I had thought that Richo's initial hit was at the right-hander above the Cutting - where Cecotto had bored in in the wet in 1987, where KB had rolled the Camaro in 1982 when the nearside rear wheel broke, past where Johnson hit The Rock. He was crawling back from that, reporting via two-way that he'd be in with a "flat" (although the team, watching the monitors, knew the car was finished), he was on slicks, and I had also thought that the reds were already out when he went off below Forrest's. He was barely moving 20 klicks or so I guess, but the torrent of water washing across the apex of Forrest's Elbow and down the hill, is what took the car off... the footage shows it slew on the water, and it more-or-less washes it down into the wall, along which it slides into the rest of the garbage...
IIRC there were some irregularities in some of the final placings - some had been taken from two laps previous IIRC, but according to the rules, Richards had led the lap prior to the reds being displayed, and was therefore the rightfully-declared winner.
For my two bob, I think the thing that people found least-digestible about the whole thing was that the winning vehicle - one which had polarised popular opinion over its "true" eligibility and worth as a Group A touring car since its introduction two years prior - was a sodden wreck, and there was a folk-hero in an older homologation special (which by that stage was a lot more palatable to the punters than the R32) who was poised to take the win should the result have been able to be validly disputed...
...never mind that if the race had not been flagged, there was a second R32 handily placed to possibly take the honours anyway...
The whole public reaction - for mine anyway - was a product of the domination of the Gibson Skylines... and the apparent arrogance with which they conducted themselves throughout that time... their up-and-comer, Mark Skaife, was described by Ray's second-best friend Wayne Webster (tongue in cheek, Ray) as a guy who polarises popular opinion - "some people hate him... others REALLY hate him..." and the team's oft-stated position was that they were doing nothing more than the best job they could do, and it was up to the rest of them to lift their game... and then continued celebrating win after win...
The GTR's levels of sophistication were something that CAMS were ill-equipped to deal with... Fred Gibson recalls CAMS consulting him over how to cut some of their advantage, due to GMS knowing much more about the cars than CAMS, and anything that Fred conceded had already been considered with regard as to overcoming the resulting handicap... and that they did so after being weighted out to nearly 1700kg - a good 400-odd kilos more than anything else there - showed that it wasn't too hard for them to do...
They were the most-professional team, with arguably the best budget, with the best homologation package, with - again arguably - the best contemporary driver line-up of the time. No more, no less. But that made them Tall Poppies, too.
That the following year's change to the basis of the "SuperCircus", with fundamentally a silhouette category was received so warmly, is a measure of just how irrelevant the punters thought Group A had become...
Edited by Hank the Deuce, 10 July 2012 - 01:05.