The 2023 Tatts Finke Desert Race features a factory-backed Ford Australia entry in the form of its Baja 1000-winning Ranger Raptor yet, 30 years ago, a lesser-known exploit wearing a blue oval made a cameo with a star driver – and a crazy finish…
Among the dust that will settle, cake and crumb off this year’s four-wheel drive dual-cab Ford entry is a tribute to the legendary effort of one of Australia’s greats – an XG Falcon ute of one Dick Johnson.
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Between his 1989 and 1994 Bathurst wins, the now Shell V-Power Racing Team figurehead ran two Finke Desert races. The first saw the Queenslander in an F-150 in 1991, and the second in the legendary local hay hauler, which had just been given an update to move from the XF to new ‘XG’ designation. Of the two, only one would make the finish line.
“Peter Gillitzer [then Ford Australia motorsport boss] organised it, and Barney as we used to call him – Peter Barnes [Johnson’s Finke co-driver] – he did a bit of work on it. He put in other shocks in and raised it up a bit and things like that,” said Johnson. “Other than that, it was stock.”
The three-time Bathurst 1000 winner admits that they didn’t know what they were in for ahead of that 1993 event with the switch from the F-150 to smaller, lower ground clearance of the Falcon. Yet they took a measured approach which, impressively, saw them home in a stunning sixth outright for a class win, shrugging off the F-150’s DNF from two years earlier.
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“You don’t drive it as if it’s a qualifying lap because there’s so many things can go wrong. We never ever did any recces or anything like that so we really had no idea of what it was like. But at the end of the day, it was very, very enjoyable, one of the most enjoyable fun things I’ve done.”
It wasn’t easy, though, as the Finke Desert Race never is.
“The only drama we had with it was because of the air cleaner, the way it’s situated, that the air would come in it through the top of the filter, if you know what I mean.
“It used to fill the filter bloody filter up with dust and so every now and again we’ve just kept going slower and slower. So we’d have to stop get out, pull filter out, belt all the shit out of it, put it back and keep going again!”
This year’s Ford entry, driven by Brad Lovell, is a 3.0-litre twin-turbo V6 with 294kW/583Nm, compared to the 1993 XG Falcon ute’s 4.0-litre inline six with stats of 148kW/348Nm (although considerably lighter than the Raptor).
“These guys don’t know how lucky that have it, doing it in a Raptor!” Johnson laughs.
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As a tribute to that 1993 effort, the driver’s side rear door of the Ranger has a graphic of the silhouette of the bullbar-festooned Falcon ute with the number 17 and the slogan ‘Drive like Dick’.
“It was something that we wanted to honour,” said Program Manager, Justin Capicchiano. “He’s [Johnson’s] been everywhere in Australian motorsport, he means a lot to the Ford brand, and to put a little Easter egg on the side of it to commemorate the 30 years it’s been since Dick went to Finke is really important for us.”
While Johnson and Barnes had a blast, and Ford a PR win which it hopes to top at this weekend’s Finke, there was one, final blunder that left the Falcon with a battle scar to sign off from its competition service.
“Mate, that was in the last bloody corner coming into the finish in Alice Springs,” says Johnson. “Being a bit of a lair, and I clipped a bit of the fencing on the way into the finish – right at the end, the last 100, 200 metres just when they had people there to make me look like a goose!”
The Ranger Raptor set impressive pace during Saturday’s Finke Prologue before Brad and son/navigator Byam Lovell completed the opening leg down to Aputula (Finke) in a time of 3:05:11.457s, almost an hour faster than the other surviving Production 4WD entry.
The return leg starts this morning at 07:15 local time/07:45 AEST, with the Campbellfield-entered #773 machine due to depart at 09:05 local time.
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