Saturday Sleuthing: The Missing HRT Car

Normally on Saturday Sleuthing we bring you the story of where one of the important or infamous cars from V8 Supercar history has ended up.

But this week our V8 Sleuth Aaron Noonan is opening up an intriguing case file and is calling on the help of V8 Supercar and Australian motorsport fans far and wide – it’s the case of the missing Holden Racing Team Commodore.

The factory Holden team is one of the most famous teams in the history of Australian touring car racing and, since officially cranking into life under the ownership of the late Tom Walkinshaw in 1990, has built a range of race and Championship-winning cars.

But there’s one that has been getting under the Sleuth’s skin for quite some time and, after a massive amount of research into the team’s cars of the early 1990s, he’s pieced together a whole pile of information that explains the timeline of a range of other cars.

That is, all except the current – or indeed final – resting place of one car.

That car is the VP Commodore raced in the 1993 Bathurst 1000 by Tomas Mezera and HRT foundation driver Win Percy – dubbed HRT 027RB by the Sleuth and also known as Dencar 19.

To understand the history behind this car and how it came to be missing, it’s important to backtrack and fill in the story of what was occurring at the time.

It had been built new in mid-1993 and debuted at the Eastern Creek Championship round after Mezera had been involved in a spectacular accident at Winton (in HRT 026 – originally the first VN built the HRT in 1991) when he was launched airborne by contact with Alan Jones as the duo avoided a clash between John Bowe and Mark Skaife.

Earlier in the year the team had written off a car during testing at Phillip Island (HRT 027 – the second VN built in 1991) with Mezera at the wheel. The shell was stripped of salvageable running gear and crushed – the remnants placed in a jar in the lunchroom in the team’s workshop!

“I nearly killed myself going into Honda Corner at Phillip Island,” Mezera recalled to the Sleuth during research for the book celebrating the 20th anniversary of HRT in 2010.

“I would have strangled Neil Lowe (HRT team manager of the time). He changed the roll centre and didn’t have a bolt long enough to do the bump steer. He just found a normal bolt in the workshop and put it in.

“I went into Honda Corner and jumped on the brakes, the bolt broke and later the boys found it on the road. It went sharp left when I put my foot on the brake. That car got chopped up, it was a big one.”

So in mid-1993, with 027 destroyed and 026 seriously damaged, HRT pressed the new 027RB car into service for Mezera.

While it was a new Dencar body shell (Dencar 19) and thus a new car, the identity of the existing 027 (Dencar 4) was carried over to the new machine, explaining why the Sleuth has dubbed this car 027RB – the RB meaning ‘rebuild’.

To explain briefly, the chassis company Dencar put its own chassis numbers on cars while HRT would later add their own number, so in essence these cars had two types of ID.

Mezera drove the new car through the remainder of the Australian Touring Car Championship and is believed to have also used it for the Sandown 500 where he took pole position only for the car to fail within a handful of laps.

Win Percy joined Mezera for Bathurst and the duo were on target for a podium position before Percy fired straight off at Murray’s Corner late in the race and hit the wall pretty hard.

The car was a mess and the front re-arranged, causing severe damage to the Telecom Mobilenet-backed VP.

And that’s where things get interesting in the hunt for the missing HRT Commodore.

Mezera stepped back into the repaired 026 for the Adelaide Grand Prix support races, while teammate Wayne Gardner had driven 029 all season – a car that was new for Bathurst 1992.

In 1994 the team used 026 and 028 (believed to have been unraced in 1993) for Peter Brock and Mezera and any reference to the 027RB chassis or timeline for it came to a grinding halt.

One hint lies in a news story in Australian Motorsport News magazine from December 1993. It stated that HRT was flat out building two new cars to start the season with, one being written off in Adelaide in a crash and the second one sold to an unnamed buyer in South Australia.

The V8 Sleuth knows that the buyer referred to in fact was from Western Australia and turned out to be privateer Graham Blythman, who bought the Gardner 029 chassis.

If the magazine had his location incorrect, then it’s completely plausible it was also slightly off the mark in saying one car was destroyed in Adelaide where Mezera crashed in the Saturday race and damaged the fuel system to the point it couldn’t be repaired in time for Sunday.

He has also stated to the Sleuth before that his Adelaide ’93 car was most certainly not a write-off.

So the Sleuth would thus believe that the car crashed by Percy at Bathurst in 1993 is the destroyed one and thus has disappeared.

But how could it – or at least the body shell – just disappear into thin air?

The Sleuth’s strongest theory is that the running gear was salvaged from the wreck, HRT prepared their remaining two cars – 026 and 028 - for the 1994 season for new signing Brock and Mezera and the team later debuted a new car (030, nicknamed Beth) at the Sandown 500 later that year.

So was the missing chassis scrapped at the tip?

Was it secured by a savvy collector and tucked away in a secret location?

Was it sold and became another racing car in another category?

Was it re-born under a new ID number as another chassis at a later date?

Think you may be able to shed some light on the case of the missing Holden Racing Team Commodore?

Get in touch with the V8 Sleuth via the following methods:

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