“Are you going to Great Keppel Island?” asks the woman next to me on the bomber to Rockhampton when I tell her I am going to Yeppoon. “Nope,” I answer.

“I’m from Yeppoon, if you’re not going to Keppel what are you doing?” she continues. I say I’m going to the opening of a Peter Brock museum. “In Yeppoon!” she says incredulously.

Yeppoon is 50 clicks from Rockhampton and apart from being the gateway to Great Keppel, is best known for its Pineapple Festival. Get the picture?

“Know where the museum is?” I ask.

“Nah, but there was a rumour going around about a big shed that is supposed to be full of Ferraris and its doors are blocked by bulldozers.”

That’ll be Peter Champion’s shed, only it won’t be full of Ferraris, it will be full of precious Holdens.

I first met Champion, self-made millionaire, recently retired coal mining contractor and avid Brock car collector, on Targa Tasmania in 2002. He was hanging out with Brock who was driving a tricked up Monaro with his (nervous) son James navigating. I just thought Champion was a mate of Brock’s. A good natured, knockabout sorta bloke, we shared rooms and I liked him because he didn’t complain about my world championship snoring.

The next time I saw Champion was at 2005’s Goodwood Festival Of Speed in England. He was there with Brock who was driving Champion’s immaculate 1984 ‘Last Of The Big Bangers’ VK Commodore. It was then that I realised Champion was also a serious collector of Brock machinery, race and road.

Champion first met Brock in the mid-‘90s. He was staying at a hotel in Brisbane and heard that Brock was also there at a function. Champion made a beeline to Brock and asked him a few questions about the HDT cars he owned.

A few months later Champion went to an Oran Park touring car round and later to a function that Brock was at and showed him a happy snap of his five HDT Commodores. Brock, as he had done a million times before, smiled and automatically went to autograph the picture but Champion recoiled and said he just wanted to show him the cars; he didn’t want Brock’s signature.

“I got talking to him and asked if he remembered how to build the Austin A30 (Brock began his career in) and he said, ‘Of course!’” Champion recalls.

That must have made an impression on Brock because he sought out Champion later and asked him for a business card. “He rang me a few days later and that was the start of our friendship.”
What Unique Cars readers probably don’t know is that the A30 was built for Champion not Brock. “I paid all the bills, Peter and James built it for me!” he laughs.

As far back as 1997, Champion had wanted to create a place where Brock fans could see his ever growing collection and it was with Brock’s blessing that the project began in 2003, in the big tin shed “full of Ferraris” on the main road to Yeppoon.

“The idea for the museum began to gel when I started collecting Peter’s old race cars, after he retired, to go with the road cars; I wanted to put together a private collection in Blackwater (west of Yeppoon), where I lived at the time,” Champion says. “Peter had already signed my shed in Blackwater in 1996 and spent two or three days with me at the mine driving dump trucks and excavators. He was just one of the boys and chilled out with all my workers; he just loved it.”

Brock had quite a hand in the design and layout of the museum, sketching the dashboard-shaped entry and deciding the course of the ‘racetrack’ walkway that winds through the displays.

Work started on the big tin shed in 2003 and it’s been soundproofed, heat-proofed, burglar-proofed, you name it. The air conditioning, which runs 24/7, cost over $250,000 and chews up $2000 per month. The massive flagpole outside took a month to erect and sits in a four-metre deep concrete hole.

We arrive a few hours before the media opening not knowing what to expect. Would it be a tacky theme park or motley assortment of 10-15 cars sitting in a row that you could see in 10 minutes? Never fear, Champion’s Brock Experience is like an Aladdin’s cave of race and road cars and priceless memorabilia, much of which Brock donated.

You walk through the ‘dashboard’ into an arena of cars lit by a $250,000 light show. It really is a stunning place with 35 cars, display cases of rare collectibles, and racing signage. When I remark that it is much more than I expected, Champion looks slightly indignant, as if I’d been expecting a cheap show. Cheap ‘CBE’ is not; Champion’s investment runs somewhere between $10-15million.

Champion has barely slept because three days before an unexpected bonus turned up, the Bob Jane Monza sports sedan, and every car that had been painstakingly positioned (on stands) had to be moved again to fit it in. And in the last week he wheelbarrowed in two truck loads of pine bark to spread around the cars.

The chunky miner is nervous – “Digging big holes in the ground is a lot easier than standing in front of 200 people” ­– the sound and light show is still being de-bugged and is yet to have a full rehearsal. It consists of films about Brock, Champion’s friendship with the man, and the building of the facility; you’ll see it if you buy the full experience.

While Champion worries, his lovely wife Sandy (Brock’s former PA) barks orders and makes sure everything is shipshape. Over 150 people, including local dignitaries, the Brock family, and Allan Moffat are expected and the plan is to lead them in through darkness then kick off the AV show.

Luckily, the show goes off without a hitch and wows everyone and Champion shyly thanks everyone involved before handing the microphone to Moffat who makes an emotional speech. Even though it is more than a year since Brock died, Moffat chokes back tears several times as he remembers his fierce on-track rival and friend.

But you can’t please everyone. No sooner had the Experience opened (Champion doesn’t like the word museum) than the chat rooms and forums were abuzz with naysayers, know-it-alls, and HDT widget trainspotters slagging him off, saying his cars weren’t legit and other claptrap.

It incensed and hurt Champion, who has made this his mission in life.

“I’ve got a couple of replicas and people don’t like it,” he shrugs. “Someone complained about braided hoses on one of my HDT road cars, saying it wasn’t original, but when Peter was in Blackwater I asked him how to protect the old hoses – because I don’t drive these cars, I want to keep them new – and he said to use braided hoses. Peter’s not around to back me up now, but these people are dickheads.

“One of them wrote, ‘Not a bad looking fake Monza,’ but it’s the real thing. Peter wrote up a wishlist of cars but we knew we wouldn’t be able to get the real thing in all cases. This is not a museum, it’s my experience with Peter Brock and people can see the first and last car he raced and if I didn’t have those replicas how would people be able to see all of Peter’s life? He gave me all his personal stuff and he sanctioned everything in there. He would give these people a real caning.”

Champion also created controversy when he purchased the Daytona Coupe replica in which Brock was killed but it wasn’t without a lot of soul searching.

“I was approached by a couple of people who were really close to Peter and they asked me if I would buy the car because they believed the spirit of Peter was still in it. I thought about it for quite a long time and the guy who owns the car (Richard Bendell from MoTeC) will repair the car when he has time. I wouldn’t display the wreck because Peter was an Australian icon and a great friend; he was also the last person who would have wanted it chopped up and thrown in a dumpmaster.”

Yeppoon is a long way from major population centres and when I suggest to Champion that more fans could see it if he relocated to Melbourne or Sydney he says he doesn’t care if no-one comes, he built it for him, not to make money. But people are coming.

“I love Yeppoon and sure, if I took it to the Gold Coast people would flock through and one day I might go to Melbourne, but people have come from all over this country and New Zealand; they come up for the weekend.” Good idea.

Some people might regard Champion’s Brock Experience as the folly of a rich fan but they would be very wrong. It is a personal tribute from one mate to another and well worth the visit. And while you’re at it you might as well go to Great Keppel Island!

See championsbrockexperience.com.au for entry details, admission prices and a rundown on all the cars in the collection