SATURDAY’S Top 10 Shootout has become an unmissable part of the annual running of the Bathurst 1000.
This year, the session for Mount Panorama’s ‘fastest of the fast’ is being held for the 50th time since its inaugural running in 1978.
No other driver has played a bigger role in the one-lap session’s history than Dick Johnson. He holds the record for the most Shootout appearances (21) and the most consecutive appearances (20).
He was there for the first edition – back when it carried the moniker Hardie’s Heroes in deference to then race sponsor Hardie-Ferodo.
Run on the Friday afternoon of the event rather than the Saturday that has become its home, wet conditions greeted Johnson and the other nine drivers that made the cut for the 1978 Shootout.
It was a genuine group of all-stars, too: along with traditional Ford and Holden heroes Allan Moffat and Peter Brock, there were fellow legends Colin Bond, Bob Morris, Allan Grice and John French, plus Tasmanian racer and future official Garth Wigston. Completing the field were a pair of F1 and Le Mans legends in Sir Jack Brabham and Derek Bell.
While now famous for being a one-and-done run per driver, the early years of the Shootout granted drivers two attempts at setting a time.
In 1978, every drivers’ opening run was blighted by a wet but drying track, including Johnson’s first flyer aboard Bryan Byrt Ford’s big blue #17 XC Falcon coupe.
He’d been fifth-fastest in Friday morning’s qualifying session but the running order for the Shootout was drawn at random, with Car 17 the fourth out of the gate for both runs.
Johnson was sixth following those first hitouts, with Moffat showing the way after being one of two drivers bold enough to fit slicks on the drying track. French was the other in the second Byrt Ford, but a misfire hampered him on his first attempt and he didn’t appear for the second.
Everyone ran slicks for the second runs and, while Johnson took 10 full seconds out of his previous time, remained sixth in the final reckoning.
He made the cut again in 1979 and again in 1980, the day before he hit the rock that changed the trajectory of his life and racing career.
Johnson was again there in 1981 in arguably the worst conditions in which a Bathurst Shootout was ever held, splashing through heavy rain to stop the clocks second fastest for the second year in a row.
He was a constant amid a raft of change throughout the 1980s, initially in Group C-spec V8 Falcons and then Group A-spec V8 Mustangs, before the arrival of Ford’s turbocharged Sierra changed the face of touring car racing in 1987.
The potency of the Shell-red rockets made Johnson a fixture of the Shootout throughout the rest of the Group A era.
He was even there for the Shootout that didn’t count towards the grid in 1988 due to a quirk of international rules; one day earlier, he’d claimed his first Bathurst 1000 pole via regular qualifying.
His second and final ‘Great Race’ pole came via the Shootout in 1992 – although another went begging in 1994.
Johnson had just set the first 2-minute 11-second touring car lap of Mount Panorama in the pre-Shootout warm-up session but, when it counted, Car 17’s tail stepped out exiting the Cutting and swiped the wall, leaving he and John Bowe to win the race from 10th on the grid.
Johnson had also provided the Shootout with its first moment of major drama – via his savage crash on the exit of Forrest’s Elbow during the 1983 edition of Hardie’s Heroes, followed by the acquisition of another Falcon and overnight rebuild to get he and co-driver Kevin Bartlett on the grid for Sunday’s race.
Johnson remained a fixture of the Top 10 Shootout well after his 50th birthday, including in his Bathurst swansong in 1999 when the session was expanded to include the 15 fastest cars.
The only time he wasn’t present was in 1998, when Car 17 wound up 12th in qualifying as both DJR Falcons struggled with a mysterious lack of straightline speed.
Johnson’s record of 21 Shootouts has yet to be matched – Larry Perkins is closest with 18, with Craig Lowndes and Peter Brock next on 17 – and there’s every chance it may never be.
Chaz Mostert and Cam Waters have the most Bathurst Shootout appearances of the current field with eight apiece.
For them to even tie Johnson’s record, they will have to make every Top 10 runoff from now until 2038…
