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October 6, 2026 — The #05 Mobil Holden Dealer Team VK Commodore that Peter Brock and Allan Moffat shared at the 1986 James Hardie 1000 anchors "Peter's Pitlane" during the Repco Bathurst 1000 at Mount Panorama, October 8–11. The tribute display, staged outside the National Motor Racing Museum, honors the nine-time Bathurst winner, who died in 2006. The VK is the only car those two old rivals ever co-drove in the Great Race, and it carries a legendary backstory: a Friday crash, an overnight rebuild, and a hard-earned top-five finish.
The announcement landed in late 1985, and Australian motorsport fans needed a second read. Peter Brock was Mr. Holden — the face of the lion brand's touring-car assault — while Allan Moffat had spent more than a decade waging war from the other side of the garage, first with Ford and later with Mazda. Their Bathurst battles were already the stuff of legend.
Moffat, a Canadian from Saskatoon who had emigrated to Australia in 1965, found himself without a drive when Mazda's factory program shut down. Brock's offer was both stunning and pragmatic: come join the Holden Dealer Team for the 1986 season. The plan took the new pairing to a street race in Wellington, New Zealand, then to selected European Touring Car Championship rounds, before the main event — Bathurst's James Hardie 1000 in October.
They clicked right away, winning their first start together on the streets of Wellington. That chemistry made the trip to Mount Panorama all the more anticipated.
Built for the 1986 endurance season, the #05 VK Commodore was known inside the workshop as "HDT 14." It was the first Commodore homologated for Group A, the FIA sedan formula that, in that era, also governed machines like the BMW M3 and the Nissan Skyline.
The engine was the clever part. Group A rules offered a weight break below five liters, so the new powerplant was a 4.9-liter V8 — just small enough to drop roughly 165 pounds (75 kilograms) from the car. A five-speed gearbox and a subtle trunk-lid spoiler completed the package.
For American fans, the VK is a historical curiosity with a familiar lineage: it belongs to the same family of rear-drive V8 Holdens that eventually reached U.S. showrooms as the Pontiac GTO and, later, the Chevrolet SS.
The VK's first race was the Castrol 500 at Sandown, the traditional Bathurst rehearsal. In those days, Sandown raced on an infield layout that drivers widely disliked. Brock put the new car on pole in the Saturday shootout, but race day proved much harder: the Commodore was a handful, and the pair crossed the line fourth — one lap behind the winning Nissan Skyline 1-2 of George Fury and Glenn Seton.
It was an early warning. The Fred Gibson-run Nissan squad had built a rocketship, and the fight at Bathurst would be fierce.
Mount Panorama is a fast, undulating public-road circuit, and McPhillamy Park — high on the mountain — is one of its most unforgiving corners. That is where Moffat's Bathurst weekend almost ended before it began. During Friday practice, he slammed the #05 into the concrete barrier, wiping out the front of the Commodore.
The damage looked terminal. Instead, the HDT crew mounted a repair that became pit-lane legend. A phone call went out to Melbourne, where a show car was stripped of front-end components. Nearly everything forward of the firewall was replaced. Less than 24 hours after the crash, Brock himself drove the rebuilt VK back to the circuit with a police escort.
The frantic effort cost the team its place in Saturday morning's "Hardies Heroes" Top-10 Shootout. With no qualifying run, the #05 was allocated 11th on the grid for the 1000.
Allan Grice was the man to beat on race day and would go on to take the win. But for a few breathtaking laps, Brock owned the moment. From 11th on the grid, he scythed through the field and moved into second place behind Grice within three laps — proof that the rebuilt Commodore had lost none of its pace.
Then Bathurst's infamous pit-lane speed humps intervened. The 1980s layout had raised humps across pit road to slow traffic, and the VK's low-slung oil cooler did not survive contact. Brock and Moffat lost roughly six minutes to repairs and ultimately finished fifth.
The post-race diagnosis was almost comically human: during the overnight rebuild, nobody had rechecked the car's ground clearance. Hit the humps at speed, and the cooler was doomed.
Most cars with that kind of story end up in a museum. This one kept working. Brock raced HDT 14 for the rest of 1986 and into the opening months of 1987, before teammate Gary Scott crashed it during private practice at Lakeside.
The team rebuilt the car rather than scrapping it — this time with VL Commodore bodywork — and handed it to Neil Crompton for his Mobil HDT racing debut at Oran Park, with Jon Crooke alongside. That same chassis went on to finish fourth in the 1987 Castrol 500, matching the result Brock and Moffat had recorded in it a year earlier. Few touring cars in Australian history have lived so many lives.
Brock and Moffat's relationship softened with time, and when Brock retired in 1997, he spoke openly about the transformation.
"It was very much 'The Odd Couple' in many respects because we'd been such bitter rivals over the years, but we got to like one another and found out we had a lot in common," Brock said. He went on to call Moffat "probably my closest friend in motor sport" — a remarkable statement for two men once separated by decades of pit-lane warfare.
In a sport built on tribalism — Holden versus Ford, red versus blue — that friendship became one of its warmest later chapters.
The 2026 Repco Bathurst 1000 runs from October 8 to 11, and this year's event carries extra weight: Brock died in September 2006, so the gathering marks the 20th anniversary of his passing. Peter's Pitlane, set up outside the National Motor Racing Museum, will showcase several cars from his career, with the #05 VK Commodore as the centerpiece.
Tickets are on sale now. For fans traveling from North America, the exhibit offers a rare chance to see the ancestor of the V8 badge-engineering hits that once sold in U.S. showrooms — and a reminder that, on a mountain in New South Wales, two old enemies once shared a car and became friends.
