The one that got away
The long-awaited unveiling of the Moffat Mazda was a glamorous black-tie affair at Melbourne’s Hilton Hotel on
1 September 1981, and the car looked resplendent in its
Peter Stuyvesant International cigarette colours, which conveniently matched Mazda’s blue and white.
Tobacco sponsorship was at its peak and Moffat, having lost his Camel backing, had gone to Rothmans for a deal. He fortuitously found himself presenting to a South African executive who was most impressed when Moffat spoke Afrikaans, remembering some of his schoolboy language skills. “Sometimes,” he wrote in his recent autobiography, Climbing the Mountain, “good luck just hits you in the face.”
Out on the track two weeks later, the new car didn’t look quite so impressive, qualifying 14th for the Sandown 400, some 4.7 seconds slower than pole man Dick Johnson’s Falcon, and nishing sixth, four laps down on winner Peter Brock’s Commodore. It was not an auspicious start.
Things went much better at Bathurst, though. Moffat made the most of inclement weather in qualifying to start fth and then drove the wheels off the car throughout the race – as did
brilliant English co-driver Derek Bell – to be running third when a massive crash at McPhillamy Park blocked the track. The race was stopped and declared at 121 laps instead of the full 163. Johnson, whose Falcon was leaking oil, was declared the winner and Bob Morris second, despite his new Falcon being a wreck in the middle of the track.
Moffat, fuelled to the end and on grippy new tyres, reckons he would have won. “My Mazda was in perfect condition… and could have won Bathurst on debut,” he wrote. “Instead, Derek and I were given third. It was gut wrenching.”
Mazda, however, was delighted. They literally rolled out the red carpet, as PR man John Croker explains: “On the Tuesday we were back in Melbourne and Allan was coming in to see Baxter to give him a debrief, so I found a little roll of red carpet from somewhere and organised all the staff to be down in the reception area of the
building. We opened the door and he stepped First pics of Moffat’s RX7 (top left) as part of Mazda’s press release, with the team being officially launched in a lavish ceremony in Melbourne (above). Moffat believes he could have won at Bathurst in 1981 had the race not been red flagged (centre).
in, then stepped back again – he was a bit stunned! He said in all his years with Ford they never did anything like that for him.”
Moffat didn’t have to wait long for a maiden victory, and this time he was thankful for officialdom. Brock had crossed the line rst in the Surfers Paradise 300, 57.5 seconds ahead of the Mazda, but a one-minute penalty for a push start in pit lane saw Moffat declared the winner. It was the end of a controversial rst season, but that was just a taste of things to come.