Saturday Sleuthing: Frosty's 2008 Perth Dominator
Ford Performance Racing's Mark Winterbottom is sitting high atop the 2014 V8 Supercars Championship pointscore with four events and a total of 13 races completed in this year's title chase.
Next weekend he and the V8 Supercar field head to Barbagallo Raceway in Perth for the Perth 400 and it's a place with some very happy memories for the factory Falcon pilot.
He clean-swept the 2008 event in style, claiming ARMOR ALL Pole Position and three straight race wins to score maximum points for his trip to 'the West'.
But that got us thinking - what happened to the Orrcon Steel/FPR #5 Falcon BF he drove to victory that weekend?
Our V8 Sleuth Aaron Noonan has gone back through his car files and they show that particular Falcon - FPR 705 - was in fact the seventh and very last BA/BF model built by the factory Ford squad.
The reasoning for the chassis numbering dated back to John Russell's tenure with the team. Now at Triple Eight, the former Williams F1 man was in charge at FPR in 2005 when they built their first, new-spec Falcon known as '501'.
The '50' was the year reversed (the '05' from 2005) with the '1' being the first of the line of cars.
So for FPR 705, build on the chassis commenced in 2007, with the first numbers '07' reversed and the '5' meaning it was the fifth car of that era.
FPR 705 was debuted by Mark Winterbottom in the 2008 Clipsal 500 in Adelaide and he drove it all season - including his dominant performance in Perth.
He also won at Queensland Raceway and paired up with Steve Richards in the chassis for the Phillip Island and Bathurst endurance races, where the car ran as the #6 Castrol/Orrcon entry and finished fourth on the Mountain after Frosty qualified on the front row of the grid.
Winterbottom used it to finish runner-up in the 2008 V8 Supercar Championship to Jamie Whincup before the introduction of the new model FG Falcon for 2009 saw the BFs sold off into the Dunlop Series (then still known as the Fujitsu Series).
Matthew White's MW Motorsport team in Melbourne purchased the 705 chassis from FPR and it competed in the 2009 Fujitsu Series as the #28 Haines Bros entry of Brad Lowe.
He raced it in six of the seven rounds of the series, however he used a spare car at the Bathurst round given the team ran this chassis as a wildcard entry in the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 (having earlier also run at the L&H 500 at Phillip Island) as the #21 green Fujitsu entry driven by Lowe and Damien Assaillit.
MW Motorsport retained the car in 2010 and David Russell drove it that year as the Team Jayco entry. He claimed victory in the Bathurst round of the DVS and finished fifth in the series.
He again drove the chassis in the 2011 DVS and finished third behind Andrew Thompson and Jack Perkins after claiming a range of podium results during the season.
The car wasn't used in the opening round of the 2012 Dunlop Series in Adelaide, but re-appeared at the Barbagallo round in Perth for Round 2 driven by Luke Youlden as the team's #28 entry.
He ran it for the large portion of the season and had his last start in it at Bathurst before stepping into the team's ex-FPR FG for the final two rounds.
This car reverted to Elliot Barbour's hands for the Winton round and Morgan Haber stepped into it for the Sydney Olympic Park final.
With BF model Falcons no longer eligible for the Dunlop Series in 2013 and MW Motorsport with a full compliment of ex-FPR FG models, FPR 705 was retained by Matthew White's team and found itself with another racing life in the V8 Touring Car Series run as part of the Shannons Nationals for ex-V8 Supercars no longer eligible for the DVS.
After running another of his ex-FPR BFs for another driver in the early part of the series, team owner White stepped back behind the wheel of '705' at Phillip Island and instantly finished on the podium - he actually crossed the line first in Race 2 but was penalised five seconds for a jump start and thus lost it!
The car last made a racing appearance at Sandown last November with young gun Jack Le Brocq getting his first race weekend in a V8 in the final round of the V8 Touring Car Series.
The 2008 Perth winner is retained by Matthew White in Melbourne, who says it will possibly run some more rounds of the V8 Touring Car Series this year.
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