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Transcript

Mark Skaife · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:15
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust, and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:29
  I'm in Melbourne for this episode at the office of Mark Scaife, one of the greatest race drivers in Australian history.
• 0:36
  A touring car champion, a Bathurst legend, who these days lends his incredible insights to the supercars broadcasts and is involved in track design and various automotive industry projects.
• 0:49
  Cars and racing have always been in the family, but the history goes back further than I realised.
• 0:56
  My grandfather came back from World War II and he was the one that actually set the original tyre businesses and stuff up.
• 1:03
  So he came from Townsville, he ended up settling in Newcastle after the war, come down to Gosford, worked for a couple of tyre places and then ended up...
• 1:12
  setting up his own tyre service.
• 1:14
  And Dad obviously worked within that, was always a bit of a petrol head and a bit of a rogue.
• 1:23
  I remember his first car, which is like buying a Brock Commodore, was an EH S4 Holden.
• 1:30
  which he went on to write off on the old Pacific Highway, so racing a bloke on a motorbike.
• 1:37
  So he had quite an adventurous bit of a lad's life, and one of the great things for me was, you know, that I spent so much time with him around car racing, and so he pretty much through the business bought his first race car, which was a LJ Toronto XE1, and...
• 1:57
  That was in the early 70s.
• 1:59
  And then from that day on, basically, that racing that he did, I was just a young bloke hanging around.
• 2:05
  And from the time that I was five or six, used to go to the race meetings with him and watching, say, for instance, at Emeroo Park, um...
• 2:12
  seeing, you know, Bob Morris versus Colin Bond in XU1s, you know, under the Rod Hodson Tower there at the final corner or sitting on his shoulders at the dog leg at Oran Park, you know, watching Alan Moffat in the Coke Mustang and stuff.
• 2:30
  So I had really early memories of, you know, great car racing.
• 2:33
  I can hear it in your voice there.
• 2:35
  He played a big part and a big influence on your career.
• 2:39
  Yeah, look, I would have learnt much more about car racing from Dad than anybody else.
• 2:43
  I mean, he had a really good feel for it.
• 2:47
  He was a businessman racer, so it was hard for him to probably get to a level of his own racing that was as good as he would have liked because he drove better than...
• 2:56
  than the results show because he just had to apply himself to make a quid.
• 3:02
  And to be fair, by the time that I got to, I was playing a lot of rugby league and stuff in those days, and by the time I got to an age where I went go-kart racing, his emphasis changed from his own racing to me.
• 3:15
  And he did pretty much everything for me in that way.
• 3:18
  And he was bloody hard.
• 3:21
  I mean, his level of expectation and attention to detail and wanting things done properly was extraordinary.
• 3:29
  I remember at the New South Wales...
• 3:31
  go-kart championships at Gilgandra, he pretty much employed a guy who was a seven-time Australian champion to help me and go with me because Dad couldn't afford to be away as much.
• 3:42
  So Don McLean, who was a great guy in those days, he used to hang around with Glenn Seton and I and Don took me out to the race out there
• 3:51
  And when Dad arrived out there for the weekend, he got out there for Saturday morning, on the front of my two carts at the time, both factory carts, and one of them had black wheels on the front and silver wheels on the back.
• 4:05
  And when he got there, he went absolutely off his mind that we were in the tyre business and we couldn't fit a set of wheels on a cart that matched.
• 4:14
  So that's a really good example of how hard he was on me in those days.
• 4:18
  And the great thing was it taught me so much in that way because it was my responsibility every day after school to have everything ready and going.
• 4:27
  So we'd have there for 100 packed.
• 4:29
  If I had forgotten anything, it was always, mate, we're going home.
• 4:34
  So it was a level of preparation and stuff that really stood me in good stead.
• 4:40
  What were the family cars in the garage back then?
• 4:42
  I reckon there's some stories about a Holden ute from memory.
• 4:44
  Is that right?
• 4:45
  Oh, we had a lot of Holdens.
• 4:47
  In fact, my pop first started buying Holdens for the tyre service, you know, a long, long time sort of before Dad got involved in the whole Holden part.
• 4:56
  And then we had – he always had the latest statesman.
• 4:59
  Dad always had the latest statesman.
• 5:01
  And then we had basically seven or eight of Holden Utes or one tonners.
• 5:06
  And then in the end, he ended up with an F-100 and stuff.
• 5:09
  So we had a lot of fun.
• 5:12
  In those days, Wyong was a country, almost seaside area that people went and holidayed from Sydney.
• 5:24
  But it was also a rural area, so a lot of farming out through the valleys at Yarrimalong and Duralong.
• 5:30
  Our businesses, our tyre businesses, basically serviced all those farms.
• 5:35
  We did all the tyre work for all the contractors on the freeway from Sydney to Newcastle.
• 5:40
  So Dad and I would go and fit Earthmover tyres like...
• 5:43
  I was only a little bloke and we'd be in the truck and we'd head out there and we'd work all night.
• 5:47
  We got $100 to change unfit and fit Earthmover tyre in the day.
• 5:52
  But, yeah, the tyres were worth $3,000 or $4,000 in those days.
• 5:56
  So the whole business part of what that did for me was also a big part of the learning because...
• 6:02
  In this mad world of car racing, we often miss the reality of life and how expensive car racing is and all the things that coincide with the work ethic required to go well.
• 6:13
  And again, that was a pretty harsh period.
• 6:17
  Was there a well-worn path from the New South Wales central coast down to, say, places like Pennant Hills Road in the northwestern Sydney?
• 6:24
  That's a major arterial.
• 6:25
  And did you ever damage a ute?
• 6:27
  And what did you tell Dad if you did?
• 6:29
  Oh, Rusty, I went through a phase where I crashed so many of his cars.
• 6:33
  Seriously.
• 6:34
  It was so bad.
• 6:36
  And it was just like a really bad runabout.
• 6:41
  I crashed, I bought a Ford ute, I crashed it.
• 6:45
  I crashed Dad's Brock Commodore because I was perving at a girl in the main street of the entrance when Dad was overseas and I was looking at this absolute gem in the main street of the entrance and everybody stopped.
• 6:56
  So I wrote the front of his best Commodore off.
• 6:59
  I had to get that fixed before he got back from Singapore.
• 7:01
  I went to Sydney...
• 7:08
  with my girlfriend and I hit a bloke on a bike coming off the bottom of the Carl Expressway and I had to get out very fast and tell him what a great ride it was because he didn't actually fall off after I hit him, but it pulled the left-headed bumper and stuff off my girlfriend's Gemini.
• 7:25
  And then the last one was that I was, I dropped my laser down to Barry Jones and I was,
• 7:33
  at Jones Speed, who was preparing the car in those days.
• 7:36
  I was down there a lot.
• 7:37
  And anyway, I dropped the car down there.
• 7:38
  I still had the trailer on.
• 7:39
  And I come back along Pennant Hills Road.
• 7:41
  And I had my girlfriend with me.
• 7:44
  We were blazing along.
• 7:45
  And this bloke cut me off.
• 7:46
  And I had half a race with this guy.
• 7:49
  As it turns out, I topped the little rise.
• 7:52
  And the traffic stopped.
• 7:53
  And oh, fuck.
• 7:55
  So I veered to the left hard, missed the traffic, but I went straight across a clearway sign.
• 8:00
  Anyway, I hit the clearway sign.
• 8:01
  I had to get Ange to get out, jump up and down on the clearway sign, back back off the clearway sign and drove it home.
• 8:06
  Well, it actually did a fair bit of damage.
• 8:08
  So I get home and I cleverly parked...
• 8:12
  the ute right down the back of our property, front in near our granny flat so that the army wouldn't see it.
• 8:22
  And I was checking his mood before I spoke to him.
• 8:25
  So because he seriously comes from a long line of overreactors, like he's just, he is mad.
• 8:32
  So finally I get the courage to say, mate, I put a bit of a mark on the front of the ute.
• 8:38
  So immediately he runs, you know, marches down with that stern look on his face he used to get, and he gets all frothed up, and he walked to the front of the ute, and he looked at me and he said, put a muck and muck on the front of the ute?
• 8:49
  So he said, you've ridden the front of the ute off!
• 8:53
  And then it was like a comedy because he's standing at the front of the ute and I'm at the back.
• 8:57
  And so I'm running around, running around, running around, running around.
• 9:00
  And it was seriously like a cartoon skit.
• 9:02
  Mum's yelling out, Russell, Russell, Russell, you know, because he's going to kill me if he gets me.
• 9:06
  Lucky I could run.
• 9:07
  And anyway, so that was, as he walked away all disgruntled from not being able to belt me, he walks away and he goes, you're not driving another car of mine ever.
• 9:15
  That was it.
• 9:16
  I was banned.
• 9:17
  And it ended up.
• 9:19
  That I, even then when the laser series come along, which is sort of the end of all this, is I crashed the first laser.
• 9:27
  I wrote the first laser off before the first race meeting.
• 9:31
  I hit a cement truck clowning up in the industrial state, and it basically cut the car in half.
• 9:37
  Like, it wrote it off.
• 9:39
  So this is a Saturday morning.
• 9:41
  I finished work, you know, 1 o'clock, I'm speeding around the zing.
• 9:45
  No one was ever there in those days, but I didn't realise that the cement trucks were being washed.
• 9:49
  So when I arrived at this quarter, it wasn't like it normally is.
• 9:53
  There's road bases, stuff everywhere, and I was speeding into this cement truck.
• 9:58
  Full Ari Barton, full Ari Barton without the skill and wrote it off.
• 10:04
  So you can imagine.
• 10:05
  So the old man arrives.
• 10:06
  Oh, my God, what a day that was.
• 10:08
  And in the end, he went down to his mate at the ELN Ford franchise down on the Tugger Estate at Wild down to Neil Lovin and said, I think we need another one of those red lasers because the other one's not very nice.
• 10:23
  So, yeah, that's how it started.
• 10:24
  I spoke to Glenn Seaton earlier in the podcast series.
• 10:27
  You both did your car racing licence test in his dad's Ford Capri.
• 10:32
  Tell us about that.
• 10:33
  They've kept it, which is tremendous too.
• 10:35
  I think the family, it's awesome.
• 10:36
  Yeah, it is tremendous.
• 10:38
  And we had a really great relationship.
• 10:39
  I mean...
• 10:41
  We'll talk about it later because I think a lot of the things about car racing and the rivalries and all those things, you know, the Setons and Glenn and I in particular, you know, we raced against each other for such a long time.
• 10:52
  But we knew each other from when we were really young.
• 10:54
  And Dad was great mates with Barry, with Bo Seton.
• 10:59
  you know, they had two AMCO Capris together in Sydney, you know, in the mid-70s.
• 11:05
  And, you know, they used to basically hang out, you know, a lot together as friends and colleagues.
• 11:11
  So we were good mates.
• 11:12
  So the way that Glenn started go-karting, I basically replicated two years after.
• 11:17
  In those days, 14 was the sort of first of the junior categories he could get involved in.
• 11:22
  And Glenn started and I sort of,
• 11:25
  watched it and then as soon as I got to 14 I did the same thing.
• 11:29
  So we were really good mates for a long time ago.
• 11:32
  Am I right in saying that your first proper car race was in an XU1 that your dad had worked on and was it Amaru Park that was the very first car race?
• 11:42
  How was that?
• 11:43
  Yeah, so I got my licence in Barry's yellow Capri, which was the car that Glenn did too, and that was at Oran Park.
• 11:53
  And then from there on, we looked around.
• 11:55
  I was still doing some go-kart racing, and Dad looked around.
• 11:58
  He ended up buying an XG1 from Mark Winterbottom's dad, from Jim Winterbottom.
• 12:04
  And so we went, picked it up at Frosty's place.
• 12:08
  Dad and I did a fair bit of work on it.
• 12:11
  We sort of tidied it up and then we took it down to Bo Seton who did the engine and we had a lot of stuff from old XU1 days.
• 12:19
  In fact, Dad had a stack of stuff from Bob Morris' old XU1s so we put a lot of the shocks and stuff in there and then obviously the tyre technology and things were better by that stage.
• 12:28
  But the car ended up being really good.
• 12:30
  We had a lot of fun.
• 12:32
  It was probably in Sydney at the time.
• 12:33
  It was the best six-cylinder sports sedan in Sydney at the day
• 12:38
  And I had a lot of fun.
• 12:39
  So, yeah, so our first race was Emery Park, but I did mostly Emery Park and Oron Park.
• 12:45
  And a great story with that first race meeting was that I'd failed my driving test the day before.
• 12:52
  For your road licence.
• 12:53
  Road licence.
• 12:54
  No way.
• 12:54
  What happened?
• 12:55
  Absolutely.
• 12:56
  Well, I got filed for overconfidence.
• 12:57
  So...
• 13:01
  The bloke asked me to do a hill start and a three-point turn, and I did that, but without heeling.
• 13:08
  I just did a heeling and towing, so I didn't use the handbrake.
• 13:12
  So he failed me for overconfidence.
• 13:14
  So when he failed me, because I was organised with the F100 and the car all loaded to drive it down to Amaroo Park.
• 13:20
  Well, then I failed the licence, and I couldn't drive it, so Dad had to put one of his mechanics on to take me down and go and drive the car.
• 13:29
  I already had my race licence.
• 13:31
  So you can imagine the old man.
• 13:33
  So he walks around to the registry office and he gives these blokes the biggest spray of all time.
• 13:41
  Because, you know, we had so many people working for us in those days who were, you know, they serious, they were muppets, they battled off a driver car and this bloke files me for overconfidence.
• 13:49
  So scathing totally tapped out.
• 13:52
  It was not nice.
• 13:53
  It was not good.
• 13:53
  Anyway, so we got over that.
• 13:55
  I failed the thing in my first drive.
• 13:57
  So this was really interesting.
• 13:59
  And it's a little E-curve system of the old man's thinking.
• 14:02
  And I reckon it's a little insight into how we view OH&S and taking risks these days.
• 14:12
  Because I couldn't drive down, I didn't get to qualify at Amaroop Park for my first race meeting.
• 14:19
  And because Dad knew Ivan Stibbard and the operators of the ARDC of the day, on Saturday, it's hosing with rain and I do no practice.
• 14:29
  So effectively, Sunday morning, it's hosing and Dad's pleading with Ivan saying,
• 14:36
  to use his discretion by the stewards to let me start at the back.
• 14:40
  So I'm 17, just failed my road licence two days earlier.
• 14:44
  I'm 17, and it's hosing with rain.
• 14:47
  And if you remember what Amarie Park was like when it rained, like the water ran off that hill like you couldn't believe.
• 14:53
  But he was totally fine.
• 14:54
  He had enough...
• 14:55
  confidence that I was capable and competent enough to go and drive the car and that he didn't think, well, I think he liked me or didn't think he wanted to hurt me.
• 15:07
  He really wanted me to drive in the wet.
• 15:10
  So I start last.
• 15:13
  there were 17 cars in the field.
• 15:17
  I ran six and got the fourth fastest lap time.
• 15:21
  And it was those days of John Teserero and all those blokes in Volvos and there was quite a good field of sports dans.
• 15:27
  But Dad, in an interesting way, because to me it really demonstrates –
• 15:34
  people who, yes, they're willing to take a risk, but B, they've got enough level of understanding of what that competency is to actually decide on what's right or wrong.
• 15:48
  And in a mad world today that we live in where we're just so risk averse, we spend our lives trying to mitigate risk.
• 15:55
  That was a really good example of that being really risky.
• 15:59
  And me in the end,
• 16:00
  really enjoying it and it was a life-changing day.
• 16:04
  I mean, I was spearing around in the rain, sliding around in the wet at one of the most unforgiving racetracks in Australia, no problem at all.
• 16:10
  Great experience and one that, you know, it wasn't about ticking boxes.
• 16:15
  It was like clearly knew this would be a good thing for you, right environment, you know.
• 16:20
  Super, super.
• 16:21
  Let's talk lasers because the second car I ever owned, mate, was a Ghia KB 1.5, little front wheel drive.
• 16:28
  It tells me a lot about you.
• 16:29
  Yeah, that's right.
• 16:30
  I'm sure it does.
• 16:32
  I thought I was hot shit.
• 16:33
  It got stolen, but that's another story.
• 16:35
  It was blue.
• 16:36
  It was blue.
• 16:37
  Tell me about yours and the mods they did to them.
• 16:40
  The highly competitive thing was it was a one-make series, wasn't it?
• 16:43
  Well, it was more money to win a Laser Series race in those days than it was to win a Touring Car Championship race.
• 16:48
  So it was $3,000 to win a race.
• 16:51
  Cars are only $9,500 to buy, and it was about $3,000 or $4,000 worth of additional stuff.
• 16:55
  You had to buy the wheels and the motorcraft performance parts that had to go in.
• 17:00
  And then we obviously had to roll cage it and stuff.
• 17:02
  And I had Bob Riley, who is a famous guy from Sydney who used to work for Bondi.
• 17:06
  Mitsubishi Rally-ar as well.
• 17:08
  Mitsubishi Rally-ar, yeah, really good guy.
• 17:10
  He actually did the roll cage for us and stuff.
• 17:12
  So...
• 17:13
  So, yeah, as it turned out, it was, I think there was 56 entries and it could only start 26 at Amaru.
• 17:22
  And in the first one, I ran third, which was actually at Orton Park.
• 17:28
  And then as the year went on, it was sort of my, I felt like it was one of the best things I've ever done because on a really level playing field, I got to race against some really good operators of those sorts of cars, you know, Mark Gibbs, Ken Douglas, all.
• 17:41
  Peter Dane, Steve Williams, David Brabham.
• 17:46
  So David Brabham and I had a ripping battle in the second year of it and fortunately was able to go okay.
• 17:53
  And that's really where I got my drive with Freddie because someone said to Fred, you should have a look at this kid, which I know who it was.
• 18:00
  It was Barry Seaton and Barry had...
• 18:04
  told Freddie that I was going okay in these things.
• 18:07
  And on the particular day that he come to see me, which I didn't know that he was there, I had to start at the back of the field and I won the race.
• 18:16
  And he, from that day, sort of had followed me enough to think, you know, maybe I can give this bloke a go.
• 18:22
  But I end up making money out of it.
• 18:24
  So not very many things in junior motorsport categories could you make money out of in car racing, but I seriously made money out of it.
• 18:29
  And even to the point where I,
• 18:31
  I called every Ford dealer in Melbourne because the Goodyear Car Owners Club series was Sydney-based.
• 18:38
  And then there was a Motorcraft series in Victoria.
• 18:41
  And Dad and I would drive down on a Thursday night.
• 18:45
  We'd practice on a Friday, do the weekend's race.
• 18:47
  And then we would drive back on the Sunday night.
• 18:49
  And I'd open the business again at 8 o'clock on the Monday morning, right?
• 18:52
  So it was all that business stuff that we had to keep on going.
• 18:54
  Non-stop.
• 18:55
  We're talking 1,000 Ks.
• 18:56
  Exactly, yep.
• 18:57
  drive all night together, get back and open the shop up.
• 19:01
  So, because we had to, it's the only way we could afford to do it.
• 19:03
  So I called every Ford dealer in Melbourne.
• 19:08
  No one would put a sign on the car for any sort of money or anything.
• 19:13
  And I ended up calling Stillwell Ford and a gentleman by the name of Ron Kaplan said, Mucky, I've seen you driving in the thing in Sydney.
• 19:20
  I said, look, listen, Ron, let's just do a deal.
• 19:23
  whatever I win in prize money, you equal it.
• 19:26
  And it was $1,000 for the Victorian one.
• 19:28
  So we won every race.
• 19:30
  So we got six grand out of Ron Kapler plus the six grand of the thing.
• 19:34
  And as I said, I made money out of the Sydney series and the Victorian series.
• 19:37
  So as I said, not very often do you make money in those junior categories.
• 19:41
  So you did an apprenticeship with Fred Gibson, who you mentioned before.
• 19:45
  Tell us how that came about.
• 19:47
  And obviously he'd spotted you, you know, the way you're talking there in the Laser series.
• 19:51
  What was the apprenticeship and what was he like as a boss?
• 19:53
  And I mean, legendary team owner, Supercars Hall of Famer, winner at Bathurst, obviously.
• 19:57
  That would have been cool.
• 19:59
  It was very cool.
• 20:01
  He didn't promise me anything, basically.
• 20:04
  I come to Melbourne to work with the team and see how I fit it in.
• 20:10
  He gave me $200 a week, and I was basically the gopher come mechanic come whatever.
• 20:17
  And we ended up doing, in the end, we ended up doing all the special vehicles cars.
• 20:20
  So we actually made quite a lot of money out of one side of the workshop.
• 20:24
  The other side of the workshop spent a lot of money, as in the factory Nissans, Skylines especially, and...
• 20:31
  But on the positive side, we made a lot of money as the Special Vehicles Department and all their engineering and product supply for that, which was a great sort of sense of business and acumen for me in those days.
• 20:43
  And as I said, Freddie didn't make any promises, but he was fantastic.
• 20:47
  I mean, he was the Roland Dane of the day, the best race team operator and a guy that knew...
• 20:55
  a lot about the cars based on his own experience but his own mechanical prowess and employed the best people of the day.
• 21:01
  It was a great journey.
• 21:04
  We're lifelong friends.
• 21:06
  In fact, Fred and Chris are sort of like a second family.
• 21:09
  We still see them a lot.
• 21:10
  They were over for barbecue at our place last week.
• 21:13
  It's a beautiful relationship because he had a lot of faith in me and I keep on saying to him that I made his shitbox cars look good.
• 21:23
  I risked my life for him.
• 21:25
  Is there a story of legend about Grant Jarrett at Bathurst in 87?
• 21:30
  I think you guys were paired together in the Gazelle and some suggestion from something Freddie spoke about, Freddie Gibson, about a stunt double to ensure that the car qualified within the mandatory cut, made the qualifying car.
• 21:45
  Well, Bathurst that year was basically the Gazelle or the Sylvia was in the same class as the BMW M3s.
• 21:53
  So as the factory BMWs were all trying to beat each other, and that was mad, you know, because like the Chocotto and Revalia and all the superstars all trying to beat each other and Jimmy Richards.
• 22:06
  So in the end, the number...
• 22:09
  that we had to get to was really being hurt a lot by how fast the BMW ended up going.
• 22:15
  And then Richo ended up beating them all.
• 22:17
  So the qualifying number was actually pretty hard to meet for the Gazelle.
• 22:22
  So I'd qualified, which was fine, but my co-driver couldn't qualify.
• 22:27
  So we come in, we go out to the back of the garage area.
• 22:32
  I put, we had the same suits, but I put his helmet on and straight out we went.
• 22:37
  And I had to do a mad lap to do a time that was going to get my car driver in or we were going home.
• 22:44
  So that's true.
• 22:45
  That's not an urban myth.
• 22:49
  That's actually true.
• 22:50
  You're the first one to have picked up on it.
• 22:51
  But you wouldn't get away with it today.
• 22:53
  In fact, you'd get hung for it today.
• 22:56
  You won the Australian 2L Touring Car Championship in 87 in a Gazelle prepared by Gibson.
• 23:02
  Was this the S12?
• 23:03
  Is that what it was?
• 23:04
  I'm trying to think what body shape it was.
• 23:06
  Yeah, it was the Sylvia.
• 23:07
  So, yeah, so it was a bit of a sort of a swept-back coupe.
• 23:14
  And it was actually a really good little car.
• 23:16
  I mean, from a balance perspective and a good little car to sort of earn...
• 23:21
  your stripes and learn the trade a bit it was actually a perfect car you know it wasn't too wild and it had um you know it had a lot of the skyline parts in it um so in those days it was actually you know a good a good grounding car and a good way to get involved did it have any little sort of nuances and and what was the secret to to making it fast i
• 23:42
  Uh, well, look, there wasn't a lot of, um, there wasn't a lot of, uh, of tricks in those days because it was grip A format and, you know, the weight limit was strictly adhered to.
• 23:54
  And, you know, we did the only, our own engines and both, both Seton and Glenn did the engines for it.
• 23:58
  So basically, you know, I had a couple hundred horsepower and by the time that we actually got ourselves into a point where, um, the car was, you know, in Peter Jackson livery, the same as the other cars, um, um, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,
• 24:10
  we went and did some additional races.
• 24:12
  And again, you know, for the CRC 300 at Amaroa Park, in the rain, we were third fastest behind Jimmy Richards' cars, behind the BMWs.
• 24:22
  So it was, and Terry Shield drove with me, you know, in those days with that car.
• 24:26
  So it was sort of one of those ones where I got a lot of miles and then when I could...
• 24:32
  Fred would put me in the DR30, which was just a little sort of incentive every now and then just to give me some miles in the other car.
• 24:40
  But it was a really good time of my career because it taught me a lot.
• 24:46
  I had to do a lot of the preparation on that car myself.
• 24:49
  They had a couple of really good blokes that were working with us.
• 24:52
  Wynn Ellery was the truck driver, so Wynn could do anything.
• 24:55
  He could make anything.
• 24:56
  And Trevor Jones, his nickname was Bones, and Trevor had worked for Fred from way back in Ford factory days.
• 25:03
  So Trevor and Wynne and I would basically go everywhere and, you know, a couple of really experienced blokes with a young maniac.
• 25:12
  And some good people in, you know, the likes of George Fury, later Jimmy Richards that, you know, for a young bloke coming through, the influence of those kind of people and, you know, that must be huge.
• 25:23
  Yeah, I mean, I was obviously always sort of really encouraged with Glenn and, you know, when Glenn left, Jim replaced Cito and that was a bit of a weird time for us all because, you know, we were all great friends and Glenn went off with Ken Potter and Peter Jackson to set up his own Sierra team.
• 25:43
  So, you know, I think that was pretty hard for everyone, you know, in those days.
• 25:47
  It was certainly hard for Barry and Fred.
• 25:51
  And it was a great opportunity in hindsight for Glenn to go and do his own thing.
• 25:54
  But, you know, there's always some emotion around, you know, long-term arrangements like that and the amount of effort that Fred had put into Glenn.
• 26:03
  And probably what was a bit of a wrecker in some ways was the next car.
• 26:08
  So after the DR30, where Glenn almost won the championship in 87, had a great battle with Richo, the next cars, the HR31, was this inline six-cylinder turbo driver.
• 26:19
  Skyline, which at the start was a shocking car.
• 26:22
  Like it was just a dog.
• 26:24
  It was just a serious hound.
• 26:26
  Like we had so much work and, and to make it a nice car was, was, um, a very, very big exercise.
• 26:32
  So in that phase, Glenn could see these Sierras that, you know, there were various suppliers, you know, Andy Rouse and Eggenberger and Johnson by himself.
• 26:42
  There were various sort of iterations of Sierras that were all going like gangbusters and, uh, yeah.
• 26:48
  You know, he saw how much trouble we were having in 88 with the Skyline.
• 26:55
  So that was sort of almost a...
• 26:57
  pivotal point for Glenn in terms of how that was going to roll out.
• 27:01
  And as a consequence, I knew I wasn't ready to step up, but fortunately Fred was able to hire Jim Richards, and that was a massive moment for the team.
• 27:16
  He, I would argue, was the best steering car driver in the world in that era, and that was, for me, a great learning exercise.
• 27:25
  You and Glenn were great mates, you know, by this period.
• 27:28
  I think he talks about, you know, when you'd hang out in Melbourne, he probably spilled more beer on his shoes than...
• 27:35
  It was a shocker.
• 27:36
  Well, it was, and he used to drink ouzo and Coke, and seriously, it's a shocking drink on your best day.
• 27:43
  And he, yeah, he would spill, like, by the end of the night, his shoes were drenched and he just, he was a mess, you know.
• 27:51
  And on his best day, Cito really can't drink that well.
• 27:54
  But after a few ouzos, he's just hopeless.
• 27:57
  You would go on to win Bathurst six times, mate, but your first podium was with Jimmy in 89.
• 28:01
  How satisfying was that as a young bloke at a place that you treasure and love?
• 28:07
  Yeah, look, that was actually really hard, Rusty, because there was nowhere near the level of data.
• 28:15
  We didn't actually have data acquisition in those days.
• 28:19
  We just had stack instruments, and, you know, every corner you come out of, you looked at the tacker as to, you know, did you make 6,500 revs on the way out of turn two or whatever it was, right?
• 28:29
  That was your marker.
• 28:30
  That was your marker.
• 28:31
  So I never really knew...
• 28:33
  through the course of that weekend, for instance, where Jim was faster than me, you couldn't have been able to tell.
• 28:38
  There were no sectors.
• 28:38
  There were no anything.
• 28:39
  You just got a lap time.
• 28:40
  And I remember at one stage in the weekend that I was, you know, two and a half or three seconds slower than Richo because one of the, you know, one of the real misnomers around Jimmy is that,
• 28:51
  He absolutely, and so did Brock, they just drove the wheels off the cars.
• 28:57
  Everyone talks about their mechanical sympathy.
• 28:59
  What absolute bullshit.
• 29:04
  They tortured the cars.
• 29:06
  It tortured them.
• 29:07
  You know, everything, Jimmy would get out of the car and it was a smouldering shitbox every time.
• 29:13
  And because he just...
• 29:14
  But fast.
• 29:14
  But fast.
• 29:15
  But fast.
• 29:16
  Man, was he fast.
• 29:17
  You know, well, you think about it, even in BMW days, he was the fastest.
• 29:20
  Outqualified every BMW when all the BMW factory teams were here.
• 29:24
  So he was tremendously fast.
• 29:26
  And, but, but.
• 29:28
  you know you can't go fast without a taking big risks and and using the equipment up to its fullest and that's exactly what he did so i sort of come out of 89 there and i got better through the course of the weekend i was probably at sandown i was almost we did all the averages of when we won the sandown 500 together in 89 um i wasn't far away from him at all when we averaged all the lap times i was only a couple of tenths away from him and i was really sort of happy about that but i
• 29:55
  I was really perplexed by the Bathurst thing because he smashed me in the early part of the week.
• 29:59
  And then as the weekend went on, I got a bit better.
• 30:02
  But Jimmy did predominantly most of the driving and we ended up third.
• 30:07
  But the following season was sort of my biggest test because –
• 30:13
  Fred ran three cars some weekends prior to that, and then in 1990, it was really Jim and I in the HO31s.
• 30:21
  And I remember at Christmastime on the deck having a beer with my dad, and I actually said to him, I said, if I can't go as fast as Jimmy Richards this year, if I come out of this year, meaning 1990...
• 30:36
  if I'm standing here at the end of next season and I'm not as fast as him, I said I'll be back at the tyre service because I really thought that it was the pivotal year of my life because he was so good.
• 30:52
  And the great thing about Richo was that he never hid anything.
• 30:55
  If I asked him anything, I don't know, debriefs, what are you doing there, mate?
• 30:59
  Why are you getting back over that side?
• 31:00
  You used the kerb at that particular corner.
• 31:02
  What market are you using, the breaking area there?
• 31:04
  He was totally honest.
• 31:05
  And the great thing about that relationship was that, you know, he's 20 years older than me.
• 31:10
  When we get on like brothers, you know, we've always got on really well because it's been totally honest.
• 31:14
  You know, he told me things, never tried to hide anything.
• 31:19
  He told me things.
• 31:20
  He taught me a lot on and off the track.
• 31:25
  But, but...
• 31:27
  One of the great things about Richo is he had such supreme confidence in his own ability that he didn't worry about telling me whatever that was.
• 31:36
  And if I could beat him, he was the first one to walk up and shake hands because it was genuine competition.
• 31:42
  He actually wanted a young bloke to test him.
• 31:45
  He actually wanted that level of rivalry, and it was amazing.
• 31:49
  The first time I qualified him was...
• 31:51
  Lakeside in 1990.
• 31:52
  And I remember to the day I die, it was probably the best qualifying session of my life.
• 31:57
  We didn't qualify on pole position, but to beat Jim Richards at a wild joint like Lakeside, that was almost the marker.
• 32:05
  It was the bang.
• 32:06
  That was the moment in time where I thought, this is going to be okay.
• 32:10
  From that moment on the back deck, what did you do?
• 32:13
  Because in my whole time of working with you, I know how meticulous you are, how hard you worked in that preparation sense.
• 32:21
  But clearly, you must have kind of doubled your efforts or ratcheted up a notch, did you, for 1990?
• 32:27
  What did you do?
• 32:29
  I remember thinking that I had to apply myself in a way that I didn't ever want to go to the racetrack and not feel like I was prepared.
• 32:38
  So it was sort of the start of me being really fit.
• 32:42
  I did a lot of work in the off-season.
• 32:44
  Because I'd always played a lot of rugby league and stuff, I basically was doing a lot of that sort of training, but I was doing more swimming.
• 32:49
  Glenn and I would go to the pool in the mornings and all that stuff.
• 32:51
  So I kept on with the swimming stuff.
• 32:53
  I kept on with my own fitness.
• 32:55
  I felt better about that.
• 32:57
  I applied myself...
• 32:59
  I was doing most of the testing.
• 33:02
  I was in the car a lot because, you know, it was also the start of the Australian Drivers' Championship competition too, so I was always either in an open-wheel car or in a touring car.
• 33:12
  In that year, I think I was in the car 114 days, you know, so it's a lot of time, exactly.
• 33:18
  And I was also doing a lot of tyre testing, which was really good because it was just lots of grind laps, you know, 20 laps of lakeside, another 20 laps of lakeside, another 20 laps of lakeside.
• 33:28
  You could do that back then too, couldn't you?
• 33:29
  Totally.
• 33:29
  I mean, it was fantastic.
• 33:30
  And they'd arrive with 300 tyres and we'd chuck tyres at it for two or three days in a row.
• 33:34
  So I was sort of the beneficiary of a lot of that that was going on in the background, as well as my own interpretation of what I needed to do to improve.
• 33:45
  It was genuinely the first of the times that we had data recordings.
• 33:50
  So our first data acquisition unit, the data logger, was the size of a typewriter and we would ratchet strap it to the passenger seat floor.
• 34:01
  That's exactly what it was.
• 34:02
  And then we would print it out and it would spit out like a big sort of IBM readout and you'd have to hold it up to a light comparing a lap to a lap.
• 34:11
  It's just mad.
• 34:13
  You think about now, it's almost archaic.
• 34:17
  But at the same time, as I said, there was a lot of work that had been done through the course of that year.
• 34:21
  You mentioned Formula Brad and Formula Holden there before.
• 34:24
  Gibson's history also includes that in your own.
• 34:28
  Open wheel race car, wings, Holden V6 engine.
• 34:31
  You won three driver's championships in that period in the early 90s there.
• 34:35
  The Confederation of Australian Motorsport Gold Star three times.
• 34:37
  They were the fastest race cars in the country.
• 34:40
  How hard were they to master?
• 34:42
  How much of a joy were they to race and drive?
• 34:44
  Yeah, that was great.
• 34:46
  I mean, I really relish those years against quality competition.
• 34:51
  You know, Mark Larkin was obviously there.
• 34:53
  Crompo was there.
• 34:55
  Guys like Paul Morris, Drew Price.
• 34:59
  There was actually quite a big field of, you know, good operators and, you
• 35:05
  prior to that there was guys like Rowan Onslow and they were all Warwick Routrun there was a lot of people that had come in and out of the category but through the course of time the battle I had with Larko was pretty cool and we did our own thing so in the end we had our own first car built SPA car that Gary Anderson of Jordan fame designed and
• 35:28
  And then after that we bought a Lola.
• 35:31
  It was Heinz Harold Frenzen's Lola that I bought from Japan.
• 35:35
  And we were actually the Lola distributor of the day.
• 35:38
  So they were quite diverse programs.
• 35:42
  And there was a lot of learning in those days in terms of aero.
• 35:45
  You know, we were...
• 35:47
  We were basically pioneering a stack of stuff.
• 35:50
  And I had Harry Galloway work for me.
• 35:53
  Pete Schaefer, who was on our touring car program, moved across to do that.
• 35:59
  I had Rod Smith, Anthony Tratt, myself, and Dad and Freddie would also come along to the race meetings.
• 36:06
  And the old man bought the tyres and Freddie and I found a way to fund it.
• 36:11
  And it was great.
• 36:14
  It was a period of my life that I reckon I learnt more about the whole of car racing development, meaning they were genuine race cars and there were lots of things that you could do that were out of the square that wasn't so restricted around, you know, Group A regulations or whatever the regulations were of the day.
• 36:32
  And it was a program which Freddie loved.
• 36:36
  You know, he was a real open wheel.
• 36:37
  He's such a traditionalist.
• 36:39
  He was quite keen to get me into open wheel cars.
• 36:42
  And I loved it.
• 36:43
  I mean, they were bloody good things to drive.
• 36:45
  I always love a good motor racing backstory.
• 36:48
  Share with us, if you will, the time you went to Winton.
• 36:51
  It must have been in the early phase of...
• 36:53
  um this chapter and learning the cars and neil crompton was there who you mentioned before you now work beside um calling the supercars championship did he tell you am i right in saying he told you you could hold it flat through the sweeper at winton is that right he's a dickhead
• 37:08
  He did.
• 37:09
  He did.
• 37:10
  And I believed him.
• 37:11
  And there you go.
• 37:12
  That shows my wyong level of infancy and my stupidity overall believing goon.
• 37:20
  Goon said to me, mate, you can get around there flat.
• 37:23
  And I was like, all right, yeah.
• 37:24
  And bump.
• 37:24
  bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, off the road.
• 37:27
  Then I come back very quickly and I said, there's no way you can get round there flat.
• 37:32
  So he laughed.
• 37:32
  He thought it was the funniest thing of all time.
• 37:35
  Oh, it was very funny.
• 37:36
  But even in those days, because, you know, the Turing car championship was still the, you know, the pinnacle.
• 37:42
  Yes.
• 37:44
  And so many times we were actually with the Touring Car Championship, we actually were racing on the same day.
• 37:48
  I mean, I got out, you know, in the end, I won the 92 Touring Car Championship in the Skyline and the Australian Drivers' Championship on the same day, drove both cars all weekend.
• 37:57
  So, I mean, it just, you know, the demand around all that was obviously quite extreme.
• 38:02
  On the weekends where we were just sort of specifically doing the Formula Holden or Formula Brabham, it was always a bit, you know, a bit more relaxed.
• 38:12
  And we had a lot of fun.
• 38:13
  You know, it was a really good time.
• 38:14
  And there was a lot of camaraderie, you know, guys that...
• 38:17
  actually wanted to race each other.
• 38:18
  You know, Neil tried to kill me at Orton Park one day.
• 38:23
  Alan Jones and Darrell Eastlake were commentating on General Nyan and he got a bad run out of Sutton, so I fired up the inside of him to go across the dogleg alongside each other.
• 38:33
  Side by side through the dogleg.
• 38:35
  Exactly, exactly.
• 38:36
  That was a little bold.
• 38:38
  And fortunately to my...
• 38:41
  for my health and that's why I'm sitting here now with you having fun, I did back off because I looked across at him and he was just, you know, there are some blokes where they get that level of determination on their face and he was desperate to stay in front of me.
• 38:57
  and I knew he wasn't going to lift.
• 38:58
  So anyway, I lifted off, fired that.
• 39:00
  But the great thing was one lap later, he lifted a big hole that I could have driven my transporter through down at the final corner of BP, and I fired down the inside and got him.
• 39:08
  So it was great.
• 39:09
  It was a great day.
• 39:10
  You might have a level of talent that I could only ever dream of, but we do share something interesting in common, and that is we have both had a steering wheel come off.
• 39:19
  My fault on my own in the Aussie racing car.
• 39:21
  That's a bit of YouTube gold if you want to search that.
• 39:23
  An idiot trying to pretend to be a racing driver.
• 39:26
  Yours was actually overseas in a Formula 3000, I think, wasn't it?
• 39:29
  Just tell us the story.
• 39:30
  What happened?
• 39:31
  Oh, yeah, I did a couple of races at the end of 1992 at Nagaro and at Magna Corp, thinking that for 1993 that we're going to go and do the whole of the F3000 series, which was obviously the series under Formula One of the day.
• 39:45
  So anyway, great field of cars and, you know, really, it was really good.
• 39:48
  So I ended up, I crashed at Turn 1 and the boys didn't really qualify that.
• 39:54
  We sort of tried to fix it, it wasn't really that good and we didn't qualify as well as we should have.
• 39:58
  So we're a fair way back.
• 40:00
  And...
• 40:01
  In the morning warm-up, in the wet, I'd speared off in a similar spot and it pulled the left-hand wheels off the side of it.
• 40:09
  It was a canoe.
• 40:10
  So anyway, the guys have gone to great lengths to get this thing going again.
• 40:15
  And as we go out onto the grid, I said to the truck driver, can you just grab another mirror for the left-hand side?
• 40:20
  And he forgot the mirror.
• 40:21
  So he runs over, does that.
• 40:23
  So it was all a bit ad hoc and it was my first drive in terms of a start.
• 40:30
  I'd done a couple of test days.
• 40:32
  In fact, the test I did was at Magna Corp was when Alain Prost had made his announcement to come back.
• 40:37
  So the crowd at Magna Corp was massive.
• 40:40
  So we hired the racetrack through 3001 International, which was Mike Earle, who went on to have Onyx Formula One team.
• 40:49
  Yeah.
• 40:51
  and Mike had hired the circuit with Williams, and it was chockers, so it was like a full-on race meeting.
• 40:58
  Anyway, so I did a little bit of that.
• 40:59
  After we then had the dramas in qualifying and the warm-up, I'm getting organised for the start.
• 41:06
  It wasn't that, you know, in terms of just how late the car was being repaired and all this stuff, it wasn't the best of all preparations I've ever had.
• 41:15
  And I really didn't know what to do in terms of how to get it off the line.
• 41:18
  So I sort of asked a couple of blokes and when in doubt, in typical race driver mode, when in doubt, you just basically hold them hard on the rev limiter.
• 41:28
  And they only had a little five and a half inch, you know, little carbon clutch.
• 41:31
  Hold them hard on the rev limiter and fire them away.
• 41:33
  Anyway, so it starts going.
• 41:35
  There's things.
• 41:37
  buzzing like you cannot believe how loud it is.
• 41:39
  And then all of a sudden, whoa, and I dropped the clutch, and it motored.
• 41:43
  Like, seriously, I made three or four positions in no time.
• 41:46
  It just so happened that when I went to tweak the wheel, the wheel comes straight off in my hand.
• 41:51
  Oh, my God.
• 41:52
  And I'm busily trying not to give positions away because I've just made ground.
• 41:56
  And I'm trying to – and it's a bit like – it's a bit – I had many of those days at the tyre service for my dad where you do a wheel alignment on a car and then you've done the wheel alignment.
• 42:06
  You haven't got the steering wheel quite right.
• 42:08
  So you'd have to go out onto the road.
• 42:11
  undo the steering wheel, pull the steering wheel off and tweak it back on.
• 42:13
  And then some days you can't get the wheel quite back on again.
• 42:15
  You know, it's a bit clumsy.
• 42:17
  Well, that's that on steroids.
• 42:19
  From blazing down to the first quarter, which I've crashed at twice.
• 42:22
  I'm about to arrive there without a steering wheel.
• 42:24
  One of the most frightening moments of my life.
• 42:26
  Finally, I was able to drag it back on the spline and got it on there.
• 42:30
  But that was a frightening moment.
• 42:32
  How serious were those international ambitions and how far did you get down the track with that?
• 42:36
  Look, I was very serious about it in those days.
• 42:38
  You know, after winning the Drivers' Championship and the Touring Car Championship and Bathurst all in 92, I thought the next step is definitely to go and have a red-hot go at making it into Formula 1.
• 42:50
  And Rothmans were great about it.
• 42:52
  You know, they funded a lot of it at the start, but mostly it was Fred and I.
• 42:56
  And, you know, those couple of drives at the end of 92, they were expensive.
• 43:00
  Like, they're basically 120 grand Australian...
• 43:03
  Each.
• 43:04
  That's a lot then.
• 43:04
  I mean, it's still a lot now.
• 43:06
  Well, it is.
• 43:07
  And the next year, effectively, was going to be roughly $1.8 or $2 million.
• 43:14
  And in those days, Greg, there was hardly any media coverage back here.
• 43:18
  There's certainly no vision from a race perspective or whatever.
• 43:22
  So you had to do it.
• 43:23
  really with no recognised value for an Australian sponsor.
• 43:28
  So Winfield were good to do that.
• 43:32
  We were trying to link up with Rothmans International in those days to try to do it.
• 43:36
  In fact, we had a million dollars sorted in the off-season to go and do it, but it wasn't enough.
• 43:43
  And we basically said, well, we can't do it.
• 43:45
  And it was...
• 43:46
  in that mad transition, probably the biggest transition of my career, but certainly for Fred, out of the back of Nissan into Holden or Ford, because we were sort of jockeying between Holden and Ford as to what we were going to do in the following year.
• 44:00
  So when the decision from CAMS to ban the GDR, when that come out and the change of regulations to what is now the Supercar Series, when that happened, it was such a pivotal time.
• 44:13
  So Fred and I pretty much, we sort of had to...
• 44:16
  had to use some discretion and get on with the Australian program.
• 44:20
  That year, 92, I mean, you would go on to win five touring car titles, six Bathursts, but, I mean, 92, mate, to do all of those things in the one year and, you know, your first, was that pretty special?
• 44:32
  Is that the one that kind of stands out in some ways?
• 44:35
  Yeah, look, I think it does.
• 44:36
  I think the biggest part about it is...
• 44:40
  recognizing the effort.
• 44:43
  I look back at it now and go, gee, I'm not sure whether you could do that again.
• 44:48
  You know, I think the... All of the commitments, all of the different kinds of racing, you think?
• 44:54
  Totally.
• 44:54
  And, you know, racing the same car on the same day at so many places...
• 45:00
  I mean, in the end, I know it was really good for me, but I also know how much effort and demand was on me at that point.
• 45:09
  It was massive.
• 45:10
  And the...
• 45:13
  The ability to get your brain around a really high-powered, no-air road, small tyre, big, powerful GDR that had a couple of hundred kilos of handicapping in those days, they were hard cars to drive.
• 45:26
  I remember having a real argument with Larry Perkins because he thought that we were fudging at Lakeside in the driver's briefing.
• 45:32
  He was giving Richo and I a spray about us not trying hard when we qualified a fair way down.
• 45:38
  And I remember giving him the offer of, you jump in this superstar and see how you go, because it was pretty volatile.
• 45:46
  It was a lot of politics and a lot of emotion around the dominance of that car in the day.
• 45:51
  And clearly that was all evident at Bathurst with the crowd response and the way the crowd reacted and the way that Jimmy reacted.
• 45:57
  But, yeah, it was quite...
• 46:01
  Quite a powerful year in that way.
• 46:03
  And at that time, I was the youngest touring car champion ever because that was Pete Gagan just prior to that.
• 46:08
  So, you know, I was only 25.
• 46:12
  So, you know, you look now at Scotty McLaughlin at 25, same thing.
• 46:15
  You know, great memories, but I also recognised just how hard it was.
• 46:21
  Tell me more about that Bathurst podium because it's been spoken about a lot over the years.
• 46:26
  I can remember being a young bloke under the podium as that happened that day and then a current affair the night after.
• 46:35
  Krompo kind of came out and I think he was a bit wound up by the crowd as well.
• 46:40
  I think he gave them the salute, didn't he?
• 46:43
  Didn't help.
• 46:43
  Didn't help.
• 46:44
  He certainly didn't help.
• 46:46
  He gave him the bird.
• 46:47
  Yeah.
• 46:47
  Yeah, so that didn't help.
• 46:50
  And it was an emotional race because, you know, Denny Holm, 1967 world champion, passed away that day.
• 46:57
  And Jimmy Richards knew that.
• 46:59
  People had told him prior to him getting in the car for that next stint that Denny had passed away.
• 47:07
  And obviously Jim was good mates with Denny.
• 47:09
  Yeah.
• 47:10
  And it was such a wild day, Rusty.
• 47:12
  I mean, you know, we talk about, you know, rain outs and bad conditions, but man, was that bad that day.
• 47:18
  Like that was just hosing with rain and it was, it rained so hard.
• 47:24
  At one stage, I couldn't even see where the safety car was.
• 47:27
  I actually ran into the back of the safety car in the race.
• 47:30
  You're doing almost the same speed as we do now.
• 47:32
  So, you know, you're doing almost 300 kilometres an hour and couldn't see a car length in front of you.
• 47:36
  Like, it was seriously wild.
• 47:38
  So to have what happened happen, meaning, you know, was only the rules, you know, I mean, the...
• 47:46
  The red flag had come out.
• 47:48
  You know, five or six cars were all parked in the fence up there.
• 47:50
  And Jimmy was on slicks.
• 47:52
  So Neil had actually come in.
• 47:54
  He was driving with Anders Olsen.
• 47:55
  Neil had come in and put wets on.
• 47:57
  And Jimmy had to hold for another lap.
• 47:58
  So Richard was caught then on slicks.
• 48:00
  He'd come out of the cutting and up around the little kink and just went straight in the fence on the left-hand side.
• 48:07
  The rivers of water running down the hill.
• 48:11
  And he was just so despondent.
• 48:12
  You know, I'll always remember his face when he'd come down.
• 48:16
  one of the medical cars brought him down.
• 48:18
  And there was a lot of conjecture at that point.
• 48:20
  And obviously the red flag had come out and there was everyone speculating as to what had just unfolded.
• 48:26
  And Jim really wasn't concerned about any of that at the time.
• 48:29
  He was, you know, he was white-faced and sombre and, you know, obviously disappointed as to what had happened.
• 48:34
  But it didn't... Like, he wasn't hurt, but he was really hurt by what had gone on.
• 48:38
  And then...
• 48:40
  And then the elation, it turned, he couldn't have got two bigger... Polar opposites.
• 48:47
  Polar opposites.
• 48:48
  It was this distraught figure who then in a nanosecond was told that he's the winner of the race.
• 48:55
  And I'm shaking hands with him and the team's erupted and the whole thing.
• 48:59
  But when we got to the next bit, which was obviously the podium, it was...
• 49:04
  It was weird because Neil's car's parked out the front pristine and Dick Johnson's car's parked out the front pristine.
• 49:13
  Dick had conveniently forgotten that he won the race in similar circumstances, you know, 10 years prior.
• 49:18
  So he'd conveniently forgotten the rule.
• 49:22
  And so Neil gives them the bird.
• 49:25
  No, that didn't go down well.
• 49:28
  Dick's given them a spray that they should have won because the car's pristine.
• 49:33
  And then by the time Richard and I got out there, they were far from happy.
• 49:36
  They were far from happy.
• 49:37
  And, you know, you've heard me say this before, but the back story is that I started to fill my pockets
• 49:43
  I went to the bar, and we both got the twoies Top Gun jackets, and I started to fill my pockets with beer cans.
• 49:48
  And Richard goes, mate, what are you doing escaping?
• 49:51
  And I said, well, I'm going to throw a few back.
• 49:54
  And he went, no, no, no, no, don't do that, don't do that.
• 49:57
  And he said, oh, handle it, don't worry.
• 49:58
  He said, do not do that.
• 50:00
  I'll speak, don't you, that's it, right?
• 50:02
  So, because he could tell how volatile I was by then.
• 50:04
  Then we walked out, and the reaction was just incredible.
• 50:07
  Like, it was so bad, you know, for a sporting contest, to have the crowd react like that.
• 50:12
  on one of the most dangerous days of all time, you reckon that you'd just basically applaud the winner and, you know, celebrate what was a pretty wild day.
• 50:20
  In the end, you know, history tells us that wasn't the case.
• 50:23
  And then when he's called them a pack of arseholes, oh, my God, it was on for young and old.
• 50:27
  It was raining beer cans and, man, it was bad.
• 50:30
  You were a bit shocked when you looked at him, weren't you?
• 50:33
  I was shocked.
• 50:34
  Well, you know, he's very calm.
• 50:35
  I mean, you don't get the title of Gentleman Jim.
• 50:38
  for no reason.
• 50:38
  So he's normally a very, very calm guy.
• 50:41
  But he was really affected by that reaction, you know, because in the end it was very much a portrayal of Jim's sporting endeavours, you know.
• 50:51
  Jim...
• 50:53
  loves and continues to love car racing, one of the best drivers of all time, on a day where, you know, his mate had passed away and all the things, all the emotion around all that.
• 51:04
  And I think, you know, in the end, he was just disappointed by what should have been a really momentous occasion turned into a disaster.
• 51:15
  And he gave him a spray, and I reckon he'd do it again tomorrow.
• 51:20
  The fortunate thing for him is that 10 years later we were able to win the race together and he called them a pack of beautiful, wonderful people.
• 51:26
  You're a pack of wonderful people.
• 51:27
  So he was able to, I think, get back on their side.
• 51:34
  More with Mark Scaife in a moment.
• 51:38
  Rally champion Molly Taylor is from a family of proper car lovers, competitors and collectors.
• 51:45
  I spoke to her in a workshop surrounded by Citroëns, Subarus, a rare BMW M3 and one special Audi Quattro.
• 51:54
  Yeah, it was actually the first one that was ever brought into the country.
• 51:57
  It was brought in by Audi for the motor show, and Kerry Packer saw it and basically said, I want it and don't take it home.
• 52:04
  And since then, it's had two owners, Kevin Bartlett.
• 52:07
  He looked after the car for Kerry and then had it, and we, being rally friends, found out about it through him and bought it off him.
• 52:14
  So we were very, very lucky to come across the gem.
• 52:17
  Listen to the full episode with Molly Taylor here on Rusty's Garage.
• 52:29
  Regenerative braking, an energy recovery mechanism using the vehicle's momentum to recover energy which slows a vehicle by converting its kinetic energy into a form which can either be used immediately or stored until needed.
• 52:41
  Look, just Google it.
• 52:43
  It's pretty complex.
• 52:44
  I want to just focus for people that follow the podcast for a moment on GTR.
• 52:52
  Where was the first time you drove it?
• 52:54
  I think it arrived mid-1990 for memory, didn't it?
• 52:56
  Where was the first time you drove it and what were your first impressions of this legendary car?
• 53:01
  Yeah, well the first car arrived as a test car, which is basically a Nismo car, and it was as rough as guts.
• 53:08
  Like seriously, everybody raves about how good those cars were in the day.
• 53:12
  I mean, fortunately, after millions of dollars and lots of man hours, we were able to make them good.
• 53:18
  In fact, the Australian cars were the best variants of GDRs in the world by a long way, not by a little bit, but by a long way.
• 53:25
  So the first car arrived, a test car.
• 53:27
  As you said, it was mid-1990, and we went to Winton with it first.
• 53:32
  And both Richard and I, we were surprised immediately with its traction as a four-drive car, and you could program...
• 53:41
  more and less and different types of programming.
• 53:43
  So it was a real technology car, you know, four-wheel steer, four-wheel drive, twin turbo, you know, everything you could possibly imagine on what was the best device.
• 53:56
  You know, that was, from a Group A standpoint, that was the best touring car in the world of the day and had won everything around the world.
• 54:04
  So that was the first foray.
• 54:06
  What were they like to drive and what were the little nuances like with them?
• 54:09
  I mean, particularly after you detailed before the previous car and the difficulties you'd encountered trying to finesse that, and then all of a sudden this arrives, okay, with a lot of work to do.
• 54:19
  The mark that you and Gibson made internationally with the machine is super impressive.
• 54:24
  But what were they like to race to drive?
• 54:27
  Well, I...
• 54:29
  Overall, they were basically similar levels of power to today's supercars, but with a smaller tyre and with little or no aero.
• 54:41
  They probably had lift.
• 54:42
  I mean, we didn't know, but they definitely had no aero.
• 54:45
  You know, they sort of didn't...
• 54:47
  nothing worked from an aero perspective on the car.
• 54:49
  So overall, in the fast corners, they were hard cars to drive.
• 54:53
  In the slow corners, their traction was remarkable, and that was sort of part of which circuits were easy.
• 54:59
  You know, places like Malala or Emery Park, Oran Park were similar.
• 55:04
  So the places that the car just come out of slow corners, like a rocket ship.
• 55:08
  Wellington, for instance, in New Zealand, my God, it was just a jet around there.
• 55:12
  You know, we had almost 700 horsepower in qualifying.
• 55:15
  Yeah.
• 55:16
  in Wellington and it was a wild, wild device.
• 55:20
  But Jim and I, we had to change our style.
• 55:24
  So the way to get the best from the car was to shorten the corner radiuses and to make those cars come off the corner straight.
• 55:33
  So you had to optimise the traction.
• 55:35
  So you break the car as deep as you could possibly break it.
• 55:39
  We used to call it arrow.
• 55:40
  So we'd arrow the car towards the corner, turn it in, minimise the corner radius, and then turn it back on itself almost to straighten the exit, and they'd fire out of corners unbelievably.
• 55:50
  the art around what you did in the slow stuff compared to what you did in the fast stuff, because, you know, I promise you the top of the hill at Bathurst.
• 55:57
  I mean, I was talking to Sean Seamer, um, from super cars, uh, the other day and he said, you know, one of the best laps that he loved was the 1991 qualifying lap for pole position at Bathurst, because you can see how much work you're doing with the car because they were hard cars to drive.
• 56:13
  And that, uh, that was one of the things that, you know, we got a lot of fun out of, um, through the course of that period, you know, we had, uh,
• 56:19
  Great rivalry against each other, but we had a thoroughly enjoyable period of time.
• 56:26
  Fred talks about, and he did this very recently at a function I was with him at at Bathurst.
• 56:31
  Fred Gibson talks about having this kind of unwritten rule for you and Jimmy that if there was any damage to the car, you repaid the crew with cases of beer.
• 56:42
  So what happened when you went to Adelaide that year and recount for us the conversation that Fred Gibson had with Jimmy Richards?
• 56:49
  So classic.
• 56:50
  I mean, to disincentivise us, meaning if we calm us down, stop running into blokes especially, even from HR 31 days, we come up with this rule that if you punch the headlight out of it or whatever, you had to buy a case of beer for the boys.
• 57:06
  So that was sort of the unwritten rule within the joint.
• 57:09
  As we went into GDR land...
• 57:12
  Jimmy and I were both trying to beat each other at Adelaide, and I went on to the back straight, which is where Micah Hackenden had that big crash.
• 57:19
  It was basically on to Quettaville Terrace.
• 57:22
  And I rode up onto the exit kerb, and it broke the bottom out of the wheel, turned the car straight over on its roof at about 180km, and whilst it's skiing along on its roof, you know, the interesting thing was, as hard as I pressed the brake, I still didn't slow down.
• 57:36
  So it fires into the fence, going hard, spins back around, ends up in the middle of the racetrack.
• 57:43
  And fortunately, Colin Bond and Peter Brock actually stopped.
• 57:45
  It was in qualifying.
• 57:46
  They actually stopped and helped me out because they couldn't open the car door.
• 57:50
  And it was on fire.
• 57:51
  So I couldn't get out.
• 57:52
  The master was yelling, it's on fire.
• 57:53
  I thought, oh, this is really handy.
• 57:55
  And it had rubbed along the road for so long that...
• 57:59
  It actually wore through the A pillar and started wearing into my helmet.
• 58:04
  So I got a big scratch marks, big flat section on the helmet going into the fence.
• 58:08
  So that knocked, you know, really knocked me about.
• 58:11
  But I was parked upside down and Fred immediately, he didn't see me come back around.
• 58:15
  So he radios and then it's red flagged and he radios to Jimmy.
• 58:21
  He said, Scafie, where's Scafie?
• 58:22
  Have you seen Scafie?
• 58:24
  And Jimmy says, yeah, yeah, he's rolled over, coming out of the back straight.
• 58:28
  And Freddie said, what's the car like?
• 58:31
  He said, I think he owes the boys a small bottle shop.
• 58:35
  So, yeah, the gag continued, but it was far from funny in those days.
• 58:40
  I think I spotted one of the Winfield cars maybe in the Lynne Fox or Fox collection.
• 58:45
  Did you keep one for a time?
• 58:46
  Is that right?
• 58:47
  Well, we did for a farewell, and part of Lindsay Fox actually buying the Nissan factory of the day was that he wanted to buy a GDR, and that was actually the car that I won the Touring Cup Championship with.
• 58:58
  So Lindsay's got one, which we used just recently for the Bathurst Hall of Fame for Legends Lane, and we were able to get the Foxes to...
• 59:07
  to deliver the car up to Bathurst and have it there on site, which is fantastic.
• 59:10
  I mean, it's a really traditional, beautiful-looking car.
• 59:13
  And a lot of...
• 59:14
  If you have a look at the attention to detail and the way those cars were prepared, it's a real testament to everyone at Gibson Motorsport of the day to do what they did.
• 59:23
  I don't want to spend too much time talking about crashes, mate, but one that springs to mind, of course, is in the VP Commodore in pre-season testing at Eastern Creek, what we now know as Sydney Motorsport Park in 1995.
• 59:34
  You'd won another title the year before.
• 59:37
  What happened that day and how much did that crash knock you around?
• 59:42
  Yeah, so it was a bit weird because 93, so we've just got to go back just a little bit.
• 59:49
  So 93, we had to convert everything we owned to whatever it was going to be fought or hold.
• 59:54
  And there was a lot of negotiation around how all that happened.
• 59:57
  We ended up obviously going to Holden.
• 1:00:00
  And for anyone that wants to see great racing, you should get on YouTube and have a look at the first race mooting of the championship at Amaru Park.
• 1:00:08
  It was one of the toughest, wildest races of all time.
• 1:00:12
  And it was everyone spearing into each other.
• 1:00:13
  And in the end, it was Glenn Seaton, John Bauer, myself on the podium.
• 1:00:18
  But it was a cracking race, one of the best races I've ever been involved in.
• 1:00:22
  And we worked really hard through the course of that year to get to a point where the car was developed properly for 94 and we were able to come out and win the championship in 94, which the first time for 14 years that Holden had won the championship, the last time was 1980 with Peter Brock.
• 1:00:37
  So Holden were totally wrapped with us and the whole thing.
• 1:00:39
  And we went into 95 going to the later model car and doing a heap more testing with Yokohama.
• 1:00:47
  And we were actually on that day doing wet weather tyre testing.
• 1:00:52
  And the wet weather tyre testing, I was blueing with Yokohama because their first batch or their first wet weather tyres were actually pretty good.
• 1:01:00
  And I kept on saying to them, you've got the compounding wrong, and within two or three laps they go away so severely that we can't, they're just not competitive.
• 1:01:11
  So they put a huge amount of effort into getting a new tyre done.
• 1:01:15
  As it turned out on that day, it wasn't really just light rain, it was actually raining pretty heavily through the course of the day.
• 1:01:21
  To be perfectly honest, I was on about my third or fourth run for tyres, and I arrived at Turn 1 on all that drag surface.
• 1:01:30
  Used to be a old drag strip as well, didn't it?
• 1:01:31
  Yeah, and they had that surface solution on the road, which is just like ice.
• 1:01:36
  And I arrived down there, turned it in, and it bolted, and I have no memory.
• 1:01:41
  from the time that I lost control to the time that I woke up in Westmead Hospital.
• 1:01:46
  So it ended up making contact with the concrete barriers at about 200k, you know, totally destroyed the car, broke the seat mounts off.
• 1:01:56
  I was actually sitting in the back of the car.
• 1:02:00
  My eyes had toe in and the whole thing I wasn't knocked out, obviously.
• 1:02:04
  But I broke a vertebra and broke a couple of ribs.
• 1:02:10
  And I had to miss the first race meeting of the championship, which was at Sandown.
• 1:02:17
  And the next one was at Tasmania.
• 1:02:19
  And I made my comeback there.
• 1:02:20
  But yeah, it was far and away the biggest crash I had in my career.
• 1:02:24
  You talked about resilience very recently at a function I was at with you and how motor racing teaches you that.
• 1:02:33
  The end of that tobacco sponsorship period and then kind of the scaling back of what Gibson Motorsport were doing from the absolute heights of, you know, factory-ness and operation and the success that you then had moving into Holden.
• 1:02:46
  Those are tough career moments, mate, but you, I imagine, learnt a lot at that time.
• 1:02:52
  Look, I certainly did.
• 1:02:53
  And, I mean, what a lot of people don't know is that I'd had quite a lot of conversations with John Crennan and Tom Walkinshaw about going to HRT.
• 1:03:03
  I could have gone to HRT a lot earlier.
• 1:03:08
  And for lots of reasons, I was...
• 1:03:10
  I was almost compelled to stay at Gibson's, although we were downscaling.
• 1:03:15
  I felt a sense of loyalty and I, you know, 1995 Bathurst, for instance, really was a pivotal time.
• 1:03:22
  I had to make up my mind whether I was going to TWR with John, and then John Crannon.
• 1:03:29
  I mean, I've got a magnificent rapport with him.
• 1:03:34
  I've learnt so much from him.
• 1:03:37
  And he was trying...
• 1:03:40
  I met him at his beach house down at Portsea in 94.
• 1:03:45
  I met Tom and John at a Sydney hotel in 94.
• 1:03:54
  I had various meetings with them again in 95.
• 1:03:56
  And pretty much...
• 1:03:58
  the plan behind the scenes was for me to go and join Brock in 96.
• 1:04:04
  But because Bathurst and the contract that I had with, with Winfield pretty much required because I was signed in as, as was Jim, we were actually part of the contract with Winfield and we didn't want anything to break that contract.
• 1:04:17
  So I ended up, I stayed through the course of 95 and at Bathurst that year, I don't know whether you remember, but at Bathurst that year,
• 1:04:25
  we were scheduled to make three stops, one full stop less than everybody else.
• 1:04:29
  So we were leading the race and we're going to make one less stop.
• 1:04:33
  We were going to win that race by a mile.
• 1:04:35
  In fact, I'd almost lapped Larry Perkins when it broke a tail shaft coming onto the main straight, onto Conrad straight.
• 1:04:42
  So the car was so superior to everybody else's car.
• 1:04:45
  And we had the best fuel economy, the best engine pace, everything.
• 1:04:49
  Every single facet of that program smashed the field.
• 1:04:52
  And at that race meeting, it was a total dominance.
• 1:04:57
  And what people didn't really know, obviously, was all that, you know, it was a massive amount of effort to have that, you know, level of technical supremacy in those days.
• 1:05:06
  So by the time then I got to the end of 95 and Freddie and I, you know, we were really struggling that whole thing about Australian sport being sort of placed in a chaotic period of cricket and rugby league and AFL and car racing, it was $110 million Australian that was taken out of Australian sport.
• 1:05:25
  Um, and, uh, overnight, you know, we went to having white cars with no sponsor and,
• 1:05:32
  And it was profoundly the most difficult time of my career.
• 1:05:36
  Like, it was a time when we had more than 40 people and we went back to having seven or eight people and we were all multitasking and we were all doing different jobs and we couldn't afford to... You know, in some ways, you know, they're really hard, sad stories around, you know, people's families and not being able to keep people employed.
• 1:05:53
  And, you know, that was a really difficult time.
• 1:05:56
  So by the end of...
• 1:05:58
  That 96 period, John had kept on making inquiry and as it turned out, I joined Brock for his 97 retirement couple of races and that was sort of the start of my HRT involvement.
• 1:06:14
  Were there some good mentors during that period for you, mate?
• 1:06:16
  I mean, you and I have worked with an old boss at Channel 10, David White.
• 1:06:20
  He was among them, I guess, that you've dealt with over time.
• 1:06:22
  They're probably important people that have helped along the way.
• 1:06:26
  Look, I've been really lucky like that, Greg.
• 1:06:28
  I mean, one of my best mates is Craig Kelly, who, you know, he was an elite AFL player and a really good business person, but a great mate.
• 1:06:39
  He was drafted across to Melbourne in the late 80s when I'd first come down to Melbourne from Sydney.
• 1:06:45
  So we hooked up, you know, very early on and our sons were born, you know, very similar times.
• 1:06:49
  We were six months apart and, you know, we got on really well.
• 1:06:52
  So Ned's always been a real sounding board player.
• 1:06:56
  I often say that I manage him more than he manages me, but that's another story.
• 1:07:00
  And then people like David White, I used to call those blokes the Life Committee.
• 1:07:05
  Whenever I had something going, I'd always sit down over a thousand beers and get Ned and David White to give me some counsel.
• 1:07:13
  And probably John Crennan become part of that too.
• 1:07:17
  As I went into HRT, that whole evolution of...
• 1:07:22
  of going in there and replacing Brock was a big part of my career and obviously something that John was always very keen to get me to come on side and to be part of that team.
• 1:07:32
  So yeah, there were very interesting periods in that transition.
• 1:07:37
  That was the team then, the Holden Racing team, to be with.
• 1:07:40
  Great period for you.
• 1:07:41
  mate, from VT Commodore to then VX.
• 1:07:44
  Is there a favourite race or moment for you?
• 1:07:49
  And is there a car that you have a soft spot for in that period?
• 1:07:54
  Look, there's lots, Greg.
• 1:07:56
  I mean, that was just a sensational period.
• 1:07:59
  And a lot of it come from the rivalry that I had with Lowndes.
• 1:08:03
  I mean, you know...
• 1:08:05
  When I watch Shane Van Gisburgh and Vessas Winkup now, I think similar things.
• 1:08:09
  I think when you have two people so desperate to beat each other, it lifts everybody.
• 1:08:16
  And that was a very big part of why we were going so well.
• 1:08:22
  So then when Lowndes left and went to Ford, obviously I was sort of the mainstay and Jason Bright arrived.
• 1:08:29
  So we...
• 1:08:31
  You know, we had just some cracking times.
• 1:08:33
  And I think probably there's a couple of drives.
• 1:08:37
  The drive from last at Clipsal in 2000, from last on the grid in the rain to win was probably one of my best drives.
• 1:08:45
  It was, you know, that was a really unbelievable day.
• 1:08:48
  And probably as a car with a soft spot that links me back to the Richo thing is winning Bathurst that year.
• 1:08:55
  To win the championship in 2002 with, you know,
• 1:09:00
  Arguably one of my best mates.
• 1:09:03
  And for us to win the race and the championship in the one year was pretty powerful.
• 1:09:10
  You talked about you and Craig Lowndes just helping to lift the whole operation.
• 1:09:14
  The pair of you just about sent the team boss, Jeff Craig.
• 1:09:19
  It was a bit of a test for Geoffrey.
• 1:09:21
  It was a bit of a test.
• 1:09:22
  And he's such a funny guy because he's such an emotional bloke that...
• 1:09:29
  On the good days, you know, he's got the big Cheshire cat smile and, you know, he loves the – he's a very, very good winner, Geoffrey, but he's a very poor, very average loser.
• 1:09:39
  And on the days where he and I were battling and sometimes there might have been a bit of panel rubbing or whatever, that was a bit of a test for Geoff.
• 1:09:49
  And because he's so emotional, his reactions were fantastic.
• 1:09:52
  And we always knew that when his reactions were like that, then we were getting the better of him.
• 1:09:55
  So it was – Not at you.
• 1:09:57
  traded on that much.
• 1:09:58
  We did, we did.
• 1:09:59
  Definitely, definitely we did trade on that.
• 1:10:01
  That's a very good terminology.
• 1:10:02
  That's exactly what it was.
• 1:10:04
  But again, it was two blokes really trying hard about each other and we had a great time.
• 1:10:10
  Sport is built on many things.
• 1:10:13
  Rivalries are one.
• 1:10:16
  You're battling Marcus Ambrose for the title in 2003, and a flashpoint in the sport happens at Eastern Creek with his then-teammate, your now TV colleague, Russell Ingle.
• 1:10:27
  I think some of the headlines were race rage, you're in the wall, you get out, he swerves at you, you've got the fist clenched.
• 1:10:34
  I mean, it was...
• 1:10:36
  heavy mate but it underscored because you were battling for the championship how much it meant to you and and it was a tremendous period for the for the sport wasn't it i mean it not a moment that that some might argue um you know relative to a championship win is a tougher one to deal with but i mean if everyone was talking about it weren't they yeah and look i i think i
• 1:10:58
  Clearly it was the biggest story in town at the end of 2003, but I think to put it in context, you've got to go back almost a full year and try to understand the...
• 1:11:13
  sorts of situation and the landscape because of TWR's receivership at the end of 2002.
• 1:11:19
  I'd just signed a new deal to drive for TWR and almost within a week of that deal, John Crannan and I were driving along together.
• 1:11:30
  We'd just been to a Hugo Boss function and we were driving on together.
• 1:11:34
  And John was, you know, arguably one of Tom's real lieutenants.
• 1:11:40
  In fact, I would argue the person, the single, the person that made the business so great in Australia.
• 1:11:47
  You know, he's just an extraordinary race team come road car business.
• 1:11:51
  And that, you know, really was testament to John's expertise and his industry now and his marketing savvy.
• 1:11:59
  But...
• 1:12:00
  Um, he was, he was really concerned that this was going to be, you know, a pivotal time based on Tom's debt from Formula One and all the other projects that he had going of the day.
• 1:12:10
  So as it turned out, they went to receivership and then there was this mad, um, state of flux for everybody as to what was going to happen with Holden Racing Team.
• 1:12:20
  And, uh...
• 1:12:21
  there was a crew of senior executives from Holden who flew immediately to, uh, to the UK and, uh, via their legal people, Mallisons of the day, they were able, they were able to secure, um, the team from the receivers and basically separate the team from the other interests that, that Tom had.
• 1:12:45
  So there was this, this incredible sort of run of events and, uh,
• 1:12:51
  such a difficult period of time for everybody to get us going in 2003.
• 1:12:58
  And I, in the end, as a consequence of Holden's request, I ended up buying Holden Racing Team in the off-season.
• 1:13:06
  And a lot of it was really personal because I had so many key staff, you know, Robbie Starr, for instance, or Richard Holwell, who would –
• 1:13:15
  come up and say, you know, what's going on here?
• 1:13:18
  You know, they've all got mortgages, you know, they've got kids in school and all that stuff that, you know, we don't often think about in terms of the purity of car racing, but it's much more of a family concept and much more of a people's business than we give it credit in some ways, and that should never be lost on any of us in the industry.
• 1:13:37
  So I felt...
• 1:13:40
  a real level of compulsion almost to do the right thing by the business and and i negotiated with holden and to and to everyone's you know everyone was raving about them giving it to me and i know exactly what i paid for it and i and and uh and uh i bought it for 3.25 million dollars so it was a lot of money and and big risk and
• 1:14:02
  And there was a lot of changes that were being made as a consequence of what I actually bought because they set up Holden Motorsport, which time would tell was one of the biggest disasters of all time.
• 1:14:12
  So Holden Motorsport was a separate entity.
• 1:14:15
  I had Holden Racing Team.
• 1:14:17
  The Kellys had the Kmart team.
• 1:14:20
  And Key's Wheel went off with the PWR outfit.
• 1:14:23
  So there's this mad state of flux around the whole commerciality of whether that team environment could be sustained, it could survive.
• 1:14:32
  It was a terrible time for Tom.
• 1:14:35
  It was a terrible time for John Crennan, who was trying to keep it all intact.
• 1:14:41
  There was Project Blueprint that was just coming in, so we had to change a heap of stuff on the cars.
• 1:14:47
  We changed the engine.
• 1:14:48
  We changed all the front suspension layout of the cars.
• 1:14:51
  And I come out and won Clipsal.
• 1:14:53
  And it was a great battle.
• 1:14:56
  I battled all weekend with Ambrose and it was seriously, you know, really good race meeting.
• 1:15:02
  And I felt on that Sunday, it was one of my best drives.
• 1:15:04
  It was actually my wife's birthday.
• 1:15:07
  So I went across the line and said, have your birthday, Tone.
• 1:15:10
  And the whole thing was, whew, like how do we get away with that?
• 1:15:14
  There was a level of chaos in the background.
• 1:15:16
  You didn't know what to do at all.
• 1:15:17
  The enormity of the whole thing to have changed the car so dramatically, to have got everything in place, to settle everybody down, to keep everybody employed, have all our deals done, have all this done in the background.
• 1:15:30
  I mean, seriously, if there's a driver in the field that could have, that could today think about how complex that is, that was just extraordinary, extraordinary and, you know,
• 1:15:44
  Fortunately, with a big tick, we were able to win the first one.
• 1:15:47
  So there was a lot of drama through the year, and the car wasn't that good because the new engine was on the dyno, not too bad, but it had installed power issues, so airbox issues, temperature issues, heaps of stuff that we weren't really up to speed with.
• 1:16:03
  And we weren't as competitive as we should have been at lots of places.
• 1:16:06
  So, you know, Ambrose is raving about how good they're going.
• 1:16:08
  They put pressure on us.
• 1:16:09
  You know, we had 1,000 issues going with...
• 1:16:12
  with the team and the car.
• 1:16:14
  And Peter Hannenberger, who, you know, was the managing director of Holden of the day, wanted me to use the latest engine.
• 1:16:19
  So he basically requested me to not use the Chev engine, but to go back to the Holden Motorsport engine or to go to the new Holden Motorsport engine to ensure that we were, you know, went on Sunday, sell on Monday stuff, that we were being market relevant.
• 1:16:32
  So, and Hannenberger was fantastic.
• 1:16:35
  He was really, really supportive of everything we did.
• 1:16:40
  So we did all the right things.
• 1:16:42
  And I ended up a wind sand down and then we go to Bathurst and had a drama at Bathurst and by the time we got to the end of the year, it was basically one for young and old to win the championship.
• 1:16:51
  And there were three of us that could win and then, you know, in this mad run back through the field, I passed Ingle down at, it's turn eight now, but it was turn nine.
• 1:17:04
  And then he, you know, fired me in the fence.
• 1:17:07
  at that point in my career, I have never had a worse moment.
• 1:17:12
  I felt like all the things that we'd worked for for the year were gone, that it was an unfair, really unsportsmanlike act.
• 1:17:26
  And honestly, I've never been so angry.
• 1:17:28
  I just, oh, man.
• 1:17:30
  Lucky I didn't get back to the pitney earlier because all I wanted was to fight somebody.
• 1:17:33
  And...
• 1:17:35
  It was an unbelievable day.
• 1:17:37
  I remember it very, very clearly and it was a disaster.
• 1:17:43
  For all of the backstory reasons, people would not have understood the risk and the level of workload and the demands and the things that had taken place in the background.
• 1:17:56
  It was just a tumultuous, dramatic season for us.
• 1:18:01
  Now you work with him.
• 1:18:03
  Have you properly buried the hatchet?
• 1:18:05
  We see some fun stuff on socials and in the broadcast at times, but that's a major point in the history of the sport, mate.
• 1:18:11
  Have you properly let it go, the both of you?
• 1:18:13
  Oh, well, he's had to apologise.
• 1:18:14
  He had to apologise with his T-shirt.
• 1:18:16
  He didn't like having to wear the T-shirt recently where he says, sorry for firing her into the fence.
• 1:18:21
  Look, yeah, we've moved on, but, you know, and time does heal those things, but, you know, still when I see the incident, it still winds my clock.
• 1:18:30
  You went into detail to talk about the ownership before there and to do that as a...
• 1:18:35
  I think even Glenn Seaton said to me in a previous podcast, it's an enormously difficult task to be at the peak of your powers, trying to win championships in Bathurst and trying to run an organisation like that.
• 1:18:46
  With the benefit of time and looking back on it, you probably can't do it now that you've got to be in that neutral position as a broadcaster, but would you do it again?
• 1:18:57
  Look, I would do it again, and I don't regret doing it when I did it.
• 1:19:04
  My biggest regret was that I probably shouldn't have tried to do everything.
• 1:19:08
  You know, I probably should have appointed – I put Craig Kelly on to be the CEO, but I was probably a bit late with that.
• 1:19:17
  And what people didn't also know, that I tried to recruit John Crennan across the run-up for me, and he really couldn't as a consequence of the HSB business in the day.
• 1:19:25
  So...
• 1:19:27
  So if I had to do it again, my biggest learning would have been to have delegated and to have taken the managerial responsibilities away.
• 1:19:39
  You know, you've got to write lots and lots of money in commercial sponsorship and partnerships.
• 1:19:48
  You've got a massive...
• 1:19:52
  demand as the official factory team of Holden.
• 1:19:55
  You know, you are their factory team.
• 1:19:56
  I would have to go in on a Monday or a Tuesday and make presentations as to how we performed.
• 1:20:01
  And people think, and it's one of the great things, people think that, you know, you're a Holden employee so you own the team.
• 1:20:09
  You know, you've got this sort of sense of responsibility around that factory status.
• 1:20:14
  The supporters loved it so much.
• 1:20:15
  You know, we had 5,000 members, you know, I mean.
• 1:20:18
  The relationship, I would argue, is still world's best practice in terms of the tripartite style arrangement between Holden and HSV and HRT in terms of that joint at the hip scenario we had going, which was the brainchild of Crenna.
• 1:20:35
  So for all the reasons and all of the stuff, it made sense.
• 1:20:39
  But the biggest learnings would certainly be to take...
• 1:20:45
  more of a backseat position in terms of the day-to-day runnings and for it to have not shortened my driving career probably.
• 1:20:53
  I mean, the demands around shortening my driving career were consequential to all of those external business demands around being able to write enough sponsorship and being able to operate, you know, a high-level team.
• 1:21:09
  Bloody hard.
• 1:21:10
  We've just come from, you know, Craig Lowndes stopping full-time driving in Newcastle, which is a major point in the history of the sport.
• 1:21:20
  Very difficult thing for someone like that to do.
• 1:21:22
  When you reached that moment, where were you and how difficult was it to make that call?
• 1:21:30
  So a couple of really significant things happened for me.
• 1:21:34
  I mean, I genuinely wasn't enjoying it as much as I should be.
• 1:21:38
  Had all that other stuff worn you down?
• 1:21:40
  For sure.
• 1:21:41
  I reckon if you make the analogy of a car and a fuel tank, you know, I was down below a quarter and I was getting to the red zone and wasn't,
• 1:21:52
  I wasn't thinking about it with the same level of passion as I should have been, and I wasn't enjoying it anywhere near as much.
• 1:22:00
  And it was for lots of reasons.
• 1:22:02
  It was not just around the demands of having to employ lots of people or the demands around the factory status from Holden.
• 1:22:09
  You know, Tom and I, and it really wasn't Tom and I, it was mostly Craig Wilson and I who were disputing financial things of those days and...
• 1:22:19
  It had quite a profound impact on...
• 1:22:23
  what I wanted to do, we had all these sort of legality issues around the team's licence agreement in the day and, you know, we were making presentations all the time to validate the structure that effectively Ray Borritt had put in as Holden Motorsport and then Tom come in and did a management agreement with Holden Motorsport.
• 1:22:46
  So that whole thing just escalated itself into a minefield of drama and...
• 1:22:51
  which I was sort of holding the bag given that I was the team's licence agreement holder and I was the one that was actually on the board of the day of the business.
• 1:23:01
  So I had to resign from the board and then, you know, legitimise the team's structure and stuff to be able to go and compete.
• 1:23:08
  So you think about all that unfolding whilst I'm supposed to be putting my helmet on and jumping in a car.
• 1:23:16
  I was far from operating at a level that I was happy with and, um,
• 1:23:20
  And even just silly things.
• 1:23:21
  I mean, my training in those days was basically a lapse of Collins Street.
• 1:23:25
  You know, I was spending the national debt on legal costs and justifying the team's existence based on the possible breach and the issues around whether the team could actually compete each weekend.
• 1:23:43
  And for the staff, you know, they'd say, mate, you've got to come to the debrief.
• 1:23:47
  I'd be back into Collins Street when I was supposed to be in the debrief.
• 1:23:51
  I mean, you know, they were really, really hard times.
• 1:23:54
  So, you know, and in essence, that was 10 years ago, I remember, after the...
• 1:24:01
  I think it might have been Bathurst where I went to the fence and made a mistake by myself.
• 1:24:04
  The car was a shit house and I made a mistake.
• 1:24:08
  Wink up and I were battling for the lead and I went into the Forest Elbow, locked a wheel and hit the fence on the outside.
• 1:24:14
  And I remember when I hit the fence then I thought, it's over and it's over, I'm done.
• 1:24:19
  So I spoke to Walkinshaw after that and...
• 1:24:23
  we decided on a timeline of me stepping away.
• 1:24:26
  And the whole thing around that in that period was then what am I going to do next, how that evolves into, you know, Tom and I had agreed on me being director of racing and going and running the race team stuff.
• 1:24:40
  So that was all sort of reasonably sane up until the point where we got to a stage where he had an option to buy me out and I had an option to buy him out and,
• 1:24:50
  And based on a bit of touch wooding, the GFC was coming.
• 1:24:58
  And, well, man, I was fortunate to sell it to him at a time when the automotive market in America went from 17 million units to nine.
• 1:25:10
  I mean, it was the biggest financial disaster ever.
• 1:25:13
  Probably in history, really.
• 1:25:15
  So that was always going to be hard as a factory team.
• 1:25:17
  So, yeah, there was a lot going on.
• 1:25:19
  I mean, Oran Park, you know, 10 years ago was the final full-time run.
• 1:25:25
  And that was pretty extraordinary times.
• 1:25:30
  Did you think about, you know, we're sitting here in your office chatting away and fantastic that you were able to pair with Craig Lowndes and co-drive to another Bathurst win for him.
• 1:25:40
  I mean, that must be coming, firing out of all that, coming through all that.
• 1:25:48
  That's good tonic, mate.
• 1:25:49
  You probably needed that, did you?
• 1:25:50
  Yeah, well, look, I did.
• 1:25:51
  And actually, James Henderson come and grab me, and he and Tim Miles and Greg Murphy had sort of conjured up a plan for me to go and drive with Murph in 2009.
• 1:26:01
  Jeff Grek was running the team.
• 1:26:02
  You know, there was a good little group of blokes that I knew.
• 1:26:05
  You put him there too, wasn't there?
• 1:26:06
  There was.
• 1:26:07
  It was good.
• 1:26:08
  And I had, you know, through the course of the year, you know, I did a lot of test driving in bits and pieces, so I actually liked it.
• 1:26:14
  I didn't feel like I'd been away, and I was sort of...
• 1:26:17
  I felt refreshed.
• 1:26:18
  I started in the media and I was driving in those couple of races.
• 1:26:22
  And the car was quite good.
• 1:26:25
  In fact, we arguably should have won Bathurst.
• 1:26:27
  We missed the safety car right at the end and we had an eight second lead over HRT at that stage.
• 1:26:32
  So Roland called me straight after Bathurst and said, what about coming and driving with Lounsey?
• 1:26:40
  So I said, yep, let's do that.
• 1:26:42
  So he sent me a contract.
• 1:26:43
  Within a week, we'd
• 1:26:44
  It was one of the easiest negotiations I've ever had.
• 1:26:47
  And within a week, I'd signed up to go and drive with Craig.
• 1:26:51
  So, you know, if you think about my career and say, you know, across the three decades, basically the time with Gibson Motorsport, the time with HRT, and then finally to finish off with Triple Eight, you know, I've been seriously blessed to have driven for the three best organisations in the history of the game.
• 1:27:08
  If people go back through YouTube or they go back through the broadcasts, they'll be able to pick up bits of radio chat where Robbie Starr's talking to you and he'd say, breathe, Mark, breathe.
• 1:27:20
  Were you really holding your breath?
• 1:27:22
  And was that a thing where they had to sort of tell you, hey, hey, take a breather here?
• 1:27:27
  Well, we'd sort of come up with a bit of a code to settle me down, and that was a good one.
• 1:27:33
  And if it was a volatile sort of key moment in the race or whatever, Robbie would get on that.
• 1:27:41
  But I used to say to him...
• 1:27:43
  he and Richard Holloway to Krusty and Rob all the time, just give me the breathe.
• 1:27:48
  And it was basically code to have a drink and actually settle down, like just to stay calm.
• 1:27:54
  And, you know, and it worked really well.
• 1:27:57
  You know, you look at what happened with Dave Reynolds at Bathurst.
• 1:28:00
  Yeah.
• 1:28:01
  Every time that they said that to me, it reminded me to have a drink and it reminded me just to let my hands go loose in the wheel and for me to have a bit of a deep breath and just to get my run around it.
• 1:28:10
  And they timed that properly so it wasn't in some mad, hectic area of the racetrack, but it was for a real reason and it absolutely worked.
• 1:28:19
  You're in broadcasting now.
• 1:28:20
  That's one of your main focuses.
• 1:28:22
  You've got other things, I know.
• 1:28:23
  But, I mean, I've been fortunate to work with you guys in that.
• 1:28:27
  It's an award-winning team, and it's very much like a race team in many respects.
• 1:28:31
  I mean, there are some ultra-competitive people in the background, people that properly know motor racing, and they put their heart and soul, their lives into it, just like a race team.
• 1:28:41
  Is there anything else that you want to do beyond broadcasting?
• 1:28:44
  Could I imagine maybe Mark Scaife working perhaps at state or federal level for, you know, better road safety or for sporting things?
• 1:28:55
  Is that something that you perhaps aspire to one day?
• 1:28:58
  Look, to be honest, I've probably done a bit of that through the course of time, and those things that I was doing for Channel 7 where we did the big road safety comparison with Europe and the way that they teach people to drive in Europe and specifically Germany, they've been really good things.
• 1:29:11
  You know, I actually really like that stuff that's sort of semi-away from car racing.
• 1:29:16
  You know, I've always had a theory that...
• 1:29:19
  You know, kids should actually have the same ethos around driving as they do if they go to the beach.
• 1:29:24
  You know, swimming between the flags is something that we all know.
• 1:29:28
  But the competency for kids learning to drive is something that, you know, I think we're... We're shy of the mark, aren't we?
• 1:29:35
  Totally derelict, you know, totally derelict.
• 1:29:37
  And the system around teaching those young people is part of, you know, a mandate that I've had for a long time.
• 1:29:42
  So, yeah, I've done a lot of that with government already.
• 1:29:44
  Yeah.
• 1:29:46
  We've just done this really big Brisbane Auto Mall, which is this precinct near the airport, which is basically, we've got 14 different brands and two and a half K test track in the middle of it, which is going to be fantastic.
• 1:30:01
  Obviously the track design stuff that I've been doing through the course of time has been excellent, started at Canberra and obviously finished up with things like Townsville and Newcastle.
• 1:30:10
  I want to just go back quickly to the point you made about the broadcast stuff because
• 1:30:14
  You know, you've lived it and you know the level of intensity around.
• 1:30:19
  In some ways, when the red light goes on with the camera, it's sort of a bit racy.
• 1:30:23
  It's sort of a bit, in terms of the similarity, it's a bit of the same anxiousness and the adrenaline, the thing that live TV creates for you.
• 1:30:33
  So it's actually, I'm not saying that it's...
• 1:30:37
  complete in the way that it responds and the way that it can fill those voids, but it does actually fill a competitive void.
• 1:30:44
  But one of the things that's really powerful in it is that, and Neil Crompton and I talk about it all the time with Larko, is that it's like you want for other TV networks to arrive at the track and compare yourself against them because that's actually what it's about.
• 1:31:00
  It's about actually doing your very, very best each weekend and...
• 1:31:05
  And we often say, and you've been there when we've been talking about it over the years, where you sort of want to say, well, if the Channel 9 and the Channel 7 bus turned up over there, what would they do?
• 1:31:17
  And to do the very best job is actually quite a competitive thing.
• 1:31:20
  So, you know, I've really enjoyed it.
• 1:31:23
  And again, it's the level of passion.
• 1:31:25
  You know, you'll like it.
• 1:31:27
  You know, Jesse Yates has been fantastic at Fox to actually have a genuine journalist view of the world.
• 1:31:34
  And then the rapport between the people that are on camera is fantastic.
• 1:31:37
  So, you know, I really value the level of effort and the people who are similar to us in terms of just wanting the best week in, week out.
• 1:31:48
  And that's very much a race team mentality.
• 1:31:51
  The automotive industry is going through really significant change.
• 1:31:53
  Obviously, Porsche in recent years has pushed ahead with Mission E. We've seen what Tesla have done.
• 1:31:59
  A significant other thing that you've done along the way is that the current car that we know in supercars, people love that V8 formula.
• 1:32:08
  As we move into the future, what in your mind is the right mix of new technologies while still savouring the thing that we love?
• 1:32:19
  Yeah, it's a really good question.
• 1:32:21
  And, Rusty, I reckon that's probably, if you said what are the three key things that the sport's got to do right now, the product plan is, I think, probably the key one.
• 1:32:33
  So like we did for Car of the Future, you've actually got to go and consider what is the next five to ten years of...
• 1:32:38
  Car company participation and what is the right balance of technology versus the DNA that we've got.
• 1:32:46
  Hard blend stuff.
• 1:32:47
  Well, yeah, we did so much work with Car of the Future.
• 1:32:50
  We did a huge amount of research.
• 1:32:51
  We did a huge amount of analysis around other car categories and racing categories around the world.
• 1:32:58
  And the big ticket thing for us is that basically we pitched between NASCAR and DTM, we basically put supercars.
• 1:33:07
  So one's massively technical, one's not so technical, but it does lots of racing and the racing quality with NASCAR.
• 1:33:13
  So how do we, you know, from an Australian version and from an Australian architecture standpoint, how do we make that successful?
• 1:33:20
  market relevant.
• 1:33:21
  How do we make car companies continue to use us as part of their key marketing platforms?
• 1:33:28
  And it's obviously fantastic for Holden to remain in the game with their new car, for Mustang to come back in, for Ford to be re-energised with that nameplate and that brand is going to be great.
• 1:33:40
  But it's also disheartening to see Nissan go away because of the 20 years that Ford
• 1:33:45
  they were missing four, based on the regulations, for them to come straight back in with four cars was tremendous validity for our game.
• 1:33:53
  So, yes, the absolute priority of product plan,
• 1:33:58
  then mixing it with your biggest customer because your biggest customer, take all the things away, it's your network TV deals.
• 1:34:06
  And the reality now, the biggest customer in the game is Fox.
• 1:34:10
  So you have to be able to have the best mixture of subscription TV and free-to-air.
• 1:34:16
  And then you have to let go and say, righto, what's the right event number?
• 1:34:21
  Because overwhelmingly the important part of how this business is working
• 1:34:28
  administered and valued is about sustainability.
• 1:34:32
  You know, the viability of the teams is integral to how this sport continues to create fans.
• 1:34:38
  You know, 165,000 people at Newcastle.
• 1:34:42
  I mean, it's a remarkable product.
• 1:34:46
  And to me, that product plan is key.
• 1:34:49
  It's fundamental to the future of the sport.
• 1:34:51
  A couple of things to finish.
• 1:34:53
  Favourite race car of all time for you that you've competed in?
• 1:34:57
  What's the one that you love the most?
• 1:35:00
  Favourites, the Golden Child, the car that we won, Clipsal and Bathurst in the championship a couple of times.
• 1:35:06
  That was a car I've got very, very fond memories with.
• 1:35:08
  What's in the Scaife garage right now?
• 1:35:12
  Well, I'm very tame these days.
• 1:35:14
  I actually just recently sold that car, so a collector's.
• 1:35:18
  That was the car that I kept.
• 1:35:21
  But, yeah, I've just recently sold it.
• 1:35:23
  So I'm very tame in terms of my collection right now.
• 1:35:27
  What about a daily driver?
• 1:35:28
  I'm actually in a SQ5 Audi at the moment, but that's mostly because I'm a, basically, I've gone from a factory driver to a factory school deliverer.
• 1:35:39
  So, yeah, so I drop my two girls to school each day and that's actually the most dangerous thing you can possibly do, I promise you.
• 1:35:47
  My God, it's like a Shanghai race.
• 1:35:50
  But it's, yeah, it's the most practical thing that I can use to get them around to school and take them off to the snow.
• 1:35:56
  I sincerely hope the girls give you a good Uber rating.
• 1:35:59
  Piece of road or racetrack that you most love.
• 1:36:02
  It can be a road trip.
• 1:36:03
  It can be a racetrack.
• 1:36:06
  I love the run-up Arthur's Seat, which is down at Mornington.
• 1:36:10
  So if you're ever down on the peninsula, which is obviously there's great golf courses and great wineries and great stuff down there.
• 1:36:17
  So on the way down to Sorrento and Portsea, when you drive along the freeway, you can take the alternate route and fire to the top of the hill.
• 1:36:26
  And that has been a bit of a racetrack over the years.
• 1:36:30
  What do you listen to when you drive and are the girls okay with Dad's choices?
• 1:36:34
  I don't get a choice.
• 1:36:35
  So my choices are just far and away yesterday's newspaper and they control it.
• 1:36:42
  Every single morning they take turns of saying which song they're going to go with so they have total control.
• 1:36:47
  We talked about licensing and driving standards before.
• 1:36:52
  Road habits that drive you mad, stuff you observe every day.
• 1:36:55
  Oh, my God.
• 1:36:56
  Well, the biggest one is the driving in the top lane, in the right-hand lane when they're not even doing the speed limit.
• 1:37:03
  That sends me off my bike.
• 1:37:05
  But there's lots of things now.
• 1:37:06
  I mean, I just – one of the things that interests me is that as a nation and as a country, we are a really polite group of people.
• 1:37:16
  You know, we've got great heritage and our social fabrics are fantastic.
• 1:37:20
  And all the things that we do, you know, we're all – I'm sure we're all proud –
• 1:37:23
  of the way that the country has evolved.
• 1:37:27
  But if you walk up to a lift or an elevator and you stand there and the door opens, it's everyone being courteous, you know, no, you go first, no, no, you go, no, no.
• 1:37:37
  And as soon as you get behind the wheel of a car, it's like a Jekyll and Hyde switch.
• 1:37:42
  It's like this level of madness that all the courtesy and the nice things go away.
• 1:37:48
  They're just gone.
• 1:37:49
  And if you compare that to Europe...
• 1:37:51
  If you go and drive in Italy or Germany or in France, the level of courtesy, the actual level of A competency, but the willingness for them to all drive together and to have a common place is magnitude multiplied massively to be better than what we've got.
• 1:38:11
  And it's very strange.
• 1:38:13
  Can't ever think or see you riding a motorbike.
• 1:38:16
  Is that the kind of thing Mark Scaife would entertain?
• 1:38:20
  I raced motocross a lot when I was a young bloke, and we had every series of YZ Yamaha bike through all the models.
• 1:38:27
  But Dad made a commitment with me because I think he thinks that I've always been slightly mad.
• 1:38:33
  He has always said that road bike land, no way.
• 1:38:37
  And we shook hands on it a long, long time ago, and I've been faithful ever since.
• 1:38:42
  Great stuff.
• 1:38:43
  Mate, it's been fantastic to walk down memory lane.
• 1:38:45
  Thank you so much.
• 1:38:45
  Five championships, six Bathurst wins, quarter of Australia medal and a swag of other.
• 1:38:50
  Very well-deserved recognition.
• 1:38:51
  Congratulations.
• 1:38:52
  Thank you.
• 1:38:53
  Thanks, Rusty.
• 1:38:56
  Cheers.
• 1:38:58
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 1:39:02
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 1:39:05
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 1:39:15
  Listener.