AMSCAR: the Group A years

Amaroo Park’s AMSCAR Series was a made-for-television tin-top competition supplementary to the main touring car championship - although sometimes the racing was more exciting than the actual ATCC. Here we revisit the ‘Amaroo Super Cars’ Series’ Group A era.

Story: Steve Normoyle

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The 1980 CRC 300 was a ground-breaking event, on two levels. For one, it was the race in which Dick Johnson properly emerged as a serious outright touring car contender. The then-privateer fronted at Amaroo Park with a brand-new XD Falcon and proceeded to make Peter Brock’s HDT Commodore VB look second-best until the big blue Ford cooked its tyres. This race, a couple of months before the 1980 Hardie-Ferodo 1000 and the rock incident, was a clear sign of what was to come from the Queenslander.

The other ground-breaking aspect of the 1980 CRC 300 was that it proved that a touring car endurance race around the tight, twisty little Sydney circuit was actually feasible.

Amaroo’s mid-year pre-Bathurst enduro would continue through most the rest of the decade, doubling as the final round of the AMSCAR Series. Likewise when Amaroo hosted ATCC rounds (as it did in ’85 and ’86, and then from ’89 onwards) the championship race almost always counted as an AMSCAR round. That meant that for some seasons late in that decade, there were only two sprint AMSCAR rounds.