Matt Simmons’ seat in Nissan’s 24 Hours of Spa line-up comes 25 years after one of Australian motorsport’s most famous names helped the Japanese giant dominate the race.
While these days running as a GT race within the wildly successful Blancpain Endurance Series, its history prior to 2001 was largely as a touring car event.
The early 1990s saw Spa feature a mix Group A, DTM and local Procar machinery and, just as it was in Australian touring car racing, the clear pick of the bunch in 1991 was the Nissan GT-R.
Nismo sent a single factory Group A entry to the August event for works drivers Anders Olofsson, Naoki Hattori and David Brabham, who would face an armada of seven BMW M3 Evos.
The then 25-year-old Brabham was a jack-of-all trades in 1991, starting the year in Formula 3000 before picking up drives with Nismo and Tom Walkinshaw’s Jaguar sportscar program.
Brabham had been recruited to Nismo by Howard Marsden to undertake testing duties with the Group A GT-R and LMP car in Japan.
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His two starts in the GT-R both came at Spa and, as history proved, delivered starkly different results.
“We felt pretty confident going there the first year that the car was going to be quick,” Brabham, who remains Australia’s only Spa 24 winner, recalled to Speedcafe.com this week.
“We knew that if we had a strong race we wouldn’t be beaten and that’s exactly what happened. We literally had the perfect race.
“We were three laps in the lead towards the end when the last of the BMW works cars gave up the ghost. That meant we won by 21 laps, which was kind of a joke really.
“I was in the right car at the right time. We could run at 90 percent pace taking any risks. That car could pass anything on the straights. It was just a beast.”
Brabham’s second and only return to the Spa 24 in 1992, however, proved a disaster as a fire broke out during a pitstop a fifth of the way into the race.
“I was in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt in the pit garage,” reflects Brabham.
“Anders came in for a pitstop and I wandered over to him to talk through the window. I asked ‘everything alright, do you need anything?’ and he just said ‘no, I’m fine, I’m fine’.
“I walked back and was standing next to the fuel rig and I saw the guy in front of the car waving his hands to signal to Anders to start.
“The car went down (off its jacks) and the car controller moved out of the way, so Anders drove off with the guy still refuelling.
“When I saw the car and the tank move I thought ‘shit, I’ve got to get out of here’, so I grabbed (wife) Lisa and headed straight for the door.
“Everyone else was just standing there looking at it (the spilling fuel) in disbelief and as I ran past, I saw there were two Nissan bosses standing with Miss Belgium, who had just come into our pit.
“I pushed Lisa out of the door and then I grabbed Miss Belgium. As I was dragging her out, the whole thing just went up in a massive explosion.
“As I looked around, all of the pit doors and the little entries were just bright orange, that’s how bright the flame was.
“It was like ants coming out of a nest with people pouring out.
“The refueller ended up in hospital with burns and the whole thing put an end to our race.”
The Nissan’s exit was just the beginning of the drama in the legendary 1992 race, which saw the factory Bigazzi and Schnitzer BMW teams go head-to-head.
Bigazzi ultimately triumphed after a late-race charge from Steve Soper saw the British ace barge his way past Eric van der Poele’s Schnitzer entry, going on to take the win by just 0.48s.
Such a tiny margin is far more likely to be repeated this year than Brabham’s 21 lap triumph of 1991 thanks to the competitiveness of the carefully performance-balanced GT3 field.
Nissan is again expected to be at the forefront of the outright battle with its lead entry crewed by Alex Buncombe, Lucas Ordonez and Mitsunori Takaboshi.
Simmons’ sister car is set to fight it out in Pro-Am – a daunting enough challenge for a 27-year-old who, prior to winning the GT Academy last year, was a postal delivery driver in Brisbane.
Impressed by the success of past graduates of the Playstation-based Academy competition including Ordonez, Brabham warns that Simmons must ease into the challenge of Spa.
“He’s got to slowly build up his confidence and just get quicker and quicker,” said Brabham when asked of what advice he’d give his compatriot.
“As soon as you try and go beyond what you’re capable of you put yourself under pressure and make mistakes.
“A lot of the gaming guys have come along and done pretty well. It’s an interesting concept that Nissan has developed.”
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