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The Australian 5.0 Litre Touring Car Association will be out in force at Sandown’s annual historic meeting this weekend with a 15 car field completing demonstration laps.
The association was established by a group enthusiasts last year as part of a bid to encourage owners of 1993-2002 generation V8 Supercars back onto the track.
Speedcafe.com’s Stefan Bartholomaeus spoke to the association’s president Troy Kelly to find out more.
SPEEDCAFE: Troy, talk us through how this association has come about.
TROY KELLY: I started working on it about 18 months ago after a friend of mine (Andre Matheson) bought an ex-Alan Jones Peter Jackson Falcon EF.
I’d been involved in Group C and A for the last six or seven years just restoring cars and driving them for a couple of guys.
At the Muscle Car Masters in 2012 when we first ran the Peter Jackson car, a guy by the name of Dave Langman came up to me and said there’s a few of these cars kicking around.
From there I thought we should get something together, so we’ve been working on it for the last 12 months or so. Early this year I decided to hit it pretty hard and really start getting off the ground with it.
We decided to go with cars from 1993 to 2002 which will give us a nice and broad range of cars across an era where there weren’t many key changes to the rules.
SPEEDCAFE: Is the idea to simply encourage cars out of their sheds for demonstration type events like at Sandown? Or will there eventually be dedicated races?
KELLY: At the moment we’re focussing on demonstrations, or spirited displays as we call them. To the spectators they’ll look like a race.
The most important thing is that we do rolling starts for mechanical empathy on the cars and to limit the start-line accidents that can occur when you’re getting these things off the line. We’ll keep that no matter what we do.
Down the track we will possibly look at race formats, but at this stage we just want to get as many cars out there as we can.
There are a lot still out there in sheds getting refurbished to the way they should be.
SPEEDCAFE: You’ve got 15 cars for Sandown. How many members do you currently have in total?
KELLY: We’ve currently got about 26 financial members. There are another four cars in Victoria that will hit the track next year and there are seven in New South Wales that won’t be at Sandown just because of timing.
I think next year we should be able to put 25 cars on the grid pretty easily.
SPEEDCAFE: Is it hard to run these cars though? It’s not like a Dunlop Series car where you can go to a main series team for a new front upright and so on…
KELLY: A lot of parts are still available for them, like the Hollinger gearboxes and Harrop rear-ends, but a lot of the stuff, especially with the Dick Johnson and Glenn Seton cars, was made in-house.
We’ve got a lot of spares with the car we run, but if anything happens and you don’t have spares you just have to fabricate your own.
Running costs and serviceability wise they’re relatively cheap because they were pretty much built to run a 1000km race as a sprint.
We don’t work them that hard mechanically, so unless you have a major shunt or engine failure then it shouldn’t be too expensive.
SPEEDCAFE: Obviously the guys involved like yourself are very passionate about these cars, but have you been impressed by just how much love there is for them from the fan base?
KELLY: All of the feedback that I’ve got about the association has been positive and I can’t believe the amount of people that compare them favourably with the cars of today.
I suppose V8 Supercars these days are custom built race cars whereas these were still production based cars. There was a lot of fabricated stuff but they were a lot more basic.
Even the signage and those types of things were more basic in those days and they were just easier to relate back to the road cars.
The amount of feedback I get through the Facebook page alone is amazing. We’ve got a guy coming down from Sydney this weekend who has a couple of the original Peter Jackson grid girl outfits that we’re going to put some girls in this weekend.
I couldn’t believe it when he got in touch, but things like that obviously evoke a lot of memories for people and it all just adds to the fun.
SPEEDCAFE: Have you had any engagement with drivers or team owners from the era about becoming involved?
KELLY: I had a discussion with John Bowe at Winton (Festival of Speed in August) and he’s pretty keen to get involved at some point.
Steven Richards has shown interest as well, and we’re incorporating a lot of the old crew members this weekend with a barbeque and drinks on Saturday after the races.
The likes of Kevin Fitzsimons, who is now the motorsport manager for Dunlop, is coming along. Fred Gibson is coming over for a look too, so to have guys like that showing an interest is great.
As we evolve and get bigger I’m certainly hoping to get guys into cars. The main focus at the moment though is just trying to get cars out onto the grid and in the specification that they were in during the era.
Sandown is our first major race meeting and after that we’ll have a closer look at what we will do into the future.
