Tru-Blu 2 has been listed for sale on Lloyds Auctions with a starting bid of $60,000.
The car made its first appearance at a Dick Johnson Racing ride day at Lakeside Park in 2020 but only made one competitive appearance that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, the Ford XD Falcon has won three Touring Car Masters races under the Team Johnson umbrella.
Tru-Blu 2 pays homage to Dick Johnson’s iconic Bathurst 1000 machine that famously hit a rock at the 1980 Great Race. Dick Johnson and John French won the Bathurst 1000 a year later.
“There are not many names more famous than Johnson in Australian motorsport, and the beloved icon of the Tru-Blu Falcon XD from the 1980s was going to be emulated some 40 years later,” the auction listing reads.
“The objective of the build was to transform the provided shell into a racecar with the same performance characteristic of all of the PACE Innovations-produced cars that had come before it.”
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In 2021, the Tru-Blu tribute met the original at the National Motor Racing Museum. At the time, Steven Johnson labelled the meeting emotional.
“It shows the history and to have two cars together that look so similar, even though they are two eras and two different sets of rules – and different sponsors – is incredible,” Johnson said in 2021.
“Our sponsors have been fantastic in that for a lot of them, their logos are not their style – but they’ve allowed that to happen so it looks very similar to the 1980, 1981 car.
“To look at both of them together is just magnificent.
“Tru-Blu was such a significant car in the history of my family and I remember it being in our garage at Daisy Hill when I was a kid, with Dad working on it.
“It’s really special to get them together like this, 40 years on from that Bathurst moment that was really significant to our family.”
The Tru-Blu tribute was eventually parked over sponsorship funding issues and is now for sale.
The same auction also features the sale of the Q17 number plate, which has already fetched an $86,000 bid by Thursday morning.
The Lloyds classic car auction closes Saturday, October 26 from 12pm during the Gold Coast 500.
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