Saturday Sleuthing: Ricky's GC600 Roll Over

Next weekend the Armor All Gold Coast 600 will round out the Pirtek Enduro Cup with a pair of 300-kilometre endurance races around the streets of Surfers Paradise - but there's a change.

Gone are the international drivers of the last three years, replaced by the same, largely local endurance pilots that also drove at Sandown and Bathurst in the previous two endurance events.

This all ties in nicely with an email our V8 Sleuth received this week from Garry Rogers Motorsport fan Blair Hathaway.

"I love your work on the V8 Sleuth and I am a huge GRM fan and have been following the team for about 15 years," writes Blair.

"Over that time I have a lot a great memories of the past race cars they have put together. I was thinking that Garry is currently celebrating 50 years of motorsport so maybe you could feature a special on some of his past cars."

So, with Blair's email in mind and the next event in Queensland in Surfers Paradise, we thought it was a good idea to rewind back to one of the biggest crashes the team has ever been involved in at last year's 2012 Armor All Gold Coast 600.

Last year's event was perhaps highlighted by the massive multi-car accident on Saturday that eliminated a range of cars, none more spectacularly than American Ricky Taylor aboard the #33 Fujitsu Racing GRM Commodore.

A litany of stalled cars with inexperienced international drivers (inexperienced in V8 Supercars at least), set off a chain reaction that saw the American Rolex Sports Car Series star sent barrel rolling down the road on his head.

It was a spectacular shunt, as Taylor launched off the back of Tonio Liuzzi aboard Tony D'Alberto's Falcon, who had already ploughed into the back of the stalled James Hinchcliffe in the sister Fujitsu car and then been smashed into from behind by Simon Pagenaud in Lee Holdsworth's IRWIN Falcon.

 The gap closed as Taylor tried to pick his way through at full throttle, though he tagged Liuzzi and was sent into a violent series of rolls and slid down the road on his roof.

Thankfully he was OK, but the car was not and he and Greg Ritter were sidelined for the rest of the season - and that actual car was sidelined for the rest of the 2012 V8 Supercars Championship.

So what was that car and would you believe it has returned to the track?

The car in question is GRM VE12 - the second last of the previous generation cars produced by Garry Rogers Motorsport in Melbourne.

It was debuted by Lee Holdsworth and David Besnard in the 2010 L&H 500 at Phillip Island and was also driven by them at Bathurst, leading more laps than any other car in the race before a pit lane drive through penalty sapped their chances.

Greg Ritter drove with Holdsworth on the Gold Coast in the inaugural year of the '600' format and Holdsworth drove the car for the remainder of that season, including victory in the final race of the season at Sydney Olympic Park - though that was overshadowed by James Courtney clinching the title.

Holdsworth retained this car for the 2011 season and scored a podium result with it at Winton before again teaming up with Ritter at Phillip Island and Bathurst and Frenchman Simon Pagenaud on the Gold Coast - they finished on the podium on the Sunday.

Holdsworth drove this car for the remainder of the season, his final of six full-time with GRM. He'd been on target for a podium result in his last race in Sydney before crashing into the spun Paul Dumbrell and his Bottle-O Falcon.

The team's new signing, Frenchman Alex Premat, took over this car for the 2012 season and he drove it through to the enduros at Sandown and Bathurst, where Jack Perkins co-drove with him.

Team boss Garry Rogers decided to make a statement and benched Premat for the Gold Coast, inserting Ritter into his ride - if only it had been known that he wouldn’t get any race laps given the big shunt that was to follow!

The car was badly damaged and unable to be repaired on site, leaving the team to prepare a spare chassis for Premat in Abu Dhabi, which was run for the rest of the season.

The crashed car was repaired and slowly re-assembled before being purchased by R Sport Race Engineering to use in the Dunlop Series.

It returned to the track at Winton in August with Aaron Tebb driving and the young gun also then drove the car in the last round at Bathurst.

So there you have it, a car involved in one of the most spectacular crashes in V8 Supercar history is back out there racing in the development category, the Dunlop Series.

It just goes to show you that V8 Supercars are built tough and very rarely does a big accident send a chassis into an early retirement!

Have a car you'd like to know more about? Know where one is?

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