First thing in the morning (Friday) I woke up relatively early in the day feeling surprisingly refreshed, especially when taking into account the entire night of sleep missed that was filled in by co-pilot Buick missions. I joined Mr. Grotty McParker in a brief tour of the area as everyone else was still asleep. We wandered the merchandising tents and found very little worthy of caring about but we also took the time to visit the paddock and the museum.
The first thing visible at the museum was the sweet, sweet 910 of Mr. Fury which was sitting in the window as you entered, I had a good wee nosey around it but it was all closed up so I couldn’t scope out the interior or underneath the bonnet. Further inside the museum were other amazing cars.
This little Mini was nestled amongst the motorcycles, most of them uninspiring but there was one in particular there that grabbed my attention, unfortunately it was propped up in a glass cage and so getting a photograph wasn’t the easiest of tasks.
I grew up aspiring to be Mick Doohan or Wayne Gardner, so seeing one of these in the metal was one of the best things EVER though as with the Bluebird, all locked up made it impossible to have a good look around it, it would have been great to have some of the cowling off and peep at the sweet, sweet motor.
The HK, HT & HG Monaro’s are easily my most favourite of Holden automobiles, there’s just something terribly staunch about them it wouldn’t bother me if they were 6 or 8, though a 327GTS would be a fantastic ride to have.
Perhaps the biggest reason this car is famous was the set up 1, 2 finish, back in 1977 where Colin Bond could have easily passed the #1 car of Alan Moffat was ordered to stay behind and roll over the checkered in the 1, 2 formation. I can imagine how hard it would have been to forfeit a Bathurst victory under team orders, ridiculously hard.
There were obviously more cars and a few other nick knacks or amazement in there but the conditions to photograph (as you can see) weren’t exactly fantastic, especially when you’d deliberately bought a camera of lesser quality to take along just in case you lost yout=r DSLR.
Outside the museum but inside the on site Supercheap Auto store were another few gems;
As was to be expected, the GTR wasn’t drawing much of a crowd but rather angry glares from here and there. It was good to finally see it in person though, so much smaller than the majority of the cars about.
I was making my way around this car to take photos when a very kind lady asked if I would like a photo of me with the car, thankful for her assistance I declined the photograph beside the A9X and chose this instead.
You’ll have to excuse the bag, I grabbed it from a new-stand person so I didn’t have to carry around the programme awkwardly for the rest of my wandering. Benson & Hedges cars piloted by Tony Longhurst are seared into my memory of watching the ATCC championships when I was a child.
After Parker and I had finished making our way around the museum and infield, etc. We made our way to Murray’s Corner to enjoy a little bit of the racing, I’ll post up some pictures that I took of that in the next post. Stay Tuned.
-Michael