Restored championship Falcon reunion 'surreal' for Ingall

Russell Ingall has opened up on his “surreal” reunion with the Ford Falcon that delivered the Supercars legend a long-awaited championship victory.

Ingall won the 2005 drivers’ championship in a Stone Brothers Racing-built BA Falcon, after four runners-up finishes at both SBR and Perkins Engineering.

Ingall finished second to Ambrose in 2004, marking the fourth time in his career he had just missed out on championship glory. Come 2005, and despite winning only two races, Ingall closed it out after a thrilling season-long battle.

Two decades on, Ross and Jimmy Stone completed a painstaking restoration of the car, chassis BA03, which was a headlined feature at the Historic GP in New Zealand over the weekend.

Ingall had the honour of taking BA03 for its first public outing since the restoration in a series of demonstration runs at Taupō, 20 years after his title triumph.

In a feature interview with broadcaster Greg Rust, Ingall was taken aback by the quality of the restoration.

“This very Ford Falcon went across the line to finally give me that championship after four times runner-up in the Supercars,” Ingall said.

"But I finally got that elusive championship, and this was it. Whoever could forget that hanging out the window burnout out the door.

"It’s very surreal, you know, after 20 years. Can you believe it’s been 20 years that we're actually back here? This has been completely rebuilt, the number nine, which then turned into the number one.”

BA03 was built new for the 2005 championship season, and was raced by Ingall to the end of 2007 before it became a spare car for SBR.

The Stones retained the Falcon amid its sale of the team to Erebus Motorsport, with the brothers first restoring Marcos Ambrose’s championship-winning Falcon before shifting attention to the Ingall car.

It has been a bumper year for historic Supercar restorations, with two Dick Johnson Racing EB Falcons set to be revealed at the upcoming Canberra Festival of Speed.

"It's immaculate… this was a total restoration, like down to the bare shell, completely repainted,” Ingall said.

“A lot of the parts remanufactured, because they had a lot of the moulds left over, from the dash, those sort of things, so they were brand new. They actually kept the original, engine, gearbox and diff.

"So every component on this is how I left it in 2005, but it's shiny new. Like, I walk around and it's like a time warp. I'm walking around this car and this was like the beginning of 2005 when I jumped into it.

"I'm looking around, I'm sitting in it, and all of a sudden, all those things start coming back.”

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