Richo's Jekyll and Hyde BMW

Pete Sturgeon is the proud custodian of two very special historic BMW touring cars.
The New Zealander owns the Johnny Cecotto/Gianfranco Brancatelli BMW M3 from the 1987 Bathurst 1000 and the JPS BMW 635 CSi raced in 1985 by Neville Crichton. Each is an excellently presented example of a fine BMW Group A model.
Or rather was, because the 1985 Crichton 635 Group A car has just undergone an exercise in time-travel that’s seen it revert to its original 1983/84 guise as a Group C machine.
At this point the question might be asked: why go to the trouble of taking a historic Group A JPS BMW 635 CSi back to Group C specs? It’s not as though the Group C version was an outstanding success over the model’s three-and-a-half-seasons. The best results achieved by Group C 635s were fifth at Bathurst in ’82 and fifth in both the ’84 Australian Touring Car Championship and the Australian Endurance Championship.
Rather, it was in the Group A era, not Group C, where the 635 CSi starred, both here and internationally.
As a Group A machine, this car completed a JPS BMW one-two in the opening round of the ’85 ATCC at Winton – the breakthrough year for BMW in Australian touring car racing as Jim Richards went on to claim the German marque’s first ATCC title.

Neville Crichton at Winton in 1985.

So it’s a car with some Group A significance – and indeed when Pete Sturgeon purchased it from Queenstown resident Jim Boult in the late 2000s, he was more than happy to have got his hands on a genuine Group A 635.
The car had been in Boult’s possession for some 17 years, having been originally imported from Australia to New Zealand by previous owner Peter Hudson in 1989.
Prior to that it had been the Jim Keogh car – the striking deep burgundy coloured machine which Keogh and Garry Rogers shared to sixth place at Bathurst in ’85. The Keogh livery was one of three distinct colour schemes the car sported that year; the others being the original JPS black/gold and the white/red/blue colours in which Glenn Molloy raced it briefly in NSW before Keogh. When Sturgeon got the car he took it back to JPS specs.
But then, when he began racing it at Historic race meetings in New Zealand, events took an unexpected twist.

In ex-JPS, Group A guises of Glenn Molloy (inset) and Jim Keogh. Interestingly, it’s the only car that can claim top 10 finishes at Bathurst in both Group C and Group A form.

Sturgeon invited Jim Richards to drive the car at Hampton Downs. As this was the Crichton car from ’85, Richards had never raced this particular Group A 635. But there was something familiar about it…
He wasn’t sure, but Jim had an inkling that this might have been the final JPS Group C 635. The car which Jim raced through ’83 and ’84 before it was converted to Group A for Crichton.
In the meantime, Pip Barker, JPS BMW team’s chief mechanic back in the day, had begun to take an interest in the JPS 635 that had just resurfaced across the ditch. As the man who had basically built the thing in the first place (as well as converting it to Group A at the end of ’84), Barker knew what to look for to confirm the car’s lineage. When he saw it running at Hampton Downs, it didn’t take long for him to be convinced: this absolutely was the Group C car.
Over the next 12 months, Barker and Richards gradually persuaded Sturgeon to turn it back into a Group C car. Barker tells the story...
“Time went by, and then I was back over there (NZ) again to do the Otago Rally with a guy, and I caught up with ‘Sturg’ on the way through. He said, ‘we need to sit down and have a talk about this car’. Jim had obviously been in his ear about it too, and so we went through what was involved and what it would cost, and he said, ‘OK, we’ll do it, but on one condition: where ever the car goes to run, you’ve got to go with it’. I said, ‘if you’re paying, that’s fine!’
“But I love being involved in it anyway. Any of the JPS cars we built I enjoy being involved with. I’ve been involved with some of the other JPS cars around the place, and I’m doing work for Jim on one of his cars at the moment – he’s got a Group A 635 and an M3.”
Amazingly, Sturgeon agreed to an expensive retrofit of his otherwise perfectly good Group A BMW – despite having never seen or heard the car in its original Group C period!