The third round of the championship at the Adelaide International Raceway was the scene of a start line accident after the Chevrolet Monza of Peter Brock snapped left off the line and speared into the concrete wall before bouncing back in front of the field. With nowhere to go and little time to react, others, led by Jim Richards crashed into Brock, with the ex-Jim Richards Ford Falcon of Tony Hubbard ending up on top of the pile and the Jaguar XJS of Queensland's Mark Trenoweth on the bottom. Reports varied from the Jane camp about the cause of the crash. Peter Brock maintained that the car had broken a CV joint while chief mechanic Pat Purcell believed the cause was actually Brock just losing control when the car found sudden grip, claiming that nothing had broken on the car before the crash. At least one third of the field was eliminated in the crash. Following the accident, neither the Monza nor the JPS BMW were raced until November at the 1983 Australian Grand Prix at Calder Park in Melbourne in the Sports Car / GT Challenge support races.[5]
Rusty French won his first Australian GT Championship with a consistent run over the six round series to score 40 points, never finishing outside of the top three positions in any round and winning Round 3 in Adelaide and the sixth and final round at Surfers Paradise. He was also the only driver in the entire field who finished (or entered) every round of the series. Jim Richards finished second in the championship with 18 points, despite competing in only the first two rounds at Lakeside and Sandown, winning both convincingly, though he was challenged by French at Sandown who used the superior power of his Porsche to stay with the BMW on Sandown's long straights. The 1980 and 1981 Australian Sports Sedan Champion Tony Edmondson finished equal second with Richards in the championship. Like Richards, Edmondson won two rounds with victory at Round 4 at Calder and Round 5 at Winton. Unlike Richards, Edmondson did enter other rounds of the championship. His was one of the cars damaged in the start line crash at the Adelaide round. Alan Browne was classified fourth in the championship in his Porsche 935, scoring 13 points.
^ abConditions for Australian Titles, 1983 CAMS Manual of Motor Sport, pages 91 to 94
^ abcdefghijkHumes Guardrail Cup, Official Programme, Adelaide International Raceway, Sunday, 10 July 1983, page 29
^Championship points have been calculated by applying the points system published in the 1983 CAMS Manual of Motor Sport to the round placings published in Australian Motor Racing Yearbook, 1983/84. The first six placegetters and the points scored by each of these drivers have been confirmed from the abbreviated Points Score Table published in Australian Motor Racing Yearbook, 1983/84.
