As we gear up for the 2023 Formula One Rolex Australian Grand Prix this month, we look back on how the F1 circus made it to Australia for the inaugural World Championship round. This edited extract, from the latest motorsport book Formula One Down Under: Australian Grand Prix History, takes an historical drive down the road leading to the much-loved parklands street circuit in Adelaide in 1985 – yeah, long before the AGP shifted to Melbourne’s Albert Park…
IN THE BEGINNING…
It’s fair to say the arrival of ‘fair dinkum Formula 1’ in Australia in the mid-1980s changed local motor racing forever. It’s also true that the Australian Grand Prix raised the benchmark for F1 events globally. The first Adelaide race in 1985 ran like clockwork, attracted a capacity crowd, put on a spectacular show and was rated the best Grand Prix of the year by Formula 1’s drivers, teams and top brass. The South Australian capital showed the world how to hold a street circuit event. After all, Aussies know how to host a party!
Formula 1 was off to a flyer in this country – and it’s still soaring in its current home of Melbourne. The magic of Adelaide’s annual F1 round quickly spurred other state governments into action. Victoria rebuilt the Phillip Island circuit ahead of welcoming the World 500cc Championship fraternity for the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix, whetting the appetite to also host the four-wheeled version. Western Australia secured the World Rally Championship and Queensland turned to the US-based IndyCars as an excuse for a Surfers Paradise street party. Temporary circuits became the rage to such a degree that the domestic Supercars series now headlines its own street race festivals. None of this would have eventuated if South Australia had misfired.
Adelaide was far from being a dud. It was an unqualified success, tossing up countless memorable moments and drawing huge crowds, culminating in an Australian record for the biggest one-day sporting attendance – 205,000 – on main race day for its 1995 swansong. Let’s take a ride down the long and winding road leading to that landmark 1985 race.
THE ROAD TO ADELAIDE
When the F1 circus arrived in Adelaide in late 1985 it was the first time the entire travelling show had pitched its tent on these shores. Yet that inaugural World Championship round was far from being the first-ever Australian Grand Prix. Nor was it the first occasion when F1 stars and cars lobbed down under.
However, 3 November 1985 was the realisation of a seemingly unattainable dream held by so many for so long. Local motor racing enthusiasts felt like Australia had finally hit the jackpot. It was truly a grand prize – the English translation of the French term ‘grand prix’ – for a proud motorsporting nation. After all, the newly created street circuit skirting the city’s CBD was playing host to the 50th running of the Australian Grand Prix. Fiftieth!
The AGP dates back to the 1920s, contested over the early decades by, mostly, a hodgepodge of open-wheel racing cars in the hands of amateur local drivers. There were many peaks and troughs between event number one and 50 as it was shared around all six states and no fewer than 22 very different venues. Left Graham Hill was among the imported F1 stars who contested the 1967 AGP at Sydney’s Warwick Farm. 5 Some were in rural areas, others in the big cities. Many were temporary tracks on public roads or ex-RAAF airfields that disappeared as quickly as they came to life. One or two ‘pop-up’ tracks endured for a decade or so or morphed into a dedicated full-time facility. Eight of the 22 were purpose-built permanent circuits that hosted all-manner of year-round racing and motorised activity.
The Adelaide Parklands track was the sixth circuit used in South Australia, beginning with Victor Harbor’s hosting of the 1937 AGP, an occasion actually held in the final days of 1936 as part of the state’s centenary celebrations. The others were Lobethal, Nuriootpa, Port Wakefield and Mallala. Five different Queensland locations were utilised: Leyburn, Southport, Lowood, Lakeside and Surfers Paradise International Raceway. A trio of Western Australian venues near Perth were called upon – Narrogin, Caversham and Wanneroo – the same number as in New South Wales. There, the famed Mount Panorama circuit played host on four occasions, all well before the first running of the iconic Bathurst 1000 touring car classic.
The AGP was also twice run in Tasmania, at Longford outside of Launceston, while five Victorian tracks had the honour – Phillip Island, Point Cook, Albert Park, Sandown and Calder Park. History records that the latter played a very important role in laying the foundation for the World Championship’s arrival in Adelaide. Phillip Island is known today for its magnificent seaside circuit that is as fast and flowing as it is picturesque. Officially, this track is called the Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit. It’s the long-time home of the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix, yet the 4.5km layout never hosted the four-wheeled AGP.
Drive a few miles from the PIGPC, though, and you will find yourself on the very roads upon which the inaugural AGP was contested, in 1928. In fact, our country’s first eight national Grands Prix took place on roughly rectangular layouts comprised of cordoned-off local roads. For the record, Australian Arthur Waite, aboard a tiny Austin 7 racer, upstaged more fancied competitors in faster cars, completing the 16-lap, 169km race in 1h46m.
A small asterix needs to be added to Phillip Island’s claim-to-fame as first AGP venue. A year before Waite’s triumph the NSW regional city of Goulburn hosted an event it called the Australian Grand Prix on its grassy showground. Lasting just seven minutes, this was more a speedway-style contest, whereas Phillip Island’s distance, duration and track was more akin to the European notion of a grand prix. It’s not our intention here to overview each and every non-World Championship AGP between 1928 and 1984, but it’s important to highlight landmark races to paint an accurate picture of how the event ebbed and flowed over its five-decade path to Adelaide.
Bathurst in 1938 saw the opening of the revered Mount Panorama circuit – built as a scenic tourist drive as an unemployment relief project during the Great Depression – and the first AGP won by a foreign driver. Briton Peter Whitehead was victorious, driving an ERA that had already enjoyed significant success in the UK. The driver and car drew enormous interest as Whitehead toured our nation, racing his striking black machine anywhere and everywhere – circuits, dirt speedways and sandy beaches. It would be another 17 to 18 years before other entrants from the United Kingdom and continental Europe would attract a similar level of attention. In fact, the mid-1950s proved a turning point in AGP history. Unsurprisingly, South Australia was central to it. There was nothing glamorous about the location of the purpose-built Port Wakefield circuit, 100km from Adelaide, yet the 1955 AGP benefitted from the hype surrounding an Aussie who was starting to make a name for himself in the Old Dart, Formula 1’s epicentre. Jack Brabham and his Cooper-Bristol were fresh from contesting the British Grand Prix and duly proved too good for the locals.
Things went to a whole new level the following year when the works Maserati team arrived with their all-conquering 250F models resplendent in Italian red. Dashing British driver Stirling Moss, one of the era’s biggest Grand Prix stars, won in Melbourne as he pleased from French teammate Jean Behra. The factory Maserati squad headlined an entry unlike anything seen in Australia before, featuring privately-entered Ferraris, Cooper-Bristols and 250Fs. One of the latter was driven by local car dealer Stan Jones, who etched his name in the event’s record books three years later at Longford, watched on by his 12-year-old son Alan.
The 1956 AGP was truly a race and location ahead of its time, held in Albert Park near the city’s CBD during the Olympic Games to take advantage of the prevailing atmosphere of ‘get out and see the world’s best’. It worked, with an estimated 110,000 lining the circuit on race day. History books recorded the occasion as one of the most vividly remembered AGPs of all, its impact across the community unmatched by any subsequent events until perhaps the first of Adelaide’s World Championship races.
It undoubtedly whet Melbournian appetites to one day host the entire F1 fraternity. Yet Albert Park’s high-water mark would prove to be an aberration, as the event continued to rotate around the states in subsequent years, fought out between talented locals from the Australian Drivers’ Championship. Mallala’s hosting of the 1961 affair saw Victorian Lex Davison win his fourth AGP in eight years.
The trend was reversed for 1962 when New Zealander Bruce McLaren, already a winner of the Monaco Grand Prix for the factory Cooper team, dominated at Caversham aboard a Cooper Climax. For the rest of the sixties the AGP was won by a succession of imported F1 stars – Jack Brabham (1963 Warwick Farm, 1964 Sandown Park), McLaren again in 1965 (Longford), then a trio of former or soon-to-be World Champions from Britain. Graham Hill (1966 Lakeside), Jackie Stewart (1967 Warwick Farm) and Jim Clark (1968 Sandown Park) were repeat visitors when the AGP was a round of the Tasman Series. This was an end-of-season summer championship in New Zealand and Australia featuring the biggest names in Formula 1. Grand Prix teams flew out the previous season’s F1 machinery in order to trump the local opposition and sell the redundant cars to wealthy local privateers.
Racing in the Antipodes over the off-season made a lot of sense on various levels for F1 teams eager to escape the northern hemisphere winter. But as the World Championship season expanded and the financial returns from contesting the Tasman Series contracted, this golden era proved painfully short. Ferrari ace Chris Amon won the last of the Tasman-era AGPs featuring full bore F1 cars at Lakeside in 1969, before the new top local formula took over the running. Formula 5000 cars driven by Australians and New Zealanders won every AGP in the 1970s and the chances of Australia hosting the World Championship seemed further away than ever.
But then Alan Jones emerged as a force in Grand Prix racing in the late seventies, ultimately winning the 1980 World Championship. With an Aussie at the top of the F1 tree, the Kerry Packer-owned Nine Network picked up local television rights and grainy live coverage from distant and exotic locations was beamed into Australian lounge rooms from 1981. Highlights of each Grand Prix were also shown on Nine’s revolutionary Saturday afternoon Wide World of Sports program that quickly became an institution for local sports lovers. Formula 1 perfectly fit Channel Nine’s push to position itself as the home of top shelf live international sport enabled by advances in satellite technology.
If the early ’80s was Formula 1’s turbocharged engine era, it was also the time when interest Down Under experienced a massive boost. Entrepreneurial types hatched plans to host a local round, with Calder Park Raceway owner Bob Jane leading the charge. The tyre magnate’s strategy was to lock down a multi-year deal to host the traditional non-World Championship AGP, then fly in some F1 stars to show F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone his venue’s potential. Jones, Bruno Giacomelli and Didier Pironi contested the 1980 race, Australia’s latest racing hero winning in his title-winning Williams, from Giacomelli’s Alfa Romeo.
Over the next four years an impressive list of other established GP aces joined Jones in contesting one or more of Calder Park’s AGPs in locally prepared Formula Pacific cars – Nelson Piquet, Alain Prost, Jacques Laffite, Keke Rosberg and Andrea de Cesaris. They were beaten on three of these occasions by Piquet’s protégé Roberto Moreno, who was yet to make his F1 debut. Prost won in 1982. The five Calder Park AGPs certainly upped the ante in Australia’s quest to host a World Championship round. Yet the facility would require a complete overhaul and, even if it did get reworked, little could be done about its less than atmospheric and attractive surrounds.
Full marks to Jane, though, for the foundation stones that he laid. Nonetheless, he was not the only one putting his best foot forward. There were news reports of apparently advanced plans for an international circuit to be built near the nation’s capital, Canberra, entrepreneur Paul Dainty’s scheme for a ‘by the harbour’ race in Sydney, and Sandown Park’s extensions to full Grand Prix length.
Sandown was the favourite to host such an event. It already had the appropriate circuit and facilities plus the experience of holding a round of the World Endurance Championship for sports cars in late 1984, and most observers were of the opinion that a World Championship AGP at Sandown in the near future was a certainty. How successful it might have been was open to debate, however, because the ridiculously slow infield section, a necessary evil in order to meet the required minimum length for a GP circuit, made the new Sandown a bit like Monaco but without the charm.
Sandown’s upgrade took away any chance of Victorian state government funding for a Calder Park upgrade. The people behind Adelaide’s bid for the race had announced their intentions during 1984, but outside that city no-one took it very seriously. It was something of a shock, then, when in February 1985 the Australian Formula One Grand Prix office was opened in Adelaide by the South Australian Premier, John Bannon.
The secret to their success was simply that they’d done their homework. Those behind Sandown’s circuit extensions had failed to take into account that the Formula One Constructors’ Association – the organisational and financial strength behind the F1 circus that was headed by Ecclestone – wanted any new race to be held on a street circuit. Sandown could not oblige there and Paul Dainty’s somewhat fanciful plans for Sydney were strongly opposed by the City Council, but Adelaide was in a position to meet any requirements the FOCA demanded – and with the full support of the state and local governments, the police, business, the people and all the various civil authorities which would have to be involved.
The origins of Adelaide’s Grand Prix go back to 1982 when businessman and former racing driver Bill O’Gorman remembered that 1986 was South Australia’s sesqui-centenary. What better way, he thought, of celebrating that than with a World Championship Grand Prix? O’Gorman took the idea to Adelaide’s mayor, Wendy Chapman, and to the chairman of the SA Jubilee 150 Committee, Kim Bonython. The latter was the former promoter of Adelaide’s Rowley Park Speedway and had himself already proposed the idea, in 1980, of staging an international event to celebrate the city’s jubilee.
A positive response was recorded all round. When FOCA was approached, it too was supportive. The only problem was that while O’Gorman’s concept encompassed a single race only FOCA was looking at a long-term deal, a development that necessitated the direct involvement of the South Australian Government. This was the clincher.
Premier Bannon became personally involved – he even flew to London for talks with Ecclestone when discussions reached a stalemate in 1984 – and the deal was finally done. It covered a total of seven races with the first three firm bookings and the remainder subject to options. Ironically, the sesquicentenary celebration Australian Grand Prix – the whole reason for getting the event – did not in fact occur. Ecclestone told Bannon he could have the ’86 race, as long as he also took it in 1985.
Thus the inaugural Australian Formula One Grand Prix, as it was styled (with the SA Government owning the rights to that name) was originally scheduled for 13 October 1985. The date soon changed to the definitive one, 3 November – a mere 10 months after the deal was done.
The 3.778km circuit was a clever utilisation of existing city streets and a new section of track built around the Victoria Park racecourse. Its detail layout changed a little during 1984 but was finalised by the time work began in early 1985. It was completed – including grandstands, barriers and the ‘demountable’ pit garages – by September, as were the other million and one things that had to be arranged, built or seen to. One was the need to introduce special legislation to the South Australian Parliament which allowed the closure of the necessary public roads for seven days.
With the logistics under control and a naming rights sponsor in local manufacturer Mitsubishi, all that was needed was a field of Formula One cars and spectators to fill the grandstands. The latter requirement was easily met from the moment tickets went on sale some months before the big day. And the rest, as they say, is history. It was a long, long road but the end result was truly magnificent.
This is an edited extract from Formula One Down Under: Australian Grand Prix History (Gelding Street Press, $39.99rrp)
Photography by BOB KING COLLECTION, FRED PEARCE AND RAY BELL
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