Latest / Rusty's Garage / Tony Cochrane (Part 2)

Transcript

Tony Cochrane (Part 2) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:20
  G'day, it's Rusty here, all set for part two of three of my podcast with Tony Cochran.
• 0:25
  If you've arrived at this point of the story and somehow missed part one, jump back to the library and give it a listen, especially if you're a two-wheel fan.
• 0:34
  Yep, there's a significant portion of that first part dedicated to SX Global, the World Supercross Championship he's now embarking on with AUSX Open founders Adam Bailey and Ryan Sanderson.
• 0:46
  They have...
• 0:47
  big plans and are putting a number of those in place right now it's got great potential incidentally we recorded this prior to the recent announcement of Feld and MX Sports announcing a partnership to try and play in this space which is the only reason we don't tackle that subject
• 1:04
  Now, part one also has some tales with the great Barry Sheen on running the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix at Eastern Creek and how it all got started for Coco, a man, a van, some lighting and immense entrepreneurial spirit.
• 1:19
  This second part covers his Supercars chapter at length.
• 1:22
  For clarity, I was on the 2-litre or Super Touring side as the categories went to war, and I'd eventually end up working for Channel 10 on the Supercars side while...
• 1:33
  endeavouring as I often do to be Switzerland.
• 1:35
  Toka as they were known batted hard but the V8 formula really appealed to Aussies and Kiwis and supercars would eventually win in a market that couldn't really sustain two big forms of motorsport.
• 1:49
  You'll hear some of the stuff that went on behind the scenes from Tony's point of view.
• 1:54
  We talk more about Baz as well, Barry Sheen but first Gold Coast Indy, an event he helped transform.
• 2:03
  I was listening to get calls from governments that are in trouble.
• 2:05
  So hardly back from that particular trip, and I get a call from this guy, Minister Bob Gibbs of the Queensland Government.
• 2:18
  Could you come up to George Street and have a meeting with the then Premier, Wayne Goss?
• 2:24
  Yeah, sure.
• 2:25
  What am I meeting about?
• 2:26
  Oh, we'd like to talk to you about Indy.
• 2:29
  So India had been going for a couple of years on the Gold Coast and, you know, had been a debacle.
• 2:36
  and it was meant to be privately run.
• 2:38
  The original concept of Indy was the government put some money in, and then once they put their money in, then this private consortium was going to run it and make a fortune out of it.
• 2:45
  So I hadn't taken a great deal of interest or notice of it, to be honest, even though it was in my backyard.
• 2:52
  I went to it, had a drink.
• 2:53
  What are we talking about?
• 2:54
  Like 92, Nigel Mansell kind of thing?
• 2:56
  We're talking 93, 94, 95, sort of around that period.
• 3:00
  Go on, sorry.
• 3:02
  And I had been involved in the first two Grand Prix's in Adelaide, but only in an entertainment sense.
• 3:07
  I hadn't done anything to do with the motorsport side of it.
• 3:09
  I'd been involved a bit on the fringes with the entertainment of the original Adelaide Grand Prix's, which were, again, terrific.
• 3:16
  Great, great, great days, great days.
• 3:20
  And –
• 3:21
  Anyway, so I stump up to this government meeting and they sit there and tell me all the wonderful things I've done to save the New South Wales government with the 500cc bike Grand Prix and they were wondering whether ING would like to step in and take over the IndyCar race on the Gold Coast.
• 3:37
  Oh, OK. Shit.
• 3:38
  Hadn't thought about that.
• 3:40
  Send us all the figures.
• 3:41
  Send us everything.
• 3:42
  We'll have a look at that.
• 3:44
  I'll never forget getting the first cut of the figures.
• 3:46
  They were 80 million in the red.
• 3:49
  And I'm thinking, how the hell have you managed to do that in two or three years?
• 3:53
  I just couldn't fathom it.
• 3:54
  You know, I mean, it was just, it was a knockout because I went from being quite excited about this to, and then I saw the figures and I was mortified.
• 4:06
  Mm-hmm.
• 4:06
  Anyway, again, Rusty to save your listeners from suffering complete boredom, I'll cut to the chase.
• 4:13
  So we took it over.
• 4:16
  They got rid of all the management group that were running it, and they had 80 staff, I think, or something approaching 80 staff, which was ludicrous for one event a year.
• 4:25
  I think I made myself most popular in the first week.
• 4:29
  I think I fired 46 people or something.
• 4:33
  And, yeah, we cut it all down and we redid it, redid the marketing, changed it to Indy Carnival and got a good group of people around us and away we went and had a crack.
• 4:46
  And we went IndyCar racing.
• 4:48
  In fact, IMG kept the contract for well after it because within two years of that decision, I had left IMG and we had gone off with David Coe and...
• 5:00
  James Eskin, we'd gone off and started SEL.
• 5:04
  So, but IMG kept the IndyCar contract on the Gold Coast for quite some time.
• 5:10
  And so having saved it once, I was, my story wasn't finished, because I ultimately came back and saved it a couple more times, which is bizarre.
• 5:19
  You're very passionate about that, I know, that event.
• 5:20
  It's bizarre, but anyway.
• 5:22
  So whilst I was doing IndyCar,
• 5:29
  on the Gold Coast and revving that up.
• 5:30
  And we turned it around, made it quite a profitable event.
• 5:33
  So the government were thrilled, fabulously happy, as were the IndyCar organisers, Andrew Craig and those guys out of the US, who are tremendous people.
• 5:42
  I really enjoyed working with Andrew.
• 5:44
  He was a really great operator.
• 5:46
  And, you know, you can almost plot the demise of certain motorsport events around the world.
• 5:53
  And the moment the team owners decided that Andrew Craig had to move on was the moment that IndyCar ended up in a basket case mess there and then ended up with a civil war between IndyCar.
• 6:05
  Champ car and Indy car.
• 6:06
  Champ car and Indy car.
• 6:07
  And, you know, it became a dog's dinner and put themselves back many, many, many, many years.
• 6:15
  In fact, I'm not sure they've ever fully recovered their glory days as I knew them compared to today.
• 6:21
  But during that period of time, you know, I was thinking, God, this motorsport cape is not bad, you know.
• 6:26
  You can make a coin here.
• 6:29
  I'm doing all right.
• 6:29
  Smell a dollar.
• 6:30
  Smell a dollar.
• 6:31
  Yeah, smell a dollar.
• 6:32
  I smelled several.
• 6:36
  And I like the vibe.
• 6:37
  I have to be honest.
• 6:38
  I thought the vibe was pretty cool.
• 6:42
  Most of the people that worked in it seemed to be pretty good people.
• 6:45
  Most of the guys on the fringe, the guys that built the...
• 6:50
  infrastructure and everything else were pretty good people to deal with you know whether it be the sign people whether it be the people that erected the pits whether it be the people that put the you know engineering in place whatever you know it was a pretty good crew you know i don't mind these people they're kind of my people um and um uh so i started to take a real
• 7:15
  Observation of what was in Group A touring cars Because you know they were the biggest show in town We're talking sort of 95, 96 We're talking 95, 96
• 7:26
  coinciding with this and I I for whatever reason right this is right towards the end of my ING four years I decided to do a what I called a white paper so I I just it was just Tony Cochran the blithering writings of Tony Cochran and I just went off and sort of started to take notes and try and analyze why they did what they did and where they went and
• 7:49
  And I actually had it picked as a much bigger business than it was.
• 7:52
  I mean, one of the things that I managed to completely screw up is I deluded myself about the size and success of this thing.
• 8:01
  At that stage.
• 8:02
  At that stage.
• 8:03
  And...
• 8:05
  Probably, I remember, you know, you get some funny stories, don't you, when you go down these paths, but I remember I decided, somebody had recommended to me, it might have been Cromley, because Cromley had a big influence.
• 8:20
  I knew Cromley a little bit.
• 8:21
  There was a story of rumour that you two caught up on a plane somewhere and then some of the conversations accelerated.
• 8:26
  I don't know if that's true, but there was some sort of, you knew each other, but then there was a convo and that sort of helped.
• 8:32
  We caught up somewhere.
• 8:34
  It certainly wasn't a brothel, but we did catch up somewhere.
• 8:40
  And, yeah, he got in my ear and, you know, he thought that I was a pretty good young entrepreneur and he got in my ear and started it.
• 8:50
  He found out that I was sort of doing this kind of study of group actoring cars.
• 8:54
  So, you know, he was really keen to, you know, you're the sort of guy we need, you know, Tigger's a mess and they all argue with each other.
• 9:01
  you know, yada, yada, yada.
• 9:02
  People don't realise that he, behind the scenes, he's very good like that, isn't he?
• 9:06
  Because he loves it so much and wants it to be.
• 9:08
  It's his life, you know, I mean, you know, as opposed to me, I, you know, I can't work out what my life is.
• 9:14
  I flip and flop between entertainment and sport and all sorts of things.
• 9:18
  So, you know, I'm sort of a, you know, I'm a multi-track and he's on one track.
• 9:26
  So, yeah, so Cromley was a big, big...
• 9:29
  I remember he organised a drink at a bar in Sydney.
• 9:32
  I reckon it was the Park Hyatt with Bob Forbes.
• 9:35
  Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 9:36
  Of course, Bob Forbes was a mover and shaker in Teagah, the original team entrance group.
• 9:42
  So he and Bob, you know, sort of got on each side of the bar and bought me copious drinks and...
• 9:48
  He's good after some Scotches, Grompo, isn't he?
• 9:50
  Yeah, and try to convince me that, you know, this is for you, my son, come and join the circus.
• 9:57
  And that was kind of interesting.
• 9:59
  Learned a fair bit there.
• 10:00
  But I did various things.
• 10:03
  And one of the things that I did was I had been recommended, and it could have been Bob Forbes who recommended this, I'm not sure, that I ought to go and meet Fred Gibson.
• 10:12
  Now, I had heard of Fred Gibson, but I didn't know Fred Gibson.
• 10:16
  So I duly decided that I'll go down and I'll watch a round of Phillip Island.
• 10:24
  Now, this proves that I wasn't a diehard motorsport fan, this story.
• 10:28
  This proves that I'm prepared to talk shit against myself.
• 10:31
  So are you secretly sneaking in here and just turning on the hill, having a look at what's going on?
• 10:37
  Or were you ever present in the paddock walking around meeting people?
• 10:40
  What was the...
• 10:42
  Oh, no, I, yeah, I was, yes, it was secret, as in the sense that I wasn't announcing.
• 10:48
  Nobody particularly knew who I was.
• 10:50
  I mean, there was an occasional person, like Alan Jones knew who I was because he came from the coast.
• 10:55
  You know, there was, you know, if Barry Sheen happened to be at an event, you know, then he'd make a big fuss over me and, you know, tell everybody, oh, this guy's great.
• 11:03
  You know, he's a great guy.
• 11:04
  TC's a great guy.
• 11:06
  You know, I remember Barry introduced me to Larry, you know.
• 11:10
  Yep, Perkins.
• 11:13
  So anyway, I decided to head down to Melbourne and to Phillip Island.
• 11:18
  So I fly down on a Saturday morning and I catch a cab out to...
• 11:23
  I prearranged.
• 11:24
  I did ring ahead.
• 11:25
  I prearranged to go and meet up with...
• 11:31
  Fred Gibson.
• 11:32
  Fred Gibson, correct.
• 11:35
  And so I go out to his workshop where the fuck it was.
• 11:38
  It was in the middle of nowhere.
• 11:40
  And I get out there and we're chatting away and I'm asking all these questions and Fred's being all super informative and a young, enthusiastic guy joins in.
• 11:51
  Of course, that's... Mark's gave.
• 11:52
  Mark's gave.
• 11:53
  So Mark at that stage is driving for Fred.
• 11:56
  They'd lost the cigarette money, so he wasn't able to race that weekend at Phillip Island because they had no sponsorship on the car.
• 12:03
  And so I'm pretty sure it's 96.
• 12:06
  It could have been 95, but I'm pretty confident it was 96.
• 12:10
  Anyway, so we have a big chat.
• 12:12
  Scafie joins in.
• 12:13
  You know, he's this enthusiastic, you know, got a zillion ideas and, you know, spitting them out at like a, you know, a machine gun.
• 12:24
  So I think, oh, this is all pretty interesting.
• 12:26
  So we spent about an hour, I guess.
• 12:28
  And then...
• 12:33
  Fred says to me, Coco, where are you going now?
• 12:38
  I said, I'm going to Phillip Island.
• 12:40
  Oh, he said, I didn't see you turn up with a car.
• 12:42
  I thought I saw a cab drop you off.
• 12:44
  I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll just grab a cab and get down to Phillip Island.
• 12:47
  And they just both absolutely pissed themselves laughing at me.
• 12:52
  You thought you were going from St Kilda to Albert Park or something, did you?
• 12:55
  I did.
• 12:56
  I thought Philip Allen was like on the outskirts of Melbourne.
• 12:59
  I thought, you know, like it might be a half an hour and a cab.
• 13:03
  Little did I know.
• 13:04
  Anyway, so after all the laughter died down, Scaifey says, look, I'm actually going to go down this afternoon.
• 13:11
  I'll drive you.
• 13:12
  Okay.
• 13:13
  So hence my, which I've turned into a bit of a famous story at various speeches and stuff that I take a bit of piss out of, but hence my famous line, Mark Scaife started out his career as my chauffeur.
• 13:28
  But so Scaife, you know, of course, you've got to be careful what you wish for in life, Rusty, because I was in a car buckled in
• 13:39
  Seatbelt definitely on, the way Scafie drove, heading to Phillip Island.
• 13:43
  But that gave Scafie, whatever it was, an hour and a half to ear bash me from the moment I got in the car to the moment I leapt out of the car.
• 13:53
  He doesn't miss an opportunity, does he?
• 13:55
  He doesn't miss an opportunity.
• 13:56
  My God, can he talk?
• 13:57
  Anyway, he, yeah, he was like a machine gun with information and, you know, this and that and the next thing.
• 14:03
  And dead keen to see me get involved and, you know.
• 14:06
  Hmm.
• 14:07
  telling me everything about the history of the championship and this and that and the next thing.
• 14:13
  So I had a whole afternoon down at Phillip Island and met a bunch of guys.
• 14:16
  I think it was the first time I met Glenn Seaton.
• 14:19
  Might have been the first time I met Mark Larkin too, possibly.
• 14:23
  So I met a few of the guys, they all seemed really quite nice guys.
• 14:26
  And I was flying back that night, finally found my way all the way back to Melbourne Airport.
• 14:33
  And I think Scafie dropped me in the city and then I got a cab out of the city down to Tullamarine.
• 14:37
  And I was sitting on the plane that night flying home to Queensland and one really apparent thought came over me that...
• 14:48
  The majority of these team owners that I met were all great guys, but they all were seeking a real direction, right?
• 14:58
  They were blundering on.
• 14:59
  Bit rudderless, bit, bit, yeah.
• 15:01
  It was completely rudderless.
• 15:02
  Mm-hmm.
• 15:03
  But their intentions were great.
• 15:06
  And I thought, by and large, they were a tremendous bunch of guys.
• 15:10
  Now, only later did I discover some of them were prime assholes, but that's okay.
• 15:17
  They probably think that of me.
• 15:19
  So away we went.
• 15:23
  And the next thing that came about in some sort of chronological order, and so by now we're probably in maybe September of,
• 15:32
  No, not quite September, maybe more like June of 96 was John Crennan who was in the very much the titular head of HRT your holds for your vehicles and yep.
• 15:46
  Yeah, he was you know, he was the big deal There's there was no question.
• 15:49
  I mean he was you know if you if you had some Demigods in that pit lane.
• 15:53
  He was definitely in that category at that stage Because he ran the whole you know HRT HSV business.
• 16:00
  Mm-hmm
• 16:01
  for Tom and he convened a meeting in his boardroom out at HSV and he invited all the other team owners at that time and some of them brought you know general managers like that's how come Wayne Caddick was there because Dick Johnson brought Wayne Caddick because Wayne and Dick were you know they were an item they were joined at the hip
• 16:25
  So there's Ross and Jimmy Stone, there's clearly LP was there, just a bunch of people, I'm pretty sure Larko was there as a young team owner.
• 16:39
  And it was an interesting exercise and that was the day that I presented to them on a
• 16:45
  My concept of Avesco, which was an acronym for the Australian V8 Supercar Company.
• 16:50
  So my suggestion was we dropped Group A Touring Cars as a name because it sounded like a blood disorder, and we became V8 Supercar.
• 16:59
  And it was a good meeting.
• 17:01
  It got heated at times, and not everybody agreed.
• 17:06
  And they used to tell me at that stage, they also had a proposal from... Oh...
• 17:13
  another sports marketing company whose name escapes me right at the moment.
• 17:16
  And maybe they did, maybe they didn't.
• 17:18
  But of an IMG kind of capacity, that style of company.
• 17:20
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:21
  Because bear in mind, they were talking to me as IMG, right?
• 17:26
  So they thought that I was going to be part and parcel of bringing IMG to the show.
• 17:33
  And one of the things that I proved on that whiteboard, which flawed every one of them, to be truthful, if they were all going to be honest, they'd say, God, he's right.
• 17:42
  I proved that Bathurst was a financial disaster for them.
• 17:46
  Wow.
• 17:46
  Because they all thought that they were doing really well.
• 17:48
  But it's the jewel now, so it wasn't a...
• 17:52
  It was a jewel for them, as in it gave them a platform that was unbelievable to showcase their product and race.
• 18:00
  It was not the jewel in terms of, in fact,
• 18:02
  I proved today on that whiteboard, and I've still got the very piece of paper from which I created that, because you never put anything on a whiteboard if you don't know the answer, Rusty.
• 18:10
  That's golden rule number one.
• 18:13
  That basically for them all to compete at Bathurst per car, they were losing about $1,000.
• 18:21
  because all they could focus on, there was $300,000 in prize money, and there was, but there was about $330,000 in expenses that they got slugged for being there.
• 18:31
  So it was a disaster.
• 18:34
  So that really got their attention, and away we went.
• 18:41
  Then we started to develop up a Vesco as a company, and originally CAMS were going to be a shareholder in it, which they initially were.
• 18:50
  That sub-asquick down the track turned into another stupid argument and a waste of time and energy in Australian motorsport Which Australian motorsport has a very very good habit of doing on a regular basis And then you know we and we we Subsequently I had to tell them that I was leaving IMG and the trade-off there was that we bought a
• 19:15
  We, SEL, bought the shareholding we had, which was roughly 25%.
• 19:21
  We bought that because we bought the time and money that IMG claimed I'd spent on doing this white paper, which amounted to about $52,500.
• 19:28
  So that's why the famous line developed.
• 19:32
  How to turn $52,500 into a valuation of $300 million.
• 19:36
  It's a slight sort of stretch of the imagination, but that's what we did, and away we went.
• 19:44
  Teams owned initially 67.5%, Cam's owned 10%, and we owned 22.5%.
• 19:51
  Part of the big change is you move networks as well.
• 19:55
  You go from the Seven Network, which had kind of been the home, the heartland, if you will, and you go to Channel 10.
• 20:03
  My old boss, David White, was there, someone who knew motorsport immensely well, and you embarked on a new chapter with them.
• 20:12
  At this stage, when you've done all your homework, you've convinced the teams that you're the right guy for the job and so on,
• 20:19
  Was there ever a moment of doubt between you and the SEL guys that this thing was not going to be good?
• 20:24
  A moment of doubt.
• 20:25
  A moment of doubt.
• 20:27
  I would say, you know how you have some of those days where you find it hard to hold everything together?
• 20:34
  We, and you talked about changing networks.
• 20:37
  So the original plan was, by the mastermind you are now talking to, the original plan was that we would start on Channel 7.
• 20:45
  didn't see any particular need to change, move on, or any of the rest of it.
• 20:49
  So what happened there?
• 20:51
  So what was going on behind the scenes was that we were being threatened that if we went ahead with this, that we would lose Bathurst.
• 21:03
  And it was a great time of animosity.
• 21:06
  I mean, I had circuit owners threatening that if we start – because they never charged, you see.
• 21:12
  This show used to turn up for free.
• 21:15
  And I said, no, no, those days are gone.
• 21:17
  We're now going to charge a fee to turn up.
• 21:19
  You're charging the punters to get in.
• 21:21
  You're charging corporates to be there.
• 21:23
  You're charging for signage.
• 21:24
  We're the show.
• 21:24
  We're the show.
• 21:25
  I came from entertainment, remember, where the Entertainment Act normally takes 90%.
• 21:30
  You're lucky if you get 10.
• 21:31
  This was completely novel to me.
• 21:33
  The entertainment, the cars and stars, were getting zero.
• 21:39
  So I was pretty dogmatic.
• 21:40
  Some would say he was incredibly difficult and some would use much stronger language than any of that.
• 21:48
  But I really stuck to my guns and I said, no, that's how it's going to be.
• 21:51
  And so we did have wars going on on several fronts, no question.
• 21:57
  And the thing that really led to the biggest one was over Bathurst.
• 22:03
  So –
• 22:07
  Channel 7, the ARDC, so the Australian Racing Drivers Club, who used to have a big shareholding in the Bathurst event, and the Bathurst City Council, they sort of all got together and decided that unless we were compliant, which was the compliance was we stayed on Channel 7 and the prize money at Bathurst did not get increased from $300,000,
• 22:38
  that they would replace us.
• 22:41
  So that led to a famous meeting.
• 22:44
  There were a lot of this.
• 22:45
  I remember there was 21 or 22 people sitting around this table out at the old Channel 7 boardroom.
• 22:51
  Epping in Sydney.
• 22:53
  Epping.
• 22:53
  Well, certainly on that side of Sydney, I can't remember whether it was Epping, but certainly out that way.
• 22:58
  And there were good representation there from the Bathurst City Council, including the mayor, who was a guy named McIntosh in those days,
• 23:06
  There was a good representation from the ARDC.
• 23:08
  I remember Colin Bond was certainly there.
• 23:11
  And the guy who'd been running Bathurst for years... Ivan Stibbard, maybe.
• 23:17
  Ivan Stibbard was certainly there.
• 23:19
  And Channel 7 had a good representation, including their then head of sport and some other hangers-on.
• 23:28
  And James Erskine and I went to this meeting and...
• 23:34
  We outlined what we wanted to achieve and They made it infinitely clear to us that that wasn't acceptable and They would they would Bathurst will become a two-litre event On its traditional October week on its tradition.
• 23:51
  This is a traditional what was in those days the AMP Bathurst And uh-huh I see
• 24:00
  And I was, you know, there's no point in changing the story now.
• 24:05
  I was mortified.
• 24:06
  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
• 24:07
  I thought, wow, this is rank stupidity of the First Order.
• 24:10
  There's a lot of them.
• 24:12
  How could they all decide such a stupid decision?
• 24:16
  Anyway, we started to get up to leave, and Ivan Stibbard said, you guys need to know that V8s are dinosaurs, right?
• 24:29
  and two leaders away are the future.
• 24:32
  And- Was that a moment of, don't tell me I can't do that like you talked about before?
• 24:36
  Was that the trigger you needed?
• 24:38
  I don't think poor old Ivan, bless him, because he's no longer with us, but I don't think Ivan realized that it would have been better just to shut up because all it did was make me go right.
• 24:51
  We can.
• 24:53
  you want to fight, I'll give you a fight.
• 24:56
  But I was trying to think, I've always been a bit of a smartass, which you might have noticed, and I was trying to think of a line to come back at, and I couldn't think of anything.
• 25:04
  So I slowly walked to the door with James, gathered our bags up, got right to the door, opened the door.
• 25:11
  James walked out the door.
• 25:12
  I was about to walk out the door, and then the line hit me.
• 25:16
  I turned around and said to the whole room,
• 25:18
  You know, you could be right, but I want you to remember one thing today.
• 25:23
  The dinosaur lived on Earth for 8,000 years in a hostile environment.
• 25:28
  And then you left.
• 25:29
  And then I left.
• 25:40
  Tony has some pretty wild stories, hey?
• 25:42
  And how good is it to hear some yards about Baz?
• 25:47
  We miss you, mate.
• 25:49
  So one thing I analysed, I thought, right, the weak link in this chain has got to be the Bathurst City Council.
• 25:56
  Because for them, for the others, if it all fails and whatever, they will go off and do their other stuff.
• 26:02
  But the Bathurst City Council, that's Bathurst.
• 26:04
  They own the track.
• 26:05
  They are the purveyors of the track.
• 26:09
  So I contacted the mayor, Ian McIntosh, on the side.
• 26:14
  And I said, Ian,
• 26:18
  How are you?
• 26:18
  I'm well, thanks, Tony.
• 26:20
  That was a difficult meeting the other day.
• 26:22
  He said, yeah, it was an extremely difficult meeting.
• 26:25
  It wasn't the outcome we were expecting.
• 26:26
  Bathurst, I can tell you.
• 26:27
  I said, yeah, well, if it makes you feel any better, it wasn't our outcome either.
• 26:32
  Anyway, I said, look...
• 26:34
  And I'm a great believer in dialogue.
• 26:38
  Why don't I come fly down to Bathurst and have a meeting with you?
• 26:42
  Sure, sure, absolutely.
• 26:43
  I said, you know, you're representing the best interests of your ratepayers.
• 26:46
  You don't care about any of this.
• 26:48
  For you, it's about the ratepayers.
• 26:50
  Oh, absolutely, absolutely it is.
• 26:53
  Because I've also been pretty good at working out politics.
• 26:56
  And so I got down to Bathurst and I had a meeting with Ian.
• 27:02
  And I said, look, I've only really got one question.
• 27:07
  He said, oh, God, I thought you'd have hundreds.
• 27:09
  I said, no, I've only got one.
• 27:10
  Have you signed an exclusive arrangement with these people?
• 27:15
  And he said, no, we have not.
• 27:17
  He said, nor would I be allowed to, you know.
• 27:22
  So I said, so I know for a fact the track can be used.
• 27:24
  I think in those days it could be used four times a year.
• 27:27
  So I know the track can be used four times a year.
• 27:30
  I want to book another weekend.
• 27:34
  He said, you what?
• 27:35
  I said, it's a pretty simple proposition.
• 27:38
  I said, I've even got my weekend picked out.
• 27:40
  How are you place November?
• 27:42
  I think it was the third week of October.
• 27:44
  We were roughly two weeks after.
• 27:46
  I said, I've got this week down, all planned, October, whatever dates.
• 27:50
  And he said, whoa, gee, that's only a couple of weeks after the AMP race.
• 27:57
  You know, I don't know whether we could turn around that quickly.
• 27:59
  And I said, well...
• 28:01
  You've got to.
• 28:01
  And by the way, we want to work out a new deal.
• 28:04
  In our deal, we want to pay you a guaranteed amount of money and we want to make you a partner in the Bathurst event.
• 28:12
  Oh, gosh.
• 28:13
  I said, now, I understand under, you know, Local Planning Act that if I present something like that to you in writing, you're obliged actually to share it with council and with your CEO.
• 28:26
  Oh, yes, I absolutely am.
• 28:27
  So I said, well, that's good.
• 28:28
  So I pull out the council.
• 28:30
  Here's one I prepared earlier.
• 28:31
  Here's one I just happened to have prepared.
• 28:33
  So I hit him with this pro forma of exactly what we were planning and wanting to do, and he went for it.
• 28:42
  And he said, you know what?
• 28:44
  Yep, it's not my role to determine what works and what doesn't work on Mount Panorama.
• 28:49
  That's the general public's role.
• 28:52
  You presented us a very fair financial deal.
• 28:54
  I can see no reason why we wouldn't do this.
• 28:56
  Wow.
• 28:58
  Of course, when we announced it about three weeks later, the World War III broke out.
• 29:02
  And of course, in that same announcement, which was pivotal to that announcement, and it wasn't David White, it preceded David White.
• 29:10
  It was- Mike Ortsent.
• 29:13
  Mike Ortsent and the very flashy guy who used to be the CEO.
• 29:17
  Grant Blackley, no.
• 29:20
  We nearly had it there.
• 29:21
  Oh, John McAlpine.
• 29:22
  John McAlpine, correct.
• 29:24
  John McAlpine, James Erskine, Tony Cochran and Mike Ortson worked out a plot to become the official station for V8 Supercar.
• 29:35
  And part of that key thing was that we were going to have a race at Mount Panorama in October.
• 29:44
  And so that really... Then when those two announcements duly hit at the same time, oh, God, all hell broke loose, so we had...
• 29:53
  We had everybody threatening and accusing us of everything.
• 29:56
  And, you know, some poor journalists in Sydney have still never got over that announcement and still got a problem with it.
• 30:04
  But the truth of the matter is it was an enormous risk on our behalf.
• 30:08
  We underwrote it.
• 30:09
  ING acted as a promoter.
• 30:13
  And away we went.
• 30:14
  And, of course, you've got to be very careful, because if you decide to let the general public vote with their feet,
• 30:21
  my god sometimes it can go against you and what happened was in that first year after all their years of history as the amp 1000 by running two liter cars i think they had a crowd of well certainly way less than 10 000 their tv ratings almost cut in half and then we turned up two weeks later we had well over 50 000 people there on the sunday and our tv ratings were right back to the best days of bathurst on the other network
• 30:48
  And that carried on for two years.
• 30:51
  And then, of course, eventually their Bathurst event went kapoop, a bit like two-litre cars that just couldn't sustain.
• 30:59
  And it all collapsed.
• 31:01
  And we rode off into the sunset as the victors of that round.
• 31:06
  And Channel 10 ended up with, very happily ended up with, what was a burgeoning rights relationship with V8 supercar.
• 31:19
  And boy, there was some angst over that, that you had to have your tough britches on during that period because- What was the toughest one?
• 31:25
  What was the toughest one that came hurling at you?
• 31:28
  At one stage, regrettably, I had to have police protection for my daughter because I had quite a few death threats, not aimed at me, aimed at her, which was really disappointing.
• 31:40
  So, yeah, it was pretty full on.
• 31:42
  There were some people that didn't like change occurring and I got some beauties at events.
• 31:50
  You know, there's three or four times when guys wanted to front me up and, you know, come and fight.
• 31:54
  What?
• 31:56
  I'm not going to stand here and fight, you idiot.
• 31:58
  No, I'm going to beat your brains out, you know.
• 32:01
  All that sort of stuff.
• 32:02
  Yeah, it was pretty interesting days.
• 32:05
  And that actually, for a period of time, I can't even remember how long now, but certainly for three or four months at future events, I had a security guard with me most of the time because you get this odd lunatic that had come up and, you know, want to take you on because I'd ruined their bathurst.
• 32:23
  And then, of course, subsequently in the third year, we moved back to the traditional weekend and everything returned to normal.
• 32:30
  And then, of course, my next big fight at Bathurst was because the pits and everything were a joke.
• 32:34
  They were just a disaster.
• 32:35
  My next big fight at Bathurst was then to get all the money to rebuild the pits and the hard stand and the paddock and...
• 32:43
  the control tower and all of that, which was a, which was yet another fight that I took on that I thought initially would be an easy fight, but it was a hell of a fight, but I got there in the end and we got the money and still today, everybody enjoys those fabulous buildings.
• 32:57
  Absolutely.
• 32:57
  Well-classed.
• 32:58
  I've got a question here from, um, from Benny Bishop.
• 33:01
  He says, I'd love to know how he went about teaching race car drivers and teams that they are in the entertainment business before the racing business.
• 33:12
  Did that sort of, I mean, you had a category that Australian Heartland loved in a V8 formula.
• 33:19
  It had gone through some tough times when you first started taking notice of it.
• 33:23
  And, you know, clearly that went through a rebuild in the way that you shaped the business.
• 33:27
  But what about, you know, helping some of these drivers become actual stars of the game?
• 33:35
  Because, I mean, Craig Lowndes was, you know, an emerging star in that late 90s period and so on.
• 33:41
  I think two or three things.
• 33:42
  I think firstly, I kind of led by example a bit.
• 33:45
  You know, I tried to be fairly flamboyant.
• 33:48
  I tried to be a talking head for the sport.
• 33:51
  You know, I hate it when things are irrelevant.
• 33:53
  So I tried to give the sport some relevancy by, you know, jumping in front of cameras and- Column space and so on.
• 34:00
  Column space and encouraging writers to write about us and spending time taking writers and journalists and TV guys out to dinners and endless meals.
• 34:10
  putting them in cars letting them taste and experience it so I think I was a bit of a catalyst I think what helped enormously was there was a rich vein of young drivers wanting to step up and become known yeah so Mark Scaife was a very good example of that um but you know um uh
• 34:35
  There was quite a few of them.
• 34:36
  Lowndes, Ambrose.
• 34:38
  Yeah, there was quite a few of them.
• 34:39
  I mean, Murph, you know.
• 34:42
  We suddenly found out that Murph had a real character, but we let it go a bit, good and bad.
• 34:47
  But that's okay.
• 34:47
  I mean, that's part of the cut and thrust.
• 34:49
  Paul Morris was a bit of a, you know, cult figure, became a bit of a, you know, sort of cowboy.
• 34:56
  So it was interesting.
• 34:58
  And, of course, like anything like that, when they get a bit of confidence and, you know, you make sure cameras are being put in their face, it sort of grew.
• 35:09
  And then we started to actually formalise it.
• 35:11
  We started to have some industry training for drivers and the like.
• 35:16
  So, you know, it wasn't one specific thing.
• 35:19
  It was just a number of things that started to layer.
• 35:23
  And it's interesting, the more we layered...
• 35:27
  I actually had one focus of doing this by the way, which I'll get to in a minute.
• 35:31
  The more we layered, the more notice was taken of them, the more it got out there, the more the show got out there.
• 35:37
  Because I was talked to about the show, I used to drive all the team owners nuts.
• 35:42
  If you speak to- They're the race, you're the show.
• 35:45
  Yeah, we're in the-
• 35:47
  We're in show business.
• 35:48
  We're in the category of sport and we're in the subcategory of motorsport, but we're in show business, guys.
• 35:54
  You lose track of that and we're screwed, right?
• 35:57
  So we've got to be bigger and larger than life.
• 35:59
  I mean, and if ever you need to see living proof of it, look how Formula One's reinvented itself.
• 36:04
  Drive to survive, totally.
• 36:06
  Right.
• 36:06
  That's all been driven by show business.
• 36:08
  That has not been driven by how many widgets they now put on the brake cylinder of the left hand wheel.
• 36:15
  Right.
• 36:17
  So so the reality was that all started to feed on itself.
• 36:22
  Now, my motivation for doing it was really simple.
• 36:25
  I wanted to get women to events because when I took on that sport, it was predominantly male, 45 plus.
• 36:32
  Okay.
• 36:33
  So I could see that it had no long-term future unless we made sure we had women there.
• 36:39
  So a lot of what I was doing to get these guys to get their helmets off, as I call it, and to get them talking and to get them to have characters and to get them to be interactive was to get women interested.
• 36:53
  Because, you know, it is a male steroid sport.
• 36:57
  Yep.
• 36:58
  And, you know, there's a lot of females that could be interested in that if they sort of got wind of it.
• 37:04
  So, you know, we had a number of programs.
• 37:06
  I had some great marketing people.
• 37:08
  You know, I mean, Penny Glasser was terrific.
• 37:10
  I mean, she just got it.
• 37:12
  You know, she was just, you know, a relatively young recruit in the early part of it.
• 37:18
  Dynamo.
• 37:19
  And terrific, you know, but...
• 37:21
  We had lots of people around the joint like that.
• 37:23
  Shane Howard, who was my CEO forever.
• 37:26
  You know, Shane got it.
• 37:27
  He understood, you know, I wouldn't say Shane led it because he didn't know necessarily how to lead it, but sure as hell, if you could, if Shane saw what I was trying to achieve, he would go out and light the fire to, you know, make it happen.
• 37:40
  Fabulous nuts and bolts guy that can execute like that, huh?
• 37:43
  Yeah, yeah.
• 37:44
  And a lot of guys like that.
• 37:45
  You know, Wayne Tadic, whilst he couldn't necessarily get it in that sense, he was terrific as being the facilitator to make sure it happened and to make sure that we were pushing boundaries and we were trying new things and we were getting more drive out of our sponsorship bucks than we originally got.
• 38:05
  And, you know, all of those things start to bubble over.
• 38:08
  And next thing, you know, Channel 10 are interested in doing a driver's program.
• 38:12
  And, you know, we have the start of those sorts of shows.
• 38:16
  So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because everything starts to tumble into itself.
• 38:23
  And before you know it, you know, we would see it year on, year out.
• 38:27
  Our female base was growing enormously.
• 38:30
  Our crowds were getting younger.
• 38:33
  We were getting kids there, you know.
• 38:36
  And then, you know, we did all sorts of things in the kids' space.
• 38:38
  Again, you know, Penny was brilliant.
• 38:40
  I mean, she brought Disney into our business.
• 38:42
  And when Cars came out, you know, that Pixar movie and, you know, how – Perfect link.
• 38:48
  Perfect link.
• 38:48
  Perfect link.
• 38:49
  Yeah, all of those things were just brought into the paddock as drivers of turning it into a family affair, not just a, you know, the 45-plus boys go along and drink as many cans as they humanly can, watch some racing and go home.
• 39:05
  So we really had a wide remit of what we thought we could make events and then we started, of course, to add entertainment to events and...
• 39:14
  And again, for the main part, most team owners went with us.
• 39:19
  They could see what we're achieving and the results started to speak for themselves and we started to become a very, very profitable organisation.
• 39:26
  Golden period for the sport.
• 39:30
  tough times too with things like the passing of Mark Porter I can very vividly recall seeing you walking through the the pit lane and I just had a conversation with Craig Baird about uh you know how Mark was and and the um you know the real state of things after that crash at Bathurst how difficult was it dealing with some of those things in in your role that's they're the tough days mate aren't they?
• 39:56
  Oh yeah, we, you know, boy, we had a few of those.
• 40:01
  We had the one at Adelaide in the development series as well, into the pit wall in De Quetival Terrace there.
• 40:08
  And, you know, and whilst he didn't die at a racetrack, you know, the impact of Peter Brock's death just right on the tip of Bathurst, you know, that year...
• 40:23
  It's one of the things that I did was when you have a big group like that, it's like a giant family on the road.
• 40:34
  And because it's such a giant family, you know, there used to be typically 800, 900 of us moved to every event.
• 40:43
  You end up with all the problems.
• 40:45
  You end up with births, deaths, marriages, divorces, arguments, happiness, you name it.
• 40:52
  And one of the things that I recognised pretty early in the piece was, and in those days he'd sort of come on an ad hoc basis, was the Reverend Gary Conley.
• 41:01
  And I gave Gary a proper place.
• 41:04
  Gary Coleman, wasn't it?
• 41:06
  Gary Coleman?
• 41:07
  Sorry?
• 41:07
  The Reverend Gary Coleman.
• 41:08
  Coleman, Coleman, sorry.
• 41:09
  No, no, you're right.
• 41:11
  I'm getting my FIA guys mixed up with my ministers.
• 41:14
  And bless them both.
• 41:16
  But, no, Gary was...
• 41:18
  Terrific.
• 41:19
  And we gave him a proper financial basis to be at all the events and that because there were so many problems going on up and down the pit lane.
• 41:27
  And, you know, he was a great, safe pair of hands and he, you know, would help in those moments.
• 41:32
  And, you know, the moment that you spoke about, you know, he was such a young guy, full of life.
• 41:38
  Yep.
• 41:39
  Young child.
• 41:39
  Yeah.
• 41:40
  Young child.
• 41:41
  Yep.
• 41:42
  He and his wife were part of the furniture of everything we were doing at that time.
• 41:47
  And it was an immensely hard day.
• 41:50
  And, you know, I have to say the thing that stands out for me from that day was the professionalism.
• 41:59
  You know, the way we as an organisation got organised in the background to do everything as...
• 42:06
  well as we could and to manage the process as well as we could to ensure that somebody got to because his wife wasn't with him she was i think on holidays somewhere i'm gonna say noosa or somewhere but
• 42:20
  you know, arranged to get somebody to be with her and, you know, the way we try to handle everything behind the scenes and, you know, most of the team were just so damn professional and, you know, made you so proud to get through a day and we, you know, we continued on with the program after a fair delay and...
• 42:40
  But it was just a tragic accident.
• 42:41
  I mean, and regrettably, it's motorsports.
• 42:45
  So regrettably, it wasn't the first and it won't be the last because it's just...
• 42:51
  You know, it's a real sport, motorsport.
• 42:53
  The famous Hemingway line's pretty true.
• 42:55
  There's only three sports, motorsports, bullfighting, and mountain climbing, the rest are games.
• 43:03
  Yeah, exactly.
• 43:04
  Who came up with the Masterstroke idea to make Barry Sheen a part of the broadcast?
• 43:08
  Because if you said that now, if you said, oh, there's...
• 43:10
  I mean, he was...
• 43:11
  absolute megastar in Europe that not all Aussies can properly appreciate.
• 43:15
  I mean, rock star sort of status in England and so on.
• 43:18
  But if you went in with that today and said, let's put a bike guy on the commentary panel of a car racing thing, not everyone would gravitate to that, but I totally got it because he was such an engaging, entertaining guy.
• 43:33
  He brought something different to that, didn't he?
• 43:36
  Oh, absolutely.
• 43:37
  He was bloody genius.
• 43:39
  There's a reason why it's called the Barry Sheen Medal.
• 43:41
  He brought so much to our sport.
• 43:45
  Look, I can't specifically remember who.
• 43:48
  It could have been James Erskine.
• 43:50
  It could have been me.
• 43:51
  It could have been even somebody suggested it out of 10.
• 43:57
  What actually happened was he had a deal with Channel 9 to host the bikes, and he had a blue with 9.
• 44:05
  Okay.
• 44:06
  We had a couple of blues with 9.
• 44:08
  One was over a dinner jacket, and this is a bloody great story in itself.
• 44:13
  About him not wanting to wear it.
• 44:14
  Yeah, correct.
• 44:16
  Um, and, and the other one was over money, of course.
• 44:18
  And, and, um, so suddenly he was available and, uh, I, I don't think it was any one great person sort of thought.
• 44:28
  I think it was a collective shit, you know, she needs a value.
• 44:32
  Let's grab Sheeney.
• 44:34
  And, um.
• 44:36
  Yeah, he was dead keen to do it, you know, because he knew he'd be on the road with me because I went to every event, you know.
• 44:44
  So he thought that was, you know, a safe pair of hands.
• 44:47
  What he meant by that was that he knew he'd stay in a good hotel room and or go to a good restaurant and or be guaranteed a good glass of Chardonnay with icebox.
• 44:58
  So, yeah, so he came on board, of course, an instant success.
• 45:02
  I mean, it was like fantastic success.
• 45:05
  Loved in the paddock, loved, you know, up and down the pit lane, loved by the fans, loved by the viewers.
• 45:12
  I mean, he just added – there was only one Barry Sheen.
• 45:15
  You know, his commentary was just special.
• 45:18
  Yep.
• 45:18
  I mean, it was just – Great one-liners.
• 45:20
  Right, you know.
• 45:21
  Tremendous.
• 45:22
  Here we are at Phillip Island, the gateway to hypothermia.
• 45:27
  You know, and there's lots of stories I can't tell because of the language in them, but he just, Barry was special and he lit the place up, you know, and he got on with pretty much everybody.
• 45:41
  There wasn't a lot of people that he didn't like in the pit lane and vice versa.
• 45:46
  Most people loved him.
• 45:48
  So he was just a natural and...
• 45:53
  Yeah, God, it's not a day doesn't go by in my life where I don't miss him.
• 45:56
  Yeah, agreed.
• 45:56
  He's just a great guy.
• 45:57
  What do you reckon he'd be doing today if he was alive next?
• 46:00
  I think about him and the world of bloody social media and everything else and how he'd be with that.
• 46:04
  Would he be totally against it or deeply engaged in it and having crazy fun like he normally would?
• 46:10
  We've all become a bit more bloody PC since his departure, very sadly.
• 46:14
  I wonder how he'd handle that.
• 46:16
  And probably the final prong to that question is how his passing affected you when you perhaps first found out about him being ill. Because he's been gone now, can you believe it, nearly 20 years.
• 46:26
  I know, I know.
• 46:28
  And he was far too young.
• 46:28
  He was taken from us far too young.
• 46:31
  Look, I dealt with it really badly, to be truthful.
• 46:35
  It was like I kind of wanted to put myself into a disbelief phase.
• 46:39
  I did not...
• 46:43
  I did not deal with it that well.
• 46:45
  And then, you know, at his funeral, it was kind of a numb affair.
• 46:50
  And...
• 46:57
  It was one of those weird things where he just didn't believe it was really happening.
• 47:01
  I mean, you know, because he was really young.
• 47:03
  I mean, I'm going to say he was 53 or 54.
• 47:05
  I want to say even 52.
• 47:06
  52, yeah.
• 47:07
  I mean, he was a young guy and so full of life.
• 47:12
  You think nothing's going to stop this bloke.
• 47:16
  And he'd had some horrendous accidents in his life where he died on the track a couple of times.
• 47:21
  So, you know, you just don't think that sort of guy's going to be cut down then with a cancer.
• 47:26
  I mean, but, you know, look, I try and reflect on all the fun shit we did and all the fun times we had together and the crazy stories.
• 47:38
  And I still, to this day, do a Barry Sheen stories.
• 47:40
  I mean, because you can't help yourself.
• 47:50
  That's the end of part two of my podcast with sports and entertainment promoter Tony Cochran, the former czar of supercars.
• 47:57
  Don't worry, we are not done with Baz yet either.
• 48:00
  Jump back to the library and hit the gas on our third and final part for this one.
• 48:04
  There is a very, very funny yarn about flying to England with Sheeny, who's been gone now for nearly 20 years.
• 48:12
  Can you believe it?
• 48:12
  Seems like yesterday.
• 48:14
  Plus, Tony's role now in AFL as the chairman of the Gold Coast Suns, his view on supercars since he departed, how motorsport is still in the Cochrane family, hanging with the Rolling Stones, and a cool car he keeps in the garage.
• 48:36
  Listener.