Kerry packer, p.8
Kerry Packer, page 8
The silver car was in left-hand drive, and hence not strictly road-legal, but Scott cheekily suggested they take it for a spin. In 1981, the car’s grip around corners, coupled with its turbocharged performance, was astonishing even to the hardened race driver.
Bartlett recalls that, a matter of days later, he was in Packer’s office when Packer asked: ‘What’s new that’s any bloody good? I need something for up at Ellerston.’
Bartlett gushed about the Audi, explaining that it had just made every other performance coupe obsolete. ‘Uh-huh, well, we’d better have one of them,’ Packer grunted.
Bartlett began to explain that this car already had a Madagascan owner, that it didn’t comply with Australian rules, it couldn’t be road registered …
Next thing Bartlett knew, he was in Germany, meeting senior Audi engineer Roland Gumpert. It was not unlike being granted an audience with Enzo Ferrari. Bartlett arranged the trip, but it was all, naturally, on the boss’s dime.
Doesn’t matter what it costs. Just do it right.
‘You just go, it will all be there,’ Bartlett says. ‘Nothing spared, first-class everything … All of that was taken care of by his secretary [Pat Wheatley]. He trusted me to make decisions as I went along.
‘There were times when he asked me, “Why did it cost that much?” And I’d only have to tell him, it was the only way to make it work, and work properly.’
Gumpert and Bartlett sat down and identified all the parts from other Audi models that would enable Bartlett to convert the commandeered Madagascan car to right-hand drive and manoeuvre it through road registration when he got home.
Drives from Sydney to Ellerston, which Packer and Bartlett regularly shared, were much enjoyed by the Big Fella, as they explored the unfamiliar driving technique demanded by the Audi’s four-wheel drive system.
‘Took him a while,’ Bartlett says. ‘But it took me a while, too. You had the drive the car really aggressively, pitch it into corners. He got to do it quite well, actually. Nearly all the way from Moonan Flat to Ellerston was on dirt in those days, and he had a bloody ball through there. Always had a big go. He enjoyed his motoring.’
GOING RACING
One of Australia’s best-remembered Bathurst racing cars is Kevin Bartlett’s ‘Channel Nine’ Chevrolet Camaro. The dark blue coupe was a constant threat in the early-1980s to the established front-line of Peter Brock’s Holdens and Dick Johnson’s Fords.
Bartlett had made his name in Formula 5000, Australia’s equivalent to Formula 1. The Camaro campaign came about through Bartlett’s burgeoning friendship with Kerry Packer.
‘[Packer] just said to me one day: “How can you go against these other blokes, this Peter Brock character? You can beat him, can’t ya?”’ Bartlett grins. ‘I said, “Yeah, most probably could—he’s been beaten, it might as well be me doing it. But I don’t race in that category.”’ He said, “Well, get yourself a car that you can race in that category.”’
The obvious choice would have been Holden or Ford, for which there was a ready industry in parts and preparation expertise. Packer suggested that Bartlett try to find something different; Bartlett suspects, to avoid snubbing either of the two local brands that were among Channel Nine’s biggest advertisers.
Bartlett began looking at eligible cars with competition potential. In Packer-world, such research wasn’t going to be restricted to poring over wads of technical documents in a library.
‘That was a round-the-world trip, that one,’ Bartlett says. ‘I went to Germany, looked at BMW and Mercedes, went to Paris to get all the relevant paperwork … Then I went to Detroit and bought a Camaro Z28.’
Bartlett began modifying the car to race in the 1979 Bathurst 1000, just four months away. It was a tough schedule. But come the October date, Bartlett would struggle to drive a wheelchair: he was lucky to have survived a 200km/h crash in his F5000 a month earlier.
‘I remember it well because it was the ninth of the ninth, 1979, and the car number was nine … I thought, this doesn’t bode too well.’
The crash had ended Bartlett’s F5000 career and left him with a lifelong limp.
He continued to develop the Camaro, and was quickly on the pace with it in 1980, taking second in the championship behind Brock. Bartlett qualified the Camaro on pole position at Bathurst in 1980 and again in ’81, though the car would not figure highly in the results.
No, the car that Kerry and Kevin built will be best remembered as the ‘Channel Six Camaro’, for its career-ending 1982 Bathurst race. Bartlett was running with the lead pack when the Camaro’s left rear wheel collapsed. The car lurched into the wall and then neatly rolled onto its roof, sliding inverted along the track for some distance before coming to rest.
Back in Sydney, the car’s sponsor was relieved to see his driver emerge from the car angry, but unharmed. Whereupon, Packer was said to have taken endless delight in seeing his Nine network’s logo—even inverted, as a six—occupying so much of rival Channel Seven’s headline sports telecast.
It was a case of one-downmanship and one-upmanship at the same time.
ROAD TEST
A bloke like Kerry Packer didn’t go shopping for cars; usually, the cars came shopping for him. But when some new four-wheeled toys piqued his interest, few had better resources immediately at hand. Wheels, the nation’s best-selling motoring magazine, happened to be among the ACP stable. As, indeed, was the second-biggest seller, MOTOR.
In 1990–91 Honda had launched a Ferrari-baiting $160,000 supercar, a slinky, aluminium-bodied missile dubbed the NSX. But around the same time, Nissan decided to import 100 road-going examples of its $110,000 all-wheel drive Skyline GT-R coupe. Dubbed ‘Godzilla’, this turbo terror was in the midst of trouncing Australia’s motor racing scene.
The Honda was like a Ferrari that Packer might conceivably fit into. But the Nissan was thematically similar to his trio of Audi Quattros, and Bartlett had already gushed to the Boss about it.
Everyone was interested in these, and the new breed of supercar. And so it came to pass that the Wheels magazine crew arrived just after dawn one Sunday morning at Sydney’s Eastern Creek Raceway, armed with its hi-tech Leitz Correvit digital speed-measuring equipment, chief test pilot Kevin Bartlett and a quintet of supercars adding up to just shy of $1 million.
The pressure was on to make the deadline for the May 1991 issue. Getting through five cars in one day, what with performance testing, course set-up, photography and tyrechanging requirements, would demand solid focus.
John Carey, Wheels’ long-serving road test editor was there:
‘I remember that day well. I was setting up cones with KB
[Kevin Bartlett] on the straight when this nice chopper … that was headed in a westerly direction, went into a hover overhead. I asked KB: “Is that who I think it is?” He fessed up that he’d mentioned this to KP, and that he’d been interested …
‘He was on his way with a bunch of polo players to a tournament in Richmond or Windsor, with young James in tow, too. We had a Honda NSX, Nissan Skyline GT-R, a privately-owned Ferrari 348tb, a BMW M5 and a Porsche Carrera 4.’
Carey recalls that the big boss drove everything except for the Ferrari, and that James was similarly like a kid in a candy store. But another Wheels crew member who was present recalls that the biggest stress-generators were the Argentinian polo players, who were hooning and spinning off the track.
‘KP was in and out of the cars that most interested him, the GT-R and the NSX,’ Carey recalls. Carey was crouching by the door of the Honda, wrestling with the suction-cups and retainer straps that secured the large timing sensor to the door of the car, when a looming presence seemed to suck out all ambient light.
‘KP had stopped to ask me what the Correvit was. So I gave him a quick description of what it did and what it had cost. Which was, in round figures, $50,000.
‘“And who owns it?” he asked me.
‘“Well, I suppose you do.”
‘Made him laugh. Nice big one. Genuine. Wealth can make some people into miserable buggers. Not Kerry Packer. He really knew how to enjoy money.’
Packer had been mightily impressed by the Nissan which, aside from its performance, offered a more accommodating cabin than the low-slung, two-seater Honda. Bartlett was standing by the chopper as Packer climbed on board to depart.
‘Get me one of those cars,’ Packer motioned towards the Nissan. ‘Nah, fuck it—get me two. One for James and one for me.’
TASMANIA BEDEVILLED
In 1988, the BMW 750iL was about the most lavishly equipped, complex and expensive car on the Australian market. But the V12-engined limousine was no less impressive in its ability to burn money: a car bought for $216,000 in 1988 (when the average house price in Sydney was $141,000) could dump half its value in just three years.
It’s probably for this latter reason, rather than any particular affection, that a white, 1988 BMW 750iL, carrying the FP-222 registration plates of his late father, would be Kerry Packer’s automotive staple for the last 17 years of his life. Regularly schmoozed by BMW and other luxury brands, Packer’s attitude remained: ‘What’s wrong with this one?’
But the Packer predilection for performance cars, evidenced by his Jaguar and Audi, had a final, courageous chapter to run, in one of the world’s most dangerous and demanding road races.
Packer had bought two Nissan GT-Rs, and in true KP style, was soon asking Bartlett: ‘How can we get them going quicker? How much power do you reckon we can get out of them?’
Bartlett shrugged. ‘They’ve got 280 horsepower now. I reckon we can get 450. Piece of cake.’
At that time, 1991, the Nissan GT-R was wiping the floor in Australian motor racing, humiliating the traditional favourite Holdens and Fords. And the fastest Nissan GT-Rs in the world were being built in Melbourne by Bartlett’s old racing pal, Fred Gibson.
The instruction was straightforward: ‘It wasn’t, “How much are you going to charge me, Freddie?” It was, “These engines are for Mr Packer, do it right.”’
Packer was delighted with his monster-powered Godzilla toys. He suddenly indicated he’d like a third Nissan GT-R, similarly high-powered, for his Fyning Hill estate in England. Bartlett offered to look into the shipping process.
Packer: ‘Nah. I want the thing there next week.’ Mere days later, Bartlett was sitting in a first-class seat on a Qantas 747 Combi, a red Nissan GT-R on the same flight with him.
At Heathrow, Bartlett was told that this Australian-specification model did not meet local regulations; thus began a frantic overnight scramble to the Channel Isles, where one may often find alternative solutions to such nettlesome matters.
‘With KP, it wasn’t a case of, “How much will it cost?” It was a case of, “Why haven’t you got it done yet?”’ Bartlett says.
‘You were put on the mark, you knew you had to perform because you would let the bloke down if you didn’t. That’s the way I felt about it: I didn’t want to let the bloke down, because he trusted me to do what he asked me to do.’
But Packer had another high-stakes goal, involving a powerful Nissan and a small island.
Twelve months earlier, in April 1992, the inaugural Targa Tasmania had been held—a five-day, flat-out road race around the island state. Each year around 300 competitors, flagged away at 30-second intervals, flash along the temporarily closed roads at better than 250 kilometres per hour.
As motor sport adventures go, Targa Tasmania is tough, wild and utterly unforgiving. And Kerry Packer wanted to do it, in one of the most powerful cars in the country.
‘He was going to drive a couple of the stages with the GT-R, which I’d arranged at great expense,’ Bartlett remembers. ‘I took two cars down: one just for practice, one for the event. I had to qualify the car for the event—big horsepower—but she went boom!’
Packer had been in Sydney, ready to board the chopper the following day to come down to Tasmania. ‘And I had the onerous task of ringing him up and saying, “Uh, KP, I’ve got bad news about the car …”’
After a response that echoed the Nissan’s engine, Packer growled: ‘Well, whaddya gonna fuckin’ do now?’
Bartlett had, with learned foresight, begun preparing the spare car, which had a ‘reasonable’ 350 horsepower (indeed, 20 per cent more than the Honda NSX that ultimately won the event) but Packer wasn’t impressed.
Bartlett did the event and, despite further mechanical issues, finished third in the Contemporary class. ‘But we’d spent $30,000 or so by that time,’ Bartlett sighs. ‘I knew KP could do it, he was a good enough driver. I felt really bad about it. I said, “I let you down.” And he said, “It happened. Let’s forget it.” But I felt bad about that for years.’
BIG BOYS’ TOYS
Kerry Packer in his post-Alan Bond period was a man who took his fun seriously. Where four wheels were concerned, there was one sight more imposing than that of a determined Packer in one of his unholy-horsepower cars: the wheeled man-mountain that was Packer on a 90-kilogram kart, roaring around the dips and twists of Ellerston’s custom-made track.
James Packer had Kevin Bartlett design a kart track on a gentle hillside north of the main homestead area.
‘James rang me up one day and said, “KB, I want you to build a bloody kart track for me and Dad,”’ recalls Bartlett. (James, evidently, had yet to graduate from ‘bloody’). The track, ultra-light aircraft and other Ellerston attractions were not only for the benefit of Packers pere et fils, but to entertain Argentinian polo players—guys who added a Latin dimension to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Bartlett was allocated a 1.5 square kilometre area of ‘snake-infested’ hillside which would, a dozen years later, be among the back nine holes of the golf course. He set to work on a ride-on mower, pegging out the circuit design ready for surfacing.
It was nothing for Bartlett to lob on the doorstep of a Sydney kart shop and buy nine complete K100 championship karts, costing around $2500 each, and a crate of spare parts. Shop owner Peter Dell remembers having to make a new mould for an ‘extra-extra-large’ seat. He’s since used the very same mould for a handful of other plus-sized customers.
A shed was built adjacent to the track to house and maintain the karts. Indeed, maintaining them would become a weekly routine for Bartlett.
‘When we were entertaining the Argies, I’d go up nearly every weekend, maintain the karts during the week for a couple of days and then stick around for the weekend. Nick Ross, the helicopter pilot, would wear out a kart every time he’d go up there.’
Garry Linnell, editor of The Bulletin from 2002-2006, got to sample the karts on an executive retreat in 2003. Linnell admits he’s no racing driver, but was eager to impress the boss.
‘I think he had done a 50-something [in seconds lap] around there. I ended up doing some really pathetic lap time. It was embarrassing.’
The Big Man enjoyed the karts immensely, Bartlett says, and was extremely adept at getting the most out of them on the track. ‘KP’s kart was usually the best, partly because it had the least use,’ Bartlett says. ‘He’d go and race it around, but he wouldn’t wear it out. And his kart didn’t have any weight penalty on it. We put weight penalties on all the others, the light blokes went into the heavy karts. But it was never really even.
‘James knows quite well that I regarded Kerry as a bloody good driver … He was always competitive in the karts, and for a big, heavy man—he was using the karts quite hard, and it takes a bit of skill for a heavy man to get a kart to go fast. And I never saw him make a mistake on them. He just had that natural ability.’
The motorised fun didn’t stay on the ground, though, as Packer was quick to get onto the new-fangled flying machines called ultra-lights.
He bought six of the spindly, rasping machines—apparently owning a variety of makes, as they were damaged and replaced—though very few guests were qualified to fly them. Trevor Sykes laughs: ‘You didn’t want to be a guest at Ellerston, because suddenly, with no training whatsoever, you’re shoved into one of these things and, “Fly it, you bastard!”’
ON SEA AND AIR
F. Scott Fitzgerald was put on this earth to say it: ‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.’ What Fitzgerald didn’t say was that the very rich can be different from each other, too.
Among several of the world’s wealthiest there has been a long-running battle for supremacy on the high seas. The superyacht contest has no shortage of high-stakes players. But at the head of the fleet in recent years have been men like tech kings Paul Allen (Microsoft) and Larry Ellison (Oracle), Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and the expected Middle Eastern and south-east Asian royals.
It’s mostly about size: the 180-metre Azzam, the largest private superyacht in the world when launched in 2013, is roughly two-thirds the size of the legendary Cunard ocean liner, Queen Elizabeth II. Owned by the Emir of Abu Dhabi, Azzam usurped the previous size queen, Abramovich’s 162 million Eclipse, which boasts around 100 rooms, 70 crew, a three-man submarine and space for three helicopters.
But it’s also about beauty. The staggering size of these floating palaces is concealed by their sleek and elegant lines, more resembling oversized speedboats than scaled-down ocean liners.
None of this seems to have impressed Packer, when he overcame years of nautical indifference—he had always regarded Sir Frank’s sailing exploits as a waste of money—and went looking for a boat.
Packer could have taken the usual route and commissioned a new design from one of the leading German or Italian superyacht specialists. He looked instead to an old and extremely unusual vessel, to be internally transformed and refitted while retaining its original character.
At 87.6 metres in length, Arctic P still ranks around 50th in the list of the world’s biggest private yachts. Among its sister superyacht fleet, however, Packer’s pleasure craft stands out like, er, dogs’, for the simple reason that it’s an ugly bloody bastard of a boat.
