The weather is really cooling down now as we head for the North Island of New Zealand. The humidity of the equator is well behind us, and the early spring of the southern hemisphere hasn’t warmed up yet.
We head out this morning for trivia, the usual general knowledge. As always the club is packed with trivia buffs, and we manage to find a seat on the edge of one of the lounges, surrounded by teams of four, five, and six people. Brian, our host, calls the game to order and we’re off. It’s Sunday, and there’s another race happening today as well. The Great Race. The Bathurst 1000.
As a kid I would get up early and watch it all day. Names like Johnson, Moffat, Perkins, and of course Brock. I was always a Ford fan, a big fan of Allan Moffat, and then along came Dick Johnson, that Aussie battler.
The race itself began in 1960 as the Armstrong 500 at Phillip Island, and moved to Mount Panorama at Bathurst in 1963. It became a 1000 kilometre race in 1973, 161 laps of a 6.2 kilometre circuit that climbs a mountain, runs down a long straight at around 300 km/h, and offers almost no run-off. It was built around the Ford and Holden rivalry, with Peter Brock, the “King of the Mountain”, winning nine times, and Moffat’s Fords taking a famous one-two finish in 1977.
Dick Johnson’s Bathurst story is one of the best in the sport. He first raced there in 1973 and went on to start 26 times. In 1980 he was leading the race in his Falcon when he ran over a large rock that had ended up on the track coming out of The Cutting. The car hit the wall and was all but destroyed. It should have been the end of a good story, but Australia took him to heart. Donations and support flooded in from the public, including my $10 I sent, and with a cheque from Ford on top, he came back in 1981 in the Palmer Tube Mills Falcon and won, sharing the drive with John French. The race was stopped early after a big accident, with Johnson and French declared the winners as the leaders, and they became the first Queenslanders to win Bathurst. A few years later, in 1983, he had another huge accident in qualifying at Forrest’s Elbow. Along the way he won five Australian Touring Car Championships (1981, 1982, 1984, 1988, and 1989), including the 1984 title in the Greens Tuf Falcon.
His second Bathurst win came in 1989, driving the Ford Sierra RS500 with John Bowe. They led from start to finish. The third was in 1994 in an EB Falcon, again with Bowe, the Falcon’s first win at the mountain since his own in 1981. Dick Johnson Racing, the team he founded in 1980, won again in 2019. Over recent years I’ve lost a little interest in touring cars. The heyday of the Ford versus Holden battles is gone now that Australia doesn’t have any car manufacturers. But recently I’ve been following the Shell cars and the Dick Johnson Racing team. Brodie Kostecki is the key driver today and sits on the front row of the grid.
But before Bathurst, we’ve got trivia. Mardi pulls out a couple of answers from somewhere deep in her brain and we do really well, scoring 18 out of 20. How will we do against the team that shall not be named? Oh, all right. Madjag. The team that gets on people’s nerves because they invariably win. There are six of them. Could today be our day?
To work out the winner at the end of the round, you keep clapping until your score is called and passed. So we start clapping, and keep clapping as Brian calls out scores. 10, 12, 15, 16. There are three teams still clapping. “17.” Two teams left, us and guess who. Then Brian calls “18.” We keep clapping, and the room is silent. Wow. We’ve won. Brian sees us clapping and yells “M and M!” During the build-up, teams around us were saying “keep going.” It seems the team that shall not be named isn’t anyone’s favourite. Our prize? The glory, and we walk out pleased with ourselves today.
After trivia we head to the Retreat lounge for “fun bingo.” It’s just bingo, but the exclusive Retreat invite described it as fun, and it is. We don’t win, but the staff in the Retreat are good fun and the crowd is in fine voice. It’s packed, with some people forced to sit on the ground.
We then enjoy lunch. Raw on 5 today, delicious sashimi. We also stop into Luminae for dessert, where they have our favourite, homemade yoghurt. Homemade on a cruise ship might be a stretch, but nonetheless, it’s yum.
A quick rest, then some progressive trivia. We’re holding down third spot, and another good showing today, 15. An afternoon in the Retreat after trivia is pleasant before a little later dinner.
During the afternoon and before dinner I watch the end of the Great Race. Mardi knits, reads and watches videos. It’s been pretty routine up until now, with Kostecki leading for much of the race until a botched pit stop puts him out of contention. But as the mountain does, there’s always a twist. As the last ten laps unfold, Kostecki and car 17 work their way back into the fight. When the first safety car of the race is needed with five laps to go after Chaz Mostert hits the wall at Forrest’s Elbow, the race suddenly becomes very interesting. The field is compressed. The leader, Anton de Pasquale, is running low on fuel. Kostecki is the fastest car out there on fresh tyres, driving aggressively. Then on the last lap, with under 5 kilometres to go, de Pasquale runs out of fuel and Kostecki and his co-driver Todd Hazelwood pass him and win. An astonishing end, and a heartbreaker for de Pasquale and his co-driver Lee Holdsworth, whose team put it down to a fuel calculation error. It was Kostecki’s second Bathurst win, after his first in 2024, and it ends a seven-year drought for Dick Johnson Racing since 2019, and gives the team its fifth win at Bathurst. Great for Dick Johnson, who despite three wins of his own has had more than his share of bad luck at the mountain.
We then head to dinner. It’s awesome. Delicious salmon sashimi for a starter. For main I have a delightful vegetable korma curry. Umesha, our head waiter, is starting to understand how much I enjoy curry. Our Indian curry night is still a couple of days away, so tonight’s is a bonus. Mardi enjoys a fresh rocket and melon salad.
We try out the casino again. The craps table is empty, but I throw the dice for a few minutes before we move to the machines. Tonight we try a new machine. I noticed it last night paying out a lot, so maybe it’s a bad idea to try it again, but we win $25 on the first spin. And the winning continues. It’s a weird machine, like playing four poker machines at once. There are buffalo, leprechauns, eagles, and cats, and the leprechaun keeps throwing coins at us. We have no idea what’s going on, but before we know it our $100 looks like $250. We let it ride for a while and pull out $200. Maybe we’ll be back. We call it a night and I settle in to watch Australia take control of the first Test against South Africa.
