Seven years on, loss of Peter Brock loss still haunts motorsport Mobil Holden Dealer Team manager John Harvey with Peter Brock and Dick Johnson before the final race of deciding round of 1981 Australian Touring championship at Lakeside. AS Peter Brock opened the door of the red Holden Monaro and slid into the drivers seat beside me he was not long for this world. He seemed composed and content enough but I wonder, if in that confined space of leather, glass and plastic, he had any sense of what lay ahead. Brock was a complex man; a notorious playboy who always talked about family, a daredevil race car driver who preached road safety, the quintessential revhead who was extolling the virtues of fuel economy as he made the Monaro's engine purr while we glided slowly around the Oran Park Raceway west of Sydney. "Eight litres to a hundred Ks,"" he told me, as we cruised down the straight and around the tight bends, "power and economy - a wonderful car."" I was half waiting for Brock to ask me if I had a trade-in or would need finance but instead, at this Holden-sponsored publicity event, we talked a little about his life, about how he had raced Holdens for 40 years, how he had learned to drive on his old man's farm vehicles and how he'd paid seven quid for his first car, an Austin 7. He was in his element that day, dressed in slacks, loafers and a sports coat, talking to fans, signing T-shirts, caps, Monaro brochures. One man even whipped out a glass eye for Brock to sign and, even though the "King of the Mountain"" was more used to corners than corneas, he made his mark with a black Texta. Brock won Australia's greatest motoring event at Bathurst a record nine times and his spirit will be evident again at Mt Panorama on Sunday as five-time winner Craig Lowndes tries to match the record of 12 podium finishes Brock shared with Larry Perkins and Jim Richards. This year, previous winners Nissan and Mercedes will challenge the traditional race mainstays Holden and Ford on the twisting course around the farmhouses and the grape vines on Mt Panorama. Brock and Perkins split suddenly in 1985. A later dalliance would prove fruitless. Back in 1961, when the event was still held at Phillip Island, Harry Firth and the dashing Bob Jane won the great race in a Mercedes 220SE. Jane eventually won four times and, even though he has since been morphed into a giant frog playing out his tortured family life on A Current Affair like it was a demon episode of Family Feud, he well remembers what it was like to be a young man fired up by super petrol, adrenalin and the chants of an adoring crowd. Jane, now 84, won the first of the events held at Bathurst 50 long years ago when it was still called the Armstrong 500 and he did it in a 3000-quid Ford Cortina Mk I GT. He and Harry Firth became the first drivers to average more than 100km/h for the event. Commodore drivers Jamie Whincup and Paul Dumbrell won last year in a car that averaged just on 160km/h but cost millions to get on the bitumen. Jane once told me that ahead of the 1963 win the Melbourne drivers picked up their cars at the Ford factory at Geelong and drove them up the Hume Highway to Bathurst themselves, trying to dodge speeding tickets all the way. The only testing they did was to make sure the Cortina engines had 13,000km on the clock so they were run in for the race. The cars that hit the tarmac had to be exactly the same as the ones sold in the showroom. No modifications. The only extras to handle the deadly corners of Mt Panorama were a safety harness and a number stuck on the side but Jane's Cortina could still reach 207km/h down Conrod Straight from a four-cylinder, 1600cc engine. "The trick to get them going really fast was to keep the momentum up,"" Jane said. "It was a bit like swinging a weight around your head so it just got faster and faster all the time."" The 29 teams eyeing a top speed of 300km/h on Sunday will be relying on much more advanced technology than that. After Brock drove me around in his Monaro as sedately as a grandmother in a supermarket car park, Garth Tander, another Bathurst winner, gave me a hot lap. We skidded and slid toward the concrete barriers, tyres burning and travelling so fast on two wheels it was like we were riding a giant, smoking slippery cake of soap. As I clawed at the glass windscreen and prayed for the ride to finish, I told myself Tander was a champion who knew what he was doing. But then, even the best racing car drivers sometimes can slip up. Mike Burgmann died in a crumpled Holden at Bathurst in 1986 and, not long after he gave me a drive in his shiny new Monaro, Peter Brock was killed in a Daytona sports car racing in Western Australia. Motorsport has always been dangerous game dangerous and on Sunday every Bathurst driver will really be in a race between life and death.