Saturday Sleuthing: Richo's Creek Crash Car
There's no doubt about it, Prodrive Racing Australia is the team to beat in the 2015 V8 Supercars Championship at the moment.
Next weekend the V8 field will be heading to Sydney Motorsport Park and hoping that the factory Ford team's record of a single victory at the venue (by Mark Winterbottom in 2008 when the venue was known as Eastern Creek) stays that way.
It's that 2008 round that is our focus today on Saturday Sleuthing and, in particular, Steven Richards' massive head-on accident in the sister, Castrol-backed Falcon that weekend.
Ford Performance Racing/Prodrive Racing Australia has constructed and raced 20 Falcon V8 Supercars of various generations and models, but Richards' Eastern Creek car is the only one of the team's cars to have ever been declared a write-off.
The 3.9-kilometre circuit has a history of claiming plenty of other racecars in massive accidents too.
Mark Skaife wrote off a Gibson Motorsport Commodore during a wet practice at the 1995 Triple Challenge and was carted off to hospital with injuries that forced him to miss the opening round of the championship a few weeks later.
Todd Kelly is another to taste the concrete at turn 1 in a massive accident, all but destroying an ex-HRT Commodore during his time with the Young Lions program in 1999.
But what about the car in which Richards was riding back in March 2008?
The now Porsche Carrera Cup Champion had joined FPR in 2007, replacing the Britek-bound Jason Bright.
Richards received a brand new Falcon BF (FPR 604) upon his arrival with the team, debuting the #6 Castrol EDGE-backed racer in the season-opening Clipsal 500 in Adelaide.
He raced it at Barbagalllo in round two before the chassis was benched for a few rounds and returned to action from Queensland Raceway onwards, scoring its first podium finish - second to Lee Holdsworth - in the next round, the Jim Beam 400 at Oran Park.
At that time, V8 Supercar teams could mix and match their drivers for the endurance races, and FPR elected to keep Richards and teammate Winterbottom split for the Sandown 500, where Owen Kelly joined Richards in the Castrol car and the duo finished third.
But for Bathurst the team elected to put their regular pilots together with Orrcon branding joining the familiar Castrol stickers on Richards' regular car, thereby creating a very strong line-up for the big race.
Winterbottom put the car on pole at Bathurst, however their Bathurst challenge that year is probably better known for Frosty's big 'off' at Caltex Chase while leading in the slippery conditions late in the day.
Somehow the #6 Falcon didn't dig into the sand trap as Winterbottom slipped off the road and launched through the air, crashing back down to earth in a moment that TV commentator Neil Crompton described as the race "going off"!
They eventually finished 10th before Richards re-took his car for the remainder of the season.
It found itself in an awkward position just a month later in Bahrain in the Middle East when it escaped without serious damage after it fell off the back of a truck while being transported to the circuit!
But the Bahrain mishap sure didn't slow down Richards or FPR 604 as they grabbed runner-up honours in the next round at Symmons Plains in Tasmania.
Richards retained his 2007 car for the 2008 season and again it ran in Castrol EDGE colours, but it didn't get very far into the season before disaster struck in round two at Eastern Creek.
After finishing a lowly 27th in Race 1 (forced to pit to repair his front spoiler after a clash with Cameron McConville that tipped him into a spin), Richards made up a whopping 20 spots to finish seventh in Race 2.
But while running fifth in the third and final race, a loose wheel sent Richards head-on into the wall exiting turn three.
"We had a loose wheel and I was actually going to come into the pits that lap," Richards recalled this week to our V8 Sleuth.
"The lower control arm machined the wheel in half, then basically the wheel took the tyre out, and the wheel sawed the brake lines off, so it had no brakes at all.
"I thought I was getting a flat tyre and had been slowing to come into the pits that lap. It was a really sudden stop, I'm pretty sure I was still doing 112 km/h and then zero. There were some tyres there but probably not enough for the speed of the corner.
"I was a little sore in the ribs, but by the Tuesday I was completely fine.
"They had to use the 'jaws of life' to get the engine out! The damage went right back through into the rear parcel shelf. It worked how it should have (to protect the driver) but it broke the engine mounts, smashed the clutch, broke the gearbox internally. It went all the way back through to the rear axle."
After the salvageable items had been removed from the chassis, the leftovers of FPR 604 were moved outside the FPR/PRA workshop to sit on the fuel bunker at the back of the factory - and what's exactly where it remains to this very day!
Saturday Sleuthing will take a break for next weekend's Sydney Motorsport Park SuperSprint but will return to v8supercars.com.au on Saturday August 29.
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