Make it through a 500 mile NASCAR race, and ultimately the “photo finish” is a manufactured event due to phantom trash causing a yellow flag, or the always predicable green, white checkers. Down in Australia though, 1000 kilometers of racing (621 miles) over a bit over six hours brought some of the tightest racing in the last 10 laps that you will see, and no safety cars, or full course yellows were needed, just two drivers going balls out for the most important race in Australian motor racing.
For those that don’t know the Bathurst 1000 is Australia’s version of the Indy 500, it’s the most important race of the year, and people who don’t care about cars, and car racing tune in for the event. You could never win a championship, but if you win Bathurst, you become part of legend.
With this years running being the 50th, many teams broke out historic paint jobs for days gone by to pay tribute to the heros of the past. The racing through out the event was some of the best the mountain has ever seen as well, but in the end, it came down to David Reynolds in the Ford Performance Racing Falcon and Jamie Whincup in the Triple Eight Comadore. The last 10 laps were nost to tail around the 6.21km circuit, with Whincup’s team mate Craig Lownes charging hard from back in 8th’s place trying to make the podium.
Here is a highlights package to look at, we are hoping that like all the other races this year, the entire race will be uploaded to YouTube.
We were preparing to do a long post for today or tomorrow running through all the teams and drivers that will be going after glory at this weekends Great Race. However, our friends at Speedcafe.com have done that for us with this very nice guide. Since they are allowing the embeding of it, we will do that for you.
Today we are going to share a video put together by Seven Network, who are the TV rights holder to the V8 Supercar series. This is a video from I believe 2009, though it was just uploaded to YouTube by V8 Supercars in the last few months.
Russell Crowe provides the voice over for this piece, and there are some great clips (vision for our Aussie fans) of some of the historic moments of the races from years past.
While this is not the most comprehensive overview of the race I have seen, the music, along with Crowe’s voice over lend great weight to this clip.
It is a lap still talked about with reverence. In 2003, in the Top 10 qualifying shootout for the Bathurst 1000, Kiwi, Greg Murphy, put down a lap that was not bettered until Friday practice in 2010 by Craig Lownes. In a series where the difference in Top 10 qualifying, even on a long track like Mount Panarama is measured in tenths and thousandths Greg Murphy blew the place up!
Murphy was an astonishing 1.0962 seconds quicker than second place qualifier John Bowe, himself, a legend of “The Mountain”. For those not familiar with V8 Supercar racing, the context of this may be a bit difficult, but just listen to Matty White and Neil Crompton call the lap, and that should be all you need to understand just how significant this lap was.
Austrailia’s great race, the Bathurst 1000 takes place this weekend. While many outside of Australia are not familar with the race, for that countries motorsports fans and athletes it is the pinicle of racing for them. Just as the Indy 500 or Daytona 500 are for American’s, the Monaco Grand Prix or the 24 Hours of Le Mans are for Sports Car fans, that is what Bathurst meens to Australians.
The Bathurst track at Mount Panarama is a “street course” but think of it more as a mountain road turned into a racetrack rather than the typical image that comes to mind when you think street course. We will be showing videos throughout the week of the track, laps of the track, and exciting moments for years past.
To kick things off today we are going to talk about Cam Waters. Cam, who is 16 years old, just won the chance to co-drive a car at this years Bathurst in the Shannons Supercar Showdown reality show run by the Kelly Brothers Racing and shown on Channel 7 in Australia.
It was a typical reality show format, “x” number come in, every week there are challenge and at the end of the show, someone goes home. The show was OK, but it was clear there were two or three contestents that were above and beyond everyone else, and Cam was one of them. The final contest was Cam against Andy and each had two laps to put in a qualifying time in a V8 Supercar, the winner would be the one with the quickest lap time. In the end, Cam won going a tenth and a half quicker than Andy.
Did we mention that Cam doesn’t even have a full license to drive on the road? However he Cam is in contention to win the Australian Formula Ford championship, so it’s not like he doesn’t have credentials!
So, here is a quick video put together to introduce eveyone to Cam Waters from the Shannons Supercar Showdown reality show. Good luck to Cam, the youngest person to drive a V8 Supercar in competition, and everyone else racing up at “The Mountain” this weekend.
Yesterday during day on of the Detroit Autoshow, Ford’s CEO Allan Mullaly announced that Australian Ford Falcon, would soon be coming to an end. Because he has focused Ford on the One Ford strategy, there is no room according to Mullaly for more than one large car platform, and that platform will be the Taurus going forward.
For 50 years the Falcon has pounded the streets and the outback of Oz, and it’s legend at The Bathurst is long and deep. To may down under killing of the Falcon would be like killing of the Mustang in the US.
Rising gas prices have put a dent into sales of the rear wheel drive car and Ute, but it’s hard to think that “The Last Of The V8’s” could be in sight.
There are truly, very few movies for car people/petrol heads, that really communicate the passion and emotion that our obsession means to us. In the US what we get for “automotive lifestyle” programing are really bad reality shows that aren’t much more than sixty minutes, well forty to forty two minutes of advertorial programing, the rest commercials, many of those for the products you just saw used in the show.
True gear heads in Hollywood are few and far between, and the ones that are mostly keep quiet because most of their colleagues are screaming about being green, and in a town that makes the high school cheerleading squad seem non cliquey, if you want to pay for your hobby and keep working, best to keep it on the down low.
There are of course a few exceptions, Jay Leno, Patrick Dempsey, Tim Allen, a few others, but you didn’t hear much about it till they were very successful, and their names were enough to sell tickets, get ratings etc to make sure everyone else was making money to keep them happy.
Eric Bana is an actor from Australia that you may have seen in Ang Lee’s “The Hulk” the 2009 re-boot of Star Trek, Troy, and a few others. Since his early days, he has been a gear head, and from the age of 15 he has had an obsession, it is his 1974 Ford Falcon XB Coupe.
Through good times and bad Eric has kept this car, first as his daily driver, then as a race car. He mad a documentary about his obsession with the car called “Love The Beast” and for me, it is the best car movie I have seen in a very long time and the best movie I saw in 2009.
Looking at some of the reviews you see comments from people who aren’t gear heads talking about how they weren’t into this movie that much but it did explain the obsession well. That to me is the key point here. Even non car people can begin to understand what drive us, to a point at least. Here are two clips from the movie I’ve spliced together of Jeremy Clarkson, explaining this better than I’ve ever seen done before.
The turning point for Bana’s Beast was running the car in the 1996 Targa Tasmania, a road rally in the spirit of the old Targa Florio. It runs for five days on the Island of Tasmania, and in Australian motorsports importance is rivaled only by the Bathurst 1000 in importance, and the Bathurst race is said by Aussies to be their version of LeMans.
The movie is how Eric completely rebuilt his Falcon to run once again in the race, as a full on race car and his experiences of elation and of depression after he has an accident on the fourth of the five days of the rally.
Through his own voice overs, and interviews with Jay Leno, Jeremy Clarkson and Dr. Phil (who for the first time ever comes off as intelligent and likable rather than a full on douchebag) they talk about what the car means to him and if he will rebuild it after this incident. Will the car be written off, or once again become the campfire by which he and his mates gather around once again to rebuild once again.
The movie has a very limited release after being shown at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, and while the DVD is on sale in Australia and the EU, it is NOT available here in the US. Now, depending on how you feel about the subject you can download the movie here.
There is also work that this will be shown on the SPEED channel on December the 18th, check your local listings, but having this go to commercial every 5-7 minutes I think will really kill the flow of this movie. It’s only 90 minutes in length, but communicates a lifetime of love and obsession.
If you were to make a list of all the important car and motorcycle races in a year, all over the world, and make a list of all the great tracks in the world, would the Bathurst 1000 on Mount Panorama make it? Well it should! In the land of Oz this is their Indy 500, their Monaco GP, their Assen and Mugello.
You can spend hours on YouTube watching videos of V8 Supercars turning laps at this place. The track looks like a mix of Spa, Road America and Laguna Seca. This TV package gives you an idea about the history of the race, the track and it’s importance to the motorsports culture of Australia.
