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"Queens Of the Mountain", published in the Rolling Stone 1997 Yearbook, December 1997
QUEENS OF THE MOUNTAIN Photography by Nick Walsh Words by Dino Scatena The posters capture the mood most concisely: The Boys Are Back In Town. Welcome to Bathurst, a normally tranquil little town about a three-hour drive north-west of Sydney. This weekend, in what's become an annual custom over the last three decades, the cream of Australia's racing drivers has converged on this country hamlet with a simple shared goal: To conquer The Mountain. Mount Panorama: A place that produces kings. Mount Panorama: One of the world's toughest, greatest race tracks. Mount Panorama: six kilometres of public road, cordoned off to create one hell of a lap. It takes you to the top of the mountain and then straight back down again, all in about two minutes and 12 seconds if you do it right. Anything can happen during this annual 1000 kilometre race here at Bathurst, and as the clique goes, it usually does. Just this weekend, during one of the practice sessions, one driver fractionally escaped slamming into a kangaroo that had hopped onto the track. Horses have also been known to wander out for a look at what's going on. That's why the races here have earned such a reputation of unpredictability. It all helps build the tradition of this place. And there's a shitload of tradition here. There's the fans who do donuts all day long in the carparks, the bizarre ritual of car-burning at the top of the mountain, the Holden/Ford rivalry, bikini girls, yobbos, extraordinary race results. And then there's Brocky. On this most spiritual of motor sport sites where every second mortal has the numeral "05" prominently exposed on their person, a silver-haired, golden-faced man named Peter Brock is Lord. Brocky, as any of the tens-of-thousands of the faithful around here will tell you, is a fair-dinkum, straight-up fucking Legend. A nine-time winner of this race, Peter Brock's name is synonymous with Bathurst. He's raced here every year of his adult life. Brock is to Australian motor racing what Michael Jordon is to basketball. And this weekend is Peter Brock's last ever race. So it's no surprise that the biggest mass of humanity this mountain has ever seen -- over 50,000 people -- has turned out to bid farewell to the Legend. And, they all pray, to see him win for a tenth and final time. Come Sunday morning, race day, it seemed like a fairytale final chapter to Brock's stellar career was set to unfold. That famous "05" car was in pole position. One thing for certain: If Brocky's car does manage to cross the finish line first, this whole place will go berserk. But there's 40 other V8s that want to make sure that doesn't happen. It's going to be a great race. Oh yeah-- this year there's a couple of shielas that are going to be driving around too. NUMBER 15 THE CASTROL COUGARS COMMODORE �It�s been a terrible weekend," declares race driver Melinda Price, standing in her garage, Saturday morning, 9am. And she's right. So far, things couldn't have gone worse for the brunette Cougar. With the start of the great race only 25 hours away, the car Melinda shares with Kerryn Brewser sits a few metres away from her in mangled pieces. Coming down the mountain yesterday in practice, Melinda lost control of her race machine coming out of the aptly-named Hells Corner and crunched the front and back of it into a concrete wall. The ferocity of the impact lifted the car two metres off the ground. That incident alone wouldn't have been too bad -- expensive cars inevitably get bent in this sport. The thing is that Melinda did almost exactly the same thing to the car on the other side of the mountain on Thursday. Two non-race crashes in two days -- that's unacceptable, unforgivable. Melinda realised that the moment her car crash-landed back on planet Earth on Friday morning. Indeed, the Castrol Cougars daddy and car owner, the lion-like five-time Bathurst winner Larry Perkins, wasn't going to be too pleased at all. "I wished I was dead," Melinda later tells the hordes of local and international motoring media. "It wasn't a big hit but it just felt terrible." As she would have expected, daddy Perkins wasn't in much of a consoling mood. When Melinda arrived back in her garage after the long and lonely ride from the scene of the accident, Perkins came ramming towards her, screaming, blaspheming, aggressively and repeatedly telling how fucking stupid she'd been. Perkins was absolutely furious, his bespectacled face beetroot red with rage. And it wasn't merely a heat-of-the-moment outburst. The screaming went on for what seemed an eternity. Melinda was in tears, at times howling in anguish. It's not like Perkins is a bad man -- far from it -- but it's just that when someone needlessly crashes one of your $100,000 cars two days in a row, you�re bound to get a littler hot under the collar. Once Perkins had wound up his barrage, everyone in the Castrol Cougars camp tried their hand at consoling Melinda. But their sympathy didn't extend to helping the girl forget what had happened. After all, what she had done -- mistake or no mistake -- was unacceptable, unforgivable. She must never forget that. And Melinda would be reminded of it constantly -- constantly -- for the rest of the weekend. Probably the most moral support for Melinda in these, her darkest hours in motor racing, came from her team-mate, the long-haired blonde from Adelaide, Kerryn Brewser. But Brewser's support came only in the shape of not rubbing Melinda's misdemeanours in her face like everyone else. After all, in this male-dominated world, the two Castrol Cougars are most competitive against each other than anyone else. Melinda's mistakes meant that Kerryn hasn't had the chance to do one solitary practice lap on this most complex of courses. Melinda doesn't have many more laps than that under her belt either. To add sand to the fuel tank, Melinda's crash on Friday morning meant that neither girl got to do an ofiicial qualifying lap. That meant that they would have to start Sunday's race from 41st place -- last place -- on the grid. Of course, that's if all the Castrol Cougars men could put the broken machine together again by then. NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT For the uninitiated, a couple of basic things about motor racing. 1. It's dangerous. This mountain alone has claimed a couple of lives in recent years. 2. It's a ridiculously expensive pursuit. In its most elite form, Formula One, drivers alone can drain a team of between $1-to-40 million. The cars themselves are worth another few million each. Here in Australia, the highest level of the sport is this so-called V8 Supercars series. Nowadays, these races are made-up exclusively of the locally-manufactured Holden Commordores and Ford Falcons. Essentially family cars, the bodies of these vehicles are modified and refined and then they have a whacking big, petrol guzzling V8 racing engine dropped into them. It allows the cars to hit speeds of up to 280 kph when they're coming down the mountain on the long Conrod straight. Of course, the price-tags on these V8s comes nowhere near the exorbitant cost of Formula One cars. Nonetheless, to keep one of these babies mixing it at the front of the pack for a season of races around the country probably won't get you much change out of $3 million. Ironically, all the prize money in the land can't cover those sorts of costs. That's where advertising comes in. Since the Sixties, race cars have doubled as mobile billboards, albeit very fast ones. Massive corporations buy the paint on the bodies of the leading team's cars, the funds raised get the machines on the track. Until recently in Australia, it was the tobacco companies that almost single-handedly funded the sport. When tobacco advertising was made illegal, the oil companies came in to lube the situation. Peter Brock's team is sponsered by Mobil, Dick Johnson's by Shell, Larry Perkins' by Castrol. And it was in Castrol's promotions department that the Cougars were conceived. Halfway through the 1997 V8 Supercar championship, John Clarke , Castrol's publicity and motor sports manager, approached their main man Larry Perkins with the concept of setting up an extra race car for a team made up of girl racers. If they could find the right woman, imagine all the extra promotion that could be garnered for their product: Every time one of those girls got their heads on TV or in print, a Castrol logo would be there too. Perkins agreed to the idea. He'd seen first-hand the popularity of the all-girl celebrity races at the Australian Grand Prix meets. Anyway, the former Formula One driver and gifted motor engineer (his own company provides racing engines for half of the Supercar field) had just finished building a new car for his team-mate and Bathurst co-driver Russell Ingall. So, as it happened, there was a spare machine lying around his massive Melbourne workshop. There were four Castrol Cougars when the new team was first introduced to the public in June. There was Melinda, Kerryn, a former Australian netball captain, Michelle Fielke, and a TV presenter Kim Watkins. Both Fielke and Watkins had driven impressively at recent Grand Prix celebrity races, Fielke winning two of them from two starts. Perkins gave each of the girls a solo drive in the remaining rounds of the Australian Touring Car Championship. Come the first of the season's endurance races, the 500 kilometre event at the Sandown track in Melbourne in September, the team had been trimmed down to its two fastest. The 26-year-old Melinda Price has been surrounded by race cars all her life. A bachelor of science and daughter of a former touring car racer and go-kart manufacturer, she's been racing semi-professionally since 1992. What do her parents think of their girl racer? "Dad loves it, mum lives with it." The 23-year-old Kerryn Brewer, by far the more intense of the two drivers, also comes from racing stock, her father once a speedway racer. A professional mechanic, Kerryn says she learnt to drive fast while delivering pizzas on a scooter when she was 17. She still drives fast on the roads, her and her boyfriend making the trip from Adelaide to Bathurst in a ridiculous nine hours at an average speed of 160 kph. "I've always been a rev-head," she grins. �It�s a bonus they�re young and quite attractive,� offered one proud Castrol crew member on the eve of the great race. �Mind you, two crashes wasn�t part of the game plan.� THE IS THE PITS They're a weird mob, motor racing fans. Between practice sessions here at Bathurst, most spend their time walking through the paddocks examining the assortment of race machines with the awe and respect of priceless museum pieces. Up on the mountain, in motor racing's equivalent to the Melbourne Cricket Ground's old Bay 13, a different breed of race fans' pastime of choice is anarchy. To all these people, the racers are superstars of the highest order. Even the drivers' kids are treated like celebrities. The best of the drivers can't step out of their garages without getting swamped by autograph hunters. Where possible in such instances, they'll hang around until everybody's got what they want. After all, they've got their sponsors' image to maintain. The Castrol Cougars were an instant hit here at Bathurst, young attractive girls as they are. Nearly every spare moment over the weekend is spent signing autographs, attending sponsors' events. One fan even buys their mangled bonnet for $200. The girls sign it for him. So does Larry Perkins, adding: �Bloody girls!� Some of the people funding the team comment in private that the girls still need to hone their media skills -- all racers have to learn to push the party line whenever there's media rep in earshot. Melinda and Kerryn still tend to be too candid for their own good at times. After Friday's incident, there are also grumblings amongst their own ranks about whether everyone had wasted their time trying to send girls out to do a man's job. But if the Castrol Cougars can just make it onto the grid on Sunday, they'll become the first women to race on the mountain in ten years. That in itself is some sort of achievement. THE COUGARS CAVE Saturday morning, 9 am again. Melinda's had a friend, a middle-aged woman called Liz, come up to Bathurst for some moral support. Liz has brought with her a little gold guardian angel which Melinda pins to her t-shirt. "It's for good luck," Liz tells her. A day on from the crash, despite the Castrol Cougars Commodore being worked on non-stop since it happened, it still looks very broken. The right fromt and back panels are missing. Some other parts had to be brought up overnight from Sydney. Melinda smiles broadly as she chats with her team of four young mechanics. Melinda's always smiling, but it's obvious she remains distressed over the crashes and the boss' attack. And the endless patronising from everyone around her doesn't help: "You won't crash the car again, will you Melinda. She's going to be careful out there, aren't you Melinda." Melinda cops it all with remarkable grace -- she hasn't got a choice. In a reflective moment later in the afternoon, Melinda confides that she's scared the bloody crash will cost her the number one driver spot with the team. Larry Perkins has already punished her by changing the game plan so that Kerryn gets the honour and the thrill of sitting in the driver's seat for the start of the race. This means that, should the car still be going after six-and-a-half hours, Kerryn will also get the kick of crossing the finish line. "All I had to do was keep it going around," laments Melinda. "I was going two seconds a lap faster than her (Kerryn} -- and now I've stuffed everything." So that crash -- what happened Melinda? "I was just pushing too hard," she answers meekly. Smashing into a wall at 160 kph. What's that feel like? "It wasn't a hard shunt but you come to a stop very quickly." Were you hurt at all? "You're not allowed to say it hurts when you're a race driver." GOING THE DISTANCE Saturday, 4 PM, final practice. At last, the Castrol Cougars Commodore is back on the track, doing nice steady laps and flying its sponsers' colours just like it was designed to do. In reality, the girls' car has no hope in hell of winning Bathurst. It probably wouldn't even manage it in the hands of Formula One world champion Jacques Villenueuve. For one thing, it's only got a five-speed gerabox; all of the front-runners six. Then there's its tyres; being a "privateer", a Level Two car, its only allowed standard racing tyres rather than rubber selected specifically for this track and conditions. During this last free practice session, the girls get half-an-hour in the car each. It's just enough time to familarise themselves with the road. The next time out they'll be racing. Well, as much as you can from last place. Melinda is in better spirits when she gets back to the garage after her drive -- getting around the track a few times in one piece has done wonders for her confidence. But immediately on her return to the garage, the mood gets heavy again. Larry Perkins draws his drivers together again for one final pep talk. He's a lot calmer than last night but his message is still the same: Don't do anything stupid, just keep the car circulating, don�t forget that Bathurst is an endurance event. Following that meeting, Melinda gets drawn into a long, heated discussion with the Cougars' head mechanic, a youngish, robust, blonde guy called Jay. Just going by the body language, the subject of the discussion is obvious. Jay's gone the best part of two nights without sleep because of Melinda. He wants to make sure it doesn't happen again. �We had niggling problems with not enough tracks time and all that so we just calmed them down a bit and got them into the right way of thinking for a long distance race,� Jay later explained. GENTLEMEN, START YOUR ENGINES Sunday, race day, 10 AM. Who could imagine what's going on in Peter Brock's mind. On pole position, the crowds cheering his name as he waits for the light to go green for the final time. Standing in the vicinity of 40 V8 Supercars bursting to break free is quite a gut-thumping experience. Down at the back of the field where it�s a bit quieter, Kerryn Brewer sits in her car waiting to make history. Before the warm-up lap is even over, the Castrol Cougars gain a place. They're now 40th. That's still last but at least they're moving in the right direction. The unexpected bonus came courtesy of one of the Young Lions -- Peter Brock team's male equivalent to the Cougars -- who wrote off his car in this morning's brief warm-up session. If what Melinda did is classified as a sin in race-speak, then that Young Lion's actions has reserved him a seat in hell for eternity. Okay, so 1000 kilometres, 161 laps, 39 cars between the Castrol Cougars and first place . . . And GO! Brewer would later reveal that her strategy at the start of the race was to let everyone get far enough away from her so there would be no chance of crashing into anything. Perkins had obviously got through. To the ecstatic roar of the massive crowd, Brocky leads at the end of the lap, closely followed by Perkins in second place. Brock and Perkins used to be co-drivers, won three Bathursts in a row together, but that was a lifetime ago now. As the lap counter starts slowly ticking over, Brocky and Perkins continue their thrilling duel for first place. Brock gets away for a while, Perkins reels him back in. Further back in the field, the Castrol Cougars car -- ten seconds a lap slower than the front runners -- is nonetheless passing some slower cars, very carefully passing some slower cars. Suddenly, come lap 18, something strange starts to happen. Front-runners start falling away like ten pins. The Dick Johnson Falcon loses its steering and goes straight into a wall. Another position up for the girls. A few laps later, the Commodore of Thomas Mezera loses its brakes, runs into a sandtrap and rolls three times. Spectacular crash -- the girls will take that one too, thanks. Next, last year's winner Craig Lowndes loses control of his machine as he comes to lap a backmarker. That�s another spot. A little under two hours into the race, Brewer pulls the Castrol Cougars car into the pits and hands it over to Price. "You under control, ready to go?" the frantic head mechanic Jay asks her as she straps herself in. "Whatever you do, take your time." An adrenaline-pumped Brewer tells her crew she had a scary moment at the top of the mountain, just near the scene of Price's accident, where she ran off the road and over a sand-trap before regaining control. Thankfully, the car didn't apparently suffer any damage and as Price screams out of the pits and onto the track, the girls are in 26th position. Then on lap 52, tragedy strikes. The "05" car, now in the hands of Brocky's team-mate Mark Skaife, makes a funny sound under the bonnet and promptly dies. The dream is over, but there's still enough time left in the race for other dreams to come true. Perkins inherits the lead. The other all-male Castrol car, driven by Tony Longhurst and Charlie O'Brien, sits in second place after having started from 39th position. (The car had made its way up to 19th place by the end of the first lap. Unfortunately, the car will only finish 110 laps of the race.) Over the next four hours, the girls keep their car circulating without incident, swapping over driving duties at regular intervals. At the end of her first stint, Melinda limps out of the machine. All the bumping and strain has aggravated an injury she sustained during Friday's crash. "My back's fucked," she mouths as Kerryn sets off for the final leg of the race. A little before 4.30 pm, Larry Perkins crosses the line to take his sixth victory at Bathurst, his second in three years with Russell Ingall sharing the helm. The Castrol pit erupts in rapture. A couple of minutes later, the Cougars car comes through to claim an astonishing 12th place. It's the best result by an all-girl team in the history of the event. An ecstatic Kerryn Brewer pulls the Cougars car into the pits and is greeted by Melinda with a hug. "You should have seen the crowd on the last lap," gushes Kerryn. "They were going absolutely beserk." Back in the garage after watching Perkins and Ingall on the podium spray their fans with champagne, the Cougars are welcomed home like victorious warriors by their back-up team. They accept all the accolades with nonchalance. Kerryn is more concerned by the state of her matted hair, Melinda is wondering why her dad hasn't called. One of the Castrol people introduces Melinda to a young fan who carries with her a scrap book of every article ever written on the racer. Melinda chats to the girl for a while. When she leaves, Kerryn turns to Melinda with a question of her own: "So was Larry nice to you?" Of course he was. Once Kerryn's hair has been brushed and Melinda's spoken to her folks, their presence is requested at the official Holden function in a tent up on Conrod straight. All the Holden heroes are called to the stage for a few words. Perkins and Ingall are hailed as the Kings Of The Mountain, Brocky gets up and gives a passionate farewell. The girls get their turn too. "So what did Larry say to you when you came back to the pits after the second crash," the MC asks Melinda. "Oh, he was very supportive," says the smiling racer. "He came up and gave me a hug, which is just what I needed." Hey, who said these girls don't know how to play the game. THE WEEKEND'S END It's getting late here on the mountain. Regardless of the fact that everyone has been up since about 5 AM, the party in the Castrol garage is still in full swing. Melinda is trying to round up some folk to go out nightclubbing. Kerryn isn't into it, says she just wants to get back to the hotel with her boyfriend and go to bed. Melinda keeps hassling her. "Look, how many laps did you do today?" snaps Kerryn. "Listen, why don't you just drive back to the hotel for a quicky and meet us back at the club later?" retorts Melinda. The way Kerryn and her boyfriend drive, they could get to Adelaide and back before the night's through. The crew prepare to leave Bathurst for anther year when that Brocky name comes back up again. "Oh, he came over and sat me down for 15 minutes on Friday," drops Melinda. What? What did the Legend say to you? Melinda smiles, shakes her head and walks away. Well, that goes someway to explaining the Castrol Cougars extraordinary result this weekend. Touched by the Lord's hand.
