This year’s Repco Bathurst 1000 features a special tribute to nine-time race winner Peter Brock, including a range of cars from his incredible career set to be on-hand at the track in ‘Peter’s Pitlane’ for fans to enjoy.
Among them is a #43 Holden Dealer Team Monaro GTS 350 from 1969, the year he made his Great Race debut as part of Harry Firth’s new three-car line-up.
A bearded ‘rough diamond’, Brock had been racing for all of 18 months in a Holden-powered Austin A30 Sports Sedan he’d built up at home and forged his reputation with.
Then he got a call from Firth to join the new HDT operation for the Hardie-Ferodo 500 at Bathurst, though couldn’t tell a soul about the new deal.
“Because it wasn’t announced that I was part of the team and Harry Firth had asked me to lay low – ‘just don’t say anything, cock’ – I had doubts whether I was ever going to get a drive,” he told me in 2006 just months before his shock death.
“It was after Sandown (where HDT had run a single Monaro that failed to finish after brake failure) that I went down to the workshop in Queens Avenue (Melbourne) and there was a sign writer in there.
“He was hand painting ‘P. Brock’ on the side and I couldn’t see what he was writing past his arm! I wasn’t game to move in case I broke the spell! I didn’t want to look! I think it’s my name – maybe it is, maybe it’s not!”
Where it all began
Brock’s debut with the HDT came, of all places, at the biggest touring car race of the season, the 1969 Hardie-Ferodo 500.
The junior driver of the six spread across the team’s three cars, he was paired with the most senior of the line-up in veteran Des West.
Firth had opted for some unusual combinations across all three cars; rally aces Colin Bond and Tony Roberts (who went on to win the race outright) and open wheeler drivers Peter Macrow and Henk Woelders shared the #44 and #42 entries respectively.
Brock had never raced the Monaro, let alone raced at Mount Panorama, so to help prepare he pounded around the back roads near his family’s home in his mother’s automatic V8 Premier to get the feel of a big car!
An improvement over the previous 327 cubic-inch version that was first-over-the-line in the 1968 race, the new ’69 Monaro featured a 5.7-litre Chevrolet-sourced V8 engine with a claimed 300 horsepower, wider track, Muncie four-speed gearbox and thicker front brake discs.
The defining moment
West and Brock lined up 10th on the grid in the unique 3-2-3 grid formation on Sunday October 5, 1969 on a day that the Michelin-shod Holdens were too strong for their opposition over 130 laps and 500 miles (805-kilometres)
Brock was staggered to find himself at one point in the lead, though a strange misfire slowed he and West in the second half of the race and they ended up coming home in third place, 1-minute and 21 seconds behind the winning Bond/Roberts car.
Nevertheless, third place was a brilliant beginning to Brock’s career with Holden and indeed his Bathurst ‘Great Race’ career in his first of an eventual 32 race starts.
His nine wins are forever in the history books, but the moment Peter Geoffrey Brock bolted himself into the #43D Monaro at Bathurst on that first Sunday in October, 1969, was a defining moment in Aussie motorsport history.
One man’s quest to become the greatest driver in Great Race history had begun.
A Mini moment with the Monaro
A completely different beast from his Austin A30 Sports Sedan, the Monaro was a very different beast for Brock to get used to.
However, his first laps in practice were at a pace far from befitting of the ‘King of the Mountain’ he eventually became!
Brock recounted his timid first few laps of the Mountain in the Monaro in the 1980 Hardie-Ferodo 1000 Bathurst race program.
“It was the worst moment I’ve ever had at Bathurst, being passed by a Mini back in 1969,” he said.
“That was the first year I’d ever been to the Hardie-Ferodo, in fact I’d never been around the circuit until the HDT chief Harry Firth drove me around at 60km/h in his road car.
“He kept telling me, “turn here,” or “slide there” and I thought it wouldn’t be all that hard.
“Anyway, there I was in this huge 350 cubic inch Monaro on my first lap at race speed, or I should say unrestricted speed, and I was passed by this Mini going through McPhillamy Park!
“It was the height of embarrassment and as I got to Skyline I thought, ‘what I am doing here?’, this is a fearful track.”
Safe to say, Brock got the hang of the “fearful” Mount Panorama course...
The Repco Bathurst 1000 will be held at Mount Panorama on October 8-11.
In collaboration with V8 Sleuth, Supercars.com is highlighting Peter Brock, who will be honoured at the 2026 Repco Bathurst 1000. The nine-time Bathurst winner will be celebrated via a series of tributes, with several of his famous cars on display at the Mountain. The Peter's Pitlane exhibition is in the National Motor Racing Museum between Thursday October 8 and Sunday October 11.
