Mountain Memories: 40 years at McPhillamy

This is the first edition of the Mountain Memories series for Supercars.com. Kicking off the countdown to this year’s Repco Bathurst 1000, we celebrate the long-held tradition of camping at the Great Race and hear the untold stories of Mount Panorama.

This year's event will be held across October 6-9. Tickets can be purchased here. 

Queenslander Scott Coleman has camped at Bathurst since 1982, his site is 1266 in McPhillamy Park.

I’ve been going to the mountain for 40 years, I started at 18 years old.

The very first one, like everybody, is until you go there, you just don't realise what a fabulous circuit it is.

I’m a motorsport tragic, I’ve travelled the world and gone to a few Grand Prix', but Bathurst is just such a fabulous circuit.

The very first time I ever went as a young bloke, we went on a bus, a friend of mine and myself.

I think we got on a bus tour from Parkes. We got off the bus on Friday morning, and just had a two-man tent.

We went up the top of the hill and camped, then got on the bus the day that it left on Sunday night. We never joined the bus tour around the mountain.

I’ll never forget the first time we walked through the circuit, and the larrikins we met at the top of the hill.

Like many fans who make the annual pilgrimage to the mountain, Coleman’s yearly trip to Bathurst is a chance to reconnect with family and friends, while immersing himself in the atmosphere of the Great Race.

My brother first went to Bathurst in 1974 but missed it for a few years as he was away working.

We began going together again around 1988 or 1986, and for many years it was the only time we saw each other.  

It's been a thing for us as brothers that we've done for nearly 30 years, so no matter where we were, we will always come back and go to Bathurst.

For the past 25 years or so we have kept the same mob of guys from all over Australia coming each year. It's an annual thing. It's fabulous. We don't miss it.

We've got a group of guys who come up from Melbourne and Sydney, and we've got some that come up in Gippsland.

There used to be a couple of guys from Adelaide that came across and camp with us.

We’ve become close mates, and we talk all the time, but we only see one another usually once or twice a year.

Our Bathurst tradition is a formal welcome dinner on Thursday night.

Inside one of the marquees, we have a three-course formal welcome dinner.

We're nearly all there by Monday or Tuesday, but that's the formal welcome dinner on Thursday, it's everything, it's a la carte, the whole bit. It’s great.

Mates at the Mountain: Coleman's McPhillamy Park campsite

Camping at McPhillamy Park for four decades, Coleman has seen all kinds of camping setups, from the remarkable to outright unthinkable.

I've seen a lot of funny, funny things that I probably couldn't tell.

But one of the best was many years ago, close to where we camp now, these guys had this huge marquee, like a circus marquee set up, and they never opened it all week.

Then I think it was Friday night when everyone had arrived up from Sydney, and these guys, they had a full-sized billiard table inside the marquee!

It had a bar with kegs and everything set up, which you could do many years ago.

That was probably the most effort that I've seen going into a campsite setup.

I’ve seen many great things, I've seen remote control eskies going through the crowd, I've seen fridges that people drive around on, just lots of funny things.

But that one sticks with me, the effort that you need to have it a full-size billiard table up on the mountain.

We spoke to one of them and they said: “You’ve got to go big at Bathurst.”

The annual Welcome Dinner at McPhillamy

Well, you couldn't do it any bigger than a full-size table on the truck being crated up there!

I've seen some pretty wild things, especially what it was like years ago.

I’ve seen it snow in 1984, I’ve seen cars set on fire, the whole Bathurst experience.

Every year we usually leave home on the Sunday or Monday afternoon the week before and arrive at around four o'clock in the morning.

We wait for a couple of hours and then begin our setup.

One year we got there and there was this noise was like a dragster, like a Double-A fueller revving its engine.

We went to find out what it was, and it was these guys from an engineering shop in New South Wales, who had made a ride-on mower with a 360-cubic inch V8 engine in it, and they were running it!

I’ve seen some crazy things.

On-track, Coleman’s campsite has given him a front-row seat to witness some of the most iconic moments in the Great Race's history.

In 1983, I was there standing right beside the last marshall at Forest Elbow when Dick Johnson hit the tree.

I thought he was dead.

I was with a mate that year who was a massive Johnson fan, and we all thought he was dead.

His head had slipped over the side of the car.

He eventually began moving and got out of the car, but I don’t think people realised how big the tree was that the car took out.

We saw Peter Brock stop to pick him up, that was something to see.

The funny thing about that is what they used to do in those days is put the running gear in from another car, and they'd let him take the car out all across the highways and hills around Bathurst in the middle of the night to run the car in.

Coleman has refined his campsite setup over the decades

You could hear it going across the hills out towards Orange and coming back in.

When Paul Radisich hit the wall, it was right in front of us, we’ve seen a lot of those sorts of things going on.

It’s been pretty spectacular over the years, but I'd have to say that one of Johnson's was pretty monumental.

I could ramble on for hours, but the day we led the parade in 2004 or 2005, in my mate's Ford Cobra, was pretty special.

One of my friends has a really rare Cobra that was the pace car at Bathurst in 1978.

We were in Bathurst for a Ford reunion, and we led the whole driver parade out on Sunday morning.

It was a surprise as we were waiting for the Course Marshall to come and lead, but they came over and said “Off you go”.

They told us to do the right thing to the top of the mountain, and go as fast as you'd like down Conrod Straight.

I've lived pretty much all of the whole Bathurst experience.

I've been lucky enough to do some laps in corporate cars too, Bathurst is one of the highlights of our year, every year, and we love it.

Remembering mates at the mountain

Refining their campsite design over the years, Coleman and his mates relish returning to their home away from home at the mountain.

We take the camper trailer because it's the easiest to tow and we take some marquees.

The usual stuff, just everything that you need, barbecues, fire pits, all the rest of it.

We have a communal area where we hang out, and between all the guys we take everything that we need, whether it be firewood or ice, or whatever we need.

There are probably a good dozen of us across our two or three campsites, and we join the group behind us as well, so there could be up to as many as 50 or 60 of us.

You’ve got to do it, you have got to camp at Bathurst, but you’ve got to get prepared.

My advice is to make sure you're warm. I've been there when it snowed, we've had sleet, and many times the wind, where it's just been nearly unbearable.

But you’ve got to experience it for yourself, get the kids, and head to the top of the mountain.

Tickets for the Repco Bathurst 1000 are available on Supercars.com and Ticketek.