Organised by the Victorian Light Car Club, the race used Phillip Island's public road circuit, which measured 6.463 miles per lap and wound through the roads around Cowes on the island's undulating coastal terrain. The surface was fast, dusty, and demanding. The circuit ran in a roughly rectangular pattern with long straights and right-angle corners, and the open nature of the roads meant competitors experienced variable grip and intermittent dust clouds raised by preceding cars.
The event followed the format established the previous year: competitors were divided into displacement classes — Class A, B, C, and D — with a staggered start procedure releasing lighter-engined cars first to give them a head start over the larger machinery. The overall winner was the quickest finisher across all classes rather than the winner of a single class.
Arthur Terdich, competing in a Bugatti Type 37A supercharged voiturette, won the race outright. The Bugatti Type 37A was among the most competitive light racing cars of the era, with its supercharged 1.5-litre four-cylinder engine well suited to the medium-length circuit. Terdich had previously demonstrated his talent in Australian light-car competition and his Bugatti proved the class of the field over the race distance.
Among the notable competitors was Bill Lowe, a Melbourne engineer and industrialist, who drove a Lombard AL3 to third place alongside co-driver John Cleaver. The AL3 was an ultra-rare French voiturette built by Andre Lombard at his Billancourt factory — a 1.1-litre twin-cam supercharged machine of which only a handful were produced. Lowe had raced a Metallurgique in the inaugural 1928 Australian Grand Prix and sought more competitive equipment for 1929; he acquired the Lombard and also secured an agency for the marque in Australia, even though Lombard's firm was already in financial difficulty. The Lombard AL3 chassis 334, which finished third, remained in Melbourne ownership throughout its life, passing through several hands including Bill Leech — who raced it in historic events — before the Murdoch family purchased it at auction in 2002.
Immediately behind Lowe and Cleaver in fifth was John Bernadou's Bugatti Type 23. Ernest King entered a 2-litre TH. Schneider 25SP but failed to finish, losing a wheel on lap 17 of the race.
The 1929 result continued the early dominance of Bugatti machinery in Australian Grand Prix competition. Terdich's victory in the Type 37A established him as one of the leading figures of Australian pre-war road racing; he would return to contest later editions of the event. The Lombard AL3's podium finish was notable as one of the rare international appearances of the marque outside Europe. The Phillip Island road course remained the home of the Australian Grand Prix through the 1930s, and the lap record set at the venue — 4 minutes 49.4 seconds at 80.397 mph, established by Bill Thompson in a Bugatti T37A during the 1932 running — illustrated the circuit's capacity for high speeds despite its rudimentary character as a closed public road.
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