Creating a giant-killer
“At last I think it’s time to actually believe CAMS has made a nal decision on the Mazda,” a relieved Allan Moffat told me in February 1981. “Now all I have to do is build a racecar.”
Having convinced the factory in Japan that this decision would stick and not be reversed, a crate of engines and gearboxes was soon on its way to Australia. But the rest of the car would have to be built at Moffat’s Malvern Road, Toorak workshop on his famed ‘surface plate’ – a perfectly at steel platform gifted to him years earlier by Ford.
Complicating matters was the fact that this would be the rst car built there in metric. Everything until now had been in inches, and that would result in some simple mistakes being made, he admitted. As if understanding the Japanese-language specs manual wasn’t hard enough…
Mazda wanted to employ a professional manager to run the team, so Moffat recommended Horsley, who had just left Oran Park, and then he rang Mick Webb to head up the mechanical team.
Only a few months earlier, Webb had built Moffat’s ultimately unsuccessful yellow Bathurst XD Falcon, in just 30 days. He would have six months to build the rst Mazda with a crew of four, and even then it would take every working day and night to get it nished.
Webb was joined by Ian Walburn, Andrew Cowcher and Dennis Watson, then brought in ace fabricator Chris Farrell (not to be confused with the Sydney F2 racer) to build the 48mm alloy roll-cage. It was all new territory to them, and they literally went by the book.
“Mazda in those days put out a fantastic step-by-step book for building a racecar,” Webb recalls, “so we built the rst car through this workshop manual basically. Things like, ‘These are the rear suspension bushes, instead of putting nylothene or rotor joints in them, you drill a few holes in the upper and lower control arms to give them a bit more wobble and a bit more movement so they don’t bind up.’
“One day I’m sitting there looking at the CAMS Manual, making notes on what we were and weren’t allowed to do, and I remember Allan walking up and looking over my shoulder. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said I was just seeing what we can do with the suspension. He grabbed the book and threw it straight in the bin and said, ‘Don’t worry about the rule book, build the best and fastest racecar you possibly can,
“We stretched the limit with that little car in lots of areas, from suspension to the engine. We sort of followed the book initially, but we changed lots of things.” - Mick Webb
we’ll worry about the rules later.’
“That’s basically how it always was. We stretched the limit with that little car in lots of areas, from suspension to the engine.
“We sort of followed the book initially, but we changed lots of things. We didn’t use the Japanese fuel bladder, we went to an ACL bladder, which Allan always had in the Mustang. Most of the engineering stuff was American – the axles, limited slip, tailshaft, other titanium parts like front and rear hubs, wheel nuts, anything to reduce the unsprung weight…
“I got Ron Harrop to do a fully oating axle, and Allan said, ‘Oh, I’ve only ever used Summers Brothers, their axles have been in the Mustang since day one and I’ve only ever had two axles – a left and a right – we should be using them.’
“But Ron was a mate of mine so we put a Harrop rear end in it, and at Sandown it broke an axle going into the old Peters Corner, where it was always bumpy.
“After that, Allan told me to get onto Summers Brothers. I sent them a sample of the diff spline and the outside hub, with the exact dimension we wanted. We had three different complete rear ends so I said I wanted three sets of axles, but the guy said, ‘No, you only need one pair of our axles.’ So we only bought two axles, and the only way they’d sell us another pair was when we built a second car. They were just bulletproof.”
Webb reckons a dozen race-ready 12A rotary engines arrived from Japan, along with four or ve gearboxes, all with different ratios that had been homologated. The 1146cc twinrotor engines were tted with Weber 48IDA downdraught carburetors, and the ve-speed gearboxes were externally cooled.
The front suspension was conventional, with independent struts, coil springs and anti-roll bar, while the rear featured longitudinal four-link control arms, coil springs, anti-roll bar and a Watts linkage to control it laterally.
Tokico adjustable shock absorbers were used all round, and the 16-inch three-piece BBS alloy wheels were 10 inches wide, running nine-inch Goodyears, of course, at the front and 10-inch ones at the rear.
Sydney engineer Wally Storey later produced a fancy Watts linkage for some privateers, which they thought was an advantage, but the Moffat boys were already ahead of the game. Knowing that an adjustable set-up was illegal, but provided the ability to change the critical rear roll centre, they simply had different diff housings manufactured with various mounting points for the pinion to suit different circuits.
Secrecy was always an Allan Moffat Racing hallmark, and the Mazda program took that to another level. It started with the build and then extended to the circuits, where the Mazda compound was like Fort Knox. It would breed suspicion and distrust.