Farewell to Peter Perfect

When Peter Brock retired from full-time racing in 1997, grown men openly wept. And last Friday, as news began to filter out from Perth that there had been an accident at the Targa West tarmac rally, the rest of Australia joined in.

Unless you have experienced Australian racing, you may struggle to appreciate the unique position that Brock occupied on the motorsport landscape. And you'll probably think I'm exaggerating when I say that in this part of the world, the news of Brock's death last week, at the age of 61, resonated more loudly than that of Ayrton Senna's 12 years ago.

There are a few celebrities in Australia who could be universally identified merely by their surname, but Brock was surely the only one who could be identified by a number: 05, the competition number that he ran on almost every car he drove from the mid-1970s up to the Daytona Coupe in which he perished.

It goes without saying that Brock had an almost supernatural talent behind the wheel. Winning the race at Bathurst even once is a massive achievement, yet he did it nine times. And that's before we get to the nine Sandown wins (the traditional 'warm-up' race for Bathurst), the three Australian Touring Car Championship titles, and assorted other bits and pieces.

But more than that, he moved beyond the boundaries of the sport in a way that no other driver ever did before, and quite possibly more than anyone will again.

Brock was the most famous racing driver in the country by a huge margin. His recognition level among the general population was something in the order of 86 percent, which is probably more than the Pope could manage. If you ever drive through the Bathurst region, you can tune your car stereo to FM station B-Rock.

He was racing's ultimate ambassador; a guy who had a rare understanding of exactly how the game worked, and of the extent to which the fans on the hill were responsible for his success.

And despite the constant demands upon him, both during his heyday and later, in 'retirement' - a word I use cautiously because, despite his best intentions, he never quite managed to wrench himself away from the wheel - Brock did whatever he could to give something back.

All of us have stories. We've all seen him stand in race paddocks signing autographs, sometimes literally for hours. And there was none of this business of taking a cap, signing it, and handing it back to the owner without a glance. On the contrary, for the five or six seconds that he might spend scribbling his name, he had this unnerving knack of making a stranger feel like an old friend.

This sometimes went to extraordinary lengths. I recall chatting with him at a race somewhere three or four years ago, and he told me of the time that a fan had handed over their glass eyeball and asked him to sign it. It may have been one of those rare moments when Brock was lost for words, but he duly obliged, and the fan popped his trophy back into its socket and wandered off happily.

It's because of this unwavering dedication to his supporters that, in a sport as tribal as touring car racing in Australia, where some fans have their allegiances to Ford or Holden literally tattooed into their skin, even the most die-hard Ford fan couldn't quite bring themselves to hate him.

Despite his nickname 'Peter Perfect', Brock had his share of human failings, some more public than others. His credibility took a severe hit in the mid-1980s when he created an 'Energy Polariser', a device that used magnets and crystals to improve performance of a car by 'aligning the molecules'.

The Polariser was one of a number of issues that led to an acrimonious split between Brock and Holden, the manufacturer with which he had become synonymous, in 1987. (They set aside their differences six years later).

Gaining widespread support for the Polariser may have been beyond even Brock, but it illustrates another aspect of his personality that made him such an intriguing figure.

Peter Brock, Holden Commodore, 2002 Bathurst 1000 © LAT

In the last 20 years of his life, Brock was an intensely deep-thinking man who was eager to share his sometimes-idiosyncratic views on the world with anyone who cared to listen. He was also a poster-boy for healthy living, and followed a strict exercise and almost-vegan diet regime for two decades.

Brock was also a keen believer that everyone should strive to achieve their maximum potential, and set up a foundation to allow ordinary but disadvantaged people to have opportunities that may otherwise have been denied them. It was not by accident that most of his autographs were accompanied with a message, usually extolling the owner to 'Enjoy life' or 'Be your best'.

But over and above everything else, he was just Brock. He was an immensely gifted steerer, a unique and charismatic personality, and the seed that germinated a culture of touring car racing that continues to flourish in Australia to this day.

Peter Brock was arguably the best touring car driver the world has ever known. It's just a shame that only a small part of the world had a real chance to enjoy watching him.

SIDEBAR

Brock's career in brief

Aside from a couple of early dalliances with open-wheelers, Peter Brock's career was steadfastly devoted to touring cars.

"No mudguards or headlights, no windscreen wipers ... they [open-wheelers] just aren't real cars," he once said in an interview. "They do everything too well; go around corners so exactly, and if they're not good enough, they re-engineer them.

"With the touring car, you've got this vehicle that has a lot of limitations, idiosyncrasies, faults, so as a driver you've got to drive around these things and make the damn thing do what you want it to."

It's impossible to condense a career that spanned almost 40 years into a few paragraphs, but here goes.

Holden Torana XU-1 © LAT

He started out with an Austin A7 with no brakes that he modified with his mother's axe (much to her chagrin), and made his mark in a 186 Holden-engined Austin A30 Sports Sedan. His success in the ungainly little thing brought him to the attention of Harry Firth, who was running the then-fledgling Holden Dealer Team. Firth offered him a drive in a Monaro at Bathurst in 1969, starting an association with the race with which his name would soon become synonymous.

The first win at The Mountain came in 1972 at the wheel of a Torana XU-1. Brock drove the entire race alone, and in the process became the last solo driver to win what is known in these parts as The Great Race. By 1987, he'd have nine wins at Bathurst to his credit.

Bathurst was the site of his last ATCC (Australian Touring Car Championship) appearance when he came out of retirement in 2004 (for the second time, having made a half-hearted attempt at the race two years earlier) to share a works Commodore with Briton Jason Plato. It was not a happy farewell - Plato was involved in a major accident that put the car out of commission before Brock got a chance to race.

And it was also the track that saw his last major win, when he claimed victory in the 2003 Bathurst 24 Hours at the wheel of the Monaro CV8 that he was sharing with V8 Supercar drivers Greg Murphy, Jason Bright and Todd Kelly.

While most of his career was spent on native soil, he ventured overseas occasionally. He had two attempts at the Le Mans 24 Hours as a privateer, the first in 1976 in a BMW 3.0 SL and the second at the wheel of a Porsche 956 in 1984, but failed to finish on both occasions.

He had better luck at Monza, where he finished second in the opening round of the FIA World Touring Car Championship in 1987. And despite his long association with Holden, he did dabble in other brands. If you look hard enough, you'll find shots of him in BMWs, in Volvos and even - tantamount to high treason - in a Ford Sierra.

But while he is heavily identified with Holden, his career, like all great careers, was really defined by who he raced against. And Brock was responsible for some intense rivalries, the greatest of which was with Ford's Allan Moffat in the 1970s.

Yet as fierce as the racing between them was, it was never anything other than fair. "My regard for Peter's abilities came from the fact that we raced hard and he never crashed into me," Moffat told Australian magazine Motorsport News this week.

"We were never enemies. That is more than I can say for a lot of fellows who took an easier way out. So Peter became very much a focal point of my admiration. There were not too many others worthy of that kind of admiration."

Peter Brock, Holden VK Commodore, 1984 James Hardie 1000 at Bathurst © LAT

The feelings were obviously reciprocated, because as soon as Brock had a chance to hire Moffat in the mid-1980s, he did. In F1 terms, this would have been a bit like Senna hiring Prost.

But there have been many others. The sheer longevity of Brock's career means that he has raced against virtually every great touring car driver the country has produced in the last 30 years, and to this day the main players in V8 Supercars remain in awe of him.

This year's Bathurst 1000, due to be held in three weeks, will be a poignant weekend indeed.

The Numbers:

• Bathurst wins: 9 (1972, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1987)
• Bathurst podiums: 12
• Bathurst poles: 6
• ATCC Championships: 3 (1974, 1978, 1980)
• ATCC starts: 212
• ATCC round wins: 37
• ATCC poles: 57
• ATCC podiums: 100
• Sandown wins: 9 (1973, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1984)