WHEN THE BOYS FROM THE BUSH FORMED A BATHURST CONVOY
Looking back at a famous piece of motorsport publicity involving some well-known touring car transporters
The convoy climbs a hill in the Central West
If you’re an Australian touring car fan, we’d bet the house that you’ve seen a compilation of the early five-litre V8 touring cars to the tune of Lee Kernighan’s ‘Boys from the Bush’ country anthem. And if you first saw it on an old analogue TV, chances are you’ve searched for it again online more recently. Who could blame you?
If by some chance you haven’t seen it, drop everything and hit the play button below. The Channel 7 crew captured an incredible era of touring car racing in three separate versions for 1993, 1994 and 1995, when the legends of Australian motorsport dragged crowds back by their thousands with Australian-built sedans that belched flames and bounced over the kerbs.
But it wasn’t just the drivers and their V8 weapons that starred in this one. The big bangers got some airtime too, running line astern in a colourful convoy worth millions of dollars.
But how exactly did their cameo in the Bathurst promotion come about?
Media day at Mount Panorama
We had the pleasure of speaking with Joe Sullivan, a legend of Australian motorsport who’s spent almost five decades driving transporters and working on race cars, to look back on how this famous footage in Australian touring car racing was shot.
Joe was driving the Peter Jackson Racing Ford L9000 for Glenn Seton at the time, and he recalled how the convoy came together in August 1993.
“It came about through Channel 7 and Mike Raymond’s involvement in the Supercars in the early nineties,” recalls Joe. “It was when the V8 formula was really taking off and Mike Raymond was a big figure in the promotion of the sport. He was always full of ideas and had the connections to pull them off.
“In that era, Oran Park hosted the last round of the touring car championship, and then the endurance championship begun in the back half of the year. That weekend in 1993, Glenn won the championship and we had a party hosted by Tony Perich at Oran Park on the Sunday night.”
That meant all the touring car teams were together in Western Sydney. But where were they heading next?
“They got this convoy to coincide with the test and media day at Bathurst in 1993, which was happening on the Tuesday after Oran Park,” Joe continues. “That media day concept was initially just for the Sydney teams and drivers, but it had progressed to pretty much all the teams going along.
“Mike Raymond had the thought of doing a helicopter video of all the transporters. It was at the stage where Dick Johnson, HRT, Glenn Seton, Larry Perkins, Fred Gibson, Tony Longhurst and others had all invested in bigger and better presented transporters. And because we were all heading for Bathurst the next day, there was a chance to make it a spectacle.”
A convoy made for television
It wasn’t quite the carefully planned and promoted transporter parades that we have today, but anyone driving in the Blue Mountains at the right time that day was treated to a particularly rare sight.
“From memory, we organised to meet on the western side of Penrith and all the transporters congregated without any normal traffic in between us. And if I remember right, they got that coverage as we travelled west toward Bathurst on the other side of the Blue Mountains.”
We then asked Joe if there were any spectators along the way.
“There weren’t really people on the side of the road,” he recalls. “It didn’t lend itself to spectators because it was out on the open road, and it wasn’t intended to be a crowd participation type of thing. It was all about getting some news time coverage and some footage to play during the touring car promotions at the time.”
And while they were all heading for the mountain that day, the cameras captured the formation at its best.
“We stayed in close formation for most of the journey, but it was only one particular spot that we were so close together for the cameras,” says Joe. “It wouldn’t have been the same spectacle coming into Bathurst, but we were certainly all heading in the same direction to be ready to go the following day.”
Jostling for position
It wasn’t a race to Bathurst, of course, but touring car teams always pay attention to their position in the pecking order.
“I was driving the Peter Jackson Racing truck at the time, and here was a bit of a contest to see who was going to lead the thing,” laughs Joe.
The Peter Jackson Racing transporter in Dandenong
Photo: Joe Sullivan
“We’d just won the touring car championship, and from memory, I reckon a few of the guys driving other transporters were subtly trying to get under our guard and form in a different order.
“I had to set out a pretty clear direction that nobody was going to form the group outside of our knowledge, and we ended up getting to the front, which you can see in the video. It was all in good fun.”
Another big thank you to Joe and his wife Wendy for sharing this and many other classic pieces of Australian race transporter history for Classics Week. We’ve got two more stories with Joe’s involvement to come later in the week.
You won’t miss any Classics Week content if you’re following our Australian pages on Facebook and Instagram. We’d love to hear any classic race transporter stories and see your pre-1999 photos this week!