Plans for a V8
Horsley revealed to AMC details of a remarkable plan that never came to fruition, but which would have been a huge story at the time – and would have seen Moffat back in a V8. With Mazda partly owned by Ford, the Moffat team planned to produce a Mazda 929 sedan powered by a Ford 302 engine!
And it wasn’t just on paper. The Moffat team went so far as to build a prototype road car at the Toorak race shop, and discovered to their delight that “the Ford V8 went straight in, and even the gearstick came up through the old hole perfectly. We even drove it around, and no one ever picked up that it was a V8. It was a beautiful thing to drive on the road, but we never put it on the track. We were going to homologate them,
but we just didn’t go on with it,” Horsley says. “It wasn’t a lot of effort to do it. It would have looked pretty standard and we could have built 20 of them easily (to qualify for Group C).”
But Group C was on its last legs and Group A was coming. And the international formula would have required a build of 5000 cars, which Mazda wasn’t prepared to do.
So 1984 would be the last year for the Big Bangers, and for Mazda, which in 1983 had
nally scored its treasured manufacturers’ title. It did so again in 1984, along with another drivers’ title for Moffat, but not another touring car crown.
The ATCC season was curtailed by a massive accident at a wet Surfers, when Garry Bottom right: Moffat’s final Bathurst in a Mazda began with a ride along the pitwall in #43 and ended, after jumping into the #42 started by Gregg Hansford, with an appearance on the podium, with third.
Top: Moffat’s last race on Aussie soil in the RX7 saw him win the AEC with second place at Surfers.
Willmington’s Falcon clipped the Mazda in the high-speed kink and Moffat headed for a large bush that unfortunately concealed a metre-wide tree stump. The Mazda stopped instantly and violently, and Moffat was taken away with a broken hand and sternum.
After three months on the sidelines, Moffat returned for the endurance races, winning at Oran Park and nishing second at Sandown, third at Bathurst and second at Surfers to wrap up the Australian Endurance Championship.
Mazda’s nal shot at winning Bathurst ended almost before it began when Steve Masterton (Falcon) hit Moffat after the start and sent the Stuyvesant RX7 (interestingly, back on carburetors) into a wall of death act on the barrier before Hell Corner. Another accident further back caused a restart, but the repaired RX7 had a fractured oil line and was out after only 15 laps. Thankfully, with just such a setback in mind, the team had entered a second car and Moffat and Hansford raced hard all the way to the end, but they were no match for the dayglo MHDT Commodores.
As a nal send-off, Mazda sent one of the RX7s to Daytona, where Moffat and Hansford were joined for the 24 Hour by Kevin Bartlett and Peter McLeod, a prominent Mazda dealer and racer who had helped clinch that rst Australian manufacturers’ title. The car ran superbly and was in ninth place outright at the 16-hour mark, well clear of its class rivals, when McLeod crashed. The car was repaired but the engine later swallowed a stone and retired.
And that was all she wrote. The often
controversial, always entertaining and sometimes spiteful era of Allan Moffat Mazda Racing was over, and Allan was once more out of business. He would be back, again making headlines, but not in a Mazda. Everything was sold off and 711 Malvern Road was again empty.
Moffat himself, who sadly now has little memory of his glorious racing past, summed up the RX7 experience to me in a 1985 interview: “The fact that it took two years to homologate is Australian motorsport’s loss, as well as mine. I think you would agree that the Mazda RX7 did nothing but improve Australian touring car racing. It gave privateers an opportunity to compete at a nancial level that wasn’t horri c. In the Ford days, 95 percent of everyone’s creative effort was spent on the engine and ve percent on the car. The ratio with the Mazda was exactly the opposite. The only time we spent on the engine was how long it took to undo the box it came in…”