Brocky’s uphill battle

Just a few months after he’d competed in the 1977 Hardie-Ferodo 1000, finishing fourth after a disappointing race by his standards, Peter Brock stuck the Bill Patterson Racing Torana A9X on the trailer and took it up to rural Morwell for the weekend.
November 27, 1977, was the day of the Australian Hillclimb Championship at this magic little ‘circuit’ in Victoria’s beautiful Gippsland region.
Why do we call it a circuit? Morwell was officially classified as a ‘hillclimb’ by CAMS because it had some steep inclines, but there were also some tricky downhill bits and drivers started and finished on the same stretch of road.
Another feature was the hump just after the start, where the faster cars got airborne. With a right-hander known as ‘Skyline’ and some downhill ‘Esses’ the place resembled a mini-Mount Panorama. Sadly, this unique venue is now gone.
Hillclimbing doesn't attract a lot of attention these days, but in earlier times this type of competition was crucial to the development of motorsport in Australia. In the pre and post-World War years when there was a scarcity of actual racing tracks, the proliferation of hillclimb venues helped sustain the sport. It wasn't hard to put on a hillclimb: all you needed was a short strip of road that took in a hill or two, either on private land or on public roads that could be closed for the event. One popular such hillclimb was the Forty Bends at Lithgow, near Bathurst, which started just off the Great Western Highway on the eastern edge of the town and comprised, you guessed it, a course with 40 bends...
Brock had done quite a few hillclimbs as a young up-and-comer in the late '60s in his Holden six-powered Austin A30 sports sedan, so he must have looked at the calendar and thought, 'yeah, why not?'
Also taking the trip was Captain Peter Janson in his famous ‘Nudge Nudge’ A9X. This was the same Ian Tate-prepped yellow and green machine in which he and Larry Perkins had scored an impressive third place at Bathurst a few weeks before, behind the two dominant Moffat Ford Dealer XC Falcons.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more! Peter ‘Nick’ Janson was up to his usual cheeky tricks.

Such was the more relaxed nature of the sport back then that two of Australia’s top touring car names had the time to turn up for a hillclimb event.
Janson, of course, was in the middle of a laughable dispute with CAMS over the use of the words ‘NGK Janson’ on his windshield strip (NGK, of course, being a brand of spark plugs).
CAMS said that this space was reserved for the driver’s name only, so Janson cheekily responded by (temporarily) changing his name by deed poll to NGK Janson!
According to Greg Stanfield’s report in Racing Car News, he was entered at Morwell as ‘Nick’ Janson. Other contenders in muscle cars were Marshall Brewer, also in a Torana A9X, and Greg East in a Torana L34. Both were hillclimb specialists (Brewer would later became a big name in AUSCAR racing at Melbourne’s Calder Park Thunderdome).
Another top gun was Harry Bargwanna, down from Como in Sydney's south, in one of the family team’s orange Torana XU-1s. This might have been the former Allan Grice car, but we can’t be sure. There was another Bargwanna in another Torana competing in the 2000-3000 Sports Sedan class, so maybe that was it?

Greg East got caught out running slick tyres on a damp track and hit the Armco fence in his Torana L34.

In any case, Brock was favourite to win the Touring Car class, but he had some competition. Marshall Brewer was fastest in practice with a razor-sharp time of 36.8 seconds.
On the first official run, Brock responded by recording an astonishing 35.8 seconds, shattering the previous Touring Car record by half a second. This was achieved, according to RCN, in typical Brocky style with “a series of wide oversteering lines” through the tighter corners.
The best Janson could achieve was 37 seconds dead. Next it was Marshall Brewer, who was clearly pumped up and looking on the money to challenge Brock’s new record - until he put one wheel in the gravel and nearly stuffed his Torana into the Armco. He caught it just in time, though, to salvage a 40.5 sec run.
The other big effort came from Harry Bargwanna, who screamed around in 37.3 seconds in his hot six-cylinder Torana, which was faster than East in his V8 L34.
Then it started to rain. Brock and Janson fitted some deep-tread wet weather race
tyres, but the chance of beating their first times was now gone. East, still on his dry weather slicks, understeered into the Armco fence at Skyline.
For the third and final run, the track was semi-dry and Brock was told to wait at the start-line until cleaning of the track surface was completed. Of course, with no air flow, his hot race engine started boiling like a tea kettle. The delay resulted in a cracked cylinder head and blown head gasket, but Brock still smoked around in an impressive 36.8 secs.
Janson ran a clean 37.4 secs but Brewer could only manage 38.0 in the tricky conditions. The finishing order in the Touring Car class was Brock, Janson, Bargwanna and Brewer.
To put Brock’s record-smashing 35.8 sec winning effort in perspective, he was faster than every sports car and sports sedan entered. In fact, only a handful of purpose-built, open-wheel hillclimb specials were faster on the day.
They were headed by Ian Judd, who in a wild V8-powered Cheetah recorded equal fastest time of 34.1 seconds to win the Australian Hillclimb Championship.
And Peter Brock in a Group C Torana was less than two seconds slower than him! Another example of why so many people say he was the best ever.