HDT's 1984 Bathurst 1-2 +Vid

30 years ago Peter Brock’s Holden Dealer Team pulled off a major 1-2 victory in the Bathurst 1000 with two new cars built specifically for the end of the 1984 racing calendar.

Peter Brock, owner of the Holden Dealer Team at the time, sacrificed a couple of rounds of the 1984 ATCC to instead contest two big FIA Group C endurance races alongside then HDT team engineer and endurance co-driver Larry Perkins. They entered the 1000km of Silverstone and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Porsche 956, but for the second half of the year their focus was very much on winning the Sandown 500 and the Bathurst 1000 back in Australia.

What’s amazing about building two brand new cars for the end of the year is that they each only did four races, the Sandown, Bathurst and Surfers Paradise endurance events and then one final outing in the support race for the Australian F1 Grand Prix. The cars were redundant in 1985 with the introduction of the FIA Group A category to replace Australian Group C.

Another amazing thing is that with a new VK Brock won the three aforementioned rounds of the 1984 Australian Endurance Championship (with Larry Perkins as co-driver at Sandown and Bathurst) and then finished second in the GP support race; a remarkable record. John Harvey in the other new car (with David Parsons as co-driver at Sandown and Bathurst) finished 3rd at Sandown, second at Bathurst for a dominant team 1-2 finish, 9th in class at Surfers, and then 4th at the GP.

After those short but glorious careers HDT recouped some of the cash by effectively selling both the cars, and here’s where it gets a bit confusing. The team accepted a lump of money from Holden to put the Bathurst-winning car in the Bathurst Motor Museum where it has been ever since, and then the team sold the Bathurst-winning car to Jim Cleland, father of then up-and-comer John Cleland, and it raced in Thundersaloons in the UK.

Sadly, all this does is cause an argument over which is which. The flaw with trainspotting by comparing the unrestored car in the museum with 1984 Bathurst photos is you’d be ignoring the fact that HDT Chassis 6 and 7 (the two cars in question) did a further two races, so any of the minor damage would have been repaired and even exact signage placement might have changed.

With one of the cars in the museum, Cleland had great success with the other VK for a couple of years, running it as a Vauxhall Senator, and then it passed through other hands in the Thundersaloons category before later being retired from competition. The UK VK was then purchased by Brock enthusiast Peter Champion and completely restored to 1984-specs by John Van Roosmalen.

After restoration, the car that was sold to the Clelands for 1985 returned to the UK for the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2005 where Brock himself drove it in the hillclimb, as you can see in the clip above

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