1995 ATTC Round - John Bowe's Diary

By: John Bowe

Date: 17.06.2017

John Bowe looks back on a special win from '95, racing in the DJR Shell Falcon at Symmons Plains

1995 ATTC Round - Symmons Plains

The success of DJR Team Penske at the Symmons Plains Supercars round was a real heart warmer for me. Congratulations to all concerned for achieving the magic 1–2 results for the two flying Shell Falcons. It links up neatly with another standout round for the Shell Falcons at Symmons Plains, way back in 1995.

We always started the year with a tyre testing session. It went well in 1995 with our new Dunlops performing beautifully. Then the Dunlop factory at Kobe was destroyed in a massive earthquake. The effort Dunlop put in to somehow produce supplies of tyres for the 1995 season was amazing. They dug the tyre moulds out of the rubble at Kobe and sent them to Dunlop in the UK. The Brit Dunlop people worked with exactly the same ‘recipes’ for the compounds as the Japanese had used, but with rubber moulding being a bit of a black art (excuse the pun), the compounds came out different. Anyway they put in a huge effort and stuck at it and managed to get supplies of tyres flowing.

At Symmons Plains the car was right and the tyres were right and I took out the round in style. It was such a relief for me personally. As a Tasmanian, Symmons Plains was my home track. My motor racing ‘baby steps’ (from age 12) and then early successes in the sport were all connected with the circuit. Despite that connection, once my career took off properly, success for me at Symmons Plains became very hard to come by.

So the big win in the DJR Shell Falcon in ’95 was very special, a real drought breaker for me personally. This year’s Bathurst 6 Hour meeting at Easter was a milestone event with a huge field of 64 cars competing across seven classes. It has a big future and I congratulate event director James O’Brien and the Bathurst City Council for staging a race with real relevance to the average motorsport fan. As James said: "Long distance races for production-based cars form the bulk of the history of racing at Mount Panorama."

David Wall and I were looking to equal or improve on our success in last year’s event in Alan East’s Mitsubishi Evo Mk IX, but it wasn’t to be. We retired with a driveshaft failure. Surprisingly the flange bolts had pulled out, dragging the threads with them. They weren’t loose – they just pulled out. We deserved better, having qualified 8th and running around 5th and 6th for a lot of the time. That’s motor racing…

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