AVID Peter Brock fan Frank Marin was on a mission yesterday after driving all the way from Wagga Wagga to Bathurst.
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His sole focus was to visit the National Motor Racing Museum at Mount Panorama, where he had the chance to see the VK Holden Commodore that Brock and Larry Perkins drove to victory in the Great Race in 1984.
The Brock car has special significance for Mr Marin as he started following the motorsport legend way back in 1971 and calls Brock his “hero”.
The Brock car is also set to be the subject of great interest in the lead-up to the Bathurst 1000 as this year will be a decade since Brock was killed while competing in a car rally in Tasmania.
According to reports in the metropolitan media on the weekend, V8 Supercars officials want to bring as many of Brock’s eight winning Bathurst cars – some worth more than $1.5 million and possibly the most expensive vehicles in the country – to Mount Panorama for a pre-race reunion blast around the racetrack they made famous in a fitting tribute.
It has been revealed that the greatest car race in Australia will become the “Brock’’ Bathurst 1000 this year in a fitting tribute to Mount Panorama’s greatest driver.
The cars, including the all-conquering LX SS Torana A9X Hatchback in which Brock won by six laps and equalled the all-time Bathurst record of four wins, will be driven by a select group of V8 Supercars drivers who have won the Peter Brock Trophy – the Bathurst winner’s trophy named after the legend following his passing in 2006.
The task of bringing all eight cars back to the Mountain is impossible, because Brock’s first SL/R Torana 500 was destroyed in an accident and the authenticity of Brock’s first Bathurst-winning car, said to be in the hands of a collector, is a subject of fierce debate.
Mystery also surrounds the whereabouts of the first Commodore to win the Bathurst 1000, with the 1980 VC vanishing after last being raced in 1984.
The first ever race-winning Commodore could be sitting in a paddock or locked up in an abandoned storage unit.
V8 Supercars CEO James Warburton is ready to attempt to hunt down what could be a multi-million-dollar rusted wreck.
“We think this will be a fitting tribute to one of the world’s greatest ever touring drivers,’’ Mr Warburton said.
