Saturday Sleuthing: Tander's Ford V8 Debut
Sincehis V8 Supercar debut at Phillip Island in 1998, Garth Tander has always been a 'red' man.
Through stints driving Commodores with Garry Rogers Motorsport, the HSV Dealer Team and now the Holden Racing Team, Tander has more round starts in a Holden than any other driver in Australian Touring Car Championship/V8 Supercars Championship history.
So it's ironic that a man with more starts than anyone in Holdens in Championship history had his first taste of a V8 Supercar in a Ford!
Today on Saturday Sleuthing we focus on an ex-Glenn Seton Racing Falcon - GSR4 to be exact - the car first tested by a young Tander in 1997.
His first sample of V8 power came after that year's Barbagallo round of the Championship, where Western Australian privateer Allan McCarthy had raced the car.
The then 20-year old was on his way to winning the Australian Formula Ford Championship against the likes of Marcos Ambrose and Todd Kelly and had an upcoming test at Mallala in one of Dick Johnson's Shell Helix Falcons.
To prepare for his big test with DJR, Tander took the opportunity to learn the ropes in the West Coast Racing Falcon in a low-pressure environment.
"It was the Monday after the Barbagallo round of the V8 Supercars from memory," Tander recalled to the V8 Sleuth this week.
"It was just so I had driven a V8 Supercar prior to the Mallala test I did later on with Dick Johnson's team.
"The reason I drove that car was that we knew Allan McCarthy who had been driving it. He teed it up for us. But that was it really, I only did about 10 laps of Barbagallo to get my head around it before the DJR test.
"I wasn't totally at sea from memory. I was only a few seconds off Allan's pace from memory by the end of it. I might have done three, five lap runs in it, so it wasn't a mega test. I can't remember a huge amount about it!"
Fittingly, the 1997 ATCC round at Wanneroo was the last ATCC/V8SC round won by Peter Brock - so the day after Brock's last win, the man who would go on to become a Holden hero of the next decade started his road to V8 success.
But what of the car in which he took his very first V8 testing laps? To tell its story, you have to rewind back four years prior to 1993 and the start of the five-litre V8 era.
GSR4 was built earlier than intended before the end of the 1993 ATCC after former open wheeler ace and Toyota touring car driver Drew Price wrote off Alan Jones' regular chassis during a test session at Phillip Island.
Jones moved into the car Seton had driven throughout the season for the final round, while Seton moved into the new GSR4 - with the running engine and gearbox carried over from the crashed ex-Jones chassis car.
Seton debuted it at Oran Park and was partnered by Jones for the endurance races, which they retired due to brake problems at Sandown and driveline problems at Bathurst.
Seton campaigned GSR4 throughout the 1994 ATCC wearing the prestigious #1 as the defending champion. It was then driven by Jones and David Parsons at Bathurst that year as #30 before being sold to Claude Giorgi from Western Australia who ran under the West Coast Racing banner.
In late 1994, Seton paired up with Giorgi to win the Wanneroo 300 endurance race against other high profile ring-ins Larry Perkins (partnering Alf Barbagallo) and John Bowe, who was making a very rare appearance behind the wheel of a VP Commodore with privateer Ian Love.
Giorgi ran GSR4 at the 1995 Triple Challenge event at Eastern Creek and at selected rounds of the 1995 ATCC. The car then spent 1996 sitting idle before being updated to EL specification and given a fresh new white interior and white and red exterior livery for 1997.
Fellow West Aussie Allan McCarthy drove the car in the Sandown round of the '97 ATCC and won the inaugural race of the short-lived ARDC AMSCAR Series for privateers at Eastern Creek.
On home soil in the ATCC round at Wanneroo, an inspired decision to use slick tyres on a damp but drying track saw McCarthy rise through the field to finish an outstanding fifth in Race 1.
After Tander had completed his short debut test, Giorgi ran it in the final '97 ATCC round at Oran Park before it was sold to Queenslander Charles Ryman later that year.
Ryman entered the car in the Sports Sedan category of selected state level meetings in Queensland before embarking on selected rounds of the 1998 ATCC after Wayne Park drove it in the non-championship Grand Prix support event at Albert Park.
The car was rebuilt in late 1998 by former racer and noted engine builder Mark McLaughlin, but in a testing session at Lakeside in early 1999, the Falcon's right front tyre let go at the fast Turn 1 kink and sent Ryman into the wall. He suffered severe concussion and bruising while the car was declared a write-off.
Sadly, the car that GSR built to replace the chassis destroyed at Phillip Island in 1993 met the same fate - and the first V8 Supercar tested by Tander is no more.While his first two drives of a V8 Supercar were in Ford products, he has since never looked back.
Having recently re-signed a multi-year deal with the Holden Racing Team, it's unlikely he'll be anything other than a Holden man for quite some years to come.
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