Mitsubishi Starion: The Series Production stars and Group A cars
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Mitsubishi Starion: The Series Production stars and Group A cars

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By MarkOastler - 23 January 2014
The Australian Mitsubishi Ralliart Group A Starions were good-looking factory race cars with a tonne of untapped potential. This is the ill-fated JB Starion shared by Peter Fitzgerald and Brad Jones that was eliminated by a first corner collision with another car in the 1985 Bathurst 1000.

“With proper development and homologation of parts, they could have been equal to the (Ford) Sierras,” racing great Kevin Bartlett told Shannons Club as he reflected on a brief and frustrating time in his career racing the ‘works’ Mitsubishi Starion in 1980s Group A touring car racing.

“The wheelbase and track dimensions were well suited to racing. I liked the way it handled and overall it was quite a good little car to drive, but it was mainly the engine (in Group A form) that let it down. 

“Like the Sierra, it had a turbocharged 2.0 litre four cylinder but the huge amount of development that went into the Ford engine with Cosworth was light years ahead of where Mitsubishi was at that stage.

“A few years later Mitsubishi brought out some brilliant engines for their world rally program. It’s frustrating to look back on it because a Starion with one of those (Lancer) Evo-type engines as a touring car would have been an absolute rocket-ship!”  

The history of the Mitsubishi Starion in Australian motor sport tells two very different stories from the same period of racing. One is of dominance of the Group E series production category. 

The other is of a Ralliart-backed Group A touring car program which never realised its true potential. 

The Starion road car was blessed with some good racing fundamentals from the outset. Its 2.0 litre, EFI, two-valve, SOHC, turbocharged four cylinder engine (4G63) produced substantial power in stock form (125kW) and a lot more was available through an increase in boost settings.

Wheelbase and track dimensions also ensured good directional stability and predictable handling, aided by well-designed MacPherson strut suspension at both ends, rack and pinion steering and four wheel disc brakes. And its angular, futuristic styling also featured a respectable .35 aero drag co-efficient which made it quite slippery through the air. 

Peter Fitzgerald enjoyed tremendous success in ‘showroom stock’ Group E series production racing for several seasons after the Starion was given the green light to compete. Here ‘Fitzy’ leads the previously dominant Mazda RX-7 and Nissan 280ZX opposition in his rapid JA Starion at Amaroo Park in 1984.

 

Showroom shock: the Starion turbo revolution

Although the Starion was released in Australia in May 1982, it wasn’t until 1984 that it made its debut in the local Series Production (Group E) class after a key change in the rules that allowed turbocharged cars to compete.

Since the return of showroom stock racing in 1981, after a decade-long absence from the sport, governing body CAMS had preserved Group E primarily as an affordable feeder category in which new drivers and teams (‘name’ drivers were banned) could develop their craft before progressing to the big dollar Production Touring - Group C division.

Although Group E initially attracted a variety of different makes and models, it didn’t take long for the cream to rise to the surface in the form of Mazda’s Series 1/Series 2 RX-7 sports coupe, which forced numerous competitors to switch to the lightweight rotary-powered rocket if they wanted to have a chance of winning. It effectively became ‘Formula Mazda’ and something needed to change.

In November 1983 CAMS announced that it was broadening the 1984 Group E eligibility list to any current model car selling for less than $30,000. This pivotal decision paved the way for some exciting new potential race winners like the Alfa 2.5 GTV6, BMW 323i, Saab Turbo - and Mitsubishi Starion.

At the time, the Starion was easily the cheapest of the new cars to put on the track. Good quality low km examples were available in the used car market for about $15-16,000 - the perfect starting point for a series production race car.

The Starion was the first of a new wave of turbocharged cars to gain eligibility for Group E. However, although its arrival immediately solved the problem of Mazda’s long standing dominance, CAMS created a new one.

1975 Bathurst 1000 winner Brian Sampson was another big name driver to join the series production ranks in 1984 driving a very quick JA Starion backed by Preston Motors. Here Sampson has his mirrors full of some typical Group E rivals of the period, racing close and hard at Amaroo Park.

In 1984 the Group E category was instead dominated by the Mitsubishi Starion, largely thanks to its powerful turbocharged engine which more than compensated for its relatively high 1265 kg kerb weight compared to the RX-7 at around 1100 kgs.

As previously mentioned, turbos had been excluded from Group E for the first three years on the grounds that they would prove too difficult to police - and that’s exactly what happened once the turbo genie was out of its bottle.

Accusations of competitors using illegally high levels of turbo boost that could not be easily detected started to come thick and fast, causing a nightmare for scrutineers and plenty of bad blood within the category. The Australian Motor Racing Yearbook best summed up the toxic environment at the time:

“The entire category operates on a bed of suspicion. Rule-bending is par for the course but most disturbing is the increasing incidence of what can only be described as cheating. Of course, it should be cut out, but so long as the combination of turbocharged engines and electronic engine management exists, that will be almost impossible at worst and extremely expensive at best.”

Despite the acrimony, the showroom category was given a ‘boost’ of a different kind in 1984 with the announcement of a tri-state, six-race series with rounds to be held at Sydney’s Amaroo Park, Melbourne’s Calder Park and Adelaide International Raceway.

With a six-figure prize purse, the Bob Jane-backed Super Series would for the first time open the door to big name drivers in addition to the regular Group E specialists to spice things up. This invitation attracted drivers of the calibre of Colin Bond (Alfa) and Allan Grice (Nissan) and not surprisingly a number of other top guns in Starions.

Kevin ‘KB’ Bartlett entered a Starion in his new works Ralliart Australia livery and Bathurst winner Brian Sampson would also prove a front runner in his Preston Motors-backed Starion. And a young kid from Albury called Brad Jones, who would later drive for HRT and now runs his own V8 Supercar team, would also emerge as a rising star in another Starion. 

Brad Jones emerged as a fast and fiercely competitive Group E driver when he raced the turbo Mitsubishi coupe in the 1980s. Here the Albury driver’s Perrier-backed JB Starion is feeling the heat from another driven by Des Gibbs at Oran Park in 1986. Gibbs won the Winton 300 enduro later that year.

Perhaps of most significance, though, was that Peter Fitzgerald also switched to the Mitsubishi coupe. Despite the quality of competition ‘Fitzy’ ran away with the one-off 1984 Super Series – a one car/one driver dominance that was exactly what CAMS and the track promoters did not want to see!

During the 1985 and 1986 seasons, production car racing’s national profile faded somewhat with the demise of the Super Series concept and the absence of any national championship for the class. Competitors tended to focus on winning individual circuit-based series like the well supported Stallion Stables/Goodyear series at Amaroo Park. 

By then the Starion onslaught was led by latest JB model. According to Bartlett, the JB was a better race car because even though it had the same sized turbo as the JA it featured the more efficient TC06 oil and water-cooled turbocharger and its larger 15-inch wheel diameter provided a broader choice of competition tyres.

Finally, in 1987 CAMS announced that Group E would get its own national championship, based on a series of qualifying races held in each state from which the leading drivers would compete in the all-important decider at Victoria’s Winton Motor Raceway in September.

CAMS also announced that 100-plus octane aviation fuel would be banned prior to the APCC final, in a vain attempt to stop all the bitter infighting over illegal turbo boost. Despite the governing body’s best intentions, as far as the competitors were concerned there was no turning back.

“The switch to normal pump fuel was a limiting factor but we still had to use a hell of a lot of turbo boost to stay competitive,” Bartlett said. “It just meant that we had to rebuild the engine every second race (due to severe detonation caused by the pump fuel’s lower octane rating). The rods and pistons copped such a hammering you’d be lucky to get through two meetings. You knew you were on the ragged edge with the engines the whole time, but you had no choice.”

Production car king Peter Fitzgerald’s JB Starion featured this striking red and black Yokohama livery in 1987 when he won the first Australian Production Car Championship in convincing style. By then the Starion’s competition included the new Toyota Supra and Mazda’s Series IV RX-7 Turbo, here chasing the APCC champ at Amaroo Park in 1987.

Despite some quality competition, the first Australian Production Car Championship also fell to Fitzgerald’s Starion after he claimed pole position and won the two 30-lap heats. Fitz also won the Winton 300 enduro with Allan Grice in December, adding to the Mitsubishi coupe’s other Winton 300 victories in 1985 and 1986.

After several years of dominance, though, the Starion’s reign as the king of production cars came to an abrupt end in 1988 when the JB had to give way to the latest unleaded JD model which critically featured a smaller turbocharger. This was the kiss of death for the Mitsubishi coupe in a category that had become hopelessly addicted to turbocharged power.

Most of the leading Starion drivers dropped the car like a hot cake for 1988, including Fitzgerald who swapped to the Series IV Mazda RX7 Turbo which in Garry Waldon’s hands had been making life increasingly hard for him towards the end of the Starion’s reign and would take its place as the new dominant force in Group E.

Mention should also be made of the Starion’s competitive showings in the Australian Rally Championship during this period. 

A JB Starion in Group A trim crewed by the talented husband and wife team of David and Kate Officer finished second overall in the 1986 ARC, beaten only by Barry Lowe’s rapid Subaru RX Turbo.

And in 1988 the sublimely talented multiple ARC champion Greg Carr teamed with Fred Gocentas in a JB Starion supplied by Ralliart, which had won the Himalayan Rally the previous year in the hands of Japanese driver Kenjiro Shinozuka.

Carr and Gocentas had an impressive season, taking the 1988 ARC battle down to the final round decider in which they narrowly lost to the superior traction of Murray Coote’s Mazda 323 4WD.

Greg Carr and Fred Gocentas threw down a serious challenge to Mazda’s 4WD opposition by taking the 1988 ARC battle down to a narrow final round loss in their Ralliart-backed JB Starion. Despite being only rear-wheel drive, the turbocharged Mitsubishi coupe proved a fast and rugged competitor deserving of a national title.

 

Group A touring cars: unfulfilled potential

In stark contrast to the Starion’s dominance of series production, its career in local Group A touring car racing from 1984-89 under the Mitsubishi Ralliart branding promised much but delivered comparatively little.

It all looked promising at the start, with the vastly experienced open wheeler and touring car ace Kevin Bartlett appointed to head up the local arm of Mitsubishi’s high performance and motor sport division in 1984, with local support to come from Mitsubishi Motors Australia Ltd (MMAL).

Mitsubishi’s motor sport-mad Kondo Akiri and Seiichiro Takahashi, who controlled Ralliart Japan’s activities through the company’s head office in Tokyo, were embarking on a program of global expansion which required establishing new operational bases in Europe and south-east Asia.

The previous year, one of the company’s most successful rally drivers, Andrew Cowan, had established Ralliart Europe in the UK as the European competition base. So it made sense that the Sydney-based Bartlett, who was well known to the Ralliart bosses through his Asian-based racing and business activities, would be the Ralliart division’s south-east Asian representative.

The first locally-built Ralliart Group A Starion was this left-hand drive JA model which had its first hit-out at the 1984 Bathurst 1000. Kevin Bartlett clashed with officials over the legality of the car based on different interpretations of the new rules. The Bartlett/Fitzgerald machine retired early from the race with differential problems.

In addition to running a Starion in Group E series production racing, Bartlett also built up a new LHD JA model in Sydney to suit the new FIA Group A touring car rules which were to replace Australia’s home-grown Group C tourers in 1985.

After a troubled shakedown in the invitational Group A class at the 1984 Bathurst 1000, preparation of the Starion was moved from Sydney to Adelaide under John and Bob Murphy with John Grant appointed as team manager. Bartlett had a disappointing season with the new car in 1985, finishing ninth overall in the ATCC in a season beset with development issues and mechanical problems.

The planned expansion to running two Ralliart-backed Starions in the five-round Australian Endurance Championship  (AEC) in the second half of the season, upgraded to the latest JB homologation package with turbo intercoolers, only added to the strain on the team’s resources. 

“The main reasons for going with left-hand drive were heat control and packaging. All of the turbo stuff was mounted on the right-hand side of the engine, so with left-hand drive you could have all your brake set-up mounted on the other side," Bartlett said. 

“It allowed us to put a really good brake package out in the open where it didn’t suffer any heat-related problems, or accessibility problems in terms of replacing turbos or working on the brake package. It was also good from a driver’s point of view to be sitting on the left hand side of the car at tracks with lots of left-hand corners, like Sandown and particularly Bathurst."

The 1985 Bathurst 1000 capped a difficult year for the Australian-based Mitsubishi Ralliart team after expanding to a two-car attack for the Sandown 500 and Bathurst 1000 Group A events. Here the LHD Bartlett/McKay entry, which was hampered by a leaking gearbox, drops down through The Dipper on its way to ninth outright.

A no-show at the opening AEC round at Amaroo was followed by a single car entry at Oran Park’s round two where Bartlett finished seventh. 

The Sandown 500 saw two Ralliart Starions on the grid for the first time, with Bartlett and motoring journalist Peter MacKay sharing one car with Mitsubishi production car aces Peter Fitzgerald and Brad Jones sharing the other car. Sadly the Fitzgerald/Jones car retired with a blown head gasket after qualifying a strong sixth while the Bartlett/McKay car suffered a new problem - broken rockers - to finish well done the field.

The Bathurst 1000 proved equally disappointing, with the Fitzgerald/Jones car crashing out at the first corner on the first lap after Fitzgerald tangled with another competitor. Bartlett and McKay soldiered on, hampered by a blown gearbox seal that required numerous extra pit stops to keep topping it up with oil. They finished ninth outright and second in class to Colin Bond’s Alfa GTV6.

For numerous political and business reasons, the Bartlett/Ralliart/MMAL partnership was not working. They split at the end of the 1985 season and MMAL announced its withdrawal from the category. Even so, Bartlett would continue to race his own privately-entered Starion in series production events.

The way ‘KB’ sees it, the Starion was the right car at the wrong time as the company’s corporate energies were focused mainly on world championship rallying and major cross-country events (Paris-Dakar etc) in which Mitsubishi products would prove enormously successful. 

Brad Jones and Japanese factory driver Akihiko Nakaya teamed up for a one-car works-assisted entry in the 1986 Bathurst 1000. With the turbo wick wound up the car impressed by qualifying for the prestigious Top 10 but retired after 61 laps with gearbox failure. The road car-derived gearboxes were a weak link in the Group A Starion package.

“The Starion fell short at the homologation stage but I can understand Mitsubishi’s attitude at the time because the Starion wasn’t a prime car in their eyes,” he reflected. “They were focused on their rally program and they went ahead in leaps and bounds from there with the development of the evolution style of motor car (Lancer Evo) into the 1990s.” (Tommi Makinen won four straight WRC titles from 1996-1999). 

“The big problem with the Group A touring car was that the road car it was based on never evolved beyond a certain point. The Starion worked very well in production car racing but the major constriction of Group A was that everything on the car had to be one of a minimum production number. Everything had to be homologated by the manufacturer, which meant we couldn’t change major things like the road car’s fuel system and that was a real problem. 

“It had huge injectors so we could get plenty of fuel into it, but there were only two of them feeding into a mixer (throttle body). This created a big blob of fuel that was very difficult to make work with a single cam two-valve engine and the big camshaft profiles we needed to run.

“We couldn’t get enough power without using an enormous amount of boost and to do that we had to use an enormous amount of fuel, but you just couldn’t manage the fuel volume down low. The engine just wouldn’t go below a certain rpm and then of course at high rpm, with the tiny turbochargers we had to use, they were overspinning to blazes and we had endless turbo failures.

“We just didn’t have the engine management system in those days that could enable us to get the car to run cleanly either at the bottom end or the top end. We were using an HKS system which was only in its early days. We tried many things and HKS helped us out tremendously but overall we were nowhere near the mark.

The local Ralliart team was restructured for 1987 with Dulux Autocolor being signed as the major sponsor. Under new team manager George Shepheard, the JB Starion driven by Nakaya and former Nissan works driver Gary Scott gave Mitsubishi its best Bathurst 1000 result with fifth outright in the 1987 race.

“Another weakness was the homologated gearbox which was just the Mitsubishi five-speed ‘box. We couldn’t use a proper Getrag or anything like that, even though a manufacturer could easily homologate one for racing if they chose to."

“Early on I tried to help them out with homologation. I submitted photographs of some Brabham-style suspension that needed to go on the car and a bigger brake system and what have you but nothing eventuated.”

Despite Bartlett and Ralliart/MMAL parting ways, the works Starion program was kept alive (albeit on a lower profile) by rally veteran Doug Stewart. His relationship with the company spanned more than two decades and he was highly regarded by Adelaide management and the company’s head office in Japan.

Through his strong internal connections, Stewart was able to establish the necessary factory resources required to continue the Australian-based Starion team as a separate entity, this time under the supervision of George Shepheard who amongst his many achievements in the sport included masterminding Holden’s crushing 1-2-3 finish in the 1979 Repco Trial.

Two works Starions were entered for the 1988 Bathurst 1000 and experienced mixed results. The Scott/Nakaya car (16) withdrew with gearbox problems after 88 laps while the sister car following here, driven by Brad Jones and Terry Shiel, finished 10th outright.

The new Ralliart Starion program would include selected Group A touring car races in Australia and  events important to Mitsubishi in south-east Asia including races in Japan, Indonesia and Macau. Brad Jones was closely involved with the team’s Australian and regional Group A racing activities during this period.

The two Group A Starions continued to be maintained by the Murphy brothers in Adelaide. Shepheard also did a lot of homologation work during this time, which resulted in approval of bigger brakes and other detailed improvements, but the major engine and transmission upgrades needed to turn the Starion into a Sierra Cosworth beater were never on the table. 

In fact, Shepheard had to rely on many tricks he learned from Harry Firth in making the road car-derived five-speed gearboxes better withstand the rigours of competition use!

The Ralliart Australia team also competed in the Bathurst 1000 during this period, achieving its best result in 1987 when the race was included as a round of the World Touring Car Championship. Against the world’s best factory teams, Queenslander Gary Scott and Japanese works driver Akihiko Nakaya finished fifth outright.

Last Bathurst outing for a works Mitsubishi Starion came fittingly in the last year of the car’s production. Bartlett rejoined the team he had help create six years before to partner Gary Scott and Terry Shiel to 18th place in the 1989 Bathurst 1000.

With the Starion nearing the end of its eight-year production run in 1989, Mitsubishi decided to shift the Adelaide-based Ralliart operation to Japan. Shepheard and Mitsubishi went their separate ways and the Starion’s local touring car career came to an end.

Given Kevin Bartlett’s earlier comments about the Ford Sierra-beating potential of the Starion in Group A touring car racing, you can’t help thinking what a touring car great it could have been had Mitsubishi backed it with the same all-out commitment it would later show in world championship rallying.

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