On facebook there was a post in an Old Falcons Appreciation of a photograph and and advert for the replacement Falcon which Dick Johnson drove at the 1983 Bathurst 1000.
It looks like it is an advert from an old edition of Auto Action or similar and act the time they were looking for $32,000 for it. Here's the weird thing. This car in that advert, appears in no such livery that the car ever raced in. My guess is that the black and white advert shows a car in green, trying to match the colours that it wore for Bathurst 1983 but that repainting it would have been too hard a job. In the advert, this car looks like it is ready for a restoration to 1983 spec and the colour scheme that it wore; but this will still require the prospective buyer to somehow procure the necessary stickers. This job is far far easier in 2023 than it would have been in 1983.
This car started out as an white Falcon which was built by George Shepard for Bob Morris Motor Sport. George Shepard had previously built the Holden Dealer Team rally Geminis as well as the Country Dealer Team's Bathurst Gemini ZZ/R. It was campaigned in the 1982 Oran Park 300 by Bob Morris and F1 Champion Alan Jones.
Group C regulations called for improved production cars; with some of the interior trim still intact. I think that a white car was selected off the production line so that future liveries could be applied to it. Since a racing car is a 300km/h billboard, then it is good to start with a blank space upon which the propaganda for the companies can be written. An all-white Falcon is likely the same trim level that they would have given to taxi fleets at the time as picking one of them off the production line, would have been an easy job.
By the time that this Falcon has got to Bathurst 1982, it had acquired a blue bonnet and roof. The car however, would not start the 1982 Bathurst 1000, as during the Saturday Afternoon's final practice session, John Fitzpatrick clipped the embankment going through the right-hander before the drop into Forrest's Elbow, which tore the steering out and the car crashed into the earth bank. The damage was so bad that the car was withdrawn from the race.
Although I can not prove it, this car might share something with the car that it replaced and that it eventually would become. As this Morris/Fitzpatrick Falcon was sponsored by Channel 7, it carried a relatively brand new Racecam unit. As far as I can tell, the Dick Johnson Tru-Blu Falcon of 1982, did not have a Racecam unit installed on the Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. Mysteriously though, the car raced on Sunday with a Racecam unit. My suspicion, given that there were so very few Racecam units in existence, is that the same camera which was in the Morris Falcon on Saturday went into the Johnson Falcon for the race on Sunday.
For 1983, the car was then bought by Andrew Harris and acquired sponsorship from Channel 9 Bendigo. The only racing that it saw during 1983 was the Mallala round of the Australian Touring Car Championship (Mallala in South Australia being the easiest to get to from the base in Bendigo) and in that race it came 9th in a field of 15. It competed in the Sandown 400 that year but went around so slowly that it didn't complete enough laps to be classified as a finisher.
The most famous outing for this Falcon was on the Sunday of the Bathurst 1000 in 1983. After Dick Johnson crashed his own Falcon into a tree during Hardie's Heroes, this car was then repainted to match the Greens-Tuf livery that Johnson had been running and Andrew Harris and Gary Cooke took over the Barry Lawrence and Geoff Russell Commodore (they were left without a drive).
The thing that amazes me about this most, is that the spray and sign-writing team sprayed not one but two cars to race the rext day and as this was 1983, there weren't that many stickers that could be shipped in at a moment's notice. The Channel 7 Colour Ring on Dick Johnson's green car, was painted and mixed by hand. Today, the whole job would have been done by a plastic printer and wrap team. Only the Channel 7 Colour Rings of the side of the car have been painted. The roundels on the bonnet and the roof remain just as pure white. The colour rings look wrong and the number 17 looks strange but given the monumental task that they were given to have a car resprayed and rebuilt in one night, that's amazing.
Dick Johnson's team ported across everything that might have been salvageable from Kermit No.1 which had crashed, to Kermit No.2 to be raced on Sunday. Unfortunately, the car failed yet again and not even Captain Invincible from the Ford Factory himself, could not solve the cars woes. To have turned the car around at all is arguably one of the greatest performances ever seen at Bathurst; this was at a time after Ford had officially pulled out of motor racing and had lost interest. Dick Johnson was (and could in theory still be) running as a privateer.
The untold story in these pictures is the giant killing performance of Andrew Harris and Gary Cooke on Sunday. They didn't even get to drive their ex-Lawrence/Russell Commodore on the Saturday as it was being sprayed first. They took the newly turned out Channel 9 Bendigo Commodore to an amazing tenth place. A fun fact about that car is that the local Ford dealership in Bathurst supplied them with 5.8 badges from the Falcon; which makes this (as badged) the only 5.8L Cleveland V8 Commodore ever.
For 1984 Andrew Harris would drive for Warren Cullen; so the Falcon was onsold to a company called Freedom Fence; where it was driven by Paul Jones and Peter Hopwood. It was then resprayed white again.
What I find extraordinary is that even in the 1984 iteration of this car, the Recaro seats which are fitted have remained for the entire of the three years that it was a racecar. Evidently nobody thought to remove them because it wasn't necessary. It isn't immediately obvious but if you look closely, on both occasions that the car was green on the outside, it still remained white inside.
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This advert which claims that this is "Australia's most historical 'Group C' racer, in full race trim", doesn't supply this car's race record in the race which it was purpose built for. That record is: Did Not Start, Did Not Finish, Did Not Finish. I do not think that it covered 1000km in its competitive life. I do not know what "most historical" is supposed to mean. The most successful racecars in Australia are the Brock/Perkins car of 1982/1983 which won the race twice but with different numbers, after it became the backup car for 1983. It shares this accolade with Shane Van Gisbergen's dual Bathurst winning Commodore - chassis 888A-054 which won in 2020 and 2022. Nor is this Australia's most famous 'Group C' racer. That either goes to Moffat and Bond's 1-2 winning Falcons of 1977 or Brock and Harvey's 1-2 winning Commodores of 1984; or maybe even the car which Kermit No.2 replaced, which got wrapped around some trees.
I will say that the story of this particular Falcon, which is ultimately a story of failures, is the most famous failure in Australian motor racing history. I have no idea where it is now or even if it exists. As it neither won anything, nor even finished the race for which it was intended, I do not think that its fame would have survived all that long.
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