Godzilla beats Ford and Holden
To understand how the Nissan GT-R earned its monster moniker, you need to travel back more than 30 years and to the holy grail of Australian motorsport – Mount Panorama.
The year was 1992. A rain-slicked Bathurst 1000 had just reached its controversial conclusion with a red flag sent flying after officials deemed the conditions too treacherous to continue.
Officials backdated the standings to determine the victor, handing the trophy to Jim Richards and Mark Skaife in the Nissan GT-R, despite Richards having already crashed his car in all the chaos.
“I thought, ‘well, that’s it, I’ve buggered it, we’ve lost the race because I hit the wall’,” Richards recalls in his book called Gentleman Jim.
“When I got out of the medical car, I thought the team was going to be pissed off. Then they all came running over waving and carrying on, Skaifey was yelling, ‘we’ve won, we’ve won’. It was unbelievable, one of the happiest moments of my life.”
It meant back-to-back victories for a car that Wheels magazine had labelled Godzilla in 1989, with Richards and Skaife having already finished a full lap clear of the field in 1991.
The parochial Holden and Ford fans had swallowed their pride in 1991, but they weren’t willing to do it a second time.
“We knew the crowd probably wasn’t going to be overly in love with a Nissan win, especially a controversial Nissan win,” Skaife recalls in a video recorded for Thirsty Camel.
“Everyone was blueing. The Ford fans were feral as well as everyone else. I walked over to the bar and I said to the gentleman behind the bar, ‘could you please pass me some beers’, so I put all these Tooheys Draught cans in my pocket.
“Jimmy [Richards] walks over to me and says, ‘what are you doing?’. I said, ‘I’m going to throw a few back’. I was serious because I could hear cans being chucked at the wall – and he went, ‘nah mate, calm down, put those back’.
“It wouldn’t have been two minutes later that Richo called out the crowd and the joint just went mental.
“One of the funniest things was that the managing director of Nissan in the day, Leon Daphne… he and his beautiful wife Kerry were parked at the back of the crowd. Kerry got her Nissan umbrella and started whacking blokes. It was just fantastic.”
That’s the story of how the Nissan GT-R became King of The Mountain for two years running in a stretch so dominant a regulation change was quickly introduced that essentially banned the vehicle from competing again in 1993.
“GT-Rs in the hands of Jim Richards and Mark Skaife destroyed their opposition,” read the Australian Motor Racing Yearbook in 1991.
“Check the statistics. From seven wins out of a possible nine, the GT-Rs finished one-two in six of them.
“Not once did a GT-R driver not stand on the podium during the 1991 Shell Australian Touring Car Championship. Of the 425 laps which made up the nine rounds, 337 of them were led by Nissans. Richards was the leader for 229 laps.”
The GT-R ruled the world’s racetracks over that period. And in the shadow of Mount Panorama, a legend was cemented. The legend of Godzilla.
