Wheels Keep Turning

How did motoring racing drivers Dick Johnston and John French feel that day in early October 1981 when they stood on the podium and accepted this ‘perpetual’ trophy, shiny and new? On top of the world!

They had won the annual ‘James Hardie 1000’ touring car championship at Mount Panorama, Bathurst. But on lap 122, a spectacular multi-car collision and pile-up crash had blocked the track, so the race could not go on. Johnston and French were declared the winners. Had they really won? Of course, fair is fair.

The trophy they received was intended to be presented annually to the winners of the Bathurst 1000 – then named after the race’s sponsor, the Australian manufacturing company, James Hardie Industries. The ‘perpetual’ trophy was presented for the first time in 1981 with medallions added on the base for the 1970-1980 races.

James Hardie is the world’s leading manufacturer of fibre cement and gypsum building products, which for many decades included asbestos boards. The company stopped producing asbestos in the 1980s, but it continued to bear the burden of the health impacts of this deadly material, being sued by several asbestosis-suffering former employees in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps sponsoring the enormously popular Bathurst 1000 race helped win back some public favour?

Sponsors had been given naming rights to the Bathurst race since 1963, when touring cars first began tearing around the Mount Panorama circuit. So, while the winners’ trophies were called ‘perpetual,’ their use as award trophies were in fact short-lived. In 1988, this James Hardie trophy was replaced when a new sponsorship deal was struck with the Sydney brewery, Tooheys. When the race changed its name to the ‘Tooheys 1000,’ a new winners’ trophy was made and named for its sponsor. In turn, subsequent sponsors would eventually be replaced too.

When it comes to corporate sponsorship and the changing interests of motor racing fans, it is clear that ‘perpetual’ cannot really mean ‘everlasting.’