By Andrew Clarke
Date posted: 24 August 2026
Three years after its last appearance, the Muscle Car Masters returns to Sydney Motorsport Park this weekend with a spectacular collection of Australian touring car history, including three Ford Sierra RS500s, famous BMWs, Mercedes DTM machinery and a rare Saturday night race.
The Apex Steel Muscle Car Masters returns to Sydney Motorsport Park on August 29-30, bringing some of the country’s most significant touring cars back to Australia’s traditional home of muscle.
Around 30 Group C and Group A cars will contest the final points round of the 2026 Heritage Touring Cars series, joining Touring Car Masters, National Sports Sedans, Historic Touring Cars Group N and Group S, HQ Holdens and Australian Trans Am for two days of racing.
For Heritage Touring Cars, the meeting brings together machinery spanning one of the most diverse periods in Australian touring car history, from locally built Holdens and Fords to the turbocharged European and Japanese cars that transformed the sport during the Group A era.
Three Ford Sierra RS500s reunited
Among the headline attractions will be three Ford Sierra RS500s running together.
Bathurst 1000 winner Jonathon Webb will drive the last Caltex Sierra built, a car raced in period by Australian touring car legend Colin Bond.
Andrew Miedecke will be reunited with the Yokohama-backed Sierra he raced during the 1989 season, while Terry Lawlor will drive the Shell Sierra associated with Dick Johnson’s dominant 1989 campaign.
The Shell car helped Johnson to the 1989 Australian Touring Car Championship and was the car in which he claimed his first Bathurst 1000 pole position.
Mercedes and BMW classics join the field
If the turbo Sierras represent one of the defining weapons of late-1980s Group A, the European contingent goes considerably deeper.
Brothers Jerome and Meon Nehrybecki, sons of Australian chassis designer Henry Nehrybecki, will bring a pair of Mercedes-Benz 190Es to Sydney Motorsport Park.
Meon’s car has particularly significant history, having been built by AMG-Mercedes for the 1991 DTM season. It competed in yellow and white Kärcher colours with Jörg van Ommen and Frank Schmickler and is now regarded as one of the more original surviving examples from the period.
BMW will also be strongly represented.
Dean How will campaign the JPS BMW 635CSi raced by Allan Grice and Jim Richards and regarded as one of the earliest BMWs connected with Frank Gardner’s Australian operation.
At the other end of Gardner’s BMW story is David Towe’s JPS M3, the final M3 built by the team.
Rick Allen will add another significant E30 M3 to the field with the Benson & Hedges car driven to fourth outright in the 1992 Bathurst 1000 by Tony Longhurst and international star Johnny Cecotto.
Japanese touring car history on show
The Japanese invasion that helped reshape Australian touring car racing will not be forgotten either.
Greg Boyle’s Falken Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R will appear as an invited car. The Skyline finished fourth outright in the 1993 Bathurst 12 Hour in the hands of Keith Carling, Bill Gillespie and Graham Neilsen, but had already enjoyed an unusual piece of Mount Panorama history as the Safety Car for the 1992 Bathurst 1000.
Peter Woods will bring the ex-Graeme Bailey Chickadee Toyota Celica, another instantly recognisable car from the Group C period.
Lloyd Williams will race a restored Mazda RX-3, while Chris O’Connor will drive Michael Logiudice’s ex-Terry Finnigan Maggi Noodles Gemini and Scott Fleming will campaign a Peter Williamson Toyota Celica.
The diversity is precisely what made the Group C and Group A periods so memorable.
Big-capacity Australian V8s shared the track with rotaries, four-cylinder screamers, turbocharged Sierras, BMWs, Mercedes and eventually the all-conquering Nissan GT-R.
More than three decades later, Muscle Car Masters will put many of those shapes, sounds and liveries back on the same circuit.
Bathurst BMW back in action
Muscle Car Masters Preview-colin-bond-caltex-ford-sierra-rs500
Back to the home of muscle
The Chickadee Celica flies again
Touring car history returns
Johnson’s mighty Shell Sierra
Touring car legends under lights
Miedecke’s Yokohama Sierra
Heritage Touring Cars under lights
And on Saturday night, spectators will get to see them in a setting rarely experienced in historic racing.
At approximately 7.15pm the Heritage Touring Cars will head onto Sydney Motorsport Park for a night race, one of only a handful held in the series’ history.
Night racing has produced some memorable Heritage Touring Cars images in the past, including the 2021 HSRCA Sydney Classic where Tony Alford’s iconic Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R led the field under lights.
The combination of glowing brake discs, turbocharged touring cars and some of Australian motorsport’s most famous liveries should make Saturday night’s race one of the highlights of the revived event.
First run in 2006, Muscle Car Masters became one of the country’s signature historic motorsport meetings before disappearing from the calendar in its familiar form.
Now it is back, and rather than simply displaying the cars that shaped Australian touring car racing, many of them will once again be doing what they were built to do.
Race.
The Apex Steel Muscle Car Masters will be held at Sydney Motorsport Park on Saturday, August 29 and Sunday, August 30.
Tickets, the full entry list, event schedule and spectator information:
Muscle Car Masters spectator information
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