Saturday Sleuthing: Canto’s V8 Lites Title Winner

We are constantly amazed at the sheer amount of email we get for Saturday Sleuthing and this week we have delved into the email box with a great suggestion for a story from Luke Burton.

Luke is keen to know about the two Dunlop Series-winning cars of Dean Canto, who thesedays is co-driving for reigning Virgin Australia Supercars Champion Mark Winterbottom in the Pirtek Enduro Cup in the #1 The Bottle-O Falcon for Prodrive.

We decided to focus on the 2000 Konica V8 Lites Series winning car of Canto, a Falcon EL that fans at Queensland Raceway actually saw in action in the Kumho V8 Touring Car Series.

While Canto is now a regular member of the Supercar enduro driver line-up, this wasn’t always the case. Like most, he had to make a name for himself in one of the numerous feeder categories to gain an eventual prized seat in the big leagues.

Lucky for Canto, Supercars introduced the Konica V8 Lites Series in 2000 (now known as the Dunlop Series), giving up-and-coming drivers the chance to develop their skill and display their talent in older, but still very fast machinery.

Canto’s title winner was actually built in 1998 by Glenn Seton Racing. Known as GSR8 this Ford was the last E-Series Falcon built by the team and the last car built by Glenn Seton Racing under the GSR banner before it became Ford Tickford Racing a year later.

Reigning Champion Seton debuted the car as the #1 Ford Credit Falcon EL at the 1998 Shell Australian Touring Car Championship round at Phillip Island, finishing the day in fourth position. Other season highlights for this car included podiums at both the Mallala and Darwin rounds of the championship.

While Seton drove the car in the championship, he was joined later in the year for the enduros by Neil Crompton.

The experienced duo qualified sixth at the Sandown 500 and brought the car home in fourth position. Bathurst was a similar story, qualifying third and finishing fifth after a delay with fractured power steering hose costing them a shot at victory.

In 1999 the team look changed dramatically with Seton rebranding the operation to Ford Tickford Racing under a new sponsorship deal with the Ford Motor Company.

Seton built a brand new AU Falcon for himself and GSR8, now painted in the blue FTR livery, was campaigned as the #6 team car by Crompton.

He raced the car for only the first three rounds of the 1999 championship before he received a brand new AU Falcon.

The GSR8 chassis made one more appearance for the team later in the year, again with Crompton driving it as the #6 FTR EL Falcon at the non-championship Gold Coast Indy event.

Teams often ran older model cars on the Gold Coast streets in those days in order to protect their newest cars for the soon-to-follow Bathurst event.

For 2000 the EL was sold to Terry Steer from RPM International Racing for Canto to drive in the inaugural Konica V8 Lites Series.

Running as car #45, Canto won races in four of the five rounds and took round wins at Eastern Creek and Oran Park to claim the title. In addition to this he also ran the car as a wildcard in that year’s Clipsal 500 in Adelaide.

The RPM team again ran the car in 2001 in the Konica Series, this time utilising a variety of drivers including Geoff Full, Greg Crick and Aaron McGill.

The car was badly damaged at the Lakeside round when McGill was tipped into a spin after contact with David ‘Truckie’ Parsons and that proved to be its final race event in either the main V8 championship or the development category.

The damaged shell was sold to Andy Cantrell in 2002 and he eventually rebuilt the car back into its 1998 Ford Credit specification.

Cantrell later raced the car in the Touring Car Challenge over many years (a category that featured old V8 Supercars, two-litre Super Tourers, Group A touring cars and even the short-lived Future Tourers), finishing third in the 2004 series.

GSR8 appeared on display at the Legends Museum at the 50th year celebrations at the 2012 Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 in the paddock display area, presented as the #1 Seton Ford Credit car from 1998.

Cantrell owns the car to this day, racing it in the Combined Sedans category at the 2016 Bathurst 12 Hour meeting and most recently at the Queensland Raceway round of the Kumho V8 Touring Car Series in Ipswich.

Even former pilot Neil Crompton – thesedays the voice of Supercar racing on television – stopped by to check out his old car in Queensland a fortnight ago; proof that while Supercar drivers may move on to other phases in their life beyond the cockpit they still enjoy looking back on the cars and races of previous years.

Saturday Sleuthing will have a break next weekend for the mid-point of the season but will return on Saturday August 20 with a car Holden fans will enjoy.

If there’s a car you’d like to see featured in an upcoming story you can get in touch with the V8 Sleuth via any of the following methods:

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