Saturday Sleuthing: The Hungry Jack's Commodore

Generally Saturday Sleuthing is full of stories relating to big name drivers and high-profile teams – the ones that have driven and built the fastest and most successful race cars seen in both the V8 Supercars Championship and its Australian Touring Car Championship forerunner.

But our V8 Sleuth’s email box often sees messages from V8 Supercar fans with great memories of some of the privateer cars that have made up the grids over the years and, while never being race-winning contenders, they made an impression on those watching over the fence or at home on television.

One such car is the first of two Commodores run by Queensland privateer Ian Palmer, a car perhaps best remembered for its stint in 1995 as the ‘Hungry Jack’s Commodore’, which is today being put back to those colours by its current owner.

Brother of former PROCAR czar Ross, Ian first appeared in touring car racing with a new #20 Commodore VP in 1994 that had been built in Brisbane using a partly-completed Dencar body shell and overseen by ex-DJR team manager Neal Lowe, who had parted ways with the Holden Racing Team the previous season.

A plain virgin white Commodore, it made its ‘big time’ debut at the V8 support races at that year’s Gold Coast Indy event and also ran the ATCC rounds at Lakeside, Winton and Eastern Creek prior to competing in the Tooheys 1000 at Bathurst.

Brett Peters joined Palmer for the Mount Panorama classic and the car had by then been covered in sponsors, meaning it was virgin white no more!

They finished 14th overall before the car was re-skinned as a VR for the 1995 season and returned to virgin white for the Lakeside ATCC round.

It scored a splash of orange for the Sandown and Bathurst endurance races, where fast food company Hungry Jack’s colours and logos appeared on the car and Peters returned to again co-driver with Palmer.

Former British Touring Car Championship driver Jeff Allam had been driving a Ford Mondeo for Ian’s brother Ross in the Australian Super Touring series and had been connected to the drive, though this didn’t eventuate.

The duo only completed 80 laps of the 161 at Sandown and were not classified as finishers, while at Bathurst they last just 38 laps before CV joint problems put them out.

Palmer had a new car built for 1996 so this car then disappeared from racetracks and from the public eye for quite some time.

The V8 Sleuth had a report the vehicle had been sold to a potential Sports Sedan entrant in Queensland in 1996 and we’ve since been able to clarify the car was indeed sold – as a rolling shell – in that year from images taken when it was collected from Palmer.

We tracked the car down in 2010 to Chris Fox, who had purchased it quite a few years earlier and had raced it in the Touring Car Challenge at Eastern Creek in 2005 – something of a hybrid series featuring ex-V8 Supercars, Super Tourers, Group A cars and Future Tourers.

Fox told the Sleuth he’d bought the car from Greg Woodrow (now Australian distributor of Mygale race cars), who had been planning on using it as a ride car. It would appear it had been through one or two owners’ hands between Palmer and Woodrow – we’d love to hear from whoever owned it in between!

Fox had fitted a Holden V8 engine and ran it in New South Wales HSV Supersprints, though experienced problems and moved to a five-litre Chev with six-speed Holinger gearbox. 

“I raced it in a Touring Car Challenge round at Eastern Creek,” Fox told the Sleuth in 2010.

“It was fun but I didn’t have the resources or funds to go on a nationwide schedule.”

Our Sleuth re-visited this car earlier this year after Victorian Kane Fitzgerald purchased it in late 2012.

“Five years ago I bought an old AUSCAR and did it up and did some track days and I always said I wanted to rebuild or do up a VR or VS V8 Supercar,” Fitzgerald told the V8 Sleuth recently. 

“I ended up getting onto Chris Fox who had this car and we got talking and I ended up doing a deal to buy it. He’d built it up from a rolling chassis and still had all of the records of what he did to it.

“The car is now completely finished sticker-wise and the sign writer that did the car used to do a lot of work for Hungry Jack’s, so he’s got onto head office in Melbourne and they’ve given us the proofs and we’ve got the genuine logo.

“The sign writer also got onto Tooheys and they’ve given us genuine logos for the doors for the 1995 race stickers, so we’ve spent a bit of time on it. 

“It’s been stripped, bits have been painted and I’m over the moon with the way it has come up. It’s had the full go-over.

“The only major thing different to how it ran in 1995 is the engine. It’s a Chev, but not the one it raced with. I got onto John Sidney and he said to take the air box off and look at the front of the aluminum heads to have a closer look – and there you can see ‘WGR’ printed in there, so it has some Wayne Gardner Racing history in it.”

The car will make its first public appearance with the Australian Five-Litre Touring Car Association at the Winton Festival of Speed on August 10/11.

The recently formed Association (which the V8 Sleuth will feature in upcoming weeks on Saturday Sleuthing) is fast becoming a gathering place for owners of five-litre touring cars/ex-V8 Supercars that competed between 1993 and the early 2000s – and that’s where Fitzgerald is aiming his car.

“Troy Kelly is getting this five-litre association off the ground so I’d like to do a few races and demos when they run and see what happens from there,” Fitzgerald said.

“I’d like to race it, but I don’t have the big funds to go ahead and do it. It’s too easy for someone else to slam into the side of it!” 

So there you have it – the story of the Hungry Jack’s Commodore!

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