Before he was known as ‘King of the Thunderdome’, now-Supercars team owner Brad Jones made an auspicious start to his AUSCAR career during the late-1980s.
Having been developed to support the local NASCAR Championship at the Calder Park Thunderdome, AUSCAR used road-going Goodyear tyres and went the opposite way around the banking to its American forefather.
Drivers of varying background took part in AUSCAR and for Jones it came after his time racing for Mitsubishi had ended. Alongside brother and team manager Kim, Jones took on the unknown of racing on the banking where he’d end up winning five AUSCAR titles in a row leading to a successful campaign with Audi in the Australian Super Touring Championship.
“I felt like we’d achieved everything we could have in Production Cars so we looked around to see what was available,” Jones explained.
“Bob Jane was a very close family friend and he knew what was going on down there. He had spoken to our father a little bit about it and maybe that was the future for us.
“We knew nothing about stock car racing at that point in time so we found one that had been half built, plus I’d also started to form a bit more of a relationship with Peter Brock at that stage in time and so we did some work to the car in Albury before we dropped it off at his workshop in Bertie Street.
“Arch McMurray did the engine for us and we went racing.”
Many items were wrong on the Jones Commodore, but to have it at Brock’s was the best scenario as he’d recently split up with Holden and was running BMWs, though parts for Australia’s own were still in abundance.
Fast forward to Jones’ first event on the Thunderdome, his first experience of it was in qualifying. Talk about being thrown into the deep end.
“It was quite weird to tell you the truth,” were Jones’ first impressions.
“The car at the very first race was painted green and it was pretty crazy weekend.
“I had a bunch of mates come to help and we had not really watched any vision of how to go about it, so when we came in for our first pit stop, we put the jack under the centre of the car to lift the front changing those tyres, then did likewise at the rear.
“I can remember Brendan Jones, who worked at Calder Park coming down and told us he was watching in the box wondering what these crazy country bumpkins were doing. He explained to us we needed to jack it up on the side.
“So we had a lot to learn at our very first race, but we did get going after that.”
Jones also revealed his cheekiness after discussing set-up with Brock and his brother Phil before the race.
“I was walking with Brock and his brother Phil, who had been racing there for a while,” Jones recalled.
“Phil was saying, ‘you’re going to come out, you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know whether you’ve got anything right or wrong’ and I said ‘I know the tyre pressures are right’.
“Brock, drinking his cup of tea asked ‘oh yeah, how do you know that?’
“I said ‘because your car was parked out the front of the workshop and I checked your tyre pressures before we came’.
“Brock nearly sprayed me in tea, he thought it was hilarious, but Phil didn’t think it was quite so funny.”
Jones went onto win five consecutive AUSCAR Championships, adding a NASCAR title in 1995 before two Australian Super Touring Championships as an Audi factory driver.
Moving into Supercars in 2000, Jones retired from full-time competition in 2006, but still heads up his team’s fortunes as a four-car entry.