Delving back again into my archive of video, I’ve stumbled across a great piece about the return of Peter Brock to Holden in 1991, after a year with BMW and two with Ford between 1988 and 1990. After losing engineering support with Andy Rouse moving to Toyota in the British series in 1991, Brock needed to make a change.
Enter Perkins Engineering, run by Larry Perkins – Brock’s former engineer and team-mate between 1982 and early 1985. Perkins had all the gear, but no funding. Brock had all the funding, but no gear. The marriage of convenience was born, and Brock returned to Holden.
Despite some reasonable results, the season wasn’t the best for the Perkins Engineering Mobil-backed team of 1991, and they went their separate ways again for 1992, with Brock holding onto the cars to form Advantage Racing, and Perkins returning to his 1990-built chassis.
But the prodigal son had returned to Holden, and the gods were appeased!
As an interesting note point of history, this segment was originally prepared to be shown on the Seven Network during their coverage of the opening round of the 1991 season from Sandown. However, due to coverage of the First Gulf War breaking into normal programming, approximately 30 minutes was trimmed from the start of the Sandown coverage. This segment was dropped, and was then shown as part of the coverage of the second round from Symmons Plains – notice the little piece tacked onto the end about how the “new team” went at Sandown.