Latest / Rusty's Garage / Mark Larkham

Transcript

Mark Larkham · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:14
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:28
  I've done podcasts in workshops, at racetracks, cafes and hotel meeting rooms, but this is a first.
• 0:36
  I'm in the Queensland bush where my guest is right at home.
• 0:40
  Mark Larkham is a country boy through and through, a racer who discovered his insatiable love for the sport at a later age than most and now shares that passion and brilliant insights from the pit lane during the Supercars broadcasts.
• 0:55
  Larco's become a bit of a cult figure in the industry for doing things in his own style.
• 1:00
  You'll hear this throughout our chat, plus he's the one who wanted a yarn over a beer sitting on a couple of logs among the gum trees.
• 1:08
  Picture Outback Jack and the city slicker, a long way from pit lane.
• 1:15
  In terms of locations for podcast chats, this takes the cake.
• 1:19
  This is Australiana at its very best, mate.
• 1:21
  So it's been a little adventure just to get here.
• 1:24
  Trust a little change of underwear for you and here we are.
• 1:27
  Well, it is nice.
• 1:28
  I mean, I live in the bush.
• 1:29
  We love the bush.
• 1:30
  So why not come to a nice quiet spot?
• 1:32
  We might see a koala or a possum or that, you know, the red-throated warbler that Krompo and I wrestled over in Darwin all those years ago.
• 1:40
  It is you, mate, this kind of countryside, isn't it?
• 1:43
  It is, mate.
• 1:44
  I guess, how do I say it in a, not in a pretentious way, but I consider myself as a quintessential Aussie.
• 1:53
  I'm a very regular person.
• 1:56
  My friends are regular people and I really like that.
• 1:58
  So it's kind of weird that I end up working in an industry that's full of some of, well, not full of, that's unfair, but there's plenty of people that are different to that.
• 2:06
  It does attract those, I think, called wankers, aren't they?
• 2:10
  It does attract a few.
• 2:11
  Let's dial the clock back in terms of your racing career.
• 2:17
  the very definition of a late bloomer, I think, was it late teens, almost 20, that you decide to have a crack at racing?
• 2:25
  Am I right in saying there's no sort of real karting background either?
• 2:28
  Is that right?
• 2:28
  No, no.
• 2:29
  In fact, 19 and 20 is way early, mate.
• 2:31
  I think it was 24.
• 2:32
  Oh, wow.
• 2:33
  Yeah, yeah.
• 2:35
  And without boring to death with the story, I had a great love of motorsport living in Griffith.
• 2:44
  absolute fan of Alan Moffat and Dick Johnson.
• 2:49
  Always been a big Dick fan.
• 2:53
  And that was you laughing, not me.
• 2:58
  No, I have.
• 2:59
  I've been a big Dick Johnson fan, an Alan Moffat fan forever.
• 3:01
  So, yeah, people say I'm biased.
• 3:03
  Absolutely I'm biased.
• 3:04
  I've got forward blood in my veins.
• 3:08
  Late starter because, and this is the nice thing and I think why I enjoyed motor racing so much,
• 3:14
  Rusty, is that I did it because of the love of driving the car.
• 3:18
  Nothing else.
• 3:19
  There was nothing else to them.
• 3:20
  We lived in the bush.
• 3:22
  I was always paddock bashing.
• 3:23
  Always.
• 3:24
  So, you know, I had old cars.
• 3:26
  Just a Nick Mum's car.
• 3:27
  And we just paddock bashed all the time.
• 3:29
  Mm-hmm.
• 3:30
  and just loved vehicle control, controlling the car, putting it to its limits.
• 3:35
  And so my racing crew was born out of nothing other than that.
• 3:39
  And I think that's a good thing.
• 3:40
  So it wasn't because my dad was in it.
• 3:42
  My dad had nothing to do with it, or family, or uncle, or there was money.
• 3:45
  I had nothing.
• 3:45
  I owned a toolbox.
• 3:46
  So I actually feel really lucky that it started that way.
• 3:50
  So my career has been a very sincere one, if that sounds right.
• 3:54
  Not to say others are insincere, but it's born out of the love of driving the motor car.
• 3:59
  You talked about Nick and your mum's car.
• 4:02
  What was the car?
• 4:04
  And were there any stories of, sorry, mum, or no, I have no idea how that happened.
• 4:08
  Well, there is a big sorry, mum story I'll get to.
• 4:11
  So mum had a Volkswagen when I was young, so I was still at school.
• 4:16
  And I worked out, we lived in a little suburban house in a little street with a tiny little backyard.
• 4:21
  But when mum wasn't home, I worked out if I could just back up the driveway, I could just get enough speed up around the back corner of the house to get just a tiny, like a tiny little bit of opposite lock on.
• 4:31
  And that was my first feeling of just... Ari Larkham.
• 4:34
  Ari Larkham.
• 4:36
  Exactly, exactly.
• 4:37
  So that was my first taste of it.
• 4:40
  Then she got a Corolla and we all know Corollas.
• 4:42
  I mean, this is like a 72 Corolla.
• 4:46
  And there would, I mean, you go back to Griffith and ask all my friends.
• 4:49
  I mean, there were very few Friday or Saturday nights where we didn't end up down behind the aerodrome in the paddocks down behind there rallying.
• 4:56
  And, you know, so I was the driver.
• 4:58
  Um, and, uh, you know, they were, they were just great days to learn car control.
• 5:04
  Um, I ended up, I actually thought I could do the Ari thing and thought I could jump mum's car.
• 5:08
  Cause there's a lot of channels, a lot of channels down there at Griffith, right?
• 5:11
  So I said, everyone hang on.
• 5:13
  So I broke it in half, broke it at the, um, broke it at the firewall.
• 5:18
  We left it where it was on the side road and we got to the party we were going to, which was great.
• 5:21
  We had a great night at the party and that was the end of Mum's Corolla.
• 5:24
  But they were great learning years.
• 5:27
  And I think the interesting thing, thruster, it shows that there was other guys back then who were still really close mates of mine now who also had paddock bashes, who also drove.
• 5:38
  And if circumstances had gone their way, if they'd chosen them, I think they would have also gone on and been really good race drivers, you know, just because that's the... And being country guys, living on farms, you learnt to fix everything yourself, you sort of, you know, you fended for yourself.
• 5:52
  So it was good backgrounding.
• 5:53
  My writer's saying too that you were an air conditioning mechanic by trade and is that how you, you know, you started to obviously earn money and did you look at an ad in Auto Action or something?
• 6:04
  How did you get your first proper race cars?
• 6:06
  So you're right, I was an apprentice refrigeration mechanic, or air conditioning mechanic down there.
• 6:11
  Did that for quite some years.
• 6:13
  And because of the rallying, and everyone would want to jump in with me, and it takes for a ride, I was just always rallying.
• 6:21
  So I had a great love of rallying.
• 6:25
  I then started to look in the back of Auto Action, and I saw these ads for rally cars, you know, five, six grand.
• 6:30
  And I thought, well, if I save up, I can actually, you know, maybe do something there.
• 6:34
  And so...
• 6:36
  It was only then me and my mates, we jumped in a Volkswagen, a HR Holden panel van, that's a whole other story, and we went to Sydney for a weekend holiday, which we'd often do as a bunch of mates.
• 6:45
  You know, we'd get two cartons done by Tamora from Griffith, right?
• 6:48
  It was a two-carton trip.
• 6:52
  Remember Village Grand Prix?
• 6:54
  Yes.
• 6:54
  The little Grand Prix thing out at the back there?
• 6:55
  On the Great Western Highway on the run towards Eastern Creek now, really, wasn't it?
• 6:59
  Yeah.
• 6:59
  Bingo.
• 6:59
  Bingo.
• 7:00
  So, and look, not for me to talk myself up, but I actually went there and did really, really well, such that the guy there brought out the better race car that they had parked in the shed.
• 7:08
  Anyway, that was, so I thought, oh, hang on, these race car kind of things, you know?
• 7:12
  So, and I was just not aware.
• 7:14
  I just wasn't.
• 7:15
  You know, for me, it was only rallying.
• 7:16
  So I had no real, I wasn't in touch with motor racing as such.
• 7:21
  So he said, mate, you should go and, you know, have a crack at this.
• 7:24
  And I'd done no karting.
• 7:27
  So a couple of weekends after that, I actually signed up to Peter Finlay's... Driving school.
• 7:32
  Driving school at Oran Park.
• 7:33
  Wow.
• 7:34
  So that was kind of funny because...
• 7:36
  I had no car.
• 7:38
  I was a bike guy.
• 7:39
  I had old bikes and stuff.
• 7:40
  So Robin, my wife now, who I was going out with then, had a 74 Gallant, a shitbox.
• 7:48
  So I rucked up at Orrham Park to a race driving school.
• 7:51
  And back then, if I remember correctly, back in that, there was quite a lot of 3 Series BMs, 260 Zs.
• 7:58
  So it was that kind of car.
• 8:02
  So I rocked up in this beaten up,
• 8:05
  Standard.
• 8:06
  Standard.
• 8:07
  Hubcap standard.
• 8:08
  I'm talking hubcap standard 74 Gallant.
• 8:11
  And they kind of half sneered at me and thought, you're not serious, are you?
• 8:15
  Anyway, two days of that went really, really well.
• 8:18
  And Peter gave me a really, really good report.
• 8:22
  Yep.
• 8:22
  So that same weekend, I actually bought a race car trailer.
• 8:26
  Yep.
• 8:28
  and a race car.
• 8:29
  I stayed down there, bought the whole shooting match.
• 8:33
  Because we'd been saving up for the rally car.
• 8:35
  So I went to Peter Verhain, who bought Peter's old 1981.
• 8:40
  So it was an old car.
• 8:41
  So imagine the glant by the time it's gone back to Griffith.
• 8:44
  So it's done Oran Park two days, and it's towed a race car on a trailer, 600 k's back to Griffith.
• 8:49
  So that was the end of the...
• 8:50
  I actually had to put a new engine in it for her, and I remember that.
• 8:54
  So that was it.
• 8:54
  So the following weekend, don't worry about any of this state-level stuff, we just entered the Driver to Europe series at Winton the following week.
• 9:01
  National.
• 9:01
  National level.
• 9:02
  National series, yeah.
• 9:03
  Well, again, had no idea.
• 9:04
  No idea.
• 9:05
  And qualified, I think, before I remember, 16th, you know, in the 30-, 40-car field back then.
• 9:11
  They were big fields.
• 9:13
  Well, it wasn't.
• 9:13
  What was great, Thrusty, was the lessons we learnt.
• 9:17
  We had no idea, just no idea.
• 9:19
  So I've got photos of my mates with mullets, seriously.
• 9:26
  And we just learnt by mistakes.
• 9:28
  And if I could have my time again, I would not do it a different way.
• 9:30
  We did some of the most silly things with set-ups, but we learnt.
• 9:34
  It was great learning.
• 9:36
  I spoke to Greg Siddle for this.
• 9:38
  I mean, Pee Wee has been a driving force in the careers of...
• 9:42
  a number of of good local and international races for that matter how did you guys connect and he kind of still helps you to this day doesn't he he's like my second father uh we've yeah we've become very very he's godfathered one of my sons um we've become very very close but um he's his assistance guidance um gee whiz mate absolutely invaluable in in in many careers um
• 10:09
  Peewee walked into my...
• 10:13
  I was aware of Peewee, everyone was aware of Peewee, he was the Van Diemen dealer back at the time, Van Diemen being the race cars that were all aspiring to race.
• 10:20
  I was racing a really old one.
• 10:22
  Um, and, and, and he's got a sharp eye and he saw something about this country kid and the way we sort of went about our business, although we didn't know what we were doing.
• 10:29
  We had no idea, mate, there's something.
• 10:31
  And that's why I take my head off to Pee Wee.
• 10:33
  He saw something I didn't know.
• 10:35
  And he walked into my tent at Adelaide International Raceway, the old circuit there.
• 10:39
  And you imagine big Pee Wee.
• 10:40
  So this silver haired guy and he had the Gucci sunglasses on.
• 10:43
  He's about seven foot tall and he had the Marlboro jacket on.
• 10:46
  And it was just so intimidating.
• 10:50
  And yet he's a gentle bloke when you get to talk to him.
• 10:51
  He's a beautiful human being.
• 10:53
  He really is.
• 10:54
  And he came in and did nothing other than show interest in my career, gave me great encouragement to continue doing what we're doing and the way we're doing it.
• 11:04
  And he'd be following us and watching us closely, which he did.
• 11:08
  So we progressed.
• 11:08
  I think we ended up getting a seventh in the old car at the last race of the year.
• 11:14
  So then we got into a newer car.
• 11:19
  And there's a bit of a story around that.
• 11:20
  So this was 1988.
• 11:24
  The signs were there, right, we need to get on with this.
• 11:26
  So we said, right, let's up stumps and move to Sydney.
• 11:30
  So that was hard because I had to get – we just had no money.
• 11:35
  So Robin, my dear wife, had to cash her superannuation in.
• 11:39
  So she had seven grand of superannuation and we needed this car.
• 11:43
  So I'd found a sponsor by now that wasn't a big sponsor.
• 11:47
  Anyway, long story short, they just disappeared off the face of the earth after I'd ordered the new car, which from memory was about 43 grand or something back then.
• 11:55
  They were going to pay for it.
• 11:55
  They disappeared.
• 11:56
  They disappeared.
• 11:57
  I didn't have money to pay for it.
• 11:59
  I didn't have any money to pay for it at all.
• 12:01
  So I went to my boss.
• 12:03
  Great.
• 12:03
  Robert Apolloni at Griffith Air Conditioning.
• 12:04
  Robert and Sue Apolloni.
• 12:06
  And said, look, can I have a couple of weeks off?
• 12:09
  I actually reckon, because we're getting a little bit of traction in the local area news, newspaper.
• 12:15
  I reckon if I go and knock on pretty well all the business stores in Griffith and see if everyone will chip in a little bit of money.
• 12:20
  And to their great credit, my boss gave me two weeks off.
• 12:23
  He said, you go and do it.
• 12:23
  And they were the first ones to support me.
• 12:25
  And that was very unselfish.
• 12:26
  It was just fabulous.
• 12:28
  So I went to the Chamber of Commerce.
• 12:30
  They said, you're mad.
• 12:31
  You know, I wanted to get their advice.
• 12:34
  I went to my dear friend, Norm Murphy, who was actually, and you like this trustee, who was actually the manager of the television station at the time.
• 12:40
  Good friend of my dad, just a lovely man, a wise man.
• 12:43
  And he said, you go for it.
• 12:45
  And I think he could see that I was convicted and I wanted to pursue this career.
• 12:48
  So I started two weeks of knocking on every business house door in Griffith.
• 12:52
  I got $100, $50, $200, $500, $200.
• 12:55
  And that's where we put the Griffith sign on the car.
• 12:58
  And you remember the whole thing of Dom McKay and the bad vibes and the drugs and all that coming out of Griffith.
• 13:04
  So there was a good thing here because we were getting telecast on Channel 7 at the time.
• 13:08
  Crumpo was commentating back then.
• 13:10
  Yeah.
• 13:11
  With a positive vibe about the Riverina region, basically.
• 13:13
  With a positive vibe about the Riverina region.
• 13:15
  So when that positive vibe...
• 13:16
  So then I went to Griffith City Council, and the Queen was coming to Griffith, right?
• 13:20
  Not Queen, the Queen.
• 13:22
  And that trip got cancelled.
• 13:25
  I'm not sure why.
• 13:25
  I can only imagine why.
• 13:27
  So that trip got cancelled, and they'd allocated four grand.
• 13:30
  So I actually got the four grand, right?
• 13:32
  It was for Her Majesty.
• 13:34
  It was for Her Majesty, right?
• 13:37
  Never thought of it that way.
• 13:38
  So I got four grand that was for Her Majesty.
• 13:40
  And what was really cool is that the stories about my racing went from the back pages to the front page of the paper, right?
• 13:46
  Because now I'd got this four grand.
• 13:48
  But I now kicked off a shitstorm in Griffith because, oh, my driveway's not great and we need bitumen or the garbage is only emptied three times a week.
• 13:55
  Why is this racing bloke getting this money?
• 13:56
  So it actually started a lot of conjecture in the editorial pages.
• 14:02
  which was kind of great because then came this tidal wave of support from the community.
• 14:06
  I'd already had 70 businesses, had signed up, 70.
• 14:10
  And they knew this was a positive vibe.
• 14:12
  We had this Griffith sign on the car.
• 14:13
  It was positive for Griffith.
• 14:14
  We were out there televised at touring car events back in the day.
• 14:18
  So that was the launching pad for the McCrease.
• 14:22
  I went to Sydney, got closer to Peewee.
• 14:24
  He was at the little Bob Jane T-Mart there out at Parramatta.
• 14:26
  Had his little office jammed in there.
• 14:31
  And away we went.
• 14:32
  He was very aware of your commitment, your dedication, your application, if you like.
• 14:40
  And that door knocking, that going to all those different businesses in Griffith and showcasing that, that led to a connection with Coffee Forward, didn't it?
• 14:49
  Actually, it did, yeah.
• 14:51
  So my race car, before I left to go to Sydney, we prepared it.
• 14:56
  So one of my best mates, old dog fart Fallon, we used to prep the car on his back patio.
• 15:03
  And because we had no idea, we kind of built this timber floor, which was wonky as buggery.
• 15:08
  We didn't know it was important.
• 15:10
  It had to be thou perfect back then, you know, but we learnt.
• 15:12
  So we used to prep the car on his back veranda and load it up and away we'd go.
• 15:17
  So he was mates...
• 15:19
  from years gone by, Warwick Chadwick, who was involved in the local Ford dealership, who was now a partner in Coffee Ford in Melbourne.
• 15:28
  So we had to go and race at Sandown.
• 15:30
  We had no money.
• 15:31
  So we ring up Warwick Chadwick, and Warwick, can we get a bet at your house?
• 15:34
  So we got a bet at his house.
• 15:37
  So we stayed at his house.
• 15:38
  I end up qualifying this thing on the front row at Sandown, which surprised me as much as anything.
• 15:43
  So Warwick says to me, how much to put Coffee Ford on the side of the car?
• 15:47
  And I said, well,
• 15:48
  quick you know it's a bit of a tony cochran thing pluck a number out of your ass right 500 bucks so he gave me 500 bucks and coffee ford went on the side of the car the next day and that started a tremendous relationship uh with those guys in formula ford that continued obviously into the year after
• 16:07
  1989, you would win the driver to Europe crown, mate, the title.
• 16:11
  I mean, to think of your limited experience, paddock bashing, not all that long prior, and now all of a sudden you're winning the national title, beginning of a bit of a rivalry too with Russell Ingle, if I remember correctly.
• 16:25
  I mean, that was a big ticket, mate, wasn't it?
• 16:27
  Yeah, it was.
• 16:28
  It actually all happened really quite fast.
• 16:31
  And I don't know why that was.
• 16:34
  I don't propose I was anything special, but I do feel that I was committed.
• 16:38
  And even in later life, when I've tried to pass on some of those learnings to younger kids coming into the sport, I think that's a really important prerequisite is you've got to do it because you want to do it.
• 16:48
  And I'll just go back to what I said earlier.
• 16:50
  I loved driving the race car.
• 16:52
  I worked out really quickly because I didn't have any money and I don't come from a family of money, is that if I wanted to do this and pursue this as a career, which I deeply wanted to do,
• 17:02
  I had to find the money myself.
• 17:04
  So you quickly start to develop and learn ways to get the money, hence the Griffith thing.
• 17:09
  So, yeah, we did right.
• 17:10
  Within 18 months, I was competing for the championship.
• 17:15
  from starting this, Chris, all did happen pretty well, but I think you're at that time in your career and your life where your mind's a bit of a sponge and you're listening to people and watching and learning and then this bloke with four fingers on one hand come along.
• 17:30
  Seriously, I remember the day.
• 17:32
  Go on, tell us the story then.
• 17:34
  Well, we were at Call of the Park and it wasn't my championship year, it was the year prior,
• 17:41
  And I'm sort of in the front sort of bunch now, and it's going pretty well.
• 17:46
  And this guy, and we shared garages.
• 17:48
  And so this guy, Russell Ingle, who word came out from South Australia that he was a hot carter, and just be careful of a bloke with four fingers on one hand, right?
• 17:57
  Might not always be straight up and down, right?
• 18:00
  there you Russell um so you know we we battled that weekend um uh he got his engine pulled um say no more uh but it did start a good rifle you know as we know to this day Russell is a tough tough racer um and and I actually feel lucky in in many ways that I got to race him for a couple of years because it did you had to sharpen your game up to race him you know you just you just
• 18:31
  yeah tick you know it was good that he was there uh media colleague phil brannigan reminded me too of a race that you had in malala i may not have the year correct but you literally went from stone motherless last to the win as well is that correct uh yeah it wasn't yeah that was russell
• 18:49
  So it's an old kart trick, because again, I didn't learn these tricks, I hadn't done karting.
• 18:53
  So we're off the front row together, I'm on pole, he's on the front row, and I've got the video of it, and we don't get 10 feet down the road, and he just turns right and suddenly puts his front wheel into my rear wheel, pirouettes me beautifully, and off he goes to think he's going to win the race.
• 19:06
  So I gather myself after the pirouette, and now I've got the bit between my teeth.
• 19:12
  And Malala's one of those gnarly little circuits, I think, where you can have a bit of a crack.
• 19:17
  And, yeah, I went after him.
• 19:18
  And it was one of those victories that stick with you for your career and knocked him off at the end.
• 19:25
  I think you gave him the bird on the way past.
• 19:26
  So we never enjoyed for many, many years a good relationship.
• 19:30
  In fact, we had tussles later in touring cars and almost came to fisticuffs a couple of times.
• 19:34
  But now?
• 19:35
  Yeah.
• 19:36
  Oh, no problem at all.
• 19:37
  I've enjoyed working with and around, you know, Russell.
• 19:41
  Russell's Russell, you know.
• 19:42
  He's never going to change.
• 19:44
  I love the hardcore racing nature about the guy.
• 19:48
  So, no, isn't it funny?
• 19:49
  You know, I've said to you earlier, mate, about Greg Murphy, all those guys you do combat with.
• 19:54
  You get to the other end and we're all so alike.
• 19:56
  It's just incredible.
• 19:57
  I guess we've walked a similar path.
• 19:59
  I'm told you tracked down the 89 car...
• 20:03
  via a fellow in Melbourne who'd seen it in New Zealand or something like that.
• 20:07
  Is that true?
• 20:07
  So you've got your car back?
• 20:08
  Yeah, I've got my car back, the championship-winning car.
• 20:12
  I looked for it for many years, but you've got to be discreet when you're looking for it because you don't want someone to stick it up your price thinking the guy that owned it and won with it.
• 20:18
  Here's Larko, he'll pay big.
• 20:20
  Yeah, exactly.
• 20:21
  So I tried to go the long way around.
• 20:22
  And anyway, the engine builder at Dick Johnson Racing rang me one night and said, mate, your car is up for sale in New Zealand, your ex-champion winning car.
• 20:32
  I said, what?
• 20:33
  So I got straight onto the guy and said, I'll buy it.
• 20:35
  He said, I just sold it.
• 20:37
  And let's give Andrew McInnes a plug.
• 20:39
  So Andrew McInnes down in Melbourne had said, no, mate, I've just bought it.
• 20:42
  I phoned him.
• 20:44
  I said, mate, you can't.
• 20:45
  I said, you've got to let me buy it.
• 20:46
  And I said, I've been chasing this car for years.
• 20:48
  And he'd already got, I think he's got one of Russell Ingalls' 89 Van Demons as well.
• 20:53
  So to Andrew's great credit.
• 20:55
  He stepped back and let me buy the car.
• 20:58
  So I had two brand new Van Diemen 89 brochures that I'd collected.
• 21:04
  So I sent him one of those.
• 21:05
  So he didn't do that well out of the deal, but he got a new brochure for his other car.
• 21:08
  Sam Michael, who I've spoken to earlier in the podcast series, shares a thing with you in that, you know, with some of the stuff.
• 21:15
  I'll get another beer while you're asking the question.
• 21:17
  You do that.
• 21:18
  He says that you're big on chassis numbers, getting stuff inch perfect.
• 21:25
  He's about to open another Corona.
• 21:26
  We're sitting in the bush in the middle of nowhere.
• 21:29
  I love this.
• 21:30
  Set the scene.
• 21:30
  Set the scene for you.
• 21:32
  This is Mark Larkin.
• 21:32
  You don't do a podcast without a tube and a bit of countryside surroundings.
• 21:38
  He's about to crack it open.
• 21:38
  What have you got, a Leatherman there or something?
• 21:40
  Have you?
• 21:40
  Leatherman.
• 21:40
  Beautiful.
• 21:41
  Listen to this.
• 21:42
  Oh, beautiful.
• 21:44
  A little bit of audio finesse for us as well.
• 21:46
  The audio engineers will love that.
• 21:48
  So what I was going to say with the car is, if I know you, it'll be authentic, and you've probably in the resto tracked down a great deal of stuff.
• 21:58
  Has it got the original engine, and is it back in period colours, things like that?
• 22:02
  No, it's not, but will be, because you're dead right.
• 22:05
  It's meaningless to me unless it is authentic.
• 22:08
  What's really, really pleasing, if we just go off on this tangent for a minute, thruster, is that the...
• 22:14
  When I scratched off the red paint, because it's been painted over the years, underneath it is the Coffee Ford yellow paint.
• 22:19
  No way.
• 22:20
  On every panel.
• 22:21
  So that is very, very cool.
• 22:23
  Yeah.
• 22:24
  Still got, so I kept all the purchase receipts, all the documentation, I got all the running sheets for it, I got my race suit, I got my helmet, I got all that stuff from back then.
• 22:31
  So it is kind of, I'm a bit anal.
• 22:33
  I'm not shocked.
• 22:35
  So gearbox is the right number, chassis hasn't been well.
• 22:38
  So it's really, it's going to be a great restoration.
• 22:41
  The Pee Wee helped me back then with a Minister engine.
• 22:43
  Minister were doing engines out of the aircraft.
• 22:45
  Out of England, yeah.
• 22:47
  I have tried very, very hard to track down the original engine, which I have all the numbers and I haven't succeeded with that yet, mate, but I'm on it.
• 22:55
  So you switch at a point to Formula Brabham, but I want to just dabble for a moment.
• 23:02
  There was a flirtation with production cars in the middle there somewhere too, wasn't there?
• 23:06
  Yeah, there was, which again was really borne out through just opportunities that presented, mate, isn't it?
• 23:14
  Again, and I'm not saying, I just didn't have money.
• 23:18
  So whatever comes your way, you sort of grab it.
• 23:21
  And Gary Rumble, who's not with us anymore, I don't know if you remember, Gary used to run a production car team and sponsor it and what have you with Gary Jones driving, who I'd done Formula 4.
• 23:30
  So they rang me up and said, come and partner us at the Winton 300.
• 23:34
  So I jumped in this thing, and I think we end up qualifying next to Kenny Douglas on the front row.
• 23:39
  So it was – and I really enjoyed that.
• 23:41
  So, you know, one thing led to an X.
• 23:42
  So I sort of did a sort of a half-quasi hybrid season in one of those.
• 23:48
  Thoroughly enjoyed it.
• 23:49
  And why it was good made it very much like Formula Ford.
• 23:52
  And, you know, not that we want to do a sermon about race driving technique, but one of the great things about Formula Ford and production cars is that anything that's got limited grip and low horsepower –
• 24:03
  really points you to the thin edge of the wedge of driving technique and setup because there's nothing left to get you out of trouble if you come off a corner and you haven't got it precisely right you can't just stomp on the loud pedal to get you out of a little bit of a strife which you maybe could with a sierra or a v8 engine not saying that's the only way to do it but it just taught you great skill and finesse to carry mid-corner speed and the things you need to do
• 24:26
  So I just think they're great learnings, and I actually don't like seeing kids now move too quickly through junior formula into cars that are too powerful, too much grip, because you'd never get to learn that stuff, and that stuff carries you for your career.
• 24:39
  Just before we go to Formula Brabham and what we knew later on as Formula Holden, the names Larkham and Brock Brabham.
• 24:49
  were together, mate, weren't they?
• 24:50
  On a Ford Sierra in the late 80s.
• 24:53
  I think there was the initial race, it blew a head gasket or had some sort of engine issue, so you didn't get in.
• 24:59
  But I think you got in at Sandown, you, Bradley Jones, and then Brock would join you, wouldn't he?
• 25:03
  Yeah, Peter, he was great.
• 25:06
  I mean, not only did he give me an opportunity in his Sierra thruster, he actually, and funny, I tripped across it the other day.
• 25:14
  When I was looking to go to Europe, when I finished my first,
• 25:17
  when I'd won the Formula 4 championship in 89, I desperately wanted to pursue an F1 career, like every young aspirant does when they win a Formula 4 championship.
• 25:25
  As always, money would be the problem.
• 25:26
  I went over there, did the Formula 4 festival, did the F3 test with Alan Docking, did all of that stuff, then came back and spent the best part of a year trying to put the money together and, you know, trying to get... And it was really tough times, actually, recession, I think, in 89, to try and get money to go to Europe.
• 25:41
  Forget it.
• 25:41
  So, but Peter...
• 25:46
  helped me with a video.
• 25:47
  So I've got a video down there, which is just magnificent of him to do it, of Peter talking about me and my career for four or five minutes for potential supporters.
• 25:58
  So I was flattered by that, and Ingrid Ropers helped me back in the day.
• 26:03
  It was great.
• 26:04
  And then Peter gave me an opportunity.
• 26:06
  They needed a co-driver in...
• 26:09
  One of the cars, Alan Gow was running the team back down, so we did some testing and got a gig in one of the cars.
• 26:15
  Andy Rouse came out for Bathurst, so I didn't get the drive at Bathurst, but I got it at Sandown.
• 26:19
  But there you go.
• 26:20
  I didn't have any money, mate.
• 26:21
  I didn't bring money along to do that.
• 26:22
  It was Peter giving a young bloke a go, and good on Peter for doing that.
• 26:26
  It was a great experience, and what a horrible, horrible car they were to drive.
• 26:30
  Why?
• 26:31
  Well, imagine, over 600 horsepower, I think they were, and that was the really early days of Sierra.
• 26:36
  Turbo came on like a light switch.
• 26:39
  And I remember when we were testing down at Winton, so over at turn 6, 7, over there, the hairpin, you used to have to, you're in the middle of a corner, it's nowhere near ready for power, but you have to condition your brain to stomp on the loud pedal, because the turbo's going to take about half an hour to wind up, and just as you're coming off the corner, it'll wind up.
• 26:56
  So it took great skill, and I mean, you know, again, I take my hat off to Peter, I mean, the way that he manhandled those cars, the guy was just incredibly skilled.
• 27:05
  And an early connection for you and Bradley Jones and a great friendship that you share with Neil Crompton and people like that in the lane to this day.
• 27:13
  Absolutely.
• 27:14
  And even Barry Sheen, Baz was there on the day.
• 27:16
  It was the day Baz stuck it in the fence, remember?
• 27:18
  He didn't like bringing that up.
• 27:19
  Oh, no, I didn't.
• 27:20
  I didn't.
• 27:21
  Larco, it wasn't true.
• 27:24
  I've never seen a man so devastated.
• 27:27
  So the friendship started with Brad, which is a lifetime friendship to this day, as you know.
• 27:31
  I mean, I consider him one of my close mates.
• 27:34
  Crompo Crompo was around.
• 27:35
  In fact, I've got a great photo because you were around, as you know, mate, on the pit lane back in the days, for those listening.
• 27:41
  So this guy sitting beside me here, our career goes back, 90s to 2003, 30s.
• 27:47
  18 years, 28 years, as a young upstart commentator that bounced onto the pit lane in Formula Brabham.
• 27:55
  And he used to piss me off because... Well, no one had asked questions all day.
• 28:00
  And this young upstart started asking questions, you know.
• 28:03
  How dare he be a journalist.
• 28:05
  How dare you be a journalist.
• 28:06
  No, and here he is, which is a credit to him.
• 28:09
  So I've got a great photo of Scaifey,
• 28:14
  And you get this because you've been part of this team.
• 28:17
  Scaifey, Crompo and I, there's one time we raced at Orem Park in our Formula Brabham's together.
• 28:23
  And the three of us were on the podium.
• 28:25
  And I put that together as a little montage and presented to them a couple of years later.
• 28:28
  And here we are 30 years later, or if you're the best part of.
• 28:31
  Still great mates.
• 28:33
  And we raced together.
• 28:34
  I mean, I just think that's just great.
• 28:36
  It's a great life journey.
• 28:37
  Most definitely.
• 28:38
  And Scaifey reminded me in the lead-up to this chat that it was an amazing period for that class, which we'll get to and talk about now.
• 28:44
  I mean, Rowan Onslow, Drew Price.
• 28:47
  I mean, it was just...
• 28:48
  There was some... Warwick Rookland.
• 28:50
  I mean, Paul Morris.
• 28:52
  Actually, we were blessed, mate, to come out of Formula Ford and have an open wheeler class that was as strong as that at that time.
• 28:59
  and of course there was Winfield, we had Mitre 10 there, there was good sponsorship there, the whole Eastern Creek thing had just happened, so that had Nathan Prendergast, our TV boss, his dad was running the show, so that's it, and here we all are all these years later, and it was this great, Oscar Firinotto, our TV engineer, and engineer was down there with Mike Quinn in the last garage, remember they had their South Australian built TAFE cars running out of the end garage there, I mean...
• 29:23
  Some great stories.
• 29:24
  So let's talk more about that class.
• 29:27
  I mean, cool open wheelers, F3000 style wings and slicks, as you point out, powered by Holden Commodore six-cylinder engines.
• 29:34
  Your first chassis, if I'm right, was it a Rolt?
• 29:37
  You had a Rolt chassis first?
• 29:38
  What did you do?
• 29:38
  Had a Rolt.
• 29:39
  So I'd just done that production car stuff we'd talked about.
• 29:42
  The 91 season was about to start.
• 29:45
  I had nothing.
• 29:47
  I didn't have a dollar.
• 29:49
  I didn't have a drive.
• 29:51
  And...
• 29:52
  So were you working a job?
• 29:53
  What were you doing here?
• 29:54
  No, I wasn't.
• 29:54
  I was my wife.
• 29:56
  God bless her cotton socks.
• 29:58
  Go out to work.
• 29:59
  Very harsh.
• 30:00
  Get her up out of bed.
• 30:01
  Kick her out the door.
• 30:02
  Get out there.
• 30:03
  Get out there and earn some bucks.
• 30:06
  Look, mate, she's been by my side since day dot, since we left school.
• 30:10
  She used to kick me out of bed, going, come on, you've got to go and do it, you've got to go and do it, you've got to go and do it.
• 30:14
  Anyway, mate, there was, mate, seriously, there was nothing.
• 30:17
  So we were a couple of weeks out, and Neil Crompton was driving the Peter Boylan RT20, remember the Dulux car with all those colours on it?
• 30:25
  And Crompo was now charging off and doing his thing.
• 30:27
  Was Wally Story engineer on that back then, I think, maybe?
• 30:29
  Back with Crompo he was.
• 30:30
  There's a couple of good old names.
• 30:31
  But isn't it funny how these links...
• 30:33
  So, ends up, Krompo wasn't going to do the 91 season.
• 30:37
  So, I went to Peter Boylan, and I didn't have any money.
• 30:42
  We kind of connected, and this is where the Mitre 10 thing started.
• 30:47
  So, my dad, who managed the True Value store at Griffith, which was kind of like a little brother hardware store to Mitre 10, got me an introduction to the New South Wales state manager of Mitre 10.
• 31:00
  I went in there, and...
• 31:04
  Whilst it would have been not wise to go in there, as I say to people now, and just ask for big bucks, I said, look, how about, rather than sell real estate on my car, I'll change my number to number 10.
• 31:16
  I'll use the font mitre and the font 10 of mitre 10.
• 31:21
  And if you go back to my first car, you'll see that was on there.
• 31:24
  Because back then you could pay cams 500 bucks, I think, and change the font.
• 31:27
  Because with that 500 bucks, they bought carrots and improved their eyesight, right?
• 31:31
  Yeah.
• 31:33
  So we had Mitre 10 on the car, and I think, if I recall, mate, I think it was like four grand.
• 31:41
  That's where it started.
• 31:41
  And Peter put his name on the car, and it was really good at Peter Boylan because, you know, this would have cost him money.
• 31:48
  So he basically, with two weeks before the start of the first round, I go and get the car.
• 31:53
  I bring it to my house.
• 31:56
  And I was fortunate enough by now to have some really good people around me and Pee Wee giving guidance.
• 32:02
  We prepped that car and prepped it and prepped it and prepped it and arrived at Eastern Creek for round one.
• 32:09
  Scaife was there with his Winfield Spa.
• 32:12
  And we smoked them.
• 32:13
  And I'm sitting here as surprised today as I was then that that happened.
• 32:18
  It's the biggest win I've ever had in my career.
• 32:19
  We won by 21 seconds to Scaifey.
• 32:22
  Now, you know, Scaifey's a class act.
• 32:26
  So things obviously went really right for me that day.
• 32:29
  I don't think I wouldn't put that down to anything clever we did or any particular way I drove the car.
• 32:34
  Just obviously everything fell into place.
• 32:37
  We just weren't that clever.
• 32:40
  The big mistake I made, which was a great life learning, was I knew Marksgaaf doesn't sit around for too long and get beaten by any margin, right?
• 32:49
  They'd go away and work hard.
• 32:50
  He had some good people around him.
• 32:51
  I had some good people around me.
• 32:52
  And this is where the competition started.
• 32:54
  And it was great.
• 32:55
  So we redesigned the car.
• 32:57
  So here's a car, an RT20 that Ron Turanac...
• 33:00
  possibly the best race car designer in history.
• 33:02
  Worked with the late great Sir Jack Brabham.
• 33:04
  Worked with the late, like Jack's cars.
• 33:06
  They're Ron's cars, right?
• 33:08
  Ron, it's Mark Larkham here.
• 33:09
  I'm talking to him on the other side.
• 33:11
  Ron, I'm going to redesign your car.
• 33:14
  You're going to walk.
• 33:15
  And Pee Wee used to work with Ron and under Ron.
• 33:19
  Ron was great because he knew that that was quite an old design and wing profiles and aerodynamic profiles around the front of the car had changed.
• 33:27
  You remember the twin wing end plates and all the stuff that was going on.
• 33:32
  So, you know, we'd been doing this, gee, thruster, maybe three months.
• 33:35
  So we were aerodynamics, we were specialists, we were gurus, right?
• 33:38
  We thought, we'll reinvent the race car.
• 33:40
  And it was, again, it was a great life lesson.
• 33:42
  Massive mistake.
• 33:43
  So I got a hydrodynamist involved because there was no aerodynamics around.
• 33:48
  And I thought, oh, well, moving water's a bit like moving air.
• 33:52
  Pissing your pants is like a fart, right?
• 33:57
  So I get a high-dust, and we redesign the front of the car, redesign the front wing, redesign everything, and we basically turn what was a magnificently designed Ron Turanac beautifully balanced race car into a pile of shit.
• 34:13
  Far out.
• 34:14
  We just ruined it.
• 34:15
  So we made it completely, so it had bucket more front downforce, but we made it massively front pitch sensitive.
• 34:23
  So I set you first race, put my foot on the brake,
• 34:27
  that means the front wing really grabs the air at the front, you know, accelerates the air under the wing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and just rotates really easily.
• 34:34
  So that was a massive mistake, and as I said, a great lesson.
• 34:38
  So that all came off there at 100 mile an hour.
• 34:40
  Why don't we go back to what Ron, like to be doing it for 60 years, and won three couple of world championships.
• 34:45
  Why don't we go back and do what he sort of proposed?
• 34:48
  I want to share a little tale with you.
• 34:51
  A kid I know on his L plates who went to high school, a couple of suburbs from Carlingford in Sydney, would often drive past the world headquarters of Mitre 10 Racing, post office street.
• 35:05
  I was in Mum's baby shit brown VC Commodore, but I would invariably slow down, mate, and check out...
• 35:11
  this house it it was perfect for you because you could tuck the transporter down the side you had a workshop out the back tell me a bit more about what went on at that joint there's so many good stories right they were the real learning years right so that that transporter you took about first of all let's not mistake that was a slick looking transporter that was four thousand dollars it was a piece of crap
• 35:33
  But it looked great.
• 35:35
  No, no, no.
• 35:35
  So I went down to Melbourne and bought this rotten old piece of crap.
• 35:38
  I think I used to cart vegetables or something, right?
• 35:40
  So we came back, and poor old Adam Perry, who's been my best mate all my life, and Sam and all of us had to hook in, and we bought sheet and welders, and we made belly lockers, and we did all this ourselves in the backyard because it was quite obvious really early that presentation was such a big part of this.
• 35:54
  If you can't win on a weekend, you've got to look like you can.
• 35:56
  You've got to look like you can win, and I think that's a really valuable lesson.
• 35:59
  So...
• 36:00
  Um, we, and I was so fortunate to be surrounded by guys that were similar in the way that absolutely.
• 36:06
  Absolutely.
• 36:07
  So we used to, we used to do that stuff, you know, and just to diverge.
• 36:10
  So Sam was great.
• 36:11
  So Sam even got his truck license.
• 36:13
  This is Sam Michael, one of your podcasts.
• 36:15
  This is a guy that went to Formula One and this is why we grabbed Sam.
• 36:18
  when he sent the letter in.
• 36:19
  Because Sam is still to this day one of the most intelligent people I've ever met in my life.
• 36:24
  And sorry I've jumped ahead here, but Sam Michael, who worked for me for a few years, went on to achieve great things.
• 36:29
  Still to this day one of the most intelligent guys.
• 36:32
  And I know he says about me, he's very similar.
• 36:35
  He's got this beautiful balance between a high degree of intelligence, which I don't, but a great sense of humour.
• 36:41
  So Sam had actually got his truck licence.
• 36:43
  He would drive the transporter.
• 36:46
  And he was so sharp at an early age, so the Formula Brabham paddock would be over there.
• 36:50
  And because this transporter looked so good, he'd wangle in with the Group A paddock and get us a flat, because he was always looking for the best flat set-up patch, right, wherever we park.
• 36:58
  And he'd always get a really good spot with a transporter.
• 37:02
  But we talk about Sanford, I mean, he was just such a great attribute to the team.
• 37:06
  We should talk about his data-locking capability in the early days.
• 37:10
  But just going back to the – they were great learning you.
• 37:13
  So as you drove past as a young bloke – I didn't know that –
• 37:16
  That was the World Court.
• 37:18
  So think of that, mate.
• 37:18
  So in Carlingford, we had these little two-car garages down the back.
• 37:21
  This is in Sydney's north-west if you're wondering where Carlingford is.
• 37:25
  And we had little two-car garages down the back that I laid some carpet out in.
• 37:30
  And we had a DOS computer, I think it was, back in the day.
• 37:32
  DOS?
• 37:33
  DOS computer.
• 37:33
  We had Marlboro signs up on the walls because cigarette advertising was all the go.
• 37:39
  That's back when you could have Playboy pin-ups around the workshop everywhere.
• 37:43
  Not anymore.
• 37:45
  And anyway, so...
• 37:48
  They were great learning.
• 37:48
  But, you know what?
• 37:49
  Bruce Carey.
• 37:51
  Peter Wallace.
• 37:52
  Dave Moore.
• 37:52
  Elwin Bickley.
• 37:54
  All of these people were working for me in different capacities back then.
• 37:58
  And seriously, could you have a better bunch?
• 38:00
  And Pee Wee, heading up all of that, a better group of people to learn from.
• 38:04
  I mean, these were guys that are the masters of motor racing and open wheeler motor racing and, to this day, historic motor racing in this country, which had a massive influence, ultimately, on the EF Falcon, I'm sure we'll get to.
• 38:19
  But, to put things in perspective, Thruster, right back then, so I'm at Carlingford, Peewee who was guiding a lot of my career was down at his little office there at Bob.
• 38:30
  So I had my Formula Ford set up back down there, but when we moved to my home, I'd still frequent Peewee down there a lot.
• 38:37
  Yep.
• 38:37
  He was Parramatta, I think, wasn't he?
• 38:38
  Parramatta.
• 38:39
  Parramatta, sorry.
• 38:41
  So no money, still no money.
• 38:43
  And every bit of money we had, you know, I just kicked Robin out the door, go back to work.
• 38:46
  We need some 325-pound springs.
• 38:48
  We only got three 15s.
• 38:50
  We need three 25s.
• 38:51
  Go and work harder.
• 38:52
  So, and she was just great support.
• 38:55
  But so, you know, I probably can say this 20, 30 years later, you know, I didn't register the cars, right?
• 39:01
  So I was driving, first of all, this little...
• 39:06
  A little.
• 39:07
  I bought a Valiant Regal, I think it was.
• 39:10
  It was about a 71 model for a guy that owned a delicatessen.
• 39:14
  So it had old bits of dried salam in it and all sorts of things.
• 39:17
  And it was unregistered.
• 39:18
  And this is a true story, mate.
• 39:20
  So I'm trying to get money for sponsorship or whatever.
• 39:22
  So I'm getting all around Sydney in this unregistered Valiant Regal.
• 39:28
  Anyway, going along, and you'd know that at Pimble Air, there's one of the main roads where all those colleges are and everything there.
• 39:33
  I'm driving down there, and because back in the day, there was no, all this computer stuff we've got now, so you had to take, if I'm doing a presentation, I'd take the VCR and a TV with me, right?
• 39:41
  The big rank arena.
• 39:43
  Right, to a present, I'd take that to a presentation.
• 39:47
  And an A4 folder with notes in it.
• 39:50
  An A4 folder with notes in my orange...
• 39:53
  faded, 71, valiant, regal.
• 39:57
  VH maybe, VJ?
• 39:58
  I can't believe something like that.
• 40:02
  A couple of Ds pull me over.
• 40:04
  because they'd obviously spotted, because it looked bad.
• 40:06
  This car just looked really bad.
• 40:10
  No registration, out you get.
• 40:11
  And, of course, they open up the back door.
• 40:12
  Here's a TV and video recorder.
• 40:13
  Hang on, and I'm wearing a suit.
• 40:17
  How do you reckon that all looked?
• 40:18
  So I kid you not, mate, you would not believe it.
• 40:23
  So we'd just raced the previous weekend at Amaru Park, and I'd won a race there, and there was four of them.
• 40:30
  And this young D got out of the back,
• 40:33
  And he knew who I was.
• 40:34
  He said, I was at Amaroop.
• 40:35
  Mate, fantastic win last weekend.
• 40:37
  Off you go, mate.
• 40:38
  Off you go.
• 40:39
  Just be careful.
• 40:43
  It was outstanding.
• 40:44
  Lucky.
• 40:45
  Outstanding.
• 40:46
  I'm led to believe that team in Carlingford would pile in the kitchen for ham and cheese toasties.
• 40:51
  Meantime, it's meant to be a home for you and Robin as well, isn't it?
• 40:56
  Yeah, well, you've got to take that off to Robin again, don't you?
• 40:58
  I mean, you know, I've got all these people coming and going and, you know, they start early.
• 41:02
  So, you know, morning cup of coffee, smoko time, lunch time.
• 41:06
  And back then it wasn't eight to five.
• 41:08
  You know, we just did whatever we had to do to get it done.
• 41:10
  So they lived in our...
• 41:12
  In our kitchen, in our living room.
• 41:14
  You had a soft spot for engine mounts.
• 41:16
  Tell me about that.
• 41:16
  I don't know.
• 41:18
  Well, that was an old Bruce Carey, and I'm sure Sam would have mentioned Bruce Carey.
• 41:22
  He was a great, like Peewee, he was a great mentor for all of us, an Aussie guy that went on and achieved things overseas, but in fact engineered David Brabham to his Formula 3 win.
• 41:34
  And even to this day, I remember when Bruce passed, Sam was overseas and he was doing Formula 1, and he couldn't make it back to his funeral, understandably, but he sent a little note back that Peewee read out, and he said that...
• 41:47
  even after then he'd been in Formula One, I can't remember, maybe 10 years, he said he could count the real, real proper engineers on one hand.
• 41:57
  Wow.
• 41:58
  Bruce was one of them.
• 41:59
  You know, and he learned from Bruce.
• 42:02
  So vanilla slices were a favourite.
• 42:05
  And if you pick up a vanilla slice, mate, from the Carlingford Bakery, it looks awfully and moves awfully like an engine mount, right?
• 42:12
  So we'd break the odd engine mount over a smoker, no problem at all.
• 42:15
  I love it.
• 42:15
  That was code.
• 42:16
  It was code, wasn't it?
• 42:17
  Sam, please pick up some engine mounts on your way back with whatever it was.
• 42:20
  Sam Michael, you've mentioned about him before.
• 42:22
  I mean, he's been a part of the podcast series.
• 42:24
  Today, when I arrived here to catch up with you, you showed me a book that would have been an inch, two inches thick, maybe, which was his thesis.
• 42:33
  Thesis, yeah.
• 42:34
  It was remarkable for its time.
• 42:36
  He's told a bit of the story, but I think you've got a bit more to tell.
• 42:40
  It would ultimately help him very significantly on that road to Formula One, wouldn't it?
• 42:45
  Yeah, it's a nice story.
• 42:47
  It's a nice story because we're still really close mates to this day, and I like that.
• 42:52
  But he walked into my garage when we were at Eastern Creek, and he walked up to me.
• 42:58
  Never seen anything like it.
• 42:59
  And I think he called me Mr. Larkham, which that was the first thing that got my attention.
• 43:02
  Never been called that ever off anyone or since, right?
• 43:06
  And handed me a letter and he literally said, I remember to this day, I won't waste any more of your time.
• 43:12
  Have a read of that.
• 43:13
  See what you think.
• 43:15
  How he walked.
• 43:16
  So I didn't, mate, seriously, yeah, okay, put him on the desk.
• 43:21
  I read it maybe a week later.
• 43:22
  Mm-hmm.
• 43:23
  And then I went straight down to Peewee and the unregistered Valiant.
• 43:27
  Parramatta.
• 43:28
  And actually, no, quick story.
• 43:30
  Wasn't the Valiant by now.
• 43:32
  Valiant was gone because I couldn't be seen in that anymore around the district.
• 43:36
  So now I'm in Robyn's Galant again.
• 43:38
  Remember the Galant we talked about earlier?
• 43:40
  But I didn't register the Galant anymore because we didn't have the muddy Galant because we needed shock absorber shims, right?
• 43:45
  So the Galant was now unregistered.
• 43:47
  So I'm going down to Peewee.
• 43:49
  True story.
• 43:51
  coppers pulled me over again.
• 43:52
  Unregistered car.
• 43:54
  But what was really bad about this one was when they pulled me over, they're out and they're going around the outside of the car looking for defects and what have you and I'd stuck a registration label off a registered car on this car right away.
• 44:11
  Very James Bond.
• 44:14
  And so I'm snuck over to the passenger side of the car.
• 44:17
  So as these guys are in the dark, as these guys are going around the torsling of the car, I've got a coin out of my pocket and I'm trying as fast as I can to scrape this Rego label off the inside of the windscreen, right?
• 44:29
  So imagine, so the coppers are outside wondering why the car's rocking, right?
• 44:33
  And it's me trying to, and I'm going at 100 mile an hour.
• 44:35
  Nelly got it, Nelly got it.
• 44:36
  And the torch comes on.
• 44:37
  So I'm like a rabbit in the spotlight.
• 44:40
  Anyway, that was, that didn't end well.
• 44:42
  There was significant fines there.
• 44:44
  Okay.
• 44:44
  Great lessons for young people.
• 44:47
  But again, you know, I don't promote that to good stuff, but it was all part of just the life experience and the desire to do what we need.
• 44:54
  And I just needed money, seriously, for springs and travel and what have you.
• 44:57
  So some things went without like car rego.
• 45:00
  Anyway, Sam, I took that letter down to Peewee.
• 45:03
  I said, have a read of this.
• 45:05
  And it read really well.
• 45:07
  So, but we just said straight away, hire him, which he did.
• 45:10
  And that was the start of it.
• 45:12
  And again, to this day, I've never seen or met a more intelligent, ambitious guy at a young age than Sam.
• 45:20
  He really was.
• 45:21
  And so he came into our team.
• 45:24
  He was still doing uni at the time.
• 45:27
  learnt from Bruce, learnt from Pee Wee, you wouldn't get too better.
• 45:31
  And he developed a lot of our early data acquisition.
• 45:34
  So you imagine back then, Thrust, this is like 90...
• 45:36
  Early days.
• 45:37
  Early days of data acquisition.
• 45:38
  In fact, I think in a Formula 3000 car, you could, Pee Wee would just start to do this black box thing, right?
• 45:43
  So, of course, we couldn't have one of those.
• 45:45
  So we thought we'd develop our own.
• 45:46
  So I did a deal with this mob in Melbourne, and I think they were called Data Communications, and they did weather recording stations, right?
• 45:54
  So I thought, oh, yeah, that's gathering data, weather recording.
• 45:57
  They take a sample, you know, once every 30 days, three weeks.
• 46:02
  What we actually need is a sample, you know, 200 samples a second.
• 46:04
  Here, Sam, can you use this?
• 46:07
  To Sam's great credit, yeah, I can use that.
• 46:09
  So we started this relationship and Sam, away he went.
• 46:12
  Remember, I said we've got the old DOS computer.
• 46:14
  I've still got photos of it out there in the workshop.
• 46:17
  A couple of Playboy pinups in front of him to motivate him.
• 46:21
  And a weather station data recorder to turn from 30-day sampling into 200 samples a second.
• 46:27
  And he did.
• 46:28
  And whilst it was really, I've kept some of the traces.
• 46:30
  I've kept some of the correspondence from back then.
• 46:33
  You can't imagine how important it was back then to have simple things like speed traces, gear shift traces, just the basic stuff.
• 46:40
  In fact, I even wish now it was back to that, rather than the plethora of stuff we just bury ourselves in now.
• 46:46
  It was the stuff that mattered.
• 46:47
  So it was a pretty cool time.
• 46:49
  He was incredibly thorough.
• 46:50
  And I remember you telling me about him going to Eastern Creek and measuring so much in the way of circuit information to perfect a lot of that.
• 46:58
  No wonder it was so comprehensive.
• 47:01
  I didn't.
• 47:01
  No, it just didn't surprise me at all that he went as far as he did.
• 47:04
  I think it was unfortunate for Sam that I think through no fault of his own he landed a couple of teams when they weren't going through their best periods because he's certainly one of our brightest.
• 47:15
  I'm a big believer in crediting as a reporter.
• 47:19
  So some of this, let's call it input, may have come from Mark.
• 47:25
  Mark's originally from the central coast of New South Wales.
• 47:28
  We can call him Scafie.
• 47:29
  I think it's OK to say.
• 47:31
  He tells me in this Formula Holden chapter that the pair of you back in 1993 were locked in a mega, a great battle at Simmons Plains for the whole race.
• 47:42
  LAUGHTER
• 47:43
  And I'm going to get your side in a moment, but I'll share his.
• 47:46
  He says he did a massive dive bomb pass at the end of the back straight.
• 47:51
  He locked up.
• 47:52
  And I think the whole niece of you kind of went into limp mode, if that is correct.
• 47:57
  But what's staggered me, mate, is you evidently... What happens next?
• 48:02
  What happens next?
• 48:03
  Because you look like you had it in the bag, but you were more worried in the mirrors about what was going on behind you.
• 48:09
  What happened next?
• 48:10
  Isn't it funny?
• 48:12
  It's hard to beat Mark Scaife on any day.
• 48:15
  He's one of our greatest.
• 48:19
  And the thrill of holding him out, because it was a Titanic battle, and we had quite a few of them.
• 48:24
  And he was right up my clack of the whole race, you know, and he's aggressive, as you know.
• 48:29
  And we come down that chute, and he puts it up this side, that side, this side, that side, then he has the big dive bomb, and all I saw in my vision mirrors was smoke.
• 48:36
  And as you know back then, the Formula Brahmers, when you lock them up, the little engine crank sensor gets all confused, and they go into limp home mode.
• 48:43
  So I go blazing around the last corner.
• 48:45
  Remember back in the day, the checkered flag used to be around what is now turn one?
• 48:50
  So just as I go around turn one, I look and he's not there.
• 48:52
  I look in that way, he's not there, and I have a huge sigh of relief.
• 48:55
  Take my foot off the swaddle, and on a flat-bottom car, the car needs to be down on the swaddle to make downforce.
• 49:00
  So I turn in the thing, and zip, zip, a couple of loops, and I'm facing backwards.
• 49:04
  And this prick, right...
• 49:07
  Goes past, gives me the bird, wins the race.
• 49:11
  And he's chugging too, isn't he?
• 49:12
  Chook, chook, chook, chook, chook, chook, chook, chook, chook, and wins the race.
• 49:18
  And, you know, I've got photos.
• 49:19
  A punter came up and gave me photos of that race.
• 49:21
  I said, don't remind me.
• 49:22
  But that was a funny moment.
• 49:24
  I mean, they were great moments.
• 49:25
  And, you know, again, mate, seriously, I just feel...
• 49:28
  So lucky now that, you know, we've become such good mates after all those years of racing and some titanic battles at the board table, around the supercars board table.
• 49:37
  And, you know, like others we've talked about today, what a great human being that bike is.
• 49:42
  Amazing.
• 49:43
  The category did go international, sort of, in the sense that there was a race in Indonesia at the Central Circuit.
• 49:49
  You won it, the 1993 Indonesian Grand Prix winner.
• 49:53
  What are your memories...
• 49:54
  of that and of racing there and the impact that it had.
• 49:58
  And can you clear up for me urban myth or truth?
• 50:03
  The then-president Zaharto's son, Tommy, who actually drove in the race, did he drive his race car to the track or is that rubbish?
• 50:10
  No, no, what gets better, not only do you drive the race car to a train...
• 50:14
  There's so many urban myths that we need to put straight here.
• 50:17
  So Tommy...
• 50:19
  Sorry, so we're at the circuit.
• 50:21
  And because he's the president's son, the grandstand thruster, the main grandstand, had glass.
• 50:25
  The whole thing was glassed in.
• 50:27
  Like, there was...
• 50:28
  300 metres of glass wrapped around this thing it was apparently all bulletproof glass and then as before our race all helicopters started to land on the mountain at the foot of these sort of hills and then all the military went out and dispersed it was insane all here to protect President Sahadu to come to watch his son race why was he coming to watch his son race haha wow
• 50:47
  Well, we all used V6 Formula Holden engines.
• 50:50
  If I remember, they were 325 horsepower.
• 50:53
  We all signed a waiver the night before to let Tommy leave the Formula 3000 engine in his car.
• 50:58
  So we're all going around, and Tommy, all on his own.
• 51:04
  So Tommy was a no-brainer to win this race, right?
• 51:07
  Tommy sticks it in the wall at the first corner.
• 51:09
  He got so excited from the back of the grid, we made him start from the back.
• 51:12
  And that was Tommy Sahado.
• 51:15
  So that was a great event, though.
• 51:18
  It was a really...
• 51:20
  I've got the trophy there.
• 51:21
  It was called the Indonesian Grand Prix.
• 51:23
  So whilst I don't profess for a minute I'm a Grand Prix winner, I'm a Grand Prix winner.
• 51:28
  I love it.
• 51:28
  I love it.
• 51:29
  Let's just digress for one quick second here and talk music.
• 51:33
  When you road trip, mate...
• 51:35
  when you're with the V8 commentary team and invariably you often travel together, are you in command of the music and is it country?
• 51:43
  Country music is you.
• 51:45
  I am a big Keith Urban fan.
• 51:47
  You know, it goes with just being out here, mate, country cattle.
• 51:50
  Country music is part of sort of what we do.
• 51:52
  So, no, no, I do.
• 51:55
  And, in fact, with my sons, both my sons, we all play a bit of guitar, just campfire guitarists.
• 52:00
  Self-taught?
• 52:00
  Yeah, self-taught.
• 52:01
  Yeah, yeah.
• 52:02
  Judd, my older son, actually does professional gigs, does a few around town.
• 52:06
  So I've been so blessed in my life, mate, to be able to sit around with my boys and...
• 52:11
  play guitar and sing songs.
• 52:13
  So that's been a feature of my life.
• 52:15
  Mate, that's really interesting because in the world of motor racing where you're a data-trace-loving, suspension, process-obsessed racer, to use that side of your brain, that creative musical side, I mean, Scaifey reminded me, you know, Elio DeAngelis, he's now gone to God, but the ex-Formula One driver, I mean, he was a concert-grade pianist, right?
• 52:39
  I know that.
• 52:39
  Yeah.
• 52:39
  So not many people...
• 52:41
  in our game, yes they like music, but they're not necessarily geared that way.
• 52:46
  So mate, the penis yes, concert grade no.
• 52:52
  So, as I said, just a bum guitarist that loves banging out a few chords and singing songs with a few mates or the TV crew or here at home.
• 53:02
  So, no, it's a great release.
• 53:04
  You know the great thing, mate, as we're sitting here amongst the birds in the bush, I love, and I quote it to my dogs, I've got a couple of Kelpies there you saw.
• 53:13
  This is such a contrast, the intensity of a race weekend.
• 53:16
  Yes.
• 53:16
  So whether it's in the commentary world or the racing world, it doesn't matter.
• 53:18
  It's the same.
• 53:20
  Time doesn't move.
• 53:21
  You know, this session starts here.
• 53:22
  That race starts here.
• 53:23
  We've got to get this done.
• 53:24
  We've got to get that away.
• 53:25
  And it's just, it's intense.
• 53:27
  And you're surrounded by intense people.
• 53:29
  So the contrast to come back to this world is great balance.
• 53:46
  A bushdov is a type of outdoor dance party, generally held in a remote country area.
• 53:53
  It's also a great place to see if your car can double up as a mobile hotel, and a restaurant, and a nightclub, and a rubbish tip, and then a paddock basher.
• 54:08
  We talked about Brock before in your time with the mobile team.
• 54:11
  Let's move to supercars now.
• 54:13
  How did that come about?
• 54:15
  How did you set the wheels in motion, if you'll pardon the pun, to move ultimately from Formula Holden?
• 54:21
  You were living in Sydney at the time.
• 54:23
  Obviously, you would hook up and have a relationship with the Stone Brothers, who were Gold Coast-based.
• 54:27
  How did that all come together?
• 54:30
  So quickly, mate, so we're doing...
• 54:33
  I guess essentially, so we'd succeeded in open wheelers.
• 54:35
  We'd been winning races in Formula Bradham.
• 54:37
  We'd just won the Formula Ford Championship.
• 54:40
  So there was nowhere to go other than touring car racing.
• 54:43
  Now, this got really difficult because remember, this was 94, which was exactly when the two-litre thing worldwide took off.
• 54:50
  Yes.
• 54:50
  Right?
• 54:51
  So I had Mitre 10 very close to me.
• 54:53
  We just had a long, successful relationship, which would go on to be a 10-year relationship.
• 54:59
  So they were happy to be part of whatever we were going to do next.
• 55:02
  But what was that?
• 55:03
  And that was really hard.
• 55:04
  So did you nearly go subterranean?
• 55:06
  Mate, I can show you a presentation down there because we were pretty close to Nissan through Peewee at the time.
• 55:10
  I did a bit of stuff with Peewee with Nissan.
• 55:13
  I'd actually done a proposal and a painting and presentation for two Primeras, Nissan Primeras, in the two-litre championship.
• 55:20
  And we got really – in fact, I actually did present that to Mitre 10 at the time.
• 55:25
  And we were looking at all of that, and then my instinct told me,
• 55:30
  This ain't right.
• 55:31
  I don't know what it was, mate.
• 55:33
  I really don't.
• 55:33
  It might have been because Larry and Scaifey and Stone, you know, those guys stuck with the V8 route, which ultimately was the right decision, but back then it was very hard to know.
• 55:45
  Because remember the British two-litre championship back then, it was mega.
• 55:48
  And it just seemed so logical.
• 55:50
  In fact, I'd even done a little bit of commentary stuff with the great Darrell Eastlake.
• 55:53
  That was fun.
• 55:54
  Around the two-litre stuff.
• 55:55
  So it was really hard to resist that.
• 55:58
  But to this day, I don't know what it was.
• 56:00
  It was instinct, said, no, no, this isn't right.
• 56:03
  Go the V8 route.
• 56:05
  So I got commitment from Mitre 10 to race in supercars.
• 56:10
  The regulations were now in place for the new era of, it wasn't supercars then, but it was touring cars, Group A. V8s, so it was specifically when it was V8s, I came in on that era.
• 56:23
  And because we'd come off the back of,
• 56:26
  Success in open wheelers, and this was another great life lesson, and that's what I put it down to.
• 56:30
  It was a mistake.
• 56:31
  It cost me a lot of money.
• 56:34
  But I don't know if I'd changed much because they were good lessons for the rest of my life, mate, is we sort of knew what we knew.
• 56:40
  We didn't know touring cars.
• 56:42
  So we looked at touring cars, and to where we'd come from as all purist open wheeler guys, which I'd surrounded myself with them, absolutely surrounded myself with them.
• 56:52
  We thought, well, we can make a better digger than that in terms of engineering from a race car point of view.
• 56:56
  And that's actually the truth.
• 56:58
  What we didn't understand, and I take full responsibility for it, because the thing you should never do is just charge a whole bunch of engineers with budget to go and build a race car.
• 57:07
  You've got to maintain control of that.
• 57:10
  And whilst from a textbook point of view, we built what was a very, very clever race car.
• 57:16
  Not me clever, them clever.
• 57:18
  They just did some stuff that to this day was outstanding.
• 57:23
  Where it did not work at all was the practicality of running the car week in and week out.
• 57:29
  Um, mate, so, so, so we had things like, you know, we had camber in the diff to get the diff housing down low.
• 57:35
  We had a three piece tail shaft with the alternator down in the tail shaft.
• 57:39
  They're all pumped down in the tail shaft.
• 57:41
  We had a tiny little radiator at the front of the car because we had all this really sophisticated ducting.
• 57:47
  All our wishbones, all our front cross members was all made out of aero tubing.
• 57:50
  You know, it was all this, it was just race car theory applied to the building of a touring car.
• 57:56
  Mm.
• 57:57
  A lot of the stuff has subsequently happened.
• 58:00
  So we bolted the seat to the cage, which was not done back then, was bolted to the floor.
• 58:05
  We moved it well inboard, which was not back then, which is done now.
• 58:11
  We built a whole capsule that Adam Perry and I built in my backyard and then got, I can't remember his second name, Greg, anyway, to build this carbon fibre cell for us.
• 58:26
  that was a fully encapsulated module with the pedals, the electrics, the hydraulics, everything in it, very much like Mercedes-Benz did 10 years later.
• 58:38
  And that's just the start of it.
• 58:41
  We had tripods in the rear axles that were a Formula One technology.
• 58:45
  We had all these great concepts in this car that...
• 58:51
  The cage we made have a thing called carbon manganese, which are making fishing rods and pushbikes in the UK.
• 58:57
  So I got a box of it out here, and you could cut it, not with a grind, you cut it with tin snips.
• 59:02
  So we had this super light cage, but if you have a look at it, it was so complex, structurally it was magnificently stiff.
• 59:08
  We had an equal length trailing house.
• 59:10
  So we had all these, on paper, great ideas.
• 59:14
  But sadly, we had things like 5 16th,
• 59:18
  bolts holding our top wishbones to our uprights and tiny lightweight bearings that on a piece of paper from a load point of view, tick, in the real world when you're racing Wayne Gardner and banging them up against a curb, they just didn't work.
• 59:33
  So everything just failed and failed and failed.
• 59:37
  And it was a really difficult time because it was hard for my men.
• 59:39
  Mm-hmm.
• 59:40
  Um, it burned them out because we had to work long hours and late nights to keep this thing serviced, to keep it going.
• 59:45
  I'm trying to keep the sponsors happy and pacified.
• 59:49
  Um, so in hindsight, mate, great lessons.
• 59:51
  Um, it was a mistake.
• 59:53
  I should have just gone and bought a Larry Perkins car and gone racing.
• 59:57
  But I learned a lot.
• 59:58
  You know, I learned about managing a budget.
• 59:59
  I learned a lot about people.
• 1:00:00
  Yeah.
• 1:00:01
  I learned a lot about people.
• 1:00:03
  So that was a good thing that I think was good for the rest of my life.
• 1:00:06
  But at the end of that year, we quickly started buying Harrop, Ronnie Harrop.
• 1:00:10
  I'm a big fan and friend of Ronnie Harrop these days.
• 1:00:12
  We're so easy to go and buy all his stuff off the shelf.
• 1:00:14
  Ronnie Harrop uprights, Ronnie Harrop diff, Ronnie Harrop everything, just to make the car reliable.
• 1:00:19
  And then by the end of that season, I thought I've got to get myself out of this mess.
• 1:00:22
  So the logical thing was to do a deal with someone.
• 1:00:25
  Ross Stone was running a great little operation up here.
• 1:00:28
  You know, we had Alan Jones driving for him, the pack leader thing, and that was coming to sort of an end.
• 1:00:32
  So Ross and I connected.
• 1:00:34
  I tried really hard to bring Ross and Jimmy back down to Sydney.
• 1:00:39
  They would not comply, and I tried and tried and tried, and they said they're not leaving Queensland.
• 1:00:43
  And when I came up here, I could see why.
• 1:00:46
  So I did something that was kind of new to the sport then, um...
• 1:00:51
  I actually took my franchise and parked it inside another organisation.
• 1:00:57
  Now, that was new territory for the category because we hadn't done that then.
• 1:01:01
  So there was all these issues around, oh, hang on, is that the way we designed the category?
• 1:01:07
  Because it was a test.
• 1:01:08
  regulations and sharing information and maybe you couldn't share data you couldn't do any of those things back then and then even subsequently when when we weren't part of the Stone Brothers organization and I set up my own organization and did an engine deal with Stone Brothers we were at the forefront of someone doing an engine deal outside of their race team so that agreement had to be put before the board of
• 1:01:32
  Tiga, which was difficult back then because the board members were other race teams, predominantly.
• 1:01:40
  And it was the right thing to do.
• 1:01:41
  So it was a good model to park yourself inside someone like your Stone Brothers.
• 1:01:45
  So working around Jimmy and Ross goes without saying.
• 1:01:48
  I love them to this day.
• 1:01:49
  They're racers.
• 1:01:50
  They're as hardcore.
• 1:01:51
  They personify the word racer.
• 1:01:54
  Yes.
• 1:01:54
  Both of them in every respect of the word.
• 1:01:57
  I have great respect for both those guys.
• 1:02:00
  And I think the sport –
• 1:02:03
  is no way better off as a result of them not being here any longer.
• 1:02:07
  I would love for them and think they still should be around.
• 1:02:09
  But anyway, be that as it may...
• 1:02:13
  We then, they moved off, built their factory.
• 1:02:17
  It was time for me.
• 1:02:17
  I had Bruce Carey working for me again, which was fabulous.
• 1:02:20
  Had my own little team.
• 1:02:21
  So I actually employed all my own staff, but worked within their organisation.
• 1:02:24
  So we shared a lot of facilities, resources, a lot of Jimmy's ideas.
• 1:02:28
  So effectively it was their team, but we kind of ran our car within their team.
• 1:02:34
  As you'd expect, that had limitations.
• 1:02:37
  And I understood that.
• 1:02:38
  So I just got to a point where the smart thing now is we had to be out on our own.
• 1:02:42
  So I think it was 99.
• 1:02:43
  They left.
• 1:02:44
  We stayed in the factory, expanded, and stayed with Mitre 10 and went on and had a couple of really good years.
• 1:02:52
  In fact, I'd say probably 97, 98, 99, 2000 were my best years in touring car.
• 1:02:59
  Then, sorry, mate, just to keep going on this thread...
• 1:03:04
  So Mitre 10, we've had a 10-year relationship.
• 1:03:06
  It was great.
• 1:03:07
  Mitre 10 felt it was time for change in terms of their organisation and their organisational structure.
• 1:03:12
  So all the people that I were connected with for so many years, which were great people, great friendships, great relationships, but most of all the sponsorship worked.
• 1:03:24
  in store at the ground level and particularly in the trade area because we were this vehicle, this marketing vehicle that put a discussion point and a commonality between the store and the tradies.
• 1:03:37
  So it was a thing that could be talked about on Monday morning.
• 1:03:40
  Yeah.
• 1:03:41
  And so it just worked.
• 1:03:42
  The demographic was right.
• 1:03:43
  We had those great Father's Day promotions.
• 1:03:46
  So everything, we brought DeWalt in, Makita in, you know, paint Taubmans.
• 1:03:50
  So there was all these co-deals that were done.
• 1:03:52
  So it was a great sponsorship model.
• 1:03:53
  So in the end, Mitre 10 put in a lot of money, but that was really propped up by money from all of these other companies.
• 1:04:00
  sponsors.
• 1:04:00
  So we had this great model that was largely propped up.
• 1:04:03
  They won because we'd go to a DeWalt and say, right, you get space on the race car, we'll give you gondola ends in store, we'll make you a feature on the second page of the Father's Day catalogue.
• 1:04:13
  And so I could do all this with Mitre 10 support, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:04:16
  So it was a really strong
• 1:04:18
  I think they badged it co-op marketing back then, didn't they?
• 1:04:20
  It was a strong proposition.
• 1:04:21
  You know, it was a strong proposition.
• 1:04:22
  So all this B2B was going on.
• 1:04:24
  So then when we'd land on the ground, we'd do on-the-ground marketing, not just with Mitre 10, but with these co-supplyers.
• 1:04:31
  And because everyone was invested in the same purchase from the same stores, it just worked.
• 1:04:36
  So there was a complete change of head office staff at Mitre 10.
• 1:04:39
  New board, new everything.
• 1:04:41
  And they ditched me on the 5th of December in 2000 when we were talking about going to two-car team.
• 1:04:51
  Not saying it was happening.
• 1:04:51
  I'd had Marcus Ambrose on the phone.
• 1:04:53
  I was talking to him.
• 1:04:54
  He was in the UK at the time doing Formula 3.
• 1:04:57
  We were having chats and I was trying to do a DeWalt Mitre 10 two-thirds, one-third car and back the other way on the other car.
• 1:05:04
  So we're in sort of this discussion phase of trying to pull this together.
• 1:05:07
  We're certainly going to be one car the next year, but we're trying to pull the two-car thing together and I was trying to find who was going to be the other.
• 1:05:12
  So there were some chats with Marcus back then.
• 1:05:15
  Long story short, 5th December, it was just, we're now going to sponsor a truck that I think went around Australia and planted trees or something.
• 1:05:21
  It was much more of an environmental thread.
• 1:05:27
  And what was really nice about that was the kickback from all the stores that were completely pissed off that that sponsorship had been taken away.
• 1:05:36
  Not all of them, but the vast majority, they surveyed them.
• 1:05:39
  Um...
• 1:05:41
  But that kind of worked him a favour because one of the stores, Greens Mitre 10 up in Brisbane, who was completely peeved, went straight to his mate, Silvio Predella, who owned Orcon, and dragged him straight down to my workshop, and we shook hands that afternoon.
• 1:05:55
  So away we went again, you know.
• 1:05:57
  So actually, no, I missed a big component.
• 1:05:59
  Sorry, mate, can we rewind?
• 1:05:59
  No, no, go.
• 1:06:01
  I've missed a big component.
• 1:06:03
  When we first lost Mitre 10...
• 1:06:06
  Yes, Greens were working in the background.
• 1:06:09
  We did a deal with the smart card.
• 1:06:10
  Remember the ICS smart card, the yellow card?
• 1:06:14
  Mate, I could talk a month about that.
• 1:06:17
  But sadly, that didn't materialise.
• 1:06:19
  I probably spent close to $20,000 on contracts to make sure that was tight.
• 1:06:24
  And as tight as we made it, it didn't materialise from there in.
• 1:06:28
  So that was...
• 1:06:30
  That was disappointing.
• 1:06:32
  But again, fortunately, through the relationships we'd developed around Mitre 10, Karcher stepped up to the plate.
• 1:06:37
  You know, IXL, there was a couple of others that stepped up to the plate and helped us to get through until Greens Mitre 10 dragged Silvio Predella from Orcon down, and we did the deal.
• 1:06:46
  So we became Orcon in 2001.
• 1:06:50
  The truth though, Greg, if I'm really honest, those good years, as I said, in touring cars, 97, 98, 99, 2000, I never recovered from what happened then with that Mitre 10 thing on the 5th of December for the subsequent six years before I sold.
• 1:07:05
  Just never did.
• 1:07:06
  Just absolutely depleted.
• 1:07:08
  That 2001 year...
• 1:07:10
  We depleted everything we had.
• 1:07:12
  You know, we just had no – I sold, not that there was much, personal assets at home to pay wages, you know, to motorbikes I had, just some bits and pieces to keep it going.
• 1:07:23
  Fortunately, I had a really loyal staff that hung in there with me, but it was tough.
• 1:07:26
  So we had a thing upstairs called the healing room.
• 1:07:29
  Right, so Kenny McNamara, who's a Triple H engine builder, Kenny will tell you about the healing room.
• 1:07:33
  Righto, Kenny, let's rebuild this engine.
• 1:07:35
  So he'd pull it all apart and he'd go upstairs to the healing room and the pistons you pulled out at the last rebuild, they'll be up there on the shelf.
• 1:07:41
  Put them back in because they've healed now.
• 1:07:43
  And we just kept recycling, you know, because everything was lifed.
• 1:07:46
  Had a kilometre, a logged kilometres life on it.
• 1:07:48
  Prompo has that line about cleanest dirty shirts.
• 1:07:51
  You were basically...
• 1:07:52
  There you go.
• 1:07:53
  So we'd go up and we'd pull a 3,500k piston out and if there was one up there, they had 2,600.
• 1:07:58
  Back in she went.
• 1:08:00
  So there was a lot of that.
• 1:08:01
  So we really stretched the life of components.
• 1:08:03
  But that was a good thing because that taught me a lot about lifing of components, recording of lifing.
• 1:08:08
  And I had some really good guys on my staff who came out of the Subaru World Rally Championship team who were really good at this lifing stuff.
• 1:08:14
  So again, it was good...
• 1:08:16
  Good learnings, but tough times.
• 1:08:17
  And, mate, you know, in a world where...
• 1:08:20
  the sport as a result of Koko coming along in, you know, 96, 97, in that sort of period, and the thing started to really take off and commercialise.
• 1:08:28
  So the money that was being invested in winning was going up substantially.
• 1:08:34
  So 2001 was a really bad time to be doing it on the bones of your arse.
• 1:08:40
  And as great as Alcon was, it was just really hard to recover from that point.
• 1:08:47
  I want to put a full stop on the car that you pioneered there in the middle of the 90s, mate.
• 1:08:53
  Firstly, Cam McConville spoke about it recently on Aaron Noonan's podcast, actually, the V8 Sleuth podcast.
• 1:09:00
  He found it difficult to drive in terms of that mid-mounted seating position.
• 1:09:05
  So I want to ask what you thought it was like to drive, get your viewpoint.
• 1:09:09
  And secondly, Scaifey says, he winds you up about it, I know.
• 1:09:15
  He kind of says it was a hound, it was worse than a dog, it was a hound and blah, blah, blah.
• 1:09:19
  But you actually, the pair of you, such as your friendship, you did have a conversation at Lakeside.
• 1:09:25
  And am I right in saying recently you found a letter where he offered you a few suggestions of things that might work if you moved away from the open wheeler philosophy and this is touring car racing kind of thing?
• 1:09:38
  So I think I said earlier, mate, I love Scafie.
• 1:09:42
  I think he's maligned sometimes in terms of fans, maybe because he was so hardcore, but what a good human being.
• 1:09:49
  So I did find that letter recently.
• 1:09:51
  It was better than a letter.
• 1:09:52
  He felt for me, because I think because we'd battled so hard in Formula Bradman, he enjoyed that competition.
• 1:09:58
  And he could see I'd probably made some wrong decisions and I asked him for a little bit of help.
• 1:10:04
  And seriously, he'd do dry grams of trailing arm geometry, where he reckons I should have my cambers, spring rates, all sorts of stuff.
• 1:10:13
  With the best knowledge he had of the Falcon at that time.
• 1:10:17
  and just laid all that in probably a four-page document and sent it to me.
• 1:10:21
  Now, if that doesn't say volumes about the guy, he knew I was no threat to him at that point in touring cars, but still, the fact that he found the time to do it, why love him.
• 1:10:33
  What was the car like to drive, though?
• 1:10:36
  It wasn't good, mate, because for the reasons we said, it was way too fragile.
• 1:10:43
  So when we first arrived, and it's interesting, you said you spoke to Cam McConville and Warwick Rookland will tell you the same story.
• 1:10:49
  It was everything, you know, it was so lightweight that it was almost flexible.
• 1:10:54
  So we arrive at Bathurst.
• 1:10:57
  which is where we actually debuted it.
• 1:10:59
  Remember they did the sprint round at Bathurst that year?
• 1:11:01
  And we hadn't finished it, but the pressure, the commercial pressure was so great because we missed Simmons planes the first round.
• 1:11:08
  So I went to Simmons and stood on the hill and signed some autographs because there was no car.
• 1:11:12
  So we took it to Bathurst.
• 1:11:13
  It didn't have a front-handed roll bar on it.
• 1:11:16
  That's not the place to take a car without a front anti-roll bar.
• 1:11:18
  But what was worse is the front uprights had super lightweight bearings in them.
• 1:11:23
  And I don't want to bore you with the technical detail, but that meant we got a lot of what's called knock-off, which means you get a long brake pedal, right?
• 1:11:30
  That's all good, except, well, it's not good, but you can deal with long brake pedal.
• 1:11:35
  Except the way this carbon fibre module was made, when the brake went long, the brake then picked up the cable that went across the accelerator and pulled that on.
• 1:11:44
  So what was really good, just at the point you ran out of brakes, you pulled on the accelerator.
• 1:11:48
  Now going into BP cutting, that was just a, ask Warren Grewkin, ask Cam, that was fantastic.
• 1:11:52
  Yeah, so it was, you know, it was those little things.
• 1:11:55
  But look, sitting in the middle of the car, for me, having come out of open wheelers, I didn't find that such an issue.
• 1:12:01
  You know, I think there's some, again, mate, there was some really good stuff there, but not in its entirety, you know, in pieces later on, good stuff, but not at the time.
• 1:12:12
  You have just answered a question from the great Shane Van Gisbergen because he's, as you know, a great fan of the history, the car data.
• 1:12:22
  And he said to me before I was coming here to chat with you, he said, ask about that car.
• 1:12:26
  He goes, I know from the Stone Brothers guys, it had some groundbreaking things.
• 1:12:29
  Okay, it didn't pan out, but I'd love to know more about it.
• 1:12:32
  So you've just answered that.
• 1:12:33
  Who needs enemies when you have good friends, mate?
• 1:12:38
  Scafie asked me to remind you about the rollover in Perth on the warm-up lab.
• 1:12:45
  Can I just have a list of the things Scafie's asked you to ask me about?
• 1:12:48
  No.
• 1:12:49
  He was wailing when he told me.
• 1:12:52
  I don't have many claims to fame thruster, but one of them is the only bloke to roll a car on the warm-up lap.
• 1:12:57
  Now, that's pretty cool, right?
• 1:12:59
  Can you claim that?
• 1:13:00
  I feel bad asking you.
• 1:13:01
  I've yanked a steering wheel off a racing car, so I can't really wind you up about this, mate, but I know your friends do.
• 1:13:07
  Yeah, they do.
• 1:13:08
  They remind me every year we go back.
• 1:13:09
  It's pretty predictable, actually.
• 1:13:12
  So we go back there.
• 1:13:13
  Look, mate, there was a little issue with the rear camber.
• 1:13:15
  Where'd your rear wheel fell off and the warm-up lap?
• 1:13:18
  And over she went.
• 1:13:18
  And thank Christ it was on the other side of that hill.
• 1:13:20
  There wasn't a camera over there.
• 1:13:22
  So there's no evidence of it.
• 1:13:23
  So I'm going to say it never happened, right?
• 1:13:24
  Okay, perfect.
• 1:13:24
  I'm going to say it never happened.
• 1:13:26
  Can't find it on YouTube.
• 1:13:27
  I know I've wound you up there, mate.
• 1:13:29
  But here's the balance from Scafie, okay?
• 1:13:32
  He has... You talked about being on the Tiger board before.
• 1:13:34
  He's got massive respect for you during your time there.
• 1:13:37
  He says you always had the best interest of the sport at heart, strong, robust discussion, particularly around things like parity.
• 1:13:45
  You tried always to kind of minimise that gap between the haves and the have-nots of the sport.
• 1:13:52
  He jokingly says, I don't understand socialist racing, but...
• 1:13:58
  But it was good, solid discussion, and he fondly recalls that period where you were on the board.
• 1:14:04
  Yeah, and good on him.
• 1:14:06
  They were tough and robust debates and discussions, and we often laugh, you know, because we're both a little bit technical on the board as well.
• 1:14:15
  So, you know, Scafie would rock up with a cylinder head, you know, into the boardroom, and I'd be there debating valve angles with him, you know, while the rest of the boards want to talk about how much the Northern Territory Government is going to pay for an event.
• 1:14:26
  But...
• 1:14:29
  Look, it's an interesting one, mate.
• 1:14:30
  I guess the only thing I can say for us to validate the way I did conduct myself back then and the way I conducted myself was very much trying to find ways to bring, not socialist racing, because I don't agree with this, this is sport the cream's got to rise to the top.
• 1:14:48
  But what I wanted to do was provide more players in the field with a more equal opportunity to...
• 1:14:56
  to do that.
• 1:14:58
  So many of the things we have today were things that were on the discussion table back then.
• 1:15:03
  Control tyre, control ECU, engine weights, all of this stuff that wasn't regulated back then.
• 1:15:11
  tell me the sense in running a seven and a half kilo crankshaft that lasts 10 minutes who's going to buy one of those i wasn't so that wasn't socialist race that was just trying to provide a more level playing for him so when the cream does rise to the crop top it's genuinely cream yes right and and you find nothing changes when you change like the cream still does rise to the top right so post my career
• 1:15:34
  As you know, my attitude on all that stuff hasn't changed.
• 1:15:37
  And I've tried to maintain that to put some credibility more back to what I was doing back then.
• 1:15:43
  And it was costly, mate.
• 1:15:44
  I don't mind saying here now, mate, years later, that that time on the board...
• 1:15:50
  I mean, parity was a big part of the debate and discussion back then, and it's popped its head up now.
• 1:15:54
  And Scaifey and I were just talking on the phone the other day.
• 1:15:57
  You know, it has been a period of years where it's been really great.
• 1:16:02
  The parity word hasn't come a lot.
• 1:16:03
  It's an ugly, ugly word in our sport, but really.
• 1:16:06
  And back then it was as ugly as hell.
• 1:16:08
  So, you know, over here you had Scaifey, Jeff Gregg, John Crennan, Larry Perkins.
• 1:16:13
  Any one of those four characters on their own.
• 1:16:15
  So four of those guys fighting the Holden battle with Holden's might behind them.
• 1:16:20
  And over on our side, you've got Dick who'd say it as it is.
• 1:16:23
  I was there.
• 1:16:24
  Ford weren't probably as strong as Holden.
• 1:16:26
  So it was a tough, tough battle to fight.
• 1:16:29
  Cedo was Cedo.
• 1:16:30
  He was just driving his race car.
• 1:16:32
  So they were tough days.
• 1:16:37
  You know, at the end of the day, Project Blueprint came out of that, out of those times.
• 1:16:42
  But the time and energy spent at board level, if I could have my time again...
• 1:16:48
  I actually think it probably cost me a little too much.
• 1:16:51
  Okay.
• 1:16:52
  But you could have devoted it elsewhere in your race team or to your driving or something, yeah?
• 1:16:55
  Into my own team, my own driving, absolutely.
• 1:16:58
  Particularly my own team.
• 1:17:00
  And not to say I didn't give my own team everything.
• 1:17:01
  It was, you know, midnight every day and every night.
• 1:17:03
  But that's not a healthy place to be when you're the driver.
• 1:17:09
  In reflection, I'd say I probably overcommitted.
• 1:17:10
  I think I was on the board like eight years, and they were the growth years of the sport.
• 1:17:14
  And, of course, with the growth of the commercialisation of the sport, the technical side went with it.
• 1:17:19
  So I was on the technical committee for a few years there as well.
• 1:17:21
  So there was an Avesco board and there was a Teiga board.
• 1:17:24
  So I was on both of those boards and trying to run my little race team.
• 1:17:28
  But I just felt compelled to be there to try and keep this...
• 1:17:32
  this balance in the sport to try and stop HRT in particular at that time, to try and just contain that a little bit, you know, for the rest of the people in the thing.
• 1:17:43
  But ultimately, mate, you know, we went through those years when zero zero come along.
• 1:17:49
  And a lounge crossed over to Ford.
• 1:17:51
  And I fell out with Ford after all these years together and taking money off them and trucks and parts and all the things we got.
• 1:17:57
  Because I couldn't see eye to eye.
• 1:18:03
  Understandably, Ford's view of the sport was Ford winning at all costs, as it should be.
• 1:18:09
  Larco's view of the sport was what's right for the sport more generally.
• 1:18:13
  And often those things would clash with Ford's desire.
• 1:18:16
  Yep, to win.
• 1:18:17
  Yep.
• 1:18:19
  I wasn't happy in my role on the board.
• 1:18:23
  I didn't say I was there necessarily representing Ford.
• 1:18:26
  you're actually representing the pit lane is what you're actually there doing.
• 1:18:29
  Constituents.
• 1:18:30
  Yeah, 100%.
• 1:18:31
  So that was a difficult time that ultimately, there was no bad falling out, but ultimately the close relationship with Ford sort of whittled away.
• 1:18:41
  And, of course, we'd lost competitiveness since 2001, as I said.
• 1:18:45
  So, you know, if I were them, I would have been putting their money elsewhere.
• 1:18:48
  But, you know, the relationship tailed away and then, you know,
• 1:18:51
  And behind the scenes, they orchestrate kind of who ends up on the board.
• 1:18:55
  So then by 2006, I was off the board.
• 1:18:58
  By then, I'd sold my team and was running Gorey's team anyway.
• 1:19:01
  So there was a whole lot of circumstances.
• 1:19:03
  But it's fair to say, yeah, I didn't feel as wedded to Ford in the end as what I did at the start.
• 1:19:09
  That leads me in a natural questioning sense because you said it earlier in the podcast, you were very much a Ford guy, right?
• 1:19:16
  So were there opportunities at Holden and were there phone calls?
• 1:19:20
  Did you explore that or did you just, even though that had happened, did you just stay Ford?
• 1:19:24
  Always Ford, but I did go and sit before I did my initial deal with Ford, which was quite fortuous, Greg, because we'd finished Formula Brabham.
• 1:19:35
  Peter Gillitzer was the Ford Motorsport boss at the time, just about to finish up.
• 1:19:41
  John Lindell was the Holden Motorsport boss.
• 1:19:46
  So Peter was making noises about, you know, because Dick and Barry were there and been winning and everything.
• 1:19:51
  They had Cito.
• 1:19:51
  He was a young guy.
• 1:19:53
  We needed a bit more young blood in there.
• 1:19:54
  So I was a bit fortunate for me.
• 1:19:56
  I was kind of Johnny on the spot.
• 1:19:57
  And we'd come out of open wheels.
• 1:19:59
  We'd been doing all this winning.
• 1:20:00
  And so I'm saying, well, we're going to build this trick car and do all of this.
• 1:20:03
  So we were kind of the new Ford team and the young bloke, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:20:07
  Before I did that deal, I actually went and sat with John Lindell at Holden.
• 1:20:10
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:20:11
  Because although I was a Ford guy, at the end of the day, the reality is it comes down to the commerciality.
• 1:20:15
  And I'd be a liar to say anything other than that.
• 1:20:17
  So I flushed out where Holden were.
• 1:20:19
  Obviously, they were doing a lot of winning then.
• 1:20:21
  They were probably pretty cool with where they were.
• 1:20:24
  There was sponsorship and support from Ford.
• 1:20:27
  They were actually thirsty to have some new blood on their side.
• 1:20:30
  So it was just such a logical... And Peter Gillison was a great guy as a motorsport boss to work under back then.
• 1:20:35
  Natural partnership, natural pairing.
• 1:20:37
  It just was, mate.
• 1:20:38
  Just so it all fell into place.
• 1:20:41
  We haven't really touched on the fact, mate, I mean, there were podiums, wins at the IndyCar race on the Gold Coast.
• 1:20:46
  Is there a proudest moment for you in a supercar sense?
• 1:20:52
  Probably two, mate.
• 1:20:54
  Another win that does get misguided, and it's not necessarily a great win, but remember they reversed, they used to reverse the top six.
• 1:21:01
  And it was – so after I had that big shunt with Paul Morris, can we just touch on that?
• 1:21:06
  So that shunt in 2000 was – The fireball at Oran Park.
• 1:21:11
  The fireball at Oran Park.
• 1:21:12
  So we subsequently looked at the data.
• 1:21:14
  So at the point of impact, that was 143 kilometres an hour.
• 1:21:18
  So that's not – you know, that's at the point of impact.
• 1:21:21
  I got my foot to the brake for about a little over two tenths, two and a half tenths of a second, excuse me, which didn't retard the speed of the car.
• 1:21:28
  No.
• 1:21:30
  And that was just pre-hands device.
• 1:21:32
  Yep.
• 1:21:35
  Subsequently, I sat back in that car because I broke my visor on my helmet on the steering wheel.
• 1:21:42
  And for the life of me... That's nuts, mate.
• 1:21:44
  So you're strapped in quite a distance from the wheel.
• 1:21:47
  And you've said it.
• 1:21:48
  Me, you've been around long enough.
• 1:21:49
  On the warm-up lap, what do we all do?
• 1:21:50
  We're just tightening, tightening, tightening your belts, tightening your belts, tightening them more because you're wiggling the car, so they come tightening, so you lock hard against the back of the seat...
• 1:21:59
  And I, for the life of me, don't know how my head got to the steering wheel.
• 1:22:02
  But it did.
• 1:22:03
  And that's why Hans device.
• 1:22:04
  I'm actually probably pretty lucky to be here today because it's that basal skull fracture that actually does kill a lot of drivers in those incidents.
• 1:22:11
  Hence the Hans.
• 1:22:11
  So I actually did a lot of the early testing for Hans device.
• 1:22:15
  or the frontal head restraint, as it probably should be called.
• 1:22:20
  And that was kind of funny.
• 1:22:23
  So they cart Paul Morris and I off to hospital, and I'm laying in the hospital bed there.
• 1:22:30
  And they want to do a thorough examination.
• 1:22:33
  And so the guy, the doctor said, do you mind if we bring in some interns to watch the examination?
• 1:22:39
  And I said, that's fine with me.
• 1:22:40
  You know, it's my head's been hurt.
• 1:22:41
  They're only going to look at my neck.
• 1:22:43
  So then they roll me over and he proceeds to put his finger in my butt, right?
• 1:22:48
  My prostate's fine, mate.
• 1:22:49
  It's my neck that's hurting, right?
• 1:22:51
  So I'm trying to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
• 1:22:54
  I've got all these 23-year-old nurses in the room.
• 1:22:58
  I couldn't quite work that out.
• 1:22:59
  Anyway, so what was funny, Adam Perry, my team manager at the time, I'm in a neck brace.
• 1:23:05
  laying flat on my back, and because there was some internal bleeding, they put a catheter in me, right?
• 1:23:11
  And I couldn't see it because I've got the neck brace on.
• 1:23:13
  And if you've ever had a catheter or seen one, it's quite a fine tube for obvious reasons.
• 1:23:17
  But then it went into, on this particular one, it went near this little tap thing and a fatter tube, and then a fatter tube.
• 1:23:23
  And so the only tube I could see was the fat tube.
• 1:23:25
  It was like about as fat as your thumb, right?
• 1:23:28
  So Adam came in, and he strayed onto this.
• 1:23:30
  So he could see, I couldn't see the little fine tube.
• 1:23:32
  And he looks at the fat tube, and he opens up his eyeballs and looks down there at me.
• 1:23:37
  He looks back at me.
• 1:23:37
  He said, Jesus, how'd they get that in there?
• 1:23:42
  Anyway, so that car was destroyed and gone, which was a shame, because that was a great car.
• 1:23:50
  But to go to your point, mate, proudest moments.
• 1:23:52
  Yep.
• 1:23:53
  We had a spare chassis painted up, ready to go in the workshop.
• 1:23:56
  When I say a chassis, I mean a chassis, nothing.
• 1:23:59
  Roll cage and tin.
• 1:24:00
  Yep.
• 1:24:01
  So over the next 10 days, the boys worked so hard.
• 1:24:06
  Wiring loom, suspension, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:24:08
  We pulled a lot of parts off the car that was crashed and burnt.
• 1:24:11
  There's still a lot of good parts.
• 1:24:12
  The chassis was ruined.
• 1:24:14
  And we went to Calder.
• 1:24:16
  It was a fortnight later and won that race.
• 1:24:18
  I think we finished sixth in the second race, which meant we started on pole on that next race.
• 1:24:24
  And won that race.
• 1:24:25
  So that was a pretty proud moment.
• 1:24:27
  Not from a driving point of view, from a team point of view.
• 1:24:30
  Because it was still my team.
• 1:24:32
  And my boys, to their great credit, had built me that race car that allowed me to go and win that race.
• 1:24:37
  So that was a very proud moment.
• 1:24:38
  I can vividly recall interviewing a pretty upset Brad Jones when you guys paired up.
• 1:24:43
  I want to say it was the 99 race at Bathurst, if I've got my... Was it 99?
• 1:24:49
  98.
• 1:24:50
  You'd had pole position.
• 1:24:51
  Was that the race that kind of...
• 1:24:53
  got away, the Bathurst race?
• 1:24:54
  Yeah, I mean, everyone's got a story that the one that got away, but that one genuinely did.
• 1:25:03
  We were just on the pace that weekend, as we were for a few of those Bathursts.
• 1:25:07
  Again, that was a good era for us.
• 1:25:08
  We'd go up there and be quick.
• 1:25:11
  And we battled with HRT and Leon's at the start of the, you know, well, the first period of that event.
• 1:25:18
  It was HRT versus little old Mitre 10 single car team.
• 1:25:21
  So that was pretty cool.
• 1:25:24
  We subsequently, I can't remember, was maybe lap 100 or early 100s or something like that.
• 1:25:29
  The car just stopped as I came around on the start line there.
• 1:25:33
  That's when Brad got upset because I think Brad, like me, knew this was our best chance ever.
• 1:25:37
  We actually reckon we were up on fuel on them.
• 1:25:39
  So we actually genuinely, at that point, were thinking we're in with a shot, right?
• 1:25:43
  We genuinely believed we're in with a shot.
• 1:25:46
  So Campbell Little was my engineer during that period because I was with Stone Brothers then.
• 1:25:54
  And it just stopped.
• 1:25:55
  I think we lost, I don't know, go back and look at the video.
• 1:25:57
  What was it, a minute or something like that, 45 seconds or a minute?
• 1:26:01
  I don't think we lost the race by much more than that.
• 1:26:03
  But, you know, again, mate, everyone's got a story.
• 1:26:06
  That was ours.
• 1:26:08
  But, you know, that one did slip through our fingers.
• 1:26:10
  I mean, it's hard, isn't it?
• 1:26:11
  I mean, we all go to Bathurst and we all compete and all the rest of it.
• 1:26:14
  But to put yourself in a winning position at Bathurst is just hard.
• 1:26:19
  Yes.
• 1:26:19
  It's just hard.
• 1:26:20
  It's interesting probably even to now, mate.
• 1:26:23
  Well, it does.
• 1:26:24
  But, you know, let's feel for Glenn Seton.
• 1:26:26
  You know, he deserves a Bathurst more than I do.
• 1:26:28
  And he went a lot of times and it didn't happen.
• 1:26:30
  And that was probably, we had a couple there that, you know, maybe, maybe not.
• 1:26:34
  That one was the one that did, that's the one that got away.
• 1:26:37
  So, yeah, it does sting.
• 1:26:38
  You moved into a team management scenario.
• 1:26:42
  Firstly, was it hard to stop?
• 1:26:44
  And it seems like a natural progression.
• 1:26:45
  You're such a racer.
• 1:26:46
  You love that aspect of it.
• 1:26:48
  You know, you'd managed sponsors.
• 1:26:49
  You'd been successful in that area.
• 1:26:51
  Keep talking.
• 1:26:53
  I'll get another beer.
• 1:26:54
  Look at that salubrious audio.
• 1:27:00
  So was it hard to stop?
• 1:27:03
  And did you enjoy that movement into the team management kind of side of things, running that operation like that?
• 1:27:09
  In a weird way, yes, I did, only because so much of my career, not by design but by default, was managing the team.
• 1:27:17
  And I like that.
• 1:27:19
  Go right back to where we started this conversation.
• 1:27:21
  So I didn't have money, so I had to learn how to find the money.
• 1:27:25
  I didn't have a race car engineer at Griffith, so I had to learn how to race car engineer.
• 1:27:29
  So all of those things you learn.
• 1:27:30
  So you become this person.
• 1:27:32
  I'm not good at anything, but I kind of know what a jack of all trades kind of thing.
• 1:27:37
  So you learn a bit of all of that.
• 1:27:39
  So over the years, you start from the driving seat, get to operate.
• 1:27:43
  But what happened in the end, Greg, is when you're a driver...
• 1:27:47
  And you own your team and you're worried so much about the commercial aspect.
• 1:27:50
  And that's the big ticket, right, is how you keep the thing funded.
• 1:27:53
  Because in the end, you know, when I, before I got out of the, you know, we were probably spending close to $4 million a year, $3.8 million a year we had to find.
• 1:28:01
  That's when we were two cars in the end.
• 1:28:02
  But that's a lot of money to find every year.
• 1:28:04
  You know, and every dollar I had to find, there was no, oh, Dad, can you give us a mill or pull a mill out of my business over here?
• 1:28:10
  There was none of that.
• 1:28:11
  You had to go and find, had to sell real estate on the car for market value.
• 1:28:17
  For market value.
• 1:28:18
  And even now, I have conversations with team owners now that don't get anything like we got for a front fender or a rear fender back then.
• 1:28:25
  Because it was just, you know, and that, sorry, mate, just to diverge.
• 1:28:28
  That's why I used to get frustrated with the sport, because I thought people like Brad Jones was a really good model, and I thought we were a good model.
• 1:28:35
  And by that, I mean we were racing people.
• 1:28:38
  We didn't have ancillary businesses hanging off the side of our racing model.
• 1:28:42
  Our income was generated through selling real estate on your vehicle and any merchandise sales you could possibly make, which was bugger all anyway.
• 1:28:50
  But that was it.
• 1:28:50
  And that was a racing model.
• 1:28:51
  So if you're competing in the top 10, for example...
• 1:28:56
  And you're selling the real estate for not discounted values, for actual market rates in the market at that time.
• 1:29:01
  Shouldn't that be the model?
• 1:29:03
  Absolutely.
• 1:29:03
  And back then, I always thought the model was around $4 million for two cars.
• 1:29:09
  To be competitive back then, if I recall, it was probably around $6.5, $7,000 you needed to be competitive with two cars, probably more.
• 1:29:17
  So I would often ask the board the question,
• 1:29:20
  How do I bridge that gap?
• 1:29:22
  And the only way to bridge that gap was to supplement it with other income not associated to the business or to have a manufacturer tip in an amount that was above market rates because you're a manufacturer-based team, which I understand that, support that.
• 1:29:35
  No problem.
• 1:29:35
  So I always wanted to see it.
• 1:29:37
  sort of come back.
• 1:29:39
  So anyway, to go to your points, Ruster.
• 1:29:41
  So when you used to pull up in a pit stop as the driver of an owner, I'd often find myself looking, what's that mechanic?
• 1:29:48
  Why isn't he doing this, that, or the other?
• 1:29:49
  Because he had 20-odd staff at the time.
• 1:29:51
  Or I'd look at the sign on the pit bar and think, geez, why is that crooked?
• 1:29:55
  I found myself distracted by other things.
• 1:29:57
  But the thing that was the determining factor is when we grew to two cars,
• 1:30:02
  I employed Jason Barguana and I retired at the end of the first year that he drove for me.
• 1:30:07
  Because I saw straight away how you do it as a driver when you don't have to worry about all the other stuff.
• 1:30:13
  And he was doing it differently to me.
• 1:30:16
  You can't, I'm not a believer in regret in life, right?
• 1:30:19
  You make the best decision with what you've got at the time.
• 1:30:22
  You've said already in the podcast how valuable some of those life lessons are.
• 1:30:28
  Would you go back and not focus on the team stuff and be more the Mark Scaife, the Marcus Ambrose, just the race driver?
• 1:30:39
  I think that question goes back a little bit further.
• 1:30:42
  So that was a conscious decision and that's a good pick-up, isn't it?
• 1:30:44
  I often think what would have happened back when I finished doing quite a bit of winning in Formula Bradman, Formula Ford, if I'd said, okay, I'm going to be a driver?
• 1:30:54
  Might have taken me on a different journey.
• 1:30:56
  I don't know, mate.
• 1:30:58
  I don't know.
• 1:30:59
  If I didn't believe I could drive a race car, you wouldn't have done any of it.
• 1:31:04
  But I guess another way to look at that question, mate, is would I have done anything differently?
• 1:31:07
  Would I change a thing?
• 1:31:08
  You know what?
• 1:31:09
  Probably not.
• 1:31:10
  Because here I am sitting here with you, mate, on my farm that I bought as a result of, which was a long life dream.
• 1:31:18
  My wife and I both wanted to have a little cattle property.
• 1:31:21
  I sold, did that as a result of selling my race team back in 06.
• 1:31:26
  I now earn a living, as you do, talking about the sport that we love.
• 1:31:30
  Yeah.
• 1:31:33
  I started this with a toolbox and being an air conditioning mechanic in Griffith.
• 1:31:39
  And I've managed to have a career of... Make a life out of it.
• 1:31:42
  Make a life out of it that I love and I've been so fortunate.
• 1:31:46
  What would you change?
• 1:31:47
  I, I, I, you know, no, no, no.
• 1:31:50
  Wouldn't change much at all.
• 1:31:51
  You may not want to talk about this and you opened up a little bit about it before the end of that, that patch when you were in partnership with someone and it didn't, it didn't go real flash, mate.
• 1:32:00
  Did you walk away?
• 1:32:03
  with a loss of love for the game or just that scenario?
• 1:32:08
  Was it you never lost passion for supercars or was it just that you were worn out by that chapter?
• 1:32:16
  No, no.
• 1:32:16
  I actually, I can tell you here now, mate, I dearly wanted to stay in the game.
• 1:32:23
  I tried very, very hard...
• 1:32:26
  to sell a percentage of my team.
• 1:32:29
  I tried to find someone that wasn't a racing person that could bring some commercial clout.
• 1:32:32
  That's what I was lacking.
• 1:32:33
  I mean, we just needed the commercial clout.
• 1:32:36
  So I tried to sell a big stake in the team to someone that I guess had passion for the sport, came from a strong commercial background.
• 1:32:47
  We got very close.
• 1:32:49
  But what pulled it up in the end, mate, is when
• 1:32:53
  An outside investor back then came into the sport and looked at it.
• 1:32:58
  And we were spending, as I said, you know, 3.9 or whatever it was back then.
• 1:33:02
  And they sort of start scratching their heads and think, well, hang on, I can see what we need to get to the front, which was another couple at least.
• 1:33:11
  Where does that come from?
• 1:33:13
  And it kind of didn't stack.
• 1:33:15
  And so I found it really difficult to find someone to come in the basis of a business investment.
• 1:33:20
  And sure, you needed to trade a little bit on their passion and their love for the sport to give a 25% levy in there.
• 1:33:28
  But there still had to be a business decision.
• 1:33:30
  So they had to see the model...
• 1:33:32
  Now, I'm not saying that model doesn't work, but that model only worked for the front teams.
• 1:33:36
  So the great lesson in all of this is you've got to be at the front, get to the front, commercially find a way to get yourself to the front.
• 1:33:44
  If you can't, I found at the time the smart decision was to get out.
• 1:33:48
  It wasn't a decision I wanted to make.
• 1:33:49
  I just thought I had to take my heart right away from it and say, you know what, Mark, it's time because I couldn't see a way...
• 1:33:59
  how do I go and employ Craig Lowndes?
• 1:34:02
  How do I go and employ Richard Holloway at the time?
• 1:34:04
  You know, to come to my... You know what I mean?
• 1:34:06
  So it's not...
• 1:34:07
  It's the... Those things.
• 1:34:08
  And you need some commercial clout in the background.
• 1:34:13
  And my racing budget, so it was the lease on my dyno, it was the rent on my shed, it was our...
• 1:34:18
  It was everything.
• 1:34:18
  It was nothing that was...
• 1:34:20
  supported by anything so Rob and I lived on a dime I tell you we wasn't about pulling any money out there was nothing left because we wanted more springs or gears or whatever it was so I just think you've got to come to the realization that the sport has grown beyond my commercial capability and I tried to look at that pragmatically so no I didn't want to but at the end of the day
• 1:34:41
  It was just the right thing to die.
• 1:34:42
  And my timing was good because we were 32 cars, supercars then, and they wanted to get back to 30.
• 1:34:50
  I had two licences, so I actually sold them back to supercars.
• 1:34:56
  Well, the irony of it, I sold the licences to supercars.
• 1:35:02
  All my...
• 1:35:03
  infrastructure, cars, equipment, diner, all of the stuff and the lease on the premises, I actually sold to a Beaudesert Santa Gertrudis cattle farmer.
• 1:35:18
  Shannon O'Brien's dad.
• 1:35:19
  Wow.
• 1:35:20
  So I end up being out here in south-east Queensland being a Santa Gertrudis cattle farmer.
• 1:35:25
  What are the chances?
• 1:35:29
  we're nearing the end of this.
• 1:35:31
  Heaps of people have reached out via social media to say, thank you, mate.
• 1:35:36
  Thank you to Larco for what he does in the broadcast.
• 1:35:39
  That space you've created where you so beautifully break down a technical sport, tell it in this laconically Australian way that we know of you.
• 1:35:49
  Yeah.
• 1:35:51
  to satisfy their thirst of knowledge your dog's come in for a pat here um how did the opportunity to move into television come about and how did you first feel about it because it's an art mate it's it's not easy is it no it's not but i think um you know it's just being yourself mate at the end of the day i think that kind of just worked in anything in life so um it was actually back in 08 i'd got out of the sport um
• 1:36:17
  sold the assets of the team, bought our little cattle property here.
• 1:36:20
  It's only modest.
• 1:36:22
  And I just wanted to have a little bit of time away from the sport to have a bit of a think about what's next.
• 1:36:26
  So I actually was driving standards observer for Career Cup for a year.
• 1:36:29
  That was a paid gig.
• 1:36:30
  I enjoyed that.
• 1:36:31
  That was good.
• 1:36:31
  And it made me sort of think, hang on, you know what, there's actually other things around.
• 1:36:35
  But festering down here was still this love of the main game, you know, which, you know, supercars, that's it.
• 1:36:43
  Murray Lomax, who was the head of TV, you know Murray's.
• 1:36:46
  rang me up and said, oh, you know, why don't you come and do some pit lane?
• 1:36:49
  And I actually, I literally pushed him away.
• 1:36:52
  No, mate, I'm not a TV guy.
• 1:36:53
  Forget it.
• 1:36:54
  Look at me.
• 1:36:55
  I'm a bloke from the bush.
• 1:36:56
  I can't do TV.
• 1:36:57
  No, no, not me.
• 1:36:59
  Anyway, and he kept at me for a while because I guess it was probably that time in television where ex-swimmers, ex-football players, ex-drivers, you know, they'd probably make appropriate commentary support people.
• 1:37:11
  So he kept at me.
• 1:37:11
  And I just said, no, look, that's just not me.
• 1:37:13
  Not interested.
• 1:37:15
  Long story short, remember Grant Denyer broke his back in the jumping truck?
• 1:37:19
  Yeah, jump truck.
• 1:37:19
  So now Murray rang me and said, mate, now can you help us?
• 1:37:24
  And that's a different proposition, of course.
• 1:37:26
  So I said, of course I can.
• 1:37:27
  So I went to Winton.
• 1:37:30
  Nathan Prentigas was the pit reporter, who's now the TV boss, who also, when you were around on the pit lane in Formula, remember, I called him Little Prenti.
• 1:37:40
  So Little Prenti, Little Ginty Head Prenti was hanging around the back of the garages.
• 1:37:43
  He was a pony in the arse back then.
• 1:37:46
  So, yeah, that's kind of how it was.
• 1:37:50
  So I went to Winton, did that, actually probably enjoyed it more than I thought, but I was
• 1:37:56
  Went pretty good, not because I was any good at the television stuff, but because I understood the sport, perhaps, you know, or maybe my dumb demeanor meant I could just explain something simple because I'm a simpleton.
• 1:38:07
  So Grant was still not good, so they said, can you do the next round, which I can't remember, might have been Sandown.
• 1:38:12
  So then that continued, oh, look, can you now do Bathurst?
• 1:38:14
  This is all going pretty well, and it just sort of grew from...
• 1:38:17
  But what was funny, mate, and you'd like this, is that I was... Because the whole thing has really been the whiteboard journey, right?
• 1:38:23
  Yes, it's true.
• 1:38:24
  I can't do anything without a wife.
• 1:38:26
  I've got one.
• 1:38:26
  Robin and I got one over our bedhead.
• 1:38:28
  You have one at home.
• 1:38:29
  Over my bedhead.
• 1:38:31
  Can we do this?
• 1:38:36
  Oh, I'm a visual guy, mate.
• 1:38:37
  Don't tell me stuff like that.
• 1:38:38
  So it's okay.
• 1:38:39
  We've been together.
• 1:38:39
  We've been married for life.
• 1:38:40
  We're good.
• 1:38:44
  I was in Murray Lomax's office on the Gold Coast here, and Simon Fordham, our dear friend Simon, who was the producer at the time, so he was doing the 2008 Olympics in China?
• 1:38:54
  Beijing, yeah.
• 1:38:56
  And I was trying to explain something to Murray.
• 1:38:58
  Murray had a whiteboard in his office, and so I just, you know...
• 1:39:01
  picked up the texture and sort of drew it on the whiteboard.
• 1:39:04
  And I said, why don't we... And Murray gerried straight away.
• 1:39:07
  So he actually picked up the phone to Fordo in Beijing and said, get like our whiteboard at whatever the next race was.
• 1:39:15
  And that's kind of... How it started.
• 1:39:17
  That evolved from there.
• 1:39:18
  And it evolved further when Krompo and I got... You know, it might have been a year later.
• 1:39:23
  We got really frustrated about the whole strategy thing.
• 1:39:25
  We thought, how do we tell the...
• 1:39:27
  the fuel strategy thing to people at home because you can talk it all you like, but it's hard to picture.
• 1:39:33
  They start with this much, the fuel windows here, the critical laps here.
• 1:39:36
  Here's the plan.
• 1:39:37
  Yeah.
• 1:39:38
  So I kid you not, mate, we're in Bahrain racing.
• 1:39:40
  I think it was – I can't remember what you were.
• 1:39:42
  Anyway.
• 1:39:42
  We're in Bahrain.
• 1:39:43
  We locked ourselves.
• 1:39:44
  We went a day earlier and we locked ourselves in one of the little commentary huts that you know too well.
• 1:39:47
  Yep.
• 1:39:48
  And we said, we're not coming out.
• 1:39:49
  We had a big whiteboard in it until we devised a system to draw fuel
• 1:39:54
  On a whiteboard.
• 1:39:56
  And we just nutted it out and nutted it out and nutted it out until we came up with the triangle thing, right?
• 1:40:02
  Simple guys, triangles, right?
• 1:40:04
  And it kind of just worked, which led to that.
• 1:40:08
  And, you know, go back to the creative thing you said earlier, mate, I've always been a bit of a sketcher drawer.
• 1:40:12
  So it was just a logical progression to start drawing things because I think in life you can explain things so much better than drawing.
• 1:40:19
  And Kopp often says, you know, he said, we can say it all we like from commentary, but unless you can see it,
• 1:40:24
  And so I've had this wonderful opportunity and, I guess, advantage by being able to describe things by drawing them or picturing them in front of you.
• 1:40:33
  So it's been an enjoyable journey for me.
• 1:40:35
  It really has.
• 1:40:36
  It's been a great journey, mate, with Logie wins and all sorts.
• 1:40:38
  So well done.
• 1:40:40
  Yes or no?
• 1:40:41
  I reckon I know the answer to this.
• 1:40:44
  I've never seen Mark Larkham do social media.
• 1:40:47
  But...
• 1:40:48
  There are things that exist out there, like a Facebook page called, when Mark Larkham gets his whiteboard out, shit's about to go down.
• 1:40:57
  And Sam Michael has kind of questioned you on this and said, are you doing the double bluffy?
• 1:41:02
  Is that really you in disguise?
• 1:41:04
  Okay.
• 1:41:05
  I can't imagine you on Facebook.
• 1:41:08
  So remember the fireworks at Eastern Creek, the Sydney race last year?
• 1:41:12
  So I'm standing there and this lovely bloke comes up.
• 1:41:14
  When I'm watching the fireworks with everyone else, he taps him on the shoulder and says, Mark, he said, I'm the guy that does whatever that is.
• 1:41:22
  The Facebook page when the shit goes down, right?
• 1:41:25
  So I give him a little hug because he was a really good guy.
• 1:41:28
  And we had a chat for a while.
• 1:41:29
  And I mean, I'm just, seriously, I'm so flattered that people would...
• 1:41:34
  do that.
• 1:41:35
  No, and I don't do social media.
• 1:41:37
  It's a very intentional strategy for me.
• 1:41:38
  I just knock your socks off.
• 1:41:41
  It's just not me.
• 1:41:42
  I've got so much in my life that I'm, my life is full.
• 1:41:44
  I'm so lucky.
• 1:41:45
  I'm happy.
• 1:41:46
  I've got a family.
• 1:41:46
  I've got a farm.
• 1:41:47
  I've got my job.
• 1:41:48
  I just, I've got no space for, I just don't have space for that.
• 1:41:51
  So I don't know.
• 1:41:52
  I don't do it under any pseudonym or anything.
• 1:41:54
  You won't find me anywhere because I don't do it.
• 1:41:57
  Let's go to the finish here.
• 1:41:59
  People asking, did you keep
• 1:42:01
  An Emtek Falcon as well.
• 1:42:03
  Is there a car, in addition to the Formula Ford that we've covered off, that's a resto project in play, have you kept a supercar as well?
• 1:42:10
  I have.
• 1:42:11
  Awesome.
• 1:42:11
  I have.
• 1:42:11
  Which one?
• 1:42:13
  I kept my last Mitre 10 Falcon, so the one we won that call to race with.
• 1:42:17
  Fantastic.
• 1:42:17
  That's got a special sort of place for me.
• 1:42:19
  It's a race winner.
• 1:42:20
  Yeah.
• 1:42:21
  And the really good thing is it also, the engine that set pole at Bathurst in 99, that engine was absolutely fine after the race.
• 1:42:31
  Obviously, things like trumpets and wires and bits and pieces.
• 1:42:33
  So I kept the pole, the Bathurst pole engine and that car.
• 1:42:38
  So that's in a million parts in my barn.
• 1:42:42
  Yep.
• 1:42:44
  And at some point I will...
• 1:42:46
  I almost see it as, not retirement, but I'm in no hurry.
• 1:42:49
  I just want to, you know.
• 1:42:50
  Take your time.
• 1:42:52
  Take my time and maybe do that.
• 1:42:54
  I mean, there's a few people scratching around trying to get it off my hands and what have you.
• 1:42:58
  So Robin's starting to talk about things like pools.
• 1:43:03
  So, yeah, you know, can I be really honest, mate?
• 1:43:06
  So, you know, I've got my Formula Ford and I've got that Mitre 10 car.
• 1:43:12
  So deep down in my heart, I'm more wedded to the Formula Ford.
• 1:43:15
  Are you?
• 1:43:16
  It's a much easier project, but let's go around circle.
• 1:43:20
  So, you know, we've talked about the commercialisation of sport, how difficult that gets as a team owner.
• 1:43:24
  When I stand behind, excuse me, a Formula Ford now, doesn't matter what vintage it is, and it sits on the ground almost like a Huntsman spider.
• 1:43:35
  Still a good-looking thing, mate, aren't they?
• 1:43:37
  And I stand behind it.
• 1:43:39
  and they start it and you smell the avgas.
• 1:43:42
  And straight away, mate, that look and that smell take me back to a time where Village Grand Prix, early years of Formula Ford, where it was just about driving the car.
• 1:43:52
  There was nothing more to it.
• 1:43:53
  It was no more complicated than that.
• 1:43:54
  And that's what motorsport is.
• 1:43:56
  And if you haven't got that bit, there's all the other stuff that kind of is just noise.
• 1:44:00
  So whilst I love the Mitre 10 thing and we achieved some things there and all the rest of it.
• 1:44:05
  the real love, deep love of the sport were those early Formula Ford years.
• 1:44:10
  So that's where probably my passion would be.
• 1:44:15
  So if the Mitre 10 thing, I'm not sure where that'll go, but the Formula Ford, that's staying.
• 1:44:19
  Yeah.
• 1:44:20
  We'll wrap this up by saying congratulations, mate, on so many levels.
• 1:44:24
  I've loved the open wheeler chat.
• 1:44:26
  There's been some real highlights and some funny stuff in the supercars chapter as well.
• 1:44:31
  And just what you do in a broadcasting sense, mate, is absolutely world class.
• 1:44:36
  But the part I love the most about it is it's true to you.
• 1:44:40
  People will sense that in the podcast.
• 1:44:41
  As you and I chat here, it's the same bloke on camera.
• 1:44:45
  I'm going to finish with a little note, a positive note from Sam Michael.
• 1:44:51
  He emailed me in the lead up to this and he goes, Larco is always dedicated to the cause.
• 1:44:56
  One of the most committed people I know and he lives and breathes racing.
• 1:45:01
  I first started working for ML in my 20s when I was halfway through my engineering degree in Sydney.
• 1:45:05
  He always looked for the positive in a negative situation.
• 1:45:10
  whether that was a technical challenge in the workshop, working on the car at the track to make it faster or repairing something, commercially, marketing, et cetera.
• 1:45:18
  He's very, very generous with his time for people that are trying to make it.
• 1:45:23
  Drivers, engineers, mechanics, et cetera.
• 1:45:26
  I don't know how he finds the time.
• 1:45:28
  But importantly, he's got a great sense of humour and this ability to make people laugh.
• 1:45:34
  And as you know, it's almost always politically incorrect.
• 1:45:39
  And that made him a good guy to work with and someone I consider a great friend.
• 1:45:42
  I reckon that's a nice way to end it, mate.
• 1:45:44
  Well done.
• 1:45:45
  Thanks, mate.
• 1:45:45
  And coming from Sam, I'm flattered.
• 1:45:48
  It probably tells you a lot about why I don't do social media.
• 1:45:51
  I'd end up in a world of shit, wouldn't I?
• 1:45:52
  Yeah.
• 1:45:54
  I really will.
• 1:45:55
  No, look, thanks, mate.
• 1:45:55
  I've enjoyed the chat.
• 1:45:56
  And at the end of the day, these chats are about the listeners and the support from people on the ground, mate, for all of us in the industry.
• 1:46:07
  That's what it's about.
• 1:46:08
  So it is we get to do this fun thing, just be ourselves, and, you know, thanks for the opportunity, mate.
• 1:46:14
  It's been a great chat.
• 1:46:15
  I've enjoyed it.
• 1:46:16
  You've actually – I've relived a few memories in my own mind.
• 1:46:19
  Thank you.
• 1:46:19
  We've had a couple of tubes.
• 1:46:20
  It's dark.
• 1:46:22
  Let's go home.
• 1:46:23
  We're doing a podcast in the bush at nearly six o'clock at night.
• 1:46:26
  Thank you.
• 1:46:27
  Thanks, mate.
• 1:46:27
  Enjoyed it.
• 1:46:32
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 1:46:36
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 1:46:40
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 1:46:49
  Listener.