was complete when the remnants of his HDT business (no longer allowed to officially fully-sick-up Holdens as a result of the court battle - Holden set up HSV in 1988 in response) started fully-sicking-up other cars, like an asthmatic six-cylinder Falcon, and later, a Lada Samara. The latter was a horrendous Russian experiment gone wrong, a mini Chernobyl on wheels - 1970s engineering in a 1980s design (with genuine Iron Curtain build quality) for a 1990s world. You could not have found a car less worthy of the once-glorious Brock name than the Lada Samara, and you could not find a more damning indictment of how Brock's new age lunacy had sent him to the gutter and beyond.
For the love of God, make the man stop
All good stories have their redemption bit and here's Brock's. In late 1990 Brock got a call from ex-teammate Larry Perkins who had a team of V8 Commodores with no sponsors. Brock had sponsors (Mobil) but no team. They joined forces for 1991 - it didn't last beyond that, the Commodores were getting whipped by the Sierras and latterly the Nissan GTR ('Godzilla') - but the key thing was, Brock was back in a Holden.
Brock and Perkins with their '84 Bathurst winner, a performance which had inspired many young Australians to take up racing, and yet more to take up smoking Marlboros
Brock ran his own team again for 1992/93, again with Commodores and again with only minor success. Then, at the end of 1993, the new factory Holden Racing Team (like HSV, borne from the late-80s ashes of Brock's HDT) decided to dispense with the services of former 500cc bike GP world champ Wayne Gardner, and was looking for a new lead driver. Brock, Mobil and the hallowed number zero-five were back on the flanks of the factory Holden racer as of 1994. Redemption complete.
Redemption for the new age shit maybe, but not for being a fucking Liberal voter.
What a cunt.
Of course he didn't actually WIN anything from then until he pulled the plug on his full-time career in 1997, but he did manage to tutor his young teammate Craig Lowndes to a sufficient level of competence such that the kid won a bunch of stuff for Holden followed by a massive Ford contract for himself (and has never looked anything like as good without Brock as his teammate). And the other reason Brock never won again was... he'd run completely out of luck. Probably a concept a bit too old-school to fit into hisown new-age belief structure, but still valid. In 16 years (1972-87) Brock won Bathurst nine times, sometimes involving the most astonishing good fortune on his part or lack thereof on that of his opponents. His luck basically ran out in ensuing years. Case in point, his first farewell at Bathurst in 1997. He started the 05 HRT Commodore from pole, led for the first hour and a half, doing it comfortably. The crowd was screaming, the sun was shining, Brock was going out on top, and all was right in the world. He pitted and handed over to new teammate Mark Skaife. One lap afterwards the thing terminally shat itself heading up Mountain Straight.
Aside from a couple of abortive comebacks (one with a hideously old thing run by his own team, another with HRT a year or so ago where his idiot Pom co-driver crashed into one of Brad Jones' Falcons) and a triumph in the thundering Monaro in the Bathurst 24 Hour, that was all she wrote. In retirement Brock developed a passion for tarmac-based road rallies such as Targa Tasmania, which was his first. Targa West, last week, was his last.
"I haven't quite got to grips with it yet..."
So ends the story of Peter Geoffrey Brock, 1945-2006. The King is dead. Vale Brocky - a proud and true Aussie bloke, and a hero for the ages. Quite an achievement given he was a new-age Liberal-voting vegan teetotaller who once fully-sicked-up a Lada hatchback.
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