Richards and Skaife Bathurst 1000 1992. Image: V8 Supercars
To fully understand how the Nissan GT-R earned its monster ‘Godzilla’ moniker, you need to travel back in time to 1992 to the holy grail of Australian motorsport, Mount Panorama.
On a drama filled day as the rain-soaked Bathurst 1000 reached its controversial conclusion – red flagged by officials who deemed conditions too treacherous to continue – few realised that the drama was about to move off the track and onto the podium.
Officials backdated the race standings to determine the victor, handing the trophy to Jim Richards and Mark Skaife in the turbocharged all-wheel drive Nissan GT-R, despite Richards having already crashed his car in the chaotic weather conditions.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s it, I’ve buggered it, we’ve lost the race because I hit the wall’,” recalled Richards in his book, Gentleman Jim.
Rain hit the 1992 Bathurst 1000
“When I got out of the medical car, I thought the team was going to be pissed off. Then they all came running over waving and carrying on, Skaifey was yelling, ‘We’ve won! We’ve won!'”
“It was unbelievable. You could say that was one of the happiest moments of my life.”
It meant back-to-back wins for a car that Wheels magazine had presciently labelled ‘Godzilla’ in 1989, two years before Richards and Skaife would dominate the 1991 Great Race and finish a full lap clear of the field.
The legend of Godzilla was stirring but the parochial V8-loving Holden and Ford fans who had swallowed their pride the previous year weren’t about to do it again.
“We knew the crowd probably wasn’t going to be overly in love with a Nissan win, especially a controversial Nissan win,” recalled Skaife in a video recorded for Thirsty Camel.
“Everyone was blueing. The Ford fans were feral, as well as everyone else. I walked over to the bar and I said to the gentleman behind the bar, ‘could you please pass me some beers?’. So, I put all these Tooheys Draught cans in my pocket.
“Jimmy (Richards) walks over to me and says, ‘what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m going to throw a few back.’ I was serious, because I could hear cans being chucked at the wall – and he went, ‘nah mate, calm down, put those back.’
Skaife and Richards on the podium – Image: V8 Supercars
“It wouldn’t have been two minutes later that Richo called out the crowd and the joint just went mental.”
Richard’s famous “You’re a pack of arseholes,” spray at the baying, can-throwing Ford and Holden fans has entered Australian automotive folklore, but what’s sometimes forgotten is that that Richard’s mate and Kiwi countryman Denny Hulme had died of a heart attack during the race, so he had much more than rabid anti-Nissan sentiment on his mind.
Nevertheless, the crowd reaction found its mark with race organisers and officials because the GT-R’s two-year stretch as a dominant force in the ATCC and at The Mountain would soon come to a premature end, thanks to hastily introduced rule changes that essentially banned Godzilla from competing again in 1993.
“GT-Rs in the hands of Jim Richards and Mark Skaife destroyed their opposition,” states the 1991 Australian Motor Racing Yearbook.
“Check the statistics: from seven wins out of a possible nine, the GT-Rs finished 1-2 in six of them. Not once did a GT-R driver not stand on the podium during the 1991 Shell Australian Touring Car Championship. Of the 425 laps which made up the nine rounds, 337 of them were led by Nissans. Richards was the leader for 229 laps.”
Like the fictional Japanese monster after which it was named, Godzilla destroyed its rivals, the GT-R ruling Aussie racetracks for an all-too-brief two-year period and cementing its status as a touring car legend.
Winning Nissan’s
