Michael Brock will co-drive in the 2008 WPS Bathurst 12-hour at Mount Panorama.
Michael Brock is set to take on the 6.2km racing circuit at Mount Panorama.
Australia's longest motor racing track, the 6.2km circuit up and down Mount Panorama at Bathurst is a lot of real estate to cover in a 12-hour race.
Especially in a little four-cylinder Japanese buzz-bomb.
But Adelaide real estate identity and motorsport enthusiast Michael Brock will squeeze his tall frame into his Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII to take on the mountain in Sunday's 2008 WPS Bathurst 12-hour.
The race is for GT Performance cars based on production cars and more closely reflects road cars than does the Bathurst 1000 race for V8 Supercars in October.
Brock is a winning name at Bathurst. And not just the late Peter Brock. South Australia's only driver in this year's 12-hour, Michael Brock, has won there before, taking out the two-hour race in a 46-car field in 2002 co-driving his Evo VIII with Garry Young.
Young, a championship-rated driver in the category, has been signed as a co-driver this time too.
The third driver will be former rugby league star turned car racer Jack Elsegood, who only missed winning the V8 Utes title last year because of a flat tyre on the penultimate lap of the last race of the year.
“The car has been totally rebuilt,” Brock said yesterday of his Coopers-green Lancer.
“Steve Knight has prepared the car, the turbo has got more boost and it's now quicker."
“What's exciting is that a few months ago at Mallala in a one-hour race it beat the car that won the Bathurst 12-hour last year.”
That Mallala result encouraged him to enter the Bathurst 12-hour and he has secured sponsorship from Coopers Brewery, which used to back Brock in V8 Ute racing.
Other sponsors are his own real estate firm Brock Harcourts and the Wellington Hotel at North Adelaide. “We're expecting to be competitive,” Brock said.
Brock has been on an intensive gym program to get fit and ready to take the physical stress of racing the mountain track in a very hot cabin on a February day.
He acknowledges that Elsegood and Young are more race-ready, and younger, and might do the greater share of the driving.
The plan is for drivers to do 90-minute stints - quite a task in the heat when you come out to do it again and again over the 12 hours.
Cheap tyres 
Credit crunch 
Ford Fiesta 
Hyundai ix35
