Q&A Allan Horsley
AMC: When did you get involved with Mazda and Moffat?
AH: In 1981. I had left Oran Park and I got a phone call just as I was about to buy a real estate agency. I was employed by Mazda, not Moffat, but he would have put me up for the job. There was no budget for privateers, but we did look after some of them.
AMC: Did you do any naughty things with the car?
AH: Not really. We were subject to closer scrutiny than any other team’s car, I reckon. Peter (Brock) was going to protest us once for gas (nitrous-oxide), but he didn’t. Mind you, we did encourage that a little bit by putting whatever the symbol was for that gas on a re extinguisher bottle or something.
AMC: Just a gag? You never ran it?
AH: No.
AMC: How did you get on with Moffat?
AH: I had a good relationship with Moff, even though he was ornery. I don’t think I ever had an argument with him.
AMC: Any regrets about the project?
AH: We should have won Bathurst – that was the real one that bugged me.
AMC: Any year in particular?
AH: The one where the big crash was (1981). We would have won that easily. We used the harder tyres right through the race, and then we put the quick ones on (for the end), the quali ers, and we could have got to the end on those. They were worth quite a bit of time. Plus Dick was absolutely out of oil, he leaked most of it onto Conrod Straight where they pulled them all up, so we would have won that race.
AMC: Whose idea was the famous mid-race pit stop at Wanneroo during the 1983 ATCC race?
AH: Mine. I’d watched them do it in Formula One, so I did all the maths and worked out what the timings were, and it was half a chance. That hill at Wanneroo certainly hurt our performance, and we knew we were so many seconds quicker with half a tank, so why don’t we do this? There was nowhere else you could really do that. Before the race I gave (TV commentator) Will Hagon an envelope and said you can open that after the race starts. I didn’t want them to go into a panic, so it explained what we were going to do.
AMC: That strategy was brilliant.
AH: It nearly became unbrilliant when bloody Mick (Webb) stuck the churn through the window glass! We hadn’t practiced a stop and he missed going into the fuel ller and it went through the window.