Redemption
When the opportunity presented itself to Peter Molloy to team up with Bob Morris for an assault on the Australian Touring Car Championship, Molloy relished the opportunity not just to try to win the ATCC but also to settle an old score.
For Peter Molloy in 1979, the battle was personal. The noted engine whiz/race engineer was making a return to touring car racing after what had been an acrimonious split with Allan Moffat after their successful 1977 season together. And he had Moffat in his sights.
“I wanted to knock those bastards off,” Molloy says, “I wanted to get back at Moffat, after the way he had treated me and my crew, and I wanted to knock off the HDT at the same time. Bob [Morris] didn’t know that at the time, but that was my motivation for getting involved.”
In the meantime in 1978, Molloy had kept himself busy running Bruce Allison’s Formula 5000 Chevron. That year in the Molloy’s Sydney workshop, he and his crew put up
a special ‘Moffat’ whiteboard on the wall of the engine room.
“We made a point of writing on the whiteboard what the Falcons did after we left Moffat, just to make a note of it. There wasn’t too much writing on the wall! That was when we decided that we’ve got to come back and beat these bastards.”
Molloy is best known as a race engine builder, and indeed he had been responsible for the 351 Cleveland V8s in Moffat’s Falcon Hardtops in ’76 and ’77. But to pigeonhole Molloy as an engine man is to sell him short: Molloy sees himself rst and foremost as a chassis specialist – and he has a record to back it up. It’s often overlooked that Molloy was responsible for the cars, and not just the engines, of Niel Allen in the 1960s and Warwick
Brown’s Formula 5000s in the 1970s (inset left). “I always said, ‘Engines don’t win races.’ It’s the platform that the engine is in that wins races. The driver? He’s about 10 percent. But a good engine won’t do the job without a good chassis.”
The 1979 arrangement between Molloy and the Morris/Hodgson out t would turn out to be highly fruitful, even if things took a while to gel, according to Molloy.
“It was a difficult year because Bob could be a very difficult person, always criticising what we were doing. But Ron Hodgson was no different. I ended up having a meeting with Hodgson, and I said to them, ‘You either do it the way I say, or I’ll just go – I’m easy.’ So they decided to do it my way.
“They didn’t have the car right, and what made that worse was the trouble we had getting homologation updates from the HDT. They didn’t want to give us anything.
“At Lakeside they brought out a new 3.9:1 diff, and other people had one but we didn’t. ‘We sent you one,’ they told us. Ours had ended up in Darwin or somewhere.
“I complained to the scrutineers and they nally gave us one – and I didn’t use it. I found it was wearing the tyres too quickly. I made out that I changed the diff; we pretended to change it – had the car up on stands in the pits with the banjo out making it look like we were changing the diff.
“It was an extremely difficult year. They made it as hard as they could, and that’s one reason we were determined to knock them off. I don’t blame Sheppo, because he had to do his job, but they were also running other cars (John Harvey’s sister car, with Wayne Negus making it a threecar HDT attack at Wanneroo) against us.”
“We just had a better setup with springs and shocks. With the way they were homologated, you weren’t allowed to change many things, so it was all about how well you set it up.”
Of course, Molloy took over on the engine development side, too. To that end, Molloy deliberately sacri ced horsepower in the search for better low-down acceleration – which he
felt would serve them better than outright horsepower on most of the circuits on the championship calendar. One of the biggest improvements came with the switch to a Holley carburettor.
“They’d been running twin 48mm Webers but they were hopeless, way too big. I put a little fourbarrel Holley on it, which was much more suitable for an engine of that size, and it gave it so much more acceleration.”
A feature of the Hodgson team that year was the fact they ran two cars across the season. It wasn’t a necessary component of their success, Molloy thinks, although it did make life a lot easier.
But the luxury of having a spare car at the ready back red on Molloy at the second round of the
AMSCAR Series when Ron Hodgson decided to race both cars – with none other than Moffat lling the spare’s seat!
“I wasn’t too impressed with having to have Moffat in the car. I just said to Ronnie Missen,
Top left: Molloy was not best pleased with having to host Allan Moffat in the second Hodgson A9X at an AMSCAR round in ‘79 – his main reason for joining Hodgson had been the chance to beat former employer Moffat!
‘You look after Moffat and I’ll do Bob’s car.’ That AMSCAR series, I was just glad to get out of that and piss off.”
At least he could console himself with the fact that the only reason Moffat was there was because his Falcon team had been completely crushed under the weight of the dominance of Molloy’s Hodgson (and the HDT) Toranas…
Meanwhile the serious business of the title ght was ongoing. Wins for Brock at Wanneroo and Surfers Paradise matched Morris’ consecutive wins from the previous Sandown and Oran Park rounds as they headed into the
nal two races. Brock was winning the war in qualifying with a string of pole positions, but fortunes were much more evenly spread when it came to the races.
Molloy puts Brock’s qualifying pace down to the HDT’s Bridgestone tyres.
“Bob kept saying, ‘They’ve got the Bridgestones,’ and I said, ‘Look, the Bridgestones are no better than the Dunlops. It bothered Bob that Brock was faster than him in qualifying but I said to him, ‘Don’t bother about Brock until the races. They’ll always be quicker than you in qualifying because of their special tyres, because they had qualifying tyres.’ We didn’t have those. We were running off-the-shelf Dunlops.
“They might have been fast in qualifying but they had to go back to their race tyres for the race. And because their car moved around more than ours, they would wear out their tyres faster than our car.”
Just as had been the case 12 months earlier, it came down to a nal round showdown at Adelaide International Raceway.
“At Adelaide I just said to Bob, ‘Look, you’ve just got to sit behind him and don’t worry about it. His car will go off in 10 laps; he’ll be bouncing all over the road.’ And that’s what happened. I used to watch the other cars out on the track and assess them – I mean, you’ve got to know what your opposition’s doing.
“When the car was really good, Bob drove very well – he was very hard to beat. Brock was a pretty good driver but a bit overrated, I thought. He panicked a bit when we put him under pressure in the nal round at Adelaide when the championship was on the line. I was watching him early in the race and the car’s moving all over the place. I just knew he wasn’t going to have any tyres left at the end. It was very satisfying to win that because I was able to achieve what I had set out to do.
“But it was embarrassing. We had [scrutineer] Harry Firth pulling us down again, as he did after every bloody race, and he kept us and our car and Sheppo with his car in parc ferme. So Sheppo and I are in there and we’re talking about the race, and Harry left us there for ages while everyone else is getting on the piss, and eventually he comes and says, ‘Righto, you can take your cars away.’ Anyway, John says to me, ‘Come over and have a couple of beers’ – he was like that, John was OK. So we went over to the HDT tent and Brocky’s in there up on the stage shooting his mouth off. He saw me there talking to Sheppo and he sung out at the top of his voice, in front of all his crew, ‘You’re working for me next year, you!,’ and I just gave him the middle nger. Not likely, mate!
“It was a very rewarding year. I like strong opposition, and Sheppo was a strong opponent. He was an ex-openwheeler guy like I was, and he was very competent.”
Elsewhere in this feature on the ’79 ATCC battle, John Sheppard makes some allegations regarding the legality of the Hodgson Toranas’ engines.
Molloy strenuously denies Sheppard’s allegation that the Hodgson Torana was running oversize bores on the right cylinder bank, describing the claim as ‘ridiculous.’
“You can’t have an unbalanced engine like that,” Molloy says. “I don’t understand why anyone would think that could even work.You wouldn’t disturb the balance of the engine just to hide something from the scrutineers, and we weren’t trying to hide anything from them anyway.
“I never ever wanted to be caught cheating – so I didn’t cheat. If you can’t do something right, don’t do it.”
He also refutes Sheppard’s claim that scrutineer Harry Firth (whom Sheppard had replaced at the HDT at the end of ’77) took a more lenient approach to checking the Hodgson
car than he did with the HDT machines.
“Everything we did was checked by Harry,” Molloy says. “You couldn’t get away with a fart. He was an absolute pest. He was down on me at every race meeting. He was out to get me from the word go, and he was totally frustrated.”
Bob Morris also refutes Sheppard’s claims: “This is the rst time that I have heard that HDT had felt that our engine was not legal,” he told AMC.
Morris believes that his engine and Brock’s were equal in power, and the difference was simply the fact that the Hodgson Torana was getting better drive onto the straight as the HDT A9X’s Bridgestones began to fade.
“I was behind him from the start of the race, and when we were both getting equal traction we were both doing the same speed down the straight, even though I was a little better geared than he was. But when his tyres started to go off, naturally I was going faster than him on the straight. We might have steamed past him on the straight, but that was only because he wasn’t able to get onto the straight quick enough.
“If we’d had a horsepower advantage, I would have been able to pass Brock much earlier in the race instead of waiting for his tyres to overheat.
“Personally, I just think on re ection that our team did our homework and outsmarted the factory team.”