In 1987 Skaife won the Australian 2.0 Litre Touring Car Championship in a Gibson Motorsport prepared Nissan Gazelle, before finishing 19th on Bathurst 1000 debut in same car (co-driven by Grant Jarret). The Bathurst result was somewhat controversial due to some alleged cheating during final qualifying. In 1987 Bathurst had become a round of the inaugural World Touring Car Championship and under the FIA's rules, all drivers had to qualify within 110% of the fastest time in their class and within 130% of the fastest overall time. Due to the different class structure of the WTCC compared to the ATCC, the Gazelle was in Class 2 against the BMW M3 and Alfa Romeo 75 (instead of against the 1.6 L Toyota Corolla's) and during Friday qualifying Jarret had been struggling to post the required time and it looked like the car would be a non-qualifier. After struggling for speed, during the morning session Jarret suddenly found the pace required and managed to easily qualify for the race. However, it was alleged that it had actually been Skaife, dressed in Jarret's race suit and wearing his helmet, who had actually set the time with some pointing to the fact that Skaife was nowhere to be seen in the pits when Jarret allegedly set his qualifying time (after returning to the pits the car was driven straight into the Nissan team garage in the pit paddock with the door immediately closed which only fueled the speculation). Nissan team boss Fred Gibson refuted these claims at the time but years later admitted that Skaife had indeed qualified the car as Jarret. Ironically Jarret's fastest race lap in the Gazelle (2:38.71) was actually faster than the qualifying time Skaife had set posing as Jarret (2:38.94).