ONE the cars involved in the fiery startline crash at Oran Park in 2000 might be on its way to a resurrection, but the other one definitely isn’t.
Paul Morris’ Big Kev Holden Commodore VS and Mark Larkham’s Mitre 10 Ford Falcon AU were severely damaged in a fiery start-line crash at the south-western Sydney circuit’s round of the 2000 championship.
While Morris’ car, now under the custodianship of Ben Eggleston, is currently undergoing an unlikely restoration at the hands of master fabricator George Smith, no such Lazarus-like comeback story awaits Larkham’s.
That particular Falcon was the first AU built by Stone Brothers Racing in 1999, which had run Larkham’s entry since the start of the 1997 season.
Christened M-TEK 02 by the Mitre 10-backed squad, its turned a wheel for the first time in Thursday practice at its debut race meeting at Albert Park in 1999.
Despite the season being largely a bust for Ford teams as they struggled to get the new AU model up to speed, the #10 Falcon was a regular focus of the Channel Ten broadcasts thanks to a pedal-facing camera – Larkham often taped jokes or messages to the commentary team to the top of his race boots!
Super Touring ace Brad Jones joined him for the endurance races, where this car achieved its most memorable piece of silverware.
Larkham set a blistering 2m09.5146s lap of Mount Panorama in the Top 10 Shootout to claim pole position for the FAI 1000, a new qualifying record and the first – and only – championship pole position of his career.
Unfortunately the car suffered clutch problems on Sunday that took the pair out of the Great Race.
The Mitre 10 team retained M-TEK 02 for the 2000 Shell Championship Series, Larkham electing to part with the Stone Brothers and run his own team under the ‘Larkham Motorsport’ banner.
He drove this car again through the first part of 2000 with improved results and cracked his first championship podium finish in July’s Queensland Raceway sprint round behind the HRT Commodores of Craig Lowndes and Mark Skaife.
Interestingly, Larkham’s Falcon was also used as a test bed by TEGA (the Touring car Entrants Group of Australia).
Traction control was used at a Queensland Raceway test to investigate and log tell-tale signs in the Motec data-logging system to help officials recognise if it was being illegally used.
Oran Park came two rounds later, and the horrifying crash marked the end of the road for this particular chassis.
While both Morris and Larkham salvaged the usable components from their wrecked machines and stripped them to bare bodyshells, the similarities ended there.
Morris retained his wrecked chassis, initially putting it on display at the Norwell Motorplex before shifting it into storage, ultimately selling it to Eggleston in recent years.
Larkham’s chassis? The only thing that remains is the CAMS rollover chassis recognition plate.
Its running gear was savable; indeed, it was transferred into a new car that Larkham drove to a race victory on debut in the very next round at Calder Park.
But the rest of M-TEK 02 was run over by an excavator and taken to the scrapyard.
“The reason we crushed that Falcon – it wasn’t an easy decision to make – but there was no way that car could have ever been rebuilt,” Larkham told the V8 Sleuth Podcast back in 2021.
“Back then, you haven’t got a lot of money so we needed the bits out of that car.
“There was nothing left anyway, because by the time you pull the engine, gearbox and the running gear, the stuff that was still good and serviceable, there wasn’t much left.
“It was the structure, it was the cage that was gone.
“The tubes were crushed all the way back to the rear shock towers, such was the impact. So even if we kept it and rebuilt it, it was never the same car, so we didn’t.
“The only regret I do have, if I did keep it … I went to Paul Morris’ museum many years ago and saw his crashed one there.
“I thought, ‘Ah, bugger, I should’ve given him the (Falcon) because he could’ve tucked it in the butt of the other one! That would have been a cool little display.”
