What is the difference between people racing each other during an event, and a straight-up battle? How can you tell when drivers aren’t concerned about every other car and instead have dialed their focus in onto just a couple of competitor’s machines? It’s important to figure that out, because battles are the exciting parts of the race that (usually) don’t involve mangled sheetmetal or a thrown punch. Braking zones become shorter, corners become tighter and straightaways become drag strips as those involve in the battle do everything in their power to move ahead. To hell with the engine, nevermind the brake pedal, just make sure that you stay out in front!

If you want to see what a battle looks like, then we go to Bathurst for the 1981 James Hardie 1000 and the first few opening laps. You’re going to focus on four cars: the Chevrolet Camaro of Kevin Bartlett, the Holden Commodore of Peter Brock, and the Ford Falcons of Dick Johnson and Bob Morris following in hot pursuit. Bartlett’s Camaro had the pole position at the start after a heroic drive in soaked conditions, Brock was a fan favorite, and Johnson was still riding a wave of support after the rock incident that had happened the year prior. With the weather out of the picture, the race was on, and boy howdy, was it on. The first few laps you’ll see here get heated in a hurry. Brock and Bartlett traded paint and positions until the Commodore’s rear axle was bent, forcing Brock to pit for 20 minutes to repair it. Bartlett, too, would spend some time in the pits after the Camaro took a hit in the driver’s front corner from the lapped Ron Wanless. That’s who Bartlett is threatening with a knuckle sandwich in the interview, but it never came to be…Wanless was a former Golden Gloves who ran a junkyard. Scrapping with him in the pits probably wouldn’t have ended well.

The 1981 Bathurst would be red-flagged and called on lap 120 after a nasty, track-wide wreck log-jammed the course. Bob Morris wound up diving into a corner and bounced off of Christine Gibson, and before the dust settled, Garry Rogers, Tony Edmondson, David Seldon and Kevin Bartlett would be left as a mangled pile of metal at the McPhillamy Park Corner.