An hour before the 49th Bathurst 1000 race was set to begin on October 8, 2006, the usually boisterous crowd at Mount Panorama were uncharacteristically silent.
For a minute, it seemed even the wildlife had been told to observe the silence to honour the life of Australian motor sport great Peter Brock.
Brock was killed a month earlier when his daytona sports car skidded off a road during a rally in Gidgegannup, Western Australia, and hit a tree. He was 61 years old and had won nine Bathurst 1000 races between 1972 and 1987, earning him the moniker “King of the mountain”. No one has won more Bathurst races.
On Thursday, his protégé Craig Lowndes stood beneath a statue of Brock, a permanent feature of Panorama Avenue since 2008. Joined by his teammate in 2006, Jamie Winchup, the pair reminisced about winning the race 20 years ago.
“The minute of silence – I’ll never forget that,” Whincup said. “You’ve generally got someone on the hill yell out or whatnot, but that day even the birds stopped chirping. It was a proper minute’s silence, which was really eerie, and that was the start of the big day.
“We knew coming here was going to be a massive weekend,” Lowndes said. “We just focused on making the race car the best we could and then the race unfolded.
“I’m not superstitious but to have that battle with Rick Kelly at the end of the race is something I probably needed. We had our strengths across the top of the mountain, he had his strength down the bottom, and history shows that the gap at the end of the day was 0.05 [seconds], and that was Brock’s number for a long time.”
Fans will never forget the images of an emotional Lowndes holding the then new Peter Brock Trophy after the race.
“[Brock and I] grew up in the same area in Victoria, went to the same high school, played AFL football in the same football club, so I had a very strong connection outside of this world [motor sport],” Lowndes said. “And my father built a lot of his [Brock’s] race-winning cars, so Peter was more than just a teammate.
“You miss him because you’d like to have that conversation with him before a race, or pick up the phone to get some advice like I used to be able to do … You have a bad weekend, you’d get some advice from him and he was very positive. Like he was just one of those people that [was] very charismatic.”
This weekend, Lowndes is set to start in his 33rd Bathurst 1000, one more than Brock. Although now it is Lowndes who is the mentor to a protégé of his own, teammate Bayley Hall.
“I’ve become that sort of leader of the group in a sense,” Lowndes said. “Bailey, we did a track walk the other day and I literally recalled everything that Peter taught me, from turn one, from Hell Corner all the way to Murray’s Corner.
“His [Brock’s] legacy will live on forever. He was bigger than the sport in some regards … He was just very much a person that could grab people’s attention, hold their attention, but also inspire them for greatness, and that’s the part that I miss 20 years on.”
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