Brock, Career Highlights +Vids

We pay tribute to Australian motor racing legend the late great Peter Brock.

Born on February 26th 1945 in Epworth Hospital, Richmond, Victoria, Peter Geoffrey Brock grew up to become an icon of Australian motorsport. He was raised in Hurstbridge, Vic, which was a country town back then and he remained there throughout his life to see the urban sprawl turn it into an outer suburb of Melbourne.

Brock’s first car was an Austin 7 that he bought for £5 and then hacked the body off with an axe, and one of the first cars he was known for racing was a blue Austin A30 Sports Sedan with a Holden 6-cylinder motor.

Brock made his Bathurst 500 debut in 1969 at the age of 24½ by sharing a Holden Monaro GTS350 with Des West for Harry Firth’s Holden Dealer team. The pair finished 3rd whilst their teammates Colin Bond and Tony Roberts won the race.

Brock’s first win in the Bathurst 500 came in 1972 with the race starting in the rain. HDT had switched from racing the Monaros to much smaller GTR XU-1 Toranas from 1970, and once the combination of the bigger 202ci engine and tricky conditions where Brock could really show his skills came together, Ford’s 2-years of dominance quickly came to an end.

In 1974 Brock won his first Australian Touring Car Championship (ATCC) driving Group C versions of the XU-1 and the then-new LH SL/R 5000 Toranans. He also won the 1973 and 1974 South Pacific Touring Series for HDT. However, Brock’s second Bathurst victory came as a privateer in 1975 with Brian Sampson in an LH SL/R 5000 L34.

Brock won the Sandown endurance race for the first time in 1973 whilst still driving for HDT, and every year from 1975 to 1981, having returned to HDT full-time from 1978. A record 9th victory at Sandown came in 1984 with Larry Perkins as co-driver after the race had been lengthened from 400km to 500km.

Brock won the ATCC twice more in 1978 and 1980 for a career total of three times, whilst Bathurst victories three, four and five came one after the other from 1978 in the Torana A9X hatch to 1980 in the VC Commodore. All three of these were with Jim Richards as co-driver, and the race’s most dominant victory took place in 1979 after A9X #05 finished six laps ahead of the field and Brock set the lap record on the final lap just to prove how strong the car still was.

Brock also drove a number of other cars in a variety of other events, including rallycross in the ’70s. He even drove a 6-cyl VB Commodore in the 1979 Repco Round Australia Trial with co-drivers Matthew Philip and Noel Richards, the trio winning the event.

At the beginning of the ’80s Brock purchased the Holden Dealer Team after Holden decided to pull out as a manufacturer, the team instead gaining the backing of the Holden dealers through an enterprise that saw HDT start building special road cars. Meanwhile Brock took on Larry Perkins as his endurance-race co-driver for the last three years of the Group C era from 1982 to 1984 with the pair winning all three Bathurst 1000 races in a row, having commandeered Harvey’s car #25 for the 1983 victory after car #05 had failed in the early stages.

A switch to Group A for Australian Touring Cars from 1985 didn’t see immediate success for Brock but it did motivate the road car operation to create probably their most iconic vehicle, the 1985 VK SS Group A, otherwise known as the Blue Meanie, which was eligible to race from 1986.

Brock also campaigned cars in Europe and took his HDT racing operation over there in 1986 to contest rounds of the European Touring Car Championship. At the Spa 24 Hours the two Mobil HDT cars, and the private entry of Allan Grice, teamed up to win the King’s Cup which was celebrated as much as the outright victory. Other international success for Brock in the VK SS Group A (and co-driver at the time Allan Moffat) came with victories at the 1986 Wellington 500, and again at the same event in 1987 when it was temporarily moved fowards to February (to separate it from the round of the World Touring Car Championship held there in late October).

1987 was the year that the world came to Bathurst for Round 8 of the WTCC, and the follow-up model VL SS Group A allowed Brock to take his record 9th Bathurst 500/1000 victory after commandeering the team’s second car again, another impressive display in the rain (this time later in the race), and the eventual disqualification of the two leading Eggenberger Sierras.

At the beginning of 1987 Brock and his HDT operation had split from Holden and he moved to ex-JPS BMW M3s for 1988, then into Sierras, initially as a customer of Andy Rouse and then as a partner with Andrew Miedecke. Brock set his record 6th Bathurst 1000 pole position time in a Sierra in 1989 (the others coming in ’74, ’77, ’78. ’79, and ’83 driving Toranas and a Commodore). He would again drive a Commodore that started The Great Race from pole in 1997, but the time was set by co-driver Mark Skaife.

After refusing to drive a VL Walkinshaw (SS Group A SV) Brock returned to driving Holdens by taking his sponsorship dollars to Perkins Engineering for 1991, the pair campaigning separate VN Commodores with the same Mobil livery.

Brock re-joined Holden as a factory team driver in 1994 and saw out his full-time Touring Car career with them, retiring at the end of 1997. Even at age 52 he was still as fast as ever, winning a race at Simmons Plains (round 4) and at Oran Park (round 10) and winning the eighth round overall at Barbagello in WA. He also started a race from pole position at the tenth and final ATCC round at Oran Park making him the oldest driver in the championship ever to do so.

Retiring from the ATCC certainly didn’t mean hanging up the helmet though. Brock returned for two more 1000km races in 2002 and 2004, and in 2003 he co-drove a Garry Rogers Motorsport Holden Monaro 427C with Greg Murphy, Jason Bright, and Todd Kelly to win the Bathurst 24hr.

Brock also enjoyed Targa-style tarmac rally events. Sadly this eventuated in his death when he took a tricky corner in the wet a bit too quickly whist competing in Targa West ’06 with a 2001 Daytona Sportscar (an Australian-made replica of the ’64 Shelby Daytona). The date was September 8th 2006 and the car hit a tree on the driver’s side, killing Brock and injuring his co-driver Mick Hone.

Brock was farewelled with a Victorian state funeral at Melbourne's St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral on September 19th 2006, and a permanent memorial was placed at Peter Brock's ‘home’ race track, Sandown Raceway, on September 22nd 2006. He is gone, but certainly not forgotten, and will always remain an icon of Australian motorsport.