BROCKY ROAD THE LEGENDARY KING OF THE MOUNTAIN
Born on February 26, 1945 in Melbourne, Victoria, Peter Geoffrey Brock was Australian motor racing for many Aussies, drawing more people to the sport than anyone before or since. For those reasons alone he’s worthy of Immortal status. Brock paved the way for the Bathurst 1000’s incredible growth, ditto local V8 touring car racing’s success in recent decades. While the early Australian touring car heroes laid the groundwork, it was Brock as the most successful driver of the 1970s and 1980s who was instrumental in building Bathurst into the motor sport phenomenon it now is. His engaging persona created a following that gave Supercars racing the critical mass to become a major player on the local sporting landscape. Well-known racer and television commentator Neil Crompton, the man who had the unenviable job of delivering a eulogy at Brock’s funeral in 2006, made his Bathurst 1000 debut in 1988 courtesy of the nine-time Great Race winner. Crompton eloquently summed up Brock’s contribution to the sport: “If you think back to the early 1970s, his rivalry with Allan Moffat built the Holden versus Ford platform,” Crompton explained. “And in those days, as I recall as a young bloke, they actually did describe the cars as ‘supercars’. That was a colloquial description of them, because three big manufacturers [including Chrysler] were all trying to one-up each other with bigger/better/faster cars. Peter was a white knight in that whole stoush. He was the all-Aussie young bloke with the good looks in the GTR XU-1. And his rival, Allan, was Canadian… but it sounded like an American accent to us. Regardless, their battles made for great theatre.”
This rivalry kept the crowds and the television audience coming back for more. Crompton says Brock’s general media magnetism saw him quickly become Australian motor sport’s front man, helping the
