than third at each round while winning in the wet at Surfers Paradise. This saw Dick Johnson win his third ATCC and the final ATCC to be run under the locally developed Group C rules. During the ABC's coverage of the final round at the Adelaide International Raceway where Johnson finished a close third behind race winner Allan Grice (Commodore) and Peter Brock, commentator Will Hagon noted that following the championship trail in 1984 had seen the Johnson team cover more than 20,000 km. Although Johnson won the championship, and pointed to the cars reliability, he did acknowledge that other top contenders not running the full series (Allan Grice didn't have enough money, Peter Brock missed rounds while racing at Le Mans, Nissan missed rounds chasing development, and defending champion Allan Moffat suffered a bad crash at Surfers in which he was injured and missed the remainder of the series) did help his championship cause. Group A Mustangs With no local Ford product suitable following a change to international Group A touring car regulations at the end of 1984 as Ford Australia were not interested in homologating the XE Falcon for Group A racing, Johnson ventured to Germany and purchased a pair of Zakspeed constructed Ford Mustangs for the 1985 and 1986 seasons. While the Mustang years brought limited success, reliability and good-handling in the underpowered cars enabled Johnson to claim runner-up in the 1985 Australian Touring Car Championship, while his one and only victory aboard the Mustang was in the Group A support race at the 1985 Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide. The Mustang, like almost all other cars in the ATCC, was outclassed by the JPS Team BMW 635 CSi of Jim Richards who won seven of the championships ten races. The team had actually entered and qualified one of the Mustangs at Bathurst in 1984 (painted white with #71) in the new Group A category, but it was only there for a shakedown run and insurance should there a repeat of 1983 and was withdrawn after Johnson had put the XE Falcon onto fourth on the grid. When the team purchased the Mustangs from Zakspeed, the engine power was quoted as . However, the car the team took to Bathurst in 1984 was described as 'sluggish' by both Dick Johnson and his co-driver John French with Johnson's best time being 5 seconds slower than the class leading