You’d be foolish to think Holden would let its rear-wheel drive Commodore go silently into the night. A project to send the Holden VF Commodore Series II is very much alive and well, but it won’t wear the ‘Bathurst’ name as once reported.
Wheels reports the name has been shelved after Holden withdrew its application to trademark the name, paying homage to the iconic Aussie motorsport the Commodore has long been a part of.
The Holden Commodore “Bathurst” was to be an even more performance oriented sendoff edition than its SSV Redline brethren. The project will live, but another name will be attached to it.

Holden VK HDT Commodore Director
Holden will also revive the “Director” nameplate, which caused quite a stir of mixed feelings. Expect a reborn Director to be Calais based, catering to the luxurious side of Commodore. The Director name was seen on the last VK and VL Commodores with the legendary Peter Brock’s blessing through HDT Special Vehicles.
On the Holden Special Vehicle side of things, rumors continue to swirl over a 6.2-liter supercharged LS9 V8 powered Commodore, likely to revive the coveted GTS-R badge.

Rendering courtesy of Trailing Throttle.
Any of these Commodores built to pay respect to the nameplate’s long history will certainly be in short supply, and high demand when they likely start to roll out this coming fall.
Comments
Have a correction to make.
Peter Brock didn’t simply ‘give his blessing’ for the Directors to be built by HDT Special Vehicles. He owned HDT at the time. Also HDT simply as ‘HDT’ or ‘Holden Dealer Team’ usually refers to the racing team which started up in 1969 under the management of Harry Firth and was a back-door factory operation. Harry retired at the end of 1977 at which time John Sheppard took over for 1978 and 1979, when HDT and Holden both announced they would be giving motorsport away. This was until Peter Brock stepped in and bought the team from Sheppo, and it was then in late 1979 after that deal was made, that Vin Keane and a few other dealers that were backing the reformed HDT, came up with the idea of the ‘Peter Brock Special Commodores’, and then HDT Special Vehicles was formed. This was kept as a separate entity to the racing team, which is why it should be referred to as ‘HDT Special Vehicles’ and not simply ‘HDT’ or ‘Holden Dealer Team’. Even when they were in the same facility in Bertie Street, they were two separate operations (as you would expect from a team of professionals, even in 1980’s Australian Motorsport), each with their own dedicated teams of workers, except for a few key people such as John Harvey (who would later work at Tom Walkinshaw’s Holden Special Vehicles) and Peter and Beverley Brock, as well as possibly Larry Perkins (who later won three Bathursts with his own team, but he frankly should’ve won one or two others during this time) and Allan Moffat (ex-Ford Australia works driver and would later go back to racing Fords, even though his time in Europe with a Commodore was pretty successful for a low budget team – he and Harvey won the 1987 WTCC Spa 24 hour race after the preceding BMWs were all deemed illegal, something which was common with European teams at the time, especially the BMW and Ford Sierra Cosworth runners – the latter of which would get the modifications made legal for 1988 in the form of the RS500 and which is what gave PB his last Bathurst 1000 win in 1987) during each of their times at HDT.
Aaron,
Thank you very much for the insight. I stand corrected in the humblest of ways.
Cheers,
-Sean
As a marketing man I hope that GM respects the historical significance of these names and uses them respectfully.
Failure to do so could end in a marketing disaster, but done well could be interesting.