Before there was Queensland Raceway, Lakeside International Raceway was the place to race near Brisbane and it proved a challenging layout as demonstrated by what occurred in 1989.
It was a chaotic round even before the round was due to begin in 1989 as floods forced the delay of the Australian Touring Car Championship event by two week.
Then during Qualifying, privateer Terry Finnigan was forced to climb through the window of his Holden Commodore after colliding heavily with the tyre wall on the outside of the opening sweeper,
In a hint of events to come, Finnigan’s Commodore burst into flames and was not going to play any more part in the weekend as the hit tore the rear away.
Next of the big incidents came on Sunday when during the Australian Production Car Championship event, Garry Waldon and Ken Douglas collided at high speed, with the latter’s Supra ending up flying over the armco fence.
Just as Waldon’s RX7 and the Supra collided with the armco, a flag marshall was sent flying onto the track being narrowly avoided in all the commotion.
The start to the Australian Touring Car Championship race was uneventful until the it reached lap 10.
Peter Brock lapped the Commodore of privateer John Lusty approaching the bridge, with Andrew Miedecke close behind. While Brock got through cleanly, Miedecke collided with the Commodore and both hit the armco hard near the bridge abutment.
Glenn Seton was also involved, but the racetrack was still live with many drivers going through the incident at full speed.
This led to Murray Carter coming into heavy contact with Miedecke’s stricken Sierra leading to a massive fireball.
Smoke engulfed the track as finally the race came to a stop, but not much was left of Miedecke’s Sierra with guest commentator Allan Grice finding it difficult to decipher what sort of motor car it was.
Miedecke emerged from the crash ok despite struggling to get off the track after departing his Sierra due to the race not being red flagged in what was a hairy scene.
The race was restarted, but the distance was halved to 30-minutes as were the points.
Local hero Dick Johnson won his first race at Lakeside since his 1981 duel with Peter Brock on his way to taking his fourth ATCC title.
Miedecke missed three rounds and returned to action at Sandown, while Carter failed to take the grid until the final race of the season and Seton missed the same amount of time as the Port Macquarie native.