Moffat’s Dekon Monza
Allan Moffat shocked Australian fans when he suddenly lobbed here with a futuristic new General Motors GT car.
Without the BMW 3.0 CSL ‘Batmobile’, Allan Moffat’s Cologne Capri would never have existed. The only reason Ford went to the trouble of building it was to beat the BMW in European racing. And nor might Moffat’s Chev Monza have existed, had it not been for the BMW 3.0 CSL…
Well, not exactly, but the fact is Moffat’s Monza – one of a 14 specially built-for-racing Monzas – was built partly because of the dominance in American GT racing of imported European cars like (especially) the Porsche Carrera RSR and (to a lesser extent) the BMW 3.0 CSL. Moffat himself won one of the big US GT events, in a one-off drive for the factory BMW team, in the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1975.
These superfast European machines were making life hard for the home-grown Camaro and Corvette runners in the IMSA GT Championship. Something had to be done, and so for 1975 IMSA set up a separate GT category called All-American GT. It was to the new AAGT formula that the race Monzas were built.
They were not factory-built or manufacturerbacked cars in the way the Porsches and BMWs were, but there was certainly factory involvement from General Motors. This was still the era of the official GM We-Don’t-Go-Racing worldwide motorsport policy but, like Holden in Australian touring car racing at the time, Chevrolet was in it up to its eyeballs. Chev helped in various areas of the design process – and it even developed the trademark bodywork flares and spoiler package.
The race Monzas were built in Libertyville, Illinois, by a company called DeKon Engineering. The firm was formed in 1974 by Lee Dykstra
Allan Moffat shocked Australian fans when he suddenly lobbed here with a futuristic new General Motors GT car.
and Horst Kwech. The name DeKon is a concatenation of the D in Dykstra and the K in Kwech, and the words Design and Construction.
Dykstra and Kwech were well known to Moffat: fellow Australian Kwech (see AMC #61) had been both a rival and a co-driver during their time in the Trans-Am in the 1960s; Dykstra had been Senior Project Engineer at Kar Kraft in the late ’60s when Moffat worked there as a development driver. So Moffat knew first-hand how good an engineer was Dykstra – and not simply because he had worked for him at Kar Kraft in 1967-68. It had been Dykstra who was the engineering genius behind the Moffat car which the Monza was effectively replacing, the legendary TransAm Boss 302 Mustang.
With the likes of Dykstra, Kwech and Chevrolet itself combining in the design and development phase (apparently General Motors’ input featured the company’s first attempt at using computer aided design and drafting technology), the end result was a very effective competition machine.
The thing about the DeKon Monza is that there’s nothing especially fancy or revolutionary in the design. In many respects it is a very conventional machine. The engine, for example – 5.7 or 6.0-litre Chev small block – isn’t midmounted; it drives through a four-speed BorgWarner gearbox and a live rear axle (in any case, American rules dictated that the drivetrain had to remain in situ). The rear end is controlled by trailing arms and a Watts Link. The diff is a Ford nine-inch – standard issue for this type of purpose.
Simple technology compared – especially – to the sorts of things that were being developed in Sports Sedan racing in Australia, where DeKon Monza chassis 1005 was destined.
Simple and perhaps not cutting edge technology, but the trick with this car was that things were done right.
Chassis-wise, the car consisted of a specially constructed space frame and integrated roll-cage welded into the standard central body structure of the original Monza shell. This was more or less in line with what was going on in Australian Sports Sedan racing.
Brakes were big 325mm front and 297mm rears using Lockheed calipers, operated through twin master cylinders with an adjustable balance bar. The DeKon Monzas came with those trademark beautiful BBS three-piece wheels, 14inch wide on the front and 17-inch on the rear.
So just as Moffat had been forced to ditch the Capri’s 16-inch wheels and tyre package this time 12 months earlier, now he would have to do the very same thing with the new car he had procured as the replacement for the Capri…
Moffat’s GM dalliance
The
’75 season had been something of a transitional one for Moffat. Cast adrift by Ford at the end of ’73, he had invested a lot of his own funds to set himself up properly as an independent touring car team, but with not all that much to show for it in terms of results. He went into the ’75 ATCC with a Falcon XB GT whose largest ‘sponsor’ signage was the ‘MOFFAT RACING’ decal on the front guards. After various dramas in the opening three rounds, Moffat quietly withdrew from the series to save his resources for Bathurst. The hiatus also gave him the chance to investigate new opportunities in the United States...
One thing the 1975 season had shown Moffat was that the Capri just wasn’t going to cut it as an outright contender at enough of the circuits in the following year’s inaugural Sports Sedan championship. Something else would be needed if he was serious about the title. As it happened, his old friends at DeKon Engineering had just the weapon.
The weapon in question may have been a Chevrolet – Moffat hadn’t always raced Fords, but he had never yet raced a GM product – but it had been two long years since Moffat had been a factory Ford driver. He was a free agent, but more to the point, he was a professional racing driver – he was in the business of winning races and championships. To stay in business, Moffat needed results, whether it was in a Ford or not.
Not long after he downed Bob Jane’s Monaro with the Capri at that memorable Winfield Sports Sedan Challenge at Wanneroo, Moffat boarded a plane headed for the States.
In late August he raced one of the new DeKon Monzas for the first time, co-driving with Kwech in a 500-mile race at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Although mechanical issues put them out, Moffat was impressed. He then went home to prepare for Sandown and Bathurst, returning to the US in November for a 250-mile race at Daytona. Driving the same chassis he’d run with Kwech at Mid-Ohio, Moffat qualified third but was sidelined by a fuel injection issue. No result, then, but Daytona was certainly an eye-opener: it was, Moffat noted of the long banked stretches, the fastest he had ever gone on a race track – the Monza topping out at a mammoth 329km/h!
It was interesting to note how Moffat fared alongside top Americans, especially those in
ostensibly identical DeKon Monzas. Against the likes of Al Holbert, Al Unser Snr and a host of other top American and European aces, and on a banked oval/road course of which he would have had not much experience, Moffat look right at home. When the injection issue halted the car, he had been comfortably ahead of the BMW 3.0 CSLs and only had the winning Corvette ahead of him.
Satisfied, Moffat put his money down. He was now the proud owner of a DeKon Monza. By then it was December. The Monza was flown straight to New Zealand, where Moffat would give it its Australasian debut in the Kiwi version of Sports Sedan racing in the NZ summer/ January series.
Monza – what’s that?
Keeping
up with the latest happenings in the world of motorsport wasn’t easy 40 years ago. There was no internet, and live TV broadcasts of motor racing were few and far between. Newspapers largely ignored the sport unless there was some spectacular crash to report (not much has changed there!). The main sources of news were the specialist motoring and motorsport magazines, most of which ran to very long lead times. It could take weeks or even a month just to find out who won the last F1 grand prix.
It was in this media landscape that the biggest Ford star in Australia was able to venture to the USA and race for the ‘dreaded’ General Motors opposition, not once but twice, during 1975 with almost no one in Australia being aware of it.
Moffat racing a Chevrolet anywhere should have been big news in motorsport in this country. Instead, the first that many fans would have heard of it was in Racing Car News in September ’75, in a tiny five-line news grab that told of Moffat partnering Horst Kwech in a Chevy Monza in an IMSA GT race at Mid-Ohio.
So for many Moffat/Ford fans it was a bit of a shock to see their hero turn up in New Zealand in January ’76 to race a new car that had a Bow-Tie, rather than Blue Oval badge.
But… Monza? What was that? To its down under audience in 1976, it was a sensational, even futuristic looking machine. With its combination of angled lines and low-slung curves, and those wild flared guards, it looked very different from all the other cars.
In New Zealand Moffat had been surprised by the amount of puzzled Kiwis asking him what kind of Porsche it was…
Likewise on this side of the Tasman, it wouldn’t have been stretching the truth to suggest that a large percentage of Australian fans probably had never seen or even heard of a Monza before. Probably many would simply have assumed that Moffat’s strange new machine was a Ford Monza!
For its New Zealand debut it was able to run in IMSA AAGT spec, which meant the 17-inch wheels could stay for the time being. It was, Moffat opined in Racing Car News in a feature entitled ‘Meet my Monza’, ‘a bit of a joke’ to have to fit 10-inch wheels.
He wrote: “The car will still perform, but I’d sure love to run the big rubber. And not just for the performance, either, but for the economics. Would you believe what one set of tyres has just done? Sixteen laps of Daytona, 30 laps of practice at Bay Park, then three races, 40 laps of testing before the meeting, then 30 laps of testing at Ruapuna, and then a heap of laps at Wigram.”
There would be an intriguing twist to the tyre/ wheel size saga. Not long after the Monza landed Left, above: Ford vs GM – but with Moffat representing The General. The Monza in its down under race debut, at New Zealand’s Bay Park. in Australia, CAMS announced that it would be changing the Sports Sedan rules to bring Australia into line with international FIA gradings for rim and tyre sizes on sedans and GT cars – meaning that over 3.0-litre cars would be allowed 16-inch wheels. However, the proposed change would not come into effect until January 1, 1977 (although even that was in doubt, because the Australian Sports Sedan Association immediately lodged a protest against the decision on the basis that it hadn’t been consulted beforehand…).
It’s tempting to wonder what might have happened, though, had CAMS brought that change in for the start of ’76. In Bryan Hanrahan’s book, Allan Moffat’s Scrapbook, Moffat talks glowingly about the Cologne Capri’s potential: “… it was not allowed to run here with the tyres as wide as it was designed to use, and we never updated the engine to the latest available specifications. Even so it could run with the big V8s except on long straights, and if we had been able to use the proper tyres they would have been good for two seconds a lap at most circuits.”
A Capri that was two seconds a lap faster might have been capable of doing the job solo in 1976, without the help of the Monza…
That notwithstanding, the reality in ’76 was that in the Monza, Moffat definitely had a car that could win.
“Let me tell you about the car,” he wrote in Racing Car News ahead of its first race here. “It really showed its paces at Wigram, just as it will in Australia, at places like Sandown, Adelaide and Surfers, anywhere I can put my foot down. Although it’s such a manoeuvrable little device that it will be good anywhere. It’s light, just over the ton, has fibreglass panels (which I first thought would be risky, but then I thought back to last year with the Capri, which hardly got a scratch on her, and I stopped worrying), and all up is probably three-quarters the size of our old Mustang.
“It’s got a 350 cubic-inch Chev V8 that’s putting out 550bhp on Kinsler fuel injection. Surprising thing is that it’s really a long-distance engine – for races like Daytona – but it’s still a real power-house for the short sprints. I think I’ll leave it like that, too, for reliability, although I plan
to get Peter Molloy to build me a genuine ‘sprinter’ soon as I get to Sydney.”
Sydney would be where the Monza made its Australian debut, at Amaroo Park in early March. The Sun-7 Rothmans 3-litre Series for touring cars was the main bill, but most of the 8500 crowd were there to see Moffat’s new Monza – and how it might fare against Pete Geoghegan’s Craven-Mild Monaro. Unfortunately, though, the Monaro had trouble in qualifying and would be starting from the rear of the grid. This wasn’t part of the plan, so the ARDC opted for a last-minute change to the programme to incorporate a pair of five-lap, twocar match races – Monaro vs Monza (it was such a quick-thinking piece of promotional brilliance that it probably left the ARDC chiefs wondering why they hadn’t thought of it in the first place!). In the end it proved a bit of a fizzer, however: the Monaro’s sparkplugs fouled, leaving Moffat to win both heats as he pleased.
The following week at Calder, Moffat was doing double duty, running the Falcon XB GT in the second round of the ATCC and the Monza in the first round of the Marlboro Sports Sedan Series. He managed a win in the Falcon but the Monza was an early casualty after he missed a gear and over-revved the engine.
Anyone with even a passing interest in the sport back in the 1970s would have been aware of the bitter rivalry between Moffat and Bob Jane. ‘Rivalry’ was perhaps putting it mildly…
One of the flash points occurred at the May Sandown meeting, where again Moffat was running the Falcon in the championship and the Monza in the support races. This was the meeting that featured a much-publicised $1000 wager between the two: Moffat’s Monza vs Jane’s Monaro. By the time the cars rolled out for qualifying the bet had escalated to $5000 – a small fortune 40 years ago! – but if the spectators hoped for a bruising grudge match in the style of so many that had taken place between Jane in the Camaro and Moffat in the Mustang, they were to be disappointed as the Monza was hit by various troubles and the two rivals didn’t really engage one another in battle.
At Calder in May, though, Moffat would turn the tables on Jane with what was the Monza’s first big win, in the Marlboro Series race.
At this meeting Moffat pulled a surprise by dusting off the Capri. He ran Monza in the over 4000cc heat (winning) and the Capri in the 2000-4000cc heat (also winning – the sundry collection of hotted up six-cylinder Torana Sports Sedans didn’t have a hope of beating the Cologne Capri), before fronting for the final with the Chevy. It was wet, but Moffat and the Monza were up for it against allcomers, even including Jim Richards, the Sidchrome Mustang finishing a close second.
This was the meeting to which Moffat refers elsewhere about the withholding of prizemoney. From Jane’s perspective, he strongly believed the Monza didn’t comply with the rules and that CAMS shouldn’t have issued it with a logbook in the first place. It ended up in a legal quagmire but eventually Jane withdrew writs he had issued against CAMS and its senior office holders.
Certainly it was not as though there hadn’t been dramas concerning the Monza’s eligibility: CAMS insisted that Moffat provide evidence that at least 5000 Chevrolet Monzas has been sold in the United States, the governing body also requiring some modifications to the floor and front suspension before it was satisfied the car complied with Sports Sedan regs.
The important thing was that it did comply, however, because the mid-May opening round of the Australian Sports Sedan Championship at Surfers Paradise (see ASCC overview section) was fast approaching…
Monza returns
Tere was no place for a Chevrolet in the new Moffat Ford Dealers regime in 1977. So the Monza was forced into exile, hidden away in an undisclosed location as if it had never existed. It would be more than two-and-a-half years before it was seen again in public.
The Monza only saw the sunlight again because at the end of 1978 there’d been another Ford flip flop as the Blue Oval withdrew from the sport yet. Back to privateer status again, Moffat dusted off the DeKon.
But a lot had changed while the Monza had been away. The dominance of the Gardner Corvair (now driven by Allan Grice) had altered the Sports Sedan landscape immeasurably. There were also new, highly developed machines like Jim Richards’ Falcon, John McCormack’s Jaguar XJS and Tony Edmondson’s Alfetta-Chev. And more were on the way – Bob Jane had got himself a DeKon Monza, and was in the process of converting it into a lightweight rocketship with a Formula 5000 transaxle rear end.
Technology was continuing to proceed at a fair rate in Sports Sedans; after 32 months away Moffat’s Monza was going to have its work cut out.
That much was proven in the Monza’s comeback race at Oran Park in April, ’79, the second round of the championship. At least two seconds a lap off the pace of the Corvair, it finished a distant fifth. Just ahead was the Monza’s old sparring partner, the Jane HQ Monaro, now with Phil Ward at the wheel.
The Monza missed the rest of the championship, but returned for the final at Sandown – where it took a surprise win. Granted the Corvair wasn’t there, and likewise some of the other front runners struck trouble, but Moffat had had to recover from dramas of his own, including having to start 22nd on the grid due to engine issues in qualifying.
To help prepare his new Falcon XD for Bathurst in 1980, Moffat enlisted none other than Lee Dykstra. Having one of the architects of the DeKon Monzas on board also helped with squeezing more speed out of car that was simply now outdated.
There was no sign of any improvement in the opening round at Oran Park, where engine issues kept the Monza well off the pace, but in qualifying at Amaroo Moffat outpaced a strong field to take pole. He couldn’t sustain it in the two races, though, slipping to sixth and fourth.
And that was it. Between competing in the Australian Sports Car Championship – which he won – in Alan Hamilton’s Porsche 934 Turbo, and the lengthy and exhausting behind-the-scenes lobbying process to get CAMS to approve the Mazda RX7 for racing, there was neither the time nor resources to continue with the old Chevy. It was sold the following year to Sydney racer Paul Jones, who ran it in local events before selling it to Fred Ewing and Neil Brain. Brain and Ewing shared it for a year before selling to John Tesoriero.
Born in the USA; back in the USA
In
1995 John Tesoriero sold the Moffat Monza to Theo Bean of Lafayette, Los Angeles. After a 20year spell down under, the Monza had now gone ‘home’. Bean already had one DeKon Monza, and he kept them stored together until selling the Moffat car to Steve Simpson of Georgia. Simpson then put the car in storage, finally selling to current owner, Steve Sorenson, of California.
Sorenson undertook the painstaking restoration which the previous three Americans intended to do but never got around to doing.
The end result is the magnificently presented machine pictured above at last year’s Rolex Monterey Motorsport Reunion at Laguna Seca. The Reunion is the United States’ premier Historics meeting (what the Americans call “Vintage racing”), with the ex-Moffat DeKon chassis 1005 proving to be a showstopper both in the paddock and when it ventured onto the track for events for GT cars with a period racing history. Appropriately, these races included other models raced by Moffat: BMW 3.0 CSL ‘Batmobile’, Porsche 935 and Porsche 934.
AMC spoke briefly to Sorenson via phone while researching this story. He said the car, when he received it, was little more than a tube frame and many boxes of parts — including some that weren’t from this car, which proved to be something of a red herring. Among the many challenges he faced was fabricating the interior and exterior panels from scratch.
Steve, there’s an open invitation to attend the Australian Muscle Car Masters with this important piece of local racing history. We salute you for returning it to the track with a livery reflecting the car’s US origins and its most famous campaigner.
Ditto Mike John and Gordon Burr in the case of the Cologne Capri. We reckon it’s a minor miracle that both chassis used by Moffat to win the 1976 ASSC survive today and are back racing. Bravo.