Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

make it to the house on Mugga Lane, albeit several hours behind the car’s owner. ‘He said, “Oh, you got it here,” and I said yeah, but I took it pretty easy. And he said, “Well that’s not what I’m fuckin’ payin’ for, is it?”’

Packer kept the Jaguar for perhaps five or six years. Bartlett says that pretty much every time he took the car out, something else would break. The car became almost useful the more they scaled back the engine power, settling on that of just one Formula 1 car. Then it caught fire again.

The burnt-out Jag was salvaged and rebuilt to fight another day. There was a popular story that the subsequent owner, Sydney Jaguar mechanic Gary Walker, had a favourite trick of sticky-taping one end of a $50 note to the glove box lid and challenging a passenger, under the full force of the Jag’s acceleration, to try and retrieve it.

But Bartlett is convinced that, for all the angst caused by the Jaguar, Packer enjoyed the entire saga.

Why not just buy a Ferrari, or a Porsche 911 Turbo? ‘Oh no, he wouldn’t do that. It had to be an individual thing, a him thing.’

OUT OF THE AUDINARY

Audi is today one of the most respected players in the luxury car market. But back in 1980, few Australians had even heard of it, or had reason to pay any attention if they had. Audi’s, certainly weren’t the sort of cars to excite a car-mad tycoon homing in on a nine-figure net worth.

In March 1980, however, at the Geneva Motor Show, Audi unveiled the Quattro. The muscular, high-performance coupe was revolutionary in that it featured four-wheel drive, a technology previously focused on plodding, off-road utility vehicles.

Four-wheel drive made this turbocharged coupe uncatchable in wet, slippery or gravel road conditions—the playgrounds of the tough sport of forest rallying.

News of the game-changing, all-wheel drive Audi crackled through to the Australian specialist car magazines. But it was soon clear that the Quattro, being built only for the European market, would be yet another in a long line of exotic cars that would forever elude Australian buyers.

Well, all but one Australian, who had the clout to hijack a car and enlist the help of Audi’s top engineers to rebuild it.

In early 1981, Kevin Bartlett received a call from Audi’s Australian public relations manager, Phil Scott (who would, much later, become publisher at Packer’s ACP). Scott was staring at a physical example of the Quattro, diverted through Sydney en route to a dealership in Madagascar.

The silver car was in left-hand drive, and hence not strictly road-legal, but Scott cheekily suggested they take it for a spin. In 1981, the car’s grip around corners, coupled with its turbocharged performance, was astonishing even to the hardened race driver.

Bartlett recalls that, a matter of days later, he was in Packer’s office when Packer asked: ‘What’s new that’s any bloody good? I need something for up at Ellerston.’

Bartlett gushed about the Audi, explaining that it had just made every other performance coupe obsolete. ‘Uh-huh, well, we’d better have one of them,’ Packer grunted.

Bartlett began to explain that this car already had a Madagascan owner, that it didn’t comply with Australian rules, it couldn’t be road registered …

Next thing Bartlett knew, he was in Germany, meeting senior Audi engineer Roland Gumpert. It was not unlike being granted an audience with Enzo Ferrari. Bartlett arranged the trip, but it was all, naturally, on the boss’s dime.

Doesn’t matter what it costs. Just do it right.

‘You just go, it will all be there,’ Bartlett says. ‘Nothing spared, first-class everything … All of that was taken care of by his secretary [Pat Wheatley]. He trusted me to make decisions as I went along.

‘There were times when he asked me, “Why did it cost that much?” And I’d only have to tell him, it was the only way to make it work, and work properly.’

Gumpert and Bartlett sat down and identified all the parts from other Audi models that would enable Bartlett to convert the commandeered Madagascan car to right-hand drive and manoeuvre it through road registration when he got home.

Drives from Sydney to Ellerston, which Packer and Bartlett regularly shared, were much enjoyed by the Big Fella, as they explored the unfamiliar driving technique demanded by the Audi’s four-wheel drive system.

‘Took him a while,’ Bartlett says. ‘But it took me a while, too. You had the drive the car really aggressively, pitch it into corners. He got to do it quite well, actually. Nearly all the way from Moonan Flat to Ellerston was on dirt in those days, and he had a bloody ball through there. Always had a big go. He enjoyed his motoring.’

GOING RACING

One of Australia’s best-remembered Bathurst racing cars is Kevin Bartlett’s ‘Channel Nine’ Chevrolet Camaro. The dark blue coupe was a constant threat in the early-1980s to the established front-line of Peter Brock’s Holdens and Dick Johnson’s Fords.

Bartlett had made his name in Formula 5000, Australia’s equivalent to Formula 1. The Camaro campaign came about through Bartlett’s burgeoning friendship with Kerry Packer.

‘[Packer] just said to me one day: “How can you go against these other blokes, this Peter Brock character? You can beat him, can’t ya?”’ Bartlett grins. ‘I said, “Yeah, most probably could—he’s been beaten, it might as well be me doing it. But I don’t race in that category.”’ He said, “Well, get yourself a car that you can race in that category.”’

The obvious choice would have been Holden or Ford, for which there was a ready industry in parts and preparation expertise. Packer suggested that Bartlett try to find something different; Bartlett suspects, to avoid snubbing either of the two local brands that were among Channel Nine’s biggest advertisers.

Bartlett began looking at eligible cars with competition potential. In Packer-world, such research wasn’t going to be restricted to poring over wads of technical documents in a library.

‘That was a round-the-world trip, that one,’ Bartlett says. ‘I went to Germany, looked at BMW