HISTORY: Between a Brock and a hard place

It took around two decades, but after 21 days and roughly 18,000 kilometres of internal organ re-arrangement, spinal compaction, dust eating and the loss of a little blood (don’t mess with a barbed wire fence!), I finally admit that I had to look up to Peter Brock.

Why did I look up to him? Was it his incredible driving ability, undeniable charisma, vast litany of racing victories, or sheer superstar status that finally got me to look up into the face of the man his most-fervent fans called god?

Nah, not really! Basically it happened because when you’re lying at the bottom of a couple of tonnes of rally-prepared Holden Jackaroo, sitting on its side in a field somewhere in the middle of nowhere in particular, and 'the great one' is dangling in the driver’s seat a few dozen centimetres above you, well, you just have to look up.

Peter Perfect? Let me be honest here, at that moment I had a few other far more descriptive terms that I could have used, although the one I chose in the heat of the moment was a rather concise but simple “You f*%king idiot”, which was delivered as Brock clambered out through the driver’s side window which now faced the sky.

So this is how we ended up, Brock and Webster, standing in a gully several metres below the dirt track where we should have been, with a significantly bruised and possibly broken Jackaroo sitting forlornly on its side with the finishing line in sight.

After 21 of 22 days, and roughly 500 kilometres from the finish line, here we were running second outright and dominating the production class and, to use long accepted motor racing terminology, in deep, deep doo-doo.

I won’t go into all the details, but we did manage to get the Jackaroo back on its wheels, although at one stage this involved it rolling backwards down the hill and almost running over Brock, who was behind it.

Not only did it fire up, but it was mechanically perfect. And we finished second outright and first in the production class.

It was not all plain sailing along the way, I’ll admit. Brock brought along a collection of old-school music cassette tapes to fill time on the long transport stages. Some were good (Ry Cooder for instance), I’ll admit that, but others . . .

His favourite sing-along was John Williamson. Now I’ll be honest here, because although Williamson, like Brock, is classified as a national treasure – in his case a living one – I cannot stand his music.

As far as I’m concerned, Hey True Blue and Old Man Emu are what the Devil plays on loop in Hell to make unfortunate sinners pay for their earthly misdemeanors.

So we were on a transport stage, travelling at 170km/h in the Northern Territory (hey, it was legal) and Brock was blasting out Williamson who was True Blue-ing and Old Man Emu-ing me to the edge of insanity.

Overcome with Williamson loathsomeness, I reached across, punched the eject button and sent Old Man Emu sailing into the NT red dust at warp speed. Run as fast as a Kangaroo can ya? Cop 170km/h mutha!

Brock was horrified and called me a number of names. None of them were good and not one suitable for publication. One, after several attempts, I’ve found to be physically impossible. But you get the idea.

I was quietly happy, and things were happily quiet, but Brock, well, he fumed. And fumed. Oh, and fumed some more.

We got to the next fuel stop, a Mobil station in the middle of nowhere, and the legend went inside to pay the bill (with his Mobil card of course) and emerged with an armful of fresh new cassettes. The SOB had discovered the motherlode of John Williamson tapes on the for-sale rack and bought each and every one.

He could now gleefully True Blue me to near-death for the days to come. Peter Brock, I’m here to say, was a sadist. But with a sense of humour.

But why, you might ask, did Australia’s greatest driver have a directionally dyslexic journalist doing his best to get him lost in what remains the last of the great round-the-nation adventures?

It's a good question.

Basically, Brock had retired (let’s not talk about the ill-fated comebacks) from V8 Supercars and had decided that the 1998 Sony Playstation Round Australia Rally would be a perfect nationwide farewell tour.

It would be a chance, if you will, to meet and greet the fans and – since he would be in a standard production model Holden Jackaroo – there would be no expectation of a repeat of his 1979 round-Australia win. This one would be just for fun.

So, with nothing left to lose and just a lot of autographs to sign along the way, he asked me, and on-and-off mate (depending on what I wrote at any given time for the Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney) to come along for the ride.

“Webby,” he said to me, “We’ll just have some fun and a laugh for a few weeks.”

Stupid me. I had known Brock for around 20 years at this stage, both professionally as the motoring editor of the Tele, and as a guy who let him crash on his couch, often after a big night and several thousand beers together.

There are a great many words that should never be used together in a variety of situations. Like, for instance, stable genius when describing Donald Trump. Or, say, delicious Japanese food.  Add to that “we’ll just have fun” when it comes to Peter Brock and a competitive environment.

From the moment the round-Australia started, Brock thought he could win. And maybe he could have, but he did spear off the track a couple of times, losing heaps of time; I did get us lost once or twice (go figure); and then we ended up on our side in that ditch to put the icing on the cake.

I wrote a book about the 1998 round-Australia called Off The Road Brock. He got paid a lot of money for me writing it. Me? Well, not so much.

Despite thinking that the '98 round-Australia would be my one-and-only time sitting in the hot seat, that was not to be the case. When Holden formed the not-so-imaginatively named Holden Rally Team in 2001 to contest the Australian Safari off-road event, I was called back to occupy the co-driver’s Recaro.

Alongside, guess who?

On one Safari event, I think it was in 2002, we were rocketing down a pretty narrow and rather nasty, barely-defined track when we had to go straight-on across a rather inviting wide and beautifully-graded main track.

Brock got to the intersection and, rather than go straight on, instead turned hard right and put the pedal to the metal. It was all beautifully executed, a masterclass in vehicle control, but rather unfortunately it left us rocketing along in the wrong direction.

I did point out this directional faux pas rather calmly at first, telling the great one that he had made a mistake and should stop, turn around and head back and rejoin the proper route.

“I saw an arrow,” he yelled at me, snicking fifth gear and driving us at increasing velocity towards who-knew-where.

Still a little bewildered, I waved the road book at him and mentioned that I knew where we were supposed to be going and, well, this wasn’t it. And what f-ing arrow you boofhead?

“I saw a f*@king arrow,” he screamed with the unwavering voice of a true believer who had seen the face of Christ on a piece of burned toast.

Now it was my turn to start yelling, telling him with quite a lot of profanity to turn around and go back. Obviously wanting to be conciliatory  Brock told me to “Get f... ed”.

This was the time to get proactive, so I knocked the Jackaroo out of gear (and wow, did it over-rev!) and grabbed the handbrake, two actions which I admit caused a little chaos for the guy holding the steering wheel. But hey, this was Peter Brock . . .

After a heated discussion, Brock finally relented and turned around while, at the same time, telling me that I was the dumbest person on the planet, would be ridiculed and hated across the nation for costing him any chance of victory in the event, and making us the most lost-and-unfortunate exploring duo since Bourke and Wills. Of course all this was delivered with a sprinkling of swear words that I had no idea could be used together to form an understandable sentence.

When we finally got back to where we were originally supposed to be going, we took off down a barely-discernible track, just two wheel ruts really, before splashing across a small creek, through a gap in a ramshackle wooden fence from a bygone era and into a wide open grassy paddock. Now, by this stage even I was starting to wonder if I was on the right track – until I looked right.

There, on a grassy slope overlooking the track, were a couple of dozen parked vehicles and a small crowd of wildly enthusiastic spectators, some waving GO BROCKY banners and cheering madly when their hero appeared.

“Shit Brock,” I mused over the Jackaroo's intercom, “All those poor bastards are lost too.”

Always one to admit that he was wrong and shrug off sarcastic ridicule, Brock gripped the wheel just a little tighter, with his jaws clenched and his black eyes staring straight ahead, and said, well, not one word.

It was a seething silence that would last for hours.

Co-driving for Brock really was a case of man management. I didn’t need to get him to drive faster, he just did that anyway, but the trick was to get him to dial it back.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa" was a constant call from the left side of the Jackaroo to try and get PB to temper his natural instinct to go balls’n’all.

"Listen mate (and when he used that term you knew he was getting really pissed off) you’re here to tell me where to go and not how to drive," he snapped many times.

But, as I was always keen to point out, I knew thanks to the roadbook that bad shit was lurking around the next bend or over the next brow and circumspection was the order of the day.

Of course he always listened. Not.

Over the course of our partnership, we hit a lot of things. Sometimes even the lead, but more often it was a tree, anthill, stump, rock or something else that didn't mate well with a speeding Jackaroo.

We once whacked a termite mound in the Northern Territory at warp speed (on my side I have to point out) but continued on.

“Man, you hit that pretty hard,” I pointed out.

“No I didn’t,” said Brock with conviction.

No more was said until we reached the next service stop where I found I couldn’t open the passenger-side door. Brock jumped out and wrenched the door open with a rather horrific screech. Upon clambering out I found the door was basically caved-in.

“How did that happen?” mused Brock as he walked away to find his usual cup of lawn clipping tea.

Don’t get the wrong idea here, PB was truly great to sit alongside, although sometimes it wasn’t immediately obvious.

When I sliced my hand open on the round-Australia on that fore-mentioned barbed wire fence and was bleeding quite profusely all over the place, including covering the road book notes in my personal claret, Brock told me to “navigate now, bleed later”.

But at the end of the stage he was out of the car like lightening, grabbing the medical kit to patch me up with real concern. He showed less concern later that day when, at the end of the competition, the rally medical officer decided to give me a tetanus injection and butterfly bandages instead of stitches.

“Shit, tetanus injections hurt like hell. Really, really painful,” he giggled as he watched on. “Man, that’s really going to hurt,” he delighted.

Now, just for a moment, I want to get serious here. Yes, I know, but work with me because it doesn’t happen often.

Peter Brock was truly a genius at the wheel with incredible reflexes and an uncanny ability to know when to go and sometimes, but not always, when to whoa.

I did a rough calculation and worked out that we spent something like 40 days and 30,000km together sharing a vehicle. Of that, let’s say 12,000km was competitive stages and the rest was transport time bull-shitting to each other.

When you think about it, I probably spent more time with Brock than his first two wives.

Maybe they didn’t like John Williamson either.