Five days to go until Christmas Day, six days to go until ASCN reaches its ninth birthday, both are great days and should be enjoyed together.

The 25th anniversary of the final races held at Calder Park Thunderdome was on Wednesday.

December 18, 1999, saw Stock Cars, a combined AUSCAR and Sportsman field, HQ Holden and Legends take to the track to kick off their 1999/00 seasons with nobody knowing it was all but curtains for the entire lot.

V8 Sleuth published a couple of stories to mark the event and posted a stack of photos with one.

A number of Stock Cars that graced the Thunderdome still race today or are currently being prepared to re-enter action, they are the #27 (Kim Jane), the #19 (Mark Harrison), the #41 (Gene Cook) and the #17 (Tony Southwell) plus one other car we will be talking about later on in this edition.

Richard White owns the Barry Blake #7 that was on the track that day, it was previously the #5 of Max Dumesny when he was in a team with Ian Thomas, its future plans will be revealed sometime later on.

The #1 VT Commodore was at Calder Park to be shown off to the people for a future debut, while the debut did not happen on the Thunderdome, it has gotten a run in Stock Cars Australia.

The #54 Sportsman of Chris Robinson was in the AUSCAR/Sportsman races as was the #31 currently under restoration and the #02 that is currently for sale, the #54 won on the Thunderdome in the 1998/99 season when the categories were separate.

The Botheras family racing auscar adventure is marching towards 350 members, they’ve been busy as they announced Junk Store as being onboard with the team.

They also set up an Instagram page and a store but that’s not all as they also shown a Log Book showing the #14 has the VIN of A 519.

We’ve written down a couple of VIN numbers over the last few years, we’ve got eight numbers below for you.

A 053- #3 Lumina
A 226 – #8 Ford EF/EB AUSCAR (last seen at Winton)
A 205 – #31 Holden Commodore AUSCAR
A 215 – #38 Ford Falcon AUSCAR
A 241 – ex-Schwantz used AUSCAR
A 519 – Botheras Family
0254 – #22 Holden Commodore AUSCAR
0042 – #6 Pontiac

In what is great timing, Joshua Rusty Baldwin asked if there was a way to check VIN’s, it was a topic that was brought up a couple of years ago, ASCN may publish a list of known VINs if the demand is there for it.

If anybody wants to add their VIN to the list, drop a line anytime.

A warning has gone out to people in the NASCAR Australia group, do not mention Gene Cook because ‘if anyone mentions his name on this page they will be banned from the page‘ and admins ‘will not allow any posts about him, or any photos of him or his history‘.

As many know, the #41 Ford Thunderbird driven by Mick Heppleston carries the number and colours used by Gene Cook when he had owned the car, we will not be joining the NASCAR Australia group in deleting or censoring the name or the records of Gene Cook, and we won’t be censoring or deleting photos of the car no matter who drives it or what the car is years down the track, we are not the former Soviet Union where people got airbrushed and deleted out of history.

EDIT: We know that Gene had done wrong by committing financial crimes, but we also know that the #41 plays an important part in Stock Cars Australia and we can’t ignore the car, we can’t ignore the history of it, and that may upset some people, but it has to remain, and its past will get mentioned by fans.

Last week, I told you all that there was good news to come, the good news for those who do not know is that Eddie Ivermee has brought an Oldsmobile.

Do you remember earlier this year that an Oldsmobile that was once on the salt flats was for sale and people were trying to identify it? Well, that’s the one Eddie brought.

It has a VIN of either A 066 or A 006, time has not treated the silver VIN sticker nicely though it is expected to be A 066.

Before Eddie got the car, we got to work on trying to identify the car based on everything that was written about it early in the year, based on that we drew up potential ownership lines, we were particularly interested in what Jimmy Kuusela wrote as his information was very precise.

Jimmy’s information pointed to the car being an ex-John Faulkner Racing Oldsmobile, so a lot of time was spent looking at JFR photos, studying the cars so we would be familiar with them once the car arrived at Eddie’s.

Eddie picked up the car and the car had a lot more to tell than what was shown in the ad, the windows were on the car and suddenly this unknown car was becoming quickly known because one window in particular is unique.

Once Eddie got the car to his home, he started to look closely at everything, remember this car was a Salt Flat car post Stock Car racing so details may have been changed or removed but one piece of its past was not, sponsorship on the dash.

In faded but still legible writing was ‘Melbourne’s Cheapest Cars’ why was this important? Eddie Abelnica owns it, and he got his cars from John Faulkner Racing.

As you can see Motorsport News wrote about Eddie Abelnica buying three JFR cars, two being an Oldsmobile, so we had a 50/50 shot of getting it correct right away.

We started looking for Eddie Abelnica car photos and video to glean details from them to match up with the JFR cars, most photo and film footage were of his Monte Carlo but there were times when he got some TV time in the Oldsmobile, one of the pit stops was on TV and just a few frames before they cut away from the car, we got to look at the back and you could see the left rear window having a square in it.

Looking at Eddie Ivermee’s car and you see it too has a square in the left rear window, so now we have the Abelnica era down good, but we needed more than that to satisfy any and all challengers of the car’s deeper history, we had now to match the car with one of the two JFR Oldsmobile’s.

Thanks to V8 Sleuth releasing a stack of pictures on Wednesday December 18, 2024, we were also able to prove that the car was the #9 Oldsmobile that raced at the Thunderdome on December 18, 1999.

So, we looked through the dozens of John Faulkner Racing photos looking for the left-rear window, most photos didn’t go that far back with a car as most prefer straight on shots and others aren’t clear, but several of Shayne Hunter’s photos did look towards the back and more than one photo has the square in great detail and it matched.

Eddie found out more details from Jimmy Kuusela, Jimmy described bracing in the engine bay, Eddie sent a video of what he could see on the car and Jimmy said, ‘that it’, you can’t get any better confirmation than that.

While that was happening, Eddie got additional details from John Faulkner who said the car came from Tropic Coast Racing (we believe it is this car here and here) and said that they got the car from TriStar Motorsports in the USA, they ran Olds in 1991 and 1992.

Ian Thomas says that he brought two cars from Morgan-McClure, and it is one of them.

John’s account was confirmed by a small article in Motorsport News, the car that is now Eddie’s was John Faulkner Racing’s second purchase, and it did come from Tropic Coast Racing.

We are still finding out more about the origins before it arrived in Australia and what happened to the car after Eddie Abelnica owned it, from what Jimmy said it went to Paul Stocker and was used in the V8 Stock Cars era but who knows where it went after that until Donald Hudson brought it for Salt Flat action in the early 2010’s.

That’s how it happened over this last week.

We’re hoping for a Christmas miracle, we are looking for anybody who has photos of the cars used by NASTRAK, we are particularly looking for an Oldsmobile, this Oldsmobile later became the above car now owned by Richard White after spending time with Brad Jones and Kim Jane.

If we can find out exactly what it was at NASTRAK then we will likely know its full story as we’ll have something to show people instead of the description.

That’s it for this edition of Aussie Stock Car News, we had a little bit of everything for you, commemoration, some controversy, the building of a team, a new team owner and more.

See you next week.