1985 Australian Touring Car Championship

The 1985 Australian Touring Car Championship was a CAMS sanctioned motor racing title for drivers of Touring Cars. It was the 26th running of the Australian Touring Car Championship and the first to be contested using regulations based on the FIA's International Group A regulations after having been run under CAMS home grown Group C rules between 1973 and 1984. The championship began on 10 February 1985 at Winton Motor Raceway (the track's first ever ATCC race) and ended on 14 July at Oran Park Raceway after ten rounds.

The championship was won for the first of an eventual 4 times by expatriate Kiwi and now Melbourne resident Jim Richards driving a BMW 635 CSi for Frank Gardner's JPS Team BMW with Jim being the first New Zealander to ever win the ATCC. 1985 was also the first time that a car from either Europe or the UK had won the ATCC since 4 time series champion Bob Jane had won his second title in a British built Jaguar Mk.II 4.1 in 1963.

Season summary

Triple Bathurst winner Jim Richards won his and BMW's first Australian Touring Car Championship driving a 3.5-litre 6 cyl BMW 635 CSi entered by JPS Team BMW. Defending champion Dick Johnson placed second in his Ford Mustang (the first time a Mustang had been seen in the ATCC since 1973), with Peter Brock finishing third in his Holden VK Commodore.

The first round of the series at Winton also created history when for the first time since the ATCC was first held in 1960, no Holden of any sort was on the grid. The only running Group A Commodore at the time was the Brock's Holden Dealer Team car that had raced in Nissan-Mobil 500 series in New Zealand in January and February, but had missed the Winton round as it was still on the boat heading back to Melbourne. The race also saw the first ever ATCC race win by a BMW with Richards, driving the full Group A 1984 Bathurst 635 (driven at Bathurst by ex-F1 champ Denny Hulme and Bavarian Prince Leopold von Bayern), winning by a lap from his new JPS teammate, fellow New Zealander Neville Crichton (like Brock's Commodore, Crichton's own ex-Alpina BMW 635, fresh from winning the Nissan-Mobil series, was still on its way to Australia so at Winton he drove the JPS team's spare, the converted ex-1984 Group C 635). Richards' win in the BMW also saw the first ATCC round win by a European car since Jim McKeown won the 7th and final round of the 1970 ATCC at Symmons Plains in a Porsche 911S.

Although both Jim Richards and Neville Crichton ran under and were fully maintained by Frank Gardner's JPS Team BMW which was based in the suburb of Terrey Hills in Sydney, both cars in fact had separate JPS sponsorship through the respective Australian and New Zealand arms of Amatil.

Swedish marque Volvo also joined the winners list when Kiwi Robbie Francevic won Round 3 at Symmons Plains in Tasmania in a Volvo 240T turbo owned by his friend, Auckland millionaire of mechanical seals designer and manufacturer (and sometimes race driver) Mark Petch.