1984 Champ, DJR's XE +Video

With the Bathurst 1000 set to take place this coming weekend we thought we’d wind the clock back 30 years and look at a few of the top cars on the grid in 1984. Here is Dick Johnson’s Palmer Tube Mills XE.

After Dick Johnson’s first Group C XE Falcon was obliterated in the Top Ten Shootout of 1983, and a replacement quickly thrown together overnight to start the race, Dick and his development engineer George Shepherd built a brand new car for the final year of Australian Group C Touring Car Racing in 1984.

Construction of the race car started back at the Ford factory, with the shell given extra spot welds, and some unnecessary brackets along with the sound deadening were left off. This was unusual for a privateer team because many Group C cars were ex-fleet vehicles, often police cars. Once the car arrived in Queensland wearing primer it was given a specially-designed lightweight alloy cage that stiffened the shell considerably, as well as a reconfigured rear suspension and a 9in diff.

Johnson and Shepherd did a substantial amount of testing and development; roughly 70% of the laps that the car did were not in racing but in testing. This certainly paid off because the car handled significantly better than its predecessor, and took advantage of some extra rule freedoms the cars were granted for 1984 like a 35hp increase from an intake manifold and more grip from wider rear tyres.

Johnson finished on the podium of every round in the 1984 Australian Touring Car Championship, including winning Round 4 at Surfer’s Paradise Raceway as seen in the vid above. This impressive consistency saw him win that championship; his third of what would become a career total of five ATCC driver’s titles.

The ATCC was all over by mid-year with the final round on July 1st, and then the Group C cars were put into endurance mode with larger fuel tanks and other subtle changes to suit the longer events of the 1984 Australian Endurance Championship. Johnson didn’t enter the Amaroo 300 but he did enter the rest of the series. At Round 2 of the Endurance Championship, the Oran Park 250, Johnson finished second, but unfortunately a gearbox failed during the Sandown 500.

Johnson returned to Bathurst in 1984 determined to do well. He put the car on the second row of the grid with a swift and tidy lap in the Top Ten Shootout and then he, and co-driver John French with whom he’d won the 1981 race, were taking and handing back the lead to the Brock and Perkins 05 Commodore in the early pit stops. Unfortunately, the car had a fuel pick-up issue and then the final blow came later when the extra grip they’d found in the rear brought to light another weakness in the driveline with a uni joint failure.

The car’s final event was the Surfers Paradise 300 where it broke two gearboxes. After that Johnson stored and displayed the car over the following two decades, not even starting the motor during that time. It was then sold to David Bowden in 2006, along with other DJR cars, on the proviso that they’d all still return to the DJR facility on a rotating basis.

The car was given a “birthday” before its first return to DJR’s display area in 2009, which wasn’t a restoration but a instead a very thorough mechanical servicing to get everything functioning normally again. The car has since been brought out to run demonstration laps on the Gold Coast and at Bathurst, where once again crowds were able to hear the glorious exhaust note of a big V8 with a dual-plane crankshaft and fat side pipes, and to enjoy the sight of a very tough-looking car that won the 1984 ATCC by a convincing margin.

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