Stretching the rubber band
Mazda rewarded Moffat with an ultimately class-winning drive at Daytona in January before tackling a new domestic season.
He was con dent after extensive testing, including in Japan (after also taking a class win in the Macau Group 5 race en route to Fuji Raceway), and at the opening ATCC round at Sandown the RX7 was 1.8 seconds a lap faster than he’d been ve months earlier.
The ATCC was not his priority in 1982, though, but rather Bathurst and the Australian Endurance Championship later in the year. He skipped the Calder round to spite track owner Bob Jane, and the long haul to Wanneroo, killed an engine at Symmons Plains from being stuck in the slipstream of Kevin Bartlett’s Camaro all race and lost a win after jumping the start at Oran Park, yet still nished third in the championship with two wins.
Still, the fans were unrepentant, hanging out banners about ‘Jap Crap,’ ‘Riceburners’ and even ‘Remember Pearl Harbour.’ It was a
Moffat joined Kent Racing for the 1982 Daytona 24 Hour race, driving with Kathy Rude and Lee Mueller, finishing sixth outright.
toxic environment, but that’s never bothered the combative Moffat.
With plenty of engines, a seemingly endless supply of Goodyear tyres and a big budget, Moffat tested extensively, honing the car’s suspension and brakes and learning how far he could stretch those seemingly bulletproof screaming rotaries.
“We’d been told to rev the engines to only 7500 or something,” Webb recalls. “But we went to Oran Park for a test week and I said, ‘Everyone I talk to says the more you rev these
little buggers the faster they’re going to go.’ So we started revving it to eight, it improved. Eight- ve, it improved. We checked the engine compression and it was still perfect. So we started revving it to nine, nine- ve, nine-eight. I think we nished up running the 12As to ten- ve.”
It paid off with pole position for the opening round of the Australian Endurance Championship, but a broken throttle cable meant they left Oran Park with no points. Three wins from the remaining four rounds – at Sandown, Surfers and Adelaide – saw Moffat claim the drivers’ title, but sadly for Mazda the manufacturers’ award went to Nissan thanks to class wins.
Even more sadly, the other non-win was Bathurst, despite building two new left-hand-drive RX7s for the anti-clockwise circuit.
New team rebrand Lucio Cesario wrecked one car in practice and was sacked, then a new front brake system – designed to eliminate a pad change – let them down in the race and a disastrously slow stop dropped Allan and his new teammate, Mazda factory ace Yoshimi Katayama, to a sixth place nish.
There was another innovation at Bathurst, too, but one that was kept secret. Knowing that the challenge at Bathurst was getting up the mountain, Webb revived an old trick he learned with the Stillwell Escort – tting an extra gear in the gearbox!
“The six-speed came about after the rst year at Bathurst. We had a super-reliable car and we could run it at for the whole race; it just lacked that little bit up the hill. I said to Allan, ‘Well, the only way to alleviate that it to put another gear in it. Let me talk to Peter Hollinger because he’s a wizard.’ So I called into Pete’s house in Warrandyte on the way home and we went through it.”
They couldn’t modify the housing because it had to look the same as the homologated
ve-speed, but they replaced reverse gear with another forward gear in the main case, then put a tiny sprocket in the extension housing so the car could be (very gently) driven in reverse.
“Fourth was direct drive and fth was an overdrive and sixth was a bigger overdrive. I think we ran a 5.3 diff ratio, which was super low, so we had the acceleration in rst, second, third and fourth up the mountain, and then used fth and sixth down Conrod. It was fantastic really, and it worked perfectly. But we only ever used it at Sandown and Bathurst.”
It had been a contentious year, and none more so than at Sandown, where Allan was black- agged for speeding in pit lane – even though there was no set limit. He pitted, but the officials had neglected to tell the team what the black ag was for, so he was sent back out, still in the lead. “The car lobbed and I had no directions from the officials, so we just let it go,” team manager Horsley says. “There was no alternative to what we did. Well, the alternative was just to sit there!”
Again the black ag came out, and this time Allan duly ignored it to take the win. It was a complete shambles, and the crowd booed Moffat wildly when he parked in front of the grandstand, only to be told Allan Grice had been declared the winner. Months later, a court upheld his appeal and the victory stood.
But there was unreported fallout from the controversial weekend. According to Webb, they had secretly used some new stiff-wall rear Dunlops, though with Goodyear stenciled on the side in deference to his long allegiance with the company. However, in the turmoil of that chaotic nish, “someone jumped up on the rostrum and put a Dunlop hat on Allan’s head, and Goodyear in Akron had the photographs within 48 hours
Above inset: The 1982 Sandown 400 saw a succession of controversial moments, culminating in someone inadvertently placing an ill-fitting Dunlop hat on Moffat’s head post-race. This hit AM in the hip-pocket when, back in Akron, Ohio, Goodyear saw images. Above left: Lucio Cesario’s time with the team was short, unlike AMR stalwart Gregg Hansford. and our sponsorship ceased forthwith – he’d been with Goodyear all his life, and the hierarchy just cancelled his contract instantly”.