Greg Murphy - Once A Warrior

Twenty years ago, Greg Murphy got his full-time break in the Australian Touring Car Championship following Craig Lowndes’ departure to Europe. It was the start of a glittering, sometimes controversial but always interesting career that intensified the generational change and the connection between talented Kiwis and our sport.

- Cameron McGavin

The 2017 Virgin Australia Supercars Championship is the year of the Kiwi. Australia’s Supercars contingent, more often than not used to maintaining a constant winning presence in its own racing series, has been enduring the kind of trans-Tasman whipping more often seen on the rugby field.

It wasn’t always this way. Sure, talented Kiwis have long prospered in Australian touring cars, but typically just one has stamped their boot on the statistics at a time, such as Jim Richards or Greg Murphy. With a posse of New Zealand talent currently tearing the Supercars field apart, and Murphy’s own championship endeavours kicking off 20 years ago this year, what better time to revisit the career of one of the all-time Kiwi greats.

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME

Twenty-eight race wins. Four Bathurst 1000s. Two Sandown 500s. Nine race wins at his Pukekohe home track. Author of probably the most celebrated lap of Bathurst ever.

Such statistics make Murphy’s arrival onto the Australian touring-car scene seem inevitable. But for the young Murph of the early 1990s, making a living out of his passion didn’t seem possible.

“Being a racing-car driver wasn’t part of the equation,” says Murphy. “It was so far off, so foreign and unobtainable. So I was trying to get myself into the NZ Air Force and go and fly Skyhawks, then I contemplated going into engineering.”

Winning NZ’s Formula Ford Scholarship, however, set him on the path to his destiny.

That led to a year working alongside movers and shakers in NZ’s Formula Ford scene in 1993. Then followed what he says was the big gamble of his career, crossing the ditch to take a punt at the first round of the 1994 Australian Driver’s Championship at Eastern Creek.