It’s 50 years since one of the most iconic and highly sought-after Australian-built cars dominated at Bathurst. Allan Moffat’s Ford XY Falcon GT-HO Phase III crushed the opposition at the Mount Panorama Circuit in 1971, making a legend of the car and driver, as we reflect back on in SupercarXtra Magazine issue #123.

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Fifty years ago, the Ford XY Falcon GT-HO Phase III was breaking records on the race track. Today, it’s breaking records off the track. In February 2021, a fully restored 1971 Phase III set an auction record for an Australian-built road car when it sold for $1.15 million.

The Phase III is one of the most iconic Australian cars of all-time, a road car built primarily for success on the race track that made Allan Moffat a household name and put Ford at the forefront of the Australian automotive market.
Ford gambled on going its own way with an Australian designed and built Falcon heading into the 1970s, to not only counter the threat of Holden’s Monaro but also to differentiate from the American-built Mustang.

The brainchild of Al Turner, with the backing of Bill Bourke, there were only 300 Phase IIIs made. Success at Bathurst was the focal point for Ford as the battle between the Blue Oval and rivals Chrysler and Holden intensified.

The Phase III may have looked just like the Falcon GT version it was based on, but it featured an upgraded engine, improved four-speed top-loader gearbox, a nine-inch differential, a larger fuel tank and race-ready brakes.

With an engine output in excess of 350 bhp, producing more than 7000 rpm, it was generally considered to be the fastest four-door production car in the world.

There were 13 GT-HOs in the field for the 1971 Bathurst 500, including the factory-backed entries of Moffat and John French and privateer entries for the likes of David McKay, John Goss, Kevin Bartlett, Murray Carter and Bob Morris.

The challengers were the recently developed Chrysler VH Valiant Charger R/T E38 and Holden’s nimble XU-1 Torana, with works teams from Toyota, Datsun, Mazda, Chrysler, Ford and General Motors highlighting the growing status of the race.

Moffat stamped his authority on the event with a crushing time in the opening practice session that was more than 13 seconds under the lap record from 1969, with that level of performance continuing throughout the race meeting.

The Phase III filled the top seven places on the grid with Moffat three seconds clear of the rest on pole position and the first non-Ford, the Charger of Leo Geoghegan, almost seven seconds off the time set by the polesitter. The Holden Dealer Team Toranas of Peter Brock and Colin Bond were a distant 11th and 15th respectively.

Moffat raced away from the start. His only threat was a stray beer carton that lodged itself on his GT-HO’s radiator grille, as a result of windy conditions on race day. The Ford team signalled to Moffat to pit so they could remove the debris, but Moffat drove on with a close eye on the car’s heating.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for the other Falcons. Bill Brown survived one of the most spectacular crashes in Bathurst history when a tyre blew on his Phase III at McPhillamy Park.

The Falcon rolled several times along the guard rail, which cut into the Falcon with the roll bar saving Brown’s life. He suffered bruising, cuts and a concussion, but it could’ve been so much worse.

Moffat took the chequered flag to claim his second consecutive Bathurst win, with a new race-time record and the first average speed in excess of 130km/h. Phase IIIs completed the podium with Phil Barnes/Bob Skelton in second and McKay in third. Bond was best of the rest in fourth with the Chrysler challenge never materialising with the top Charger in seventh place.

The biggest concern for the Phase III at Bathurst was whether its brakes would survive the race distance. But new pads developed by Bill Collins were so good that the leading Phase IIIs went the distance without a change of pads, for the first time for the winner of the event.

The stunning performance of the Phase III is best illustrated when comparing the times set by Moffat in the XW Falcon GT-HO Phase II in 1970. The pole time from 1971 was almost 10 seconds quicker than 1970, while Moffat’s race time was lowered by 33 minutes. He called the Phase III “one of the best cars in the world,” comparable to GT cars of the time.

Moffat drove the Phase III to Australian Touring Car Championship title success in 1973, the first championship run to the locally-derived Group C regulations.

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After the heartbreak of crashing out of the lead following a tangle with a rock at Bathurst in 1980, Dick Johnson and his eponymous team fought back to win the championship and Great Race double in 1981. Forty years on, we reflect on one of the greatest comebacks in Australian touring-car history in SupercarXtra Magazine issue #123.

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When the dejected Johnson appeared on Channel Seven’s coverage of the 1980 Bathurst 1000 after crashing out from the lead of the race due to a rock on track, the Queenslander questioned whether he would be back at Mount Panorama having “had a gutful of the whole bloody operation.”

The then 35-year-old had already made a name for himself in Australian touring-car circles before he shot to fame as a result of his misfortune at Bathurst in 1980. Johnson made semi-regular championship and Bathurst appearances in the 1970s, initially in privateer Holden Toranas and then with Ford outfit Bryan Byrt Racing.

Following Byrt’s death and the demise of the team, Johnson had two choices: giving up on racing and focusing on his day job running a Shell service station, or setting up his own racing outfit. Johnson bought the car and equipment off Bryan Byrt Racing and formed what became known as Dick Johnson Racing (DJR).

“There’s a chance if we can do this right we can win a few races, so we stuck everything we had into the race car and it went from there,” said Johnson.

It would prove to be worth the risk when he qualified on the front row and led the early stages of the biggest race of the year at Bathurst in 1980.

The unfancied Johnson and co-driver John French were controlling proceedings at Bathurst in an impressive run for the new outfit when Johnson encountered a football-sized rock heading up Mount Panorama on lap 17.

“I just couldn’t believe my bloody eyes with these galoots up there that just throw boulders; that was enormous,” he said post-race.

“This was our big shot; we had sunk every bob into this. With our car the way it was, it was more than capable of winning the race – and doing it easily!” But rather than being a crushing blow, the incident led to an outpouring of support.

As Johnson later admitted, winning Bathurst that year would not have given him the amount of exposure that he received following the crash. “At the time, it was the worst thing, but it turned out to be the best thing,” he said.

More than $70,000 was donated by the public and Ford Australia to get him back on track for the following season, with Edsel Ford matching the public donations. Johnson built a new Falcon XD and won his first championship race at the 1981 season opener at Symmons Plains. He went on to win the championship over Peter Brock following a thrilling finale on home soil at Lakeside.

“We’d put an awful lot on the line to get to there and it seemed like it was going to be the end, but because of one of the callers to Channel Seven (who launched a fundraising appeal), what happened saved us,” reflected Johnson.

“Seven’s switchboard was absolutely jam-packed with people ringing in to donate money to get us back on track, and one of the callers was Edsel B Ford II (Ford Motor Company heir and then assistant managing director of Ford Australia).

“Edsel said that for every dollar donated he would match it one-for-one – and he did. He may have thought it was only going to be four or five grand, but 78 grand later, he’d given us a pretty good budget to do the full season the following year, which I needed really bad. In a sense, that put an awful lot of pressure on me.

“I’m not one to let people down, so it made me, not try harder, but it made it more important for me to get out there and make sure I did the best job for all the people who supported us.

“That was a lot of money in 1980. But we never really did it easy because there was only the two of us. It was (Dick’s brother) Roy and I. We were building the car together, and I was building the engines and gearboxes.

“Roy and I used to drive the truck everywhere and we’d live in the truck. We didn’t have the budget to stay in motels. There were some interesting times.

“It was an absolute blinder of a championship because it was one that came down to the last race between Brock and myself and there was only one point in it. It was a race around Lakeside, and we were wheel-to-wheel for the entire duration of the event.”

Brock would later describe the win as a “turning point” in Johnson’s life, giving him the self-belief and confidence as the Blue Oval’s new leader. Following on from that championship success, Johnson returned to Bathurst to make amends for the heartbreak that had occurred 364 days before.

Johnson again qualified in second place and overcame the challenge of Brock and Kevin Bartlett, leading on lap 121 when a multi-car pile-up ended the race early. Despite engine concerns and the uncertainty around the race stoppage, Johnson and co-driver French were awarded the win, completing the remarkable comeback.

“You wouldn’t believe the feeling of relief after we won, firstly the championship and then Bathurst; it was a fitting climax to an incredible 12-month journey,” said Johnson.

“There’s a lot from 1980 that attributes to the win in 1981. Fortunately, I won, which meant it was the first championship, and then to go to Bathurst that year was really something special.

“We had a really good, strong car; we had a good combination in Frenchy and myself; and the car was really strong leading the race quite easily.

“It just so happened that we did everything right during the day, and I think it was about lap 121 where there was a big shunt on top of the Mountain, and it was between Bob Morris and Christine Gibson, and that sort of blocked the track a fair bit because a lot of cars came around unaware of what was in front of them and completely blocked the track.

“So they red flagged the race and because the race had done more than 75 percent, they declared us the winners.

“They went back a lap and actually Bob Morris, who was second at the time, ended up coming second even though his car had crashed, so that’s obviously what the rules were all about.

“It was a hell of a relief for me because all those people had really stuck their faith behind us back in 1980, and to come back the following year and not only win the championship but win the race (Bathurst), which was pretty cruel to us the year before, was special.”

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The Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R arrived in Australia from Japan in 1990 with the nickname of ‘Godzilla’. By the time Gibson Motorsport literally turned the car upside down over the next 12 months, they’d created perhaps the greatest touring car in the world. We caught up with Mark Skaife and Jim Richards 30 years on from their comprehensive 1991 Bathurst 1000 win, where they qualified 1.2 seconds ahead of their nearest rival and won the race by a lap at record pace, in SupercarXtra Magazine issue #123.

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Five-time Australian Touring Car Championship winner Skaife openly admits that the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R “polarised people”, but for Nissan fans that supported Fred Gibson and George Fury with the Bluebird in the early 1980s through to the arrival of the Skyline RS DR30 in the mid-80s and finally the R32 GT-R, it was the hero car they’d been waiting for.

“It’s easy to be disparaging of what was the most advanced touring car in the world of the day,” says Skaife. “But it really changed the face of Australian racing where we actually saw a regulation change; the car was effectively banned! The series changed at the end of 1992, and basically we went to what we’ve got today.”

Skaife took the first of his six Bathurst 1000 wins in 1991 in the GT-R and says he remembers it like it was yesterday.

“It was a pretty powerful time in a young racing driver’s life when you win your first Bathurst, especially winning it with Jim Richards and Fred Gibson’s team,” reflects Skaife.

“So many of the people were almost like family members. It was essentially a complete Japanese-spec car when it arrived in 1990. And by the time we got to the end of the year in 1991, it had become an Australian-ised Nissan GT-R, which was not only faster but certainly more reliable and durable.”

Four-time Australian Touring Car Championship winner Richards says after his 1990 and 1991 championship successes, they knew the GT-Rs would be fast for the 1991 Bathurst 1000.

“The main thing I remember was that we knew if the car didn’t have a mechanical failure at all, then we could probably win it,” says Richards.

“Basically, it was a trouble-free run for us; everything went really well and it was a great moment for Nissan… reliability wasn’t a problem because we weren’t running a lot of boost.

“The car had four-wheel drive, so although the Sierras could keep up for four or five laps, we could pull away after their tyres got a bit worn because we had four wheels doing the driving and they had two wheels doing the driving.

“So we were never really worried about them, to be honest. We knew if we drove it fast that there was no car out there in the race that could actually beat us.”

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The 2011 Supercars season saw Jamie Whincup return to the top after narrowly missing out on the title the previous year; significant changes for foundation teams; a rookie winner at Bathurst; and one of the most spectacular crashes in the history of the category.

With a chapter extract from Supercars: The Holden VS Ford Era 1993-2020 (Gelding Street Press, $39.99), edited by Luke West and available now where all good books are sold, SupercarXtra Magazine issue #123 reflects back on the season.

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For the second consecutive year the driver who had won the title in a Ford would be defending it in a Holden. No one could blame 2010 champion James Courtney for disembarking the Dick Johnson Racing (DJR) ship for 2011. DJR appeared to be sinking under the weight of financial dramas and difficulties between Dick Johnson and Charlie Schwerkolt, and it was a small wonder the team actually made it to season’s end, let alone bagging the championship.

A lucrative offer from the Holden Racing Team (HRT) would have looked fairly irresistible to Courtney and long-time manager Alan Gow. The deal was done. Courtney had had an offer from Schwerkolt to join him in a Ford Performance Racing-run Falcon, with backing from Pepsi, but HRT’s offer proved too tempting. Courtney would be the replacement for Will Davison as HRT pushed on into 2011 in the wake of the death of owner Tom Walkinshaw a few weeks before Christmas.

It shaped up as a pivotal year for the HRT. The flagship Red Lion squad clearly was not the Holden team that had done the bulk of the winning in 2010. If this trend continued, Holden’s motorsport flagbearer was in danger of losing its lustre and becoming just another Commodore team.

The late Walkinshaw’s 23-year-old son, Ryan, arrived in Australia to assure everyone he was determined to restore his late father’s team to its former glory. 

The main story of Bathurst 2011 was debutant Percat, who won the biggest race on the calendar – the biggest racing prize he’ll likely ever win – in his role as co-driver to Tander. It wasn’t a blemish-free performance by any means as he survived tagging the wall during his second stint. The racing gods that haunt Mount Panorama, usually so eager to teach errant newcomers harsh lessons, were smiling on the young South Australian that day, the #2 HRT Commodore emerging without damage from the incident. 

Percat’s brush with the wall likely took the edge off the car’s performance and left Tander vulnerable to Lowndes during the sprint to the flag after the final safety car period, but the HRT team leader drew on all his experience to hold off car #888 by 0.3 seconds to claim his third Bathurst victory. Percat, meantime, became the first rookie to win the Great Race since Jacky Ickx in 1977. 

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