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The Crystal-Based Energy Polarizer Was the Weirdest Performance Option Ever
In the automotive world, there are two famous guys named Peter Brock. One you’ve probably heard of: the designer behind the Shelby Cobra Daytona coupe, founder of BRE, the man who gave us years of the fastest Datsuns out there. If, however, you’re Australian, then the Peter Brock you know best is the racing driver who stood atop the podium at Bathurst so many times that they just went ahead and named the trophy after him. For years Down Under, the Brock name was synonymous with heavy-hitter Holdens, but somewhere along the way, he developed some odd ideas. One of them, in fact, had to be among the most bizarre factory add-ons ever fitted to a performance car.
Born in 1946 near Melbourne, Brocky—yes that was his nickname, because that’s how Australian nicknames work—often claimed his skill could be traced to his early days driving an Austin 7 with no brakes. When he was drafted into the Australian military at the age of 20, Brock was trained as an ambulance driver. He and the other drivers were known to occasionally race the ambulances around the camp. There is every chance that he may have done so against Dick Johnson, a three-time Bathurst winner who was concurrently stationed at the same training camp.
During this period, while on leave, Brock saw his first Bathurst races. If you’re not familiar with the race, let’s take a quick sidebar to catch you up:
The Mount Panorama circuit is located in Bathhurst, New South Wales (hence the name of the race), about a three-hour drive from Sydney. It was built in 1936, although there was dirt-track racing before then, and its construction involved a slightly underhanded dodge from the then-mayor, Martin Griffin. Being in the middle of the Great Depression, there were public funds available for work projects like paving city streets, but nothing for frivolity such as a racetrack. So, Griffin created Mount Panorama … Scenic Drive. The loophole: Mount Panorama is still a public roadway on non-race days, and you can drive around it for free. Just don’t speed, as the Aussie cops have ensured that this is one of the most well-patrolled roads in the country.
In modern times, the Bathurst 1000 is run by the Supercars Championship; since the demise of Holden, that means Mustangs versus Camaros. In the old days, however, many classes ran, everything from production touring cars to motorcycles. Toward the end of the 1960s, Bathurst became the scene of many a knife fight between Ford Falcons and Holden Monaros, and thanks to Crocodile Dundee, Australia is quite famously a place where people know what a knife is.
Besides Ford vs. Holden, Brock would have seen all manner of cars competing, from Datsuns to Alfa Romeos. Right then and there, at Bathurst, he decided he would become a racing driver as soon as he got out of the army. Ultimately he didn’t even have to wait until then: While still serving, he started to build a hairy homebuilt special, taking the body of an Austin A30 coupe and stuffing the 3.0-liter inline-six from a Holden sedan into it. Anyone who knows how small an A30 is will be unsurprised to learn that the engine protruded right through the firewall and into the cabin.
Having built this bonkers, fiberglass-flared monstrosity, Brocky took to the track. Triple SU carbs and other modifications squeezed 200 hp out of the six-cylinder, and with the Austin only weighing 1560 pounds, it was a pretty swift creation indeed. It was also a complete handful to drive, prone to swapping ends and plagued by directional instability under braking. Or acceleration. Or funny looks in its general direction.
However, this scruffy and ill-tempered little dingo met its match with one of the most naturally gifted racers ever to come out of Australia. Brocky won more than a hundred races in it, and his victories did not go unnoticed by one Harry Firth, team manager for the Holden Dealer Team.
Better known as HDT, this was a factory-backed Holden racing team enjoying a little creative financing to get around GM’s official ban against corporate involvement in motorsport. Brock proved Firth’s confidence in him was well-placed, finishing third in the 1969 Hardie-Ferodo 500 driving a Monaro GTS350.
While Brock would drive other cars, and quite successfully, this was the beginning of his long association with Holden. In 1972, he won the Bathurst 500 in an inline-six–powered LJ Torana GTR, amid extremely wet conditions. And Brock didn’t just win—he whipped the rest of the competition thoroughly, beating the next-closest racer by five laps. Later in his career, he’d beat the Bathurst field by six laps, a record which was never equaled and never will be thanks to modern rule changes.
Brock won nine times at Bathurst, another record which has never been broken. He did a little racing outside of Australia, but the man never had his Jack Brabham or Mark Webber moment. Still, for those who grew up during the golden age of battling Aussie-built V-8 touring cars, Brock was a hero of speed. True blue.
Here’s where the story misjudges an apex and spins off into the gravel, however. In 1980, Brock took over the HDT team, which began selling street cars to race fans. It was a pretty standard move, similarly done by auto performance divisions around the world, and with Brock’s on-track record, sales were brisk.
However, by 1984, Brock was suffering from health issues. Some of it was surely down to the wear and tear of the life of a hard-charging racer, and that’s when a neighbor of Brock’s stepped in with a novel treatment. His name was Dr. Eric Dowker; he’d been a chiropractor in the U.S., and he believed in the healing power of crystals.
Dowker convinced Brock to cut down on the smoking and drinking and eat more vegan meals—all sound advice. But married to this advice about healthy eating were claims that crystals could take the toxins out of food or even heal small cuts. Dowker wore a huge quartz crystal around his neck, and he convinced Brock of the magical properties of crystalline energy. Well then, Brock appeared to think, maybe it’ll work on cars, too?
Brock thus created the Energy Polarizer, a small resin box filled with crystals and magnets. At first, this item was secretly installed into the HDT racing cars, but Brock’s co-driver Larry Perkins discovered it, which led to a shouting match between the two. Perkins quit, but Brock decided to double down, listing the Polarizer as a $480 option on HDT’s new VL Director in early 1987.
Naturally, when Holden got word of what Brock was up to, it threw a fit. Brock debuted the HDT Director alongside Dowker in early 1987, and of the five hundred cars made, roughly one-third were built with an Energy Polarizer in the engine bay. As Brock was willing to spout off to anyone about the science-adjacent properties of the crystal box, Holden soon severed ties with him, instead founding Holden Special Vehicles as its performance division. A society called the Australian Skeptics even got involved, issuing Brock a challenge to prove his claims.
As the years passed, something strange happened. First, with a retroactive application of Aussie humor, the Polarizer became a desirable collector item for the typical HDT fan. In the same way that a DeLorean DMC owner might have a flux capacitor handy, the little crystal box is a wink and a nod to those in the know.
Perhaps even crazier was the re-emergence of the Energy Polarizer in 2011, as part of an HDT package for the fourth-generation Commodore (the one that shares its bones with the Pontiac G8). This was a ferocious sedan with 470 hp worth of supercharged V-8, a fully upgraded suspension, and a numbered build plate. It carried Peter Brock’s signature … despite the fact that he’d been dead since 2006, killed in a crash while racing in the Targa West Rally.
As a nod to his legacy as “The King of the Mountain,” that same year the trophy for the Bathurst 1000 was changed to the Peter Brock Trophy. A memorial statue was also built at Mount Panorama.
You have to wonder what might have happened if Brock had made his claims about crystals now instead of nearly 40 years ago. Consider that Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness company, Goop, has raked in more than a $100 million in revenue despite promoting and selling products treated with extreme skepticism (if not outright dismissal) from the scientific community. Of course, racers have always had their superstitions, whether it was Tazio Nuvolari‘s racing tortoise or Joey Dunlop’s lucky red T-shirt. Maybe Brock’s insistence on the power of crystals would be treated with a little more indulgence today. His legacy includes both a track record as one of Australia’s best racers, as well as a fun oddball footnote that Holden fans won’t ever forget.
There were so many goofy things back then. The Magnets on the fuel line for better MPG etc.
Back then people were gullible and there was little info to better inform people of the quack properties of these claims.
Recent events suggest people are more gullible than ever….
“Willfully gullible” there, made it more accurate.
Amennn!
People are STILL gullable.
Remember what P. T. Barrnum said…
Yes. I remember the magnets. A tube made of copper I think about 6-7 inches long with magnets inside installed on the fuel line. It was called The Vitalizer. Worked in my head but not on my car.
When I was in my Diesel mechanicking days, the owner of one of the outfits I worked for had some similar beliefs. He had these jugs full of pellets in a liquid, which had wires coming out of them that were connected to metal components either in our building, or in some of the trucks. These were either one gallon jugs or 4 inch PVC tubes with caps. This practice (in the trucks anyway) came to an abrupt halt after 9-11 for obvious reasons. We called them voodoo buckets around the shop, and they came from somewhere in the Pennsylvania Dutch world, but I never got a lot of info on them
In the immortal words of the great philosopher William Claude Fields: “there’s a sucker born every minute”…
The bit about lowering tire pressures to maximize the gadget’s effect is hilarious !
You mean “Dukenfield”, not Fields, and the quote is probably Barnum’s.
“Never give a sucker an even break” was one of W.C.’s movie titles.
I got a relative that uses voodoo dolls and burns sage around the house. I am not sure if that stuff does anything but she scares me.
As you mentioned, I would hesitate to fall asleep around any relative who engages in rituals like that. Worst case scenario: keep one eye open at all times!
She’s a shoo-in for the next California governor.
🤣🤣🤣 Sadly you are probably correct.
Gobbly goop at its hilarious best.
So how do I get one? lol
Well, O’Reilly‘s auto parts does have a flux capacitor listed in their parts catalog.
They also carry blinker fluid.
I had a pal Tony that raced a longhood 911. This 911 was wicked fast. He & it were “as-one” when together & basically could not be beat. That car would stand on three wheels with him at the helm, and it never missed a beat.
Being mechanical I wanted to look under the hood. He befriended me so he welcomed a Porsche expert looking his stuff over in the pits. There in the engine bay as I looked around were crystals attached in a fashion that they were directed towards components that were important. I said to Tony “hey my friend, what are these things?” as I pointed at the many crystals in the engine bay. Tony sorta got nervous and shooed me away from the engine bay as he closed the lid. No details were ever spoken past that… But now that I think about it, Tony was as into racing as you could be, and I bet he honored the great Peter Brock in his way. This detail being part of it.
It may just have been an advantage!
Well, if a driver BELIEVES they have an advantage, it can make them faster. I think that psychology has been used throughout the history of motorsports.
Ya know, crystal radios worked, and didn’t require a power source.
We’ve been using quartz to build watch movements and had “quartz-synthesized tuning” in our stereos.
Maybe there’s something to this after all…
In 1979 I worked for a company in Oklahoma City that sold a device that went in between the spark plug wires and distributor that was supposed to increase gas mileage by providing an electrical charge to the incoming fuel mixture thereby exciting the mixture for a more complete burn. It had wires that ran from each plug in to the next one almost like a string of Christmas tree lights. I couldn’t tell if it made much of a difference in performance or mileage but it seemed more viable than a lot of the other wacky stuff out there. Does anyone remember these and know what they were called? I thinks the company name was Minor Trans Incorporated.
That has the right amount of 80’s New Age mumbo jumbo and graphics to make me laugh. I’ll take two for my upcoming IROC Z.
Speaking of automotive gadgets, there used to be a company making a little box with a couple wires coming out of it that was supposed to be attached to the body metal somewhere on the car, to prevent rust. Something about sending a low level charge thru the metal, or polarizing it somehow. Funny thing is, they actually worked. The last one I saw was installed in a beat-up Ford Astro with a giant patch of sheet metal welded onto one side, no paint or primer or any other coating I could see, and even the welds weren’t rusty. No idea what they were called, however.
Something similar is used on museum ships I believe to slow down rust.
What Tim and JW described is technically sound and commonly applied in industry to protect metallic surfaces that are exposed to oxidizing (e.g., road salt, salt water) or reducing conditions by providing an electric potential (voltage) to counteract the reactions that cause the corrosion. Typical applications include cathodic protection of buried pipelines and anodes installed in wet scrubbers to protect alloys of construction from pitting corrosion caused by chloride and/or fluoride. I think it would be costly to effectively protect the various parts of a car, though.
There’s a similar thing in the audiophile world. Machina Dynamica Brilliant Pebbles are basically aquarium gravel in a baggie tied to your speaker cables. Then again we are talking about a hobby where people claim a fancy USB cable “opens up the sound stage”
A friend of mine tuned Peter Brock’s race cars when he came to Perth. He had several unsold Brock Polarizers on his shelves until some Holden collectors saw them and snapped them up. The ultimate Brock collectors’ item! He sold them for a healthy profit – Brockie won again.
If it was groundbreaking, it would have been in the Warshawsky catalogue. Harness the energy! I got a feeling that Solyndra bought the rights to the magic crystals. Good enough to get self centered Mr. Gullible himself to write a $500 million, no quibble check back in 2009. Now if only I could go back 60 years and stockpile all the huge chunks of black obsidian glass rock from grandma’s backyard that she used as edging…