Teams and drivers
The following drivers and teams competed in the 1990 Australian Touring Car Championship.
The 1990 Australian Touring Car Championship was a CAMS sanctioned Australian motor racing title open to Group 3A Touring Cars. [1] The championship, which was the 31st Australian Touring Car Championship, [2] was promoted as the Shell Ultra Australian Touring Car Championship. [3] It began on 25 February 1990 at Amaroo Park and ended on 15 July at Oran Park Raceway after eight rounds. [4]
The title was won by Jim Richards, his third Australian Touring Car Championship victory. Richards drove for Nissan Motorsport Australia, utilising both Nissan Skyline HR31 GTS-R and the new Skyline R32 GT-R during one of the most competitive seasons in the history of the championship.
The following drivers and teams competed in the 1990 Australian Touring Car Championship.
The opening three rounds of the championship continued the story of the previous two seasons with the Ford Sierra RS500's of Dick Johnson Racing teammates Dick Johnson (winner of Symmons Plains and Phillip Island) and John Bowe dominating podiums with only the tight nature of the Amaroo Park layout giving another driver a look-in, namely the Nissan Skyline of Jim Richards who held off Bowe in a race long duel to win the season's opening round. Another tight track at Winton Motor Raceway gave Richards his second victory of the year with team-mates Tony Longhurst and Alan Jones putting their Benson & Hedges Sierras ahead of the DJR pair onto the podium (the Longhurst Sierra's were generally acknowledged as most powerful of the Blue Oval's cars at some 590 bhp (440 kW; 598 PS), though the extra power usually hurt the Sierra's skinny rear tyres and as team manager Frank Gardner put it a year later, "We usually started at the front and worked our way back"). Lakeside Raceway saw a complete upset with veteran Colin Bond winning his first ATCC race since 1978 from former teammate Peter Brock in his Mobil 1 Sierra and Holden Racing Team driver Win Percy in what would prove be Holden's only podium finish of the season. Englishman Percy, a former three time British Touring Car Champion, had taken over the role of team manager and lead driver of the HRT in 1990 and was contesting his first ATCC.
Colin Bond made it two in a row at Mallala after Mark Skaife's spectacular debut of Nissan's new 640 bhp (477 kW; 649 PS), 4WD, twin turbo Skyline R32 GT-R, which was nicknamed "Godzilla", ended with a broken hub after storming to the lead in the early laps. As at Lakeside, Bond's steady, though unspectacular race pace paid off and as others fell away, his Caltex Sierra emerged in front. Peter Brock broke through for his first victory of the year at Wanneroo despite driving with falling turbo boost pressure for the last half of the race which actually helped minimise his tyre wear, while a broken axle to Johnson at Wanneroo saw his points lead surrendered to Richards who finished fourth in his first race of the new GT-R.
Ahead of the Oran Park Raceway Grand Finale, Richards held a three-point lead over two-time defending champion Johnson, with Bond and Brock still a chance being eleven and twelve points behind respectively. Bowe, winless despite his form, was too far behind even if he won and all other contenders retired. Richards, again in the GT-R, dominated Oran Park, making the points calculations irrelevant. Second place allowed Brock to slip past Johnson and Bond into the series runner's up position. After a poor start by Brock, who proved to be the only Sierra driver capable of matching Richards in the Nissan (though his fastest lap time proved to be almost 2 seconds slower than the Nissan), Richards drove away from the field. Behind Bowe, Longhurst was sixth after an inconsistent season ahead of Glenn Seton's improving Sierra. Percy was the best of the Holdens in eighth ahead of Alan Jones and Gregg Hansford who only had a partial season in Allan Moffat's Eggenberger Motorsport built Sierra.
For the first time since the ATCC changed from a single race to a series of races in 1969, the ATCC did not appear in Melbourne with neither Sandown or Calder hosting a round. The Phillip Island circuit, revived in 1989 for the Australian motorcycle Grand Prix which was a round of the 1989 Grand Prix motorcycle World Championship, held its first ATCC race since 1977.
The 1990 Australian Touring Car Championship consisted of 8 rounds with one race per round. [4] Each race was slightly under one hour in duration.
Points were awarded on a 20–15–12–10–8–6–4–3–2–1 basis for the first ten outright positions in each race. [15] The best seven race results counted for each driver's total. [15]
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Robert James Francevic is a retired racing driver who featured prominently in New Zealand and Australia during the 1970s and 1980s. His biggest wins were the inaugural Wellington 500 street race in Wellington, New Zealand in 1985 driving a Volvo 240T, and the 1986 Australian Touring Car Championship, also in a 240T. Francevic's win in the 1986 ATCC was the first and only ATCC win by a non-Australian resident.
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John Bowe is an Australian racing driver, presently racing a Holden Torana in the Touring Car Masters series.
Anthony Lawrence Longhurst is an Australian racing driver and former Australian Champion water skier. He is most noted for his career in the Australian Touring Car Championship and V8 Supercar series. Longhurst is a two-time winner of the Bathurst 1000, winning the event in 1988 with Tomas Mezera and in 2001 with Mark Skaife, and is one of only five drivers to win Bathurst in both a Ford and a Holden.
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Gibson Motorsport was an Australian motor racing team that competed in the Australian Touring Car Championship from 1985 until 2003, though the team had its roots in Gibson's "Road & Track" team which ran a series of Ford Falcon GTHOs in Series Production during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The name of the team was also the name of Fred Gibson's automotive business in Sydney. As Gibson was also a driver for the Ford Works Team, his team was sometimes a pseudo-works team when the Ford factory did not enter.
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George Fury is a retired Australian rally and racing car driver. For the majority of his career Fury was associated with Nissan, twice winning the Australian Rally Championship, and twice runner up in the Australian Touring Car Championship. Fury, a farmer living and working in the New South Wales country town of Talmalmo, was nicknamed "Farmer George" or "The Talmalmo Farmer".
The 1985 Australian Touring Car Championship was a CAMS sanctioned motor racing title for drivers of Touring Cars. It was the 26th running of the Australian Touring Car Championship and the first to be contested using regulations based on the FIA's International Group A regulations after having been run under CAMS home grown Group C rules between 1973 and 1984. The championship began on 10 February 1985 at Winton Motor Raceway and ended on 14 July at Oran Park Raceway after ten rounds.
The 1990 Australian Touring Car season was the 31st year of touring car racing in Australia since the first runnings of the Australian Touring Car Championship and the fore-runner of the present day Bathurst 1000, the Armstrong 500.
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