Walkin' a Lonely Road

When it hit the streets in mid-1988, the VL Commodore SS Group A SV "Walkinshaw," better known as the Walky, was the fastest and most expensive Holden ever made. It was also, by a considerable margin, the most painful to look at.

Today, after thirty years of ever-more-yobbo Holdens aimed at the knuckle-dragging AC/DC crowd, it doesn't seem that outrageous. But in a decade when Holden was trying to market itself as urbane and European, the Walky was far from subtle, standing out in traffic even in its gentle Panorama Silver paint scheme. At the vehicle's launch, Holden executive John Crennan was prompted to state: "To some people it may be over the top, but everything on the vehicle is there for a good reason. In many ways this is the most advanced car ever produced in Australia."

...Which was mostly because it hadn't been developed in Australia at all. The most prominent and recognisable part of the car, its outlandish bodykit, had been developed by Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR), based at Oxfordshire in the U.K.

The Sleeping Lion: Holden Special Vehicles
Scott Grant, managing director of HSV for about five minutes there ten years ago, once claimed that, "The birth of HSV and the reveal of the very first VL Group A SS Commodore – commonly referred to as the 'Walkinshaw' – took place at the 1987 Sydney Motor Show." While that much is true, the big reveal was done via a giant giant billboard with a full-size cardboard cutout, not the machine itself. The display also featured a pre-production version of the new Group A racing engine, Holden's first V8 to be fitted with fuel injection, with the real gravy being a cutaway plenum chamber showing the huge induction trumpets and twin throttle bodies, a work of art by 1987 standards. A single example of HSV's new wheel design was also on show.

The only image I can find is from the brochure, ironically as cutaway as the engine itself. (Source)

However, there wasn't actually a single production-spec Walkinshaw anywhere in existence at that time. Indeed, the outfit that would build them technically didn't exist yet. The display itself carried the new legend "Holden Special Vehicles," as Holden managing director Chuck Chapman and TWR founder and namesake Tom Walkinshaw had chosen this very event to announce their new joint venture. So how could they show off a production-ready car and engine when the ink on the contract was barely dry? Because the Walky was never meant to be a Walky. If things had gone according to plan it would have been another Brock, put together in Bertie Street by the crew at HDT Special Vehicles.

Back up to 1986. With Peter Brock slowly losing his mind over the Energy Polarizer, Holden had gone looking for someone else build their high-performance offerings and run the race team, just in case it all went pear-shaped. By happy coincidence, about this time GM in Detroit had finally overturned their long-standing "no race" policy, which had been in place since the Le Mans disaster of 1955 and made subterfuges like the Holden Dealer Team necessary in the first place ("No no, it's our dealer network that's racing. No sir, we're certainly not subsidising them or providing free cars..."). With the ban lifted, Holden were able to be fully and publicly involved at long last, founding a new branch of the company especially to liaise with the racing teams – Holden Motor Sport, or HMS.

The first boss of HMS was one John Lindell, and it was he who brought British touring car, sportscar and later F1 outfit Tom Walkinshaw Racing into the Holden family. Having campaigned Rovers and Jaguars in Europe for several years, with great success, by 1986 the granite-browed Scotsman was on the lookout for his next big project, and his eye fell upon the humble VL Commodore. Tom seems to've nursed a desire to win Bathurst, not just as an entrant but as a driver, and having experienced the Commodore as a rival in his first two Bathurst campaigns (and then seen it beat all comers, against the odds, in 1986), he'd probably decided it was a case of horses for courses. In a Commodore, he’d have a better shot at winning Bathurst than with anything else being campaigned at the time – and, given this was pre-Sierra RS500, he was probably right.

Yes, I said two Bathurst campaigns – the year before the Big Cats, Tom entered his works-backed Rovers in 1984's Group A "preview" class. He'd carried that torch for a while, it seems.

Whatever his deeper motivations, Tom asked HMS to back a team of TWR Commodores in Europe. With the Brock issue still up in the air Lindell was only too happy to oblige, flying two plane-loads of cars and parts to TWR's Oxfordshire base at the end of 1986 so they could assess the VL's development potential. At this stage it was just a one-off development contract – "Please fix our aero, here's a couple of samples to get you started" – but that December, possibly strategically, Lindell informed Brock that they would be encouraging TWR's campaign.

I flew back from Japan after racing at Mount Fuji and found myself on the same plane as Tom Walkinshaw, who was putting a deal together to build special vehicles. I knew nothing of it, but it showed how far we'd grown apart in the latter part of 1986. – Peter Brock

Which really should've been clue number one-thousand or so for Brock to knock it off already, but he tended to just tune out things he didn't want to hear. In any case, TWR's preliminary aerodynamic work won them a purchase order to continue, as Lindell realised that the existing VL Group A would need a major update to stay competitive. He also had his eye on a possible export model and/or racing special that could show off the new fuel-injected 4.9-litre V8 globally. At that stage the plan was still to have TWR finalise the car and then contract Brock and HDT to build the production version and race it, which is what had happened with the previous VL Group A (the red one). That car had been signed off and finalised before HDT were allowed to touch it, and any extra input from TWR this time around didn't meaningfully change that equation.

But then of course, in February 1987, Brock found himself exiled from Holden over the HDT Director, a very necessary decision that nevertheless cost Holden their prized go-faster cottage industry. TWR's development work wouldn't be finished until July, which left a tight deadline if they were going to have the new car ready by November. Holden suddenly realised they had to get a whole new wing of the company founded, staffed, furnished, waltzed through the legal and paperwork minefield, and then put a brand-new car on the road – all in just 10 months.

To speed things up, the obvious trick would be to contract someone already established, someone with experience who could be relied on to know what they were doing, and it seemed inevitable that that someone would be TWR. Holden released the tender in May 1987, and sure enough, Walkinshaw's submission was the one chosen, beating out eight other proposals from around the world. On 15 October 1987, TWR signed the initial ten-year agreement that created Holden Special Vehicles.

The official opening of HSV came on 17 February 1988. Inaugural HSV chief John Crennan had reportedly been recruited at the 1987 Adelaide Grand Prix, leaving his job as national marketing director to become managing director of HSV. The all-important marketing and public relations job was given to a man hand-picked by Walkinshaw himself, Brock's faithful lieutenant and co-driver from the glory days, John Harvey. Slug's first task was finding HSV a suitable property to use as a base, and he settled on a site at Notting Hill in Melbourne's south-east industrial belt, even though he could foresee parking would eventually become a problem, especially when they had 500 VL Group As to build in short order. "We were running out of time," he said.

The Elephant in the Room: That Aero Kit
Cd, or coefficient of drag, was the Next Big Thing for car designers of the 1980s. Arguably it had started with the Audi 100 of 1983, which managed to combine a Cd of 0.30 with remarkably unremarkable styling – it was around 30% more aerodynamic than most other cars of the time, yet was neither a weird-looking experimental nor a svelte low-slung sports car (technically Ford beat them to the punch with the Sierra, but that was regarded as a very odd duck when it was new – the nickname "Jellymould" said it all). After the Audi, other manufacturers started adopting their shallow-angled rear glass, high boot lines and underfloor guidance panels chasing ever-greater open-road fuel efficiency and, yes, higher speeds.

Audi 100, the quiet revolution. (Source)

It was to this end TWR coughed up possibly the most elaborate bodykit ever put on a production car, comprising huge front and rear spoilers, door and sill side skirts, C-pillar fairings and a large bonnet bulge which incorporated cold air (engine) induction, hot air (radiator) extraction, and sufficient clearance for the new fuel injection system. This monstrosity was not the result of stylists working out of a think tank at Fishermens Bend, but of painstaking testing carried out in the U.K.'s MIRA windtunnel at simulated speeds of up to 240km/h – tests which, rumour has it, tended to strain the local electricity supply. The silhouette that emerged earned the car a plethora of nicknames, from the somewhat flattering "Batmobile," to the deeply unflattering but possibly more descriptive "Plastic Pig."

There were 21 or 22 fibreglass pieces, each of which had to be painted separately. It was a massive task co-ordinating suppliers and painters. It was the hardest I ever worked. I rented another property and put all the parts on newspapers on the floor so they wouldn't be damaged. I regularly left home at six in the morning and went to one painter for the day and one for overnight to get them finished. I’d get home at six or seven and worked weekends. – John Harvey

In a press interview in 1987, John Lindell admitted the Walky's aerodynamics had been honed to work on a race car at race speeds. The catch was the regulations required all bodywork on a Group A car to remain stock-standard, the idea being to preserve the link with the showroom product and ensure the racing really did improve the breed. Holden, however, was perfectly willing to do things the other way around and put this ludicrously impractical bodywork on a road car, even if it had a detrimental effect on sales. The bodykit did indeed prove too extreme for the street, and most dealers supplied the lowest skirts and lips in a box, allowing the owner to choose whether they wanted to apply the full racing look or be able to get over a speed bump. It also contributed to a noticeable weight gain, the Walky weighing in at a rather bulky 1,340 kilos, with the complex bodykit accounting for at least 65 of them.

Via Facebook page, "VL SS Group A SV - Walkinshaw."

But that didn't mean the fibreglass was a failure. Harvey – who had shared the Rothmans VL with Allan Moffat in 1987 on fast European circuits like Monza and Spa – knew firsthand how at high speed the car seemed to hit an impenetrable wall of air, and yet was unnaturally nervous through high-speed corners. TWR's own testing had produced similar conclusions. Ergo, TWR's aerodynamicists had worked hard to reduce drag and increase downforce, and they succeeded on both counts.

With a Cd of 0.40, the standard VL was bad even by the standards of the 1980s, which is why it took so much bodykit to correct it. At the front was a very deep air dam, in appearance similar to the one on the previous Group A, but in function quite different. The brake cooling ducts had been moved toward the centre of the car, and the standard VL grille was virtually blanked off – the large duct under the bumper provided adequate airflow, said John Lindell. More importantly, the used cooling air was extracted by way of a large vent in the bonnet: excess under-bonnet air pressure had been a major problem with the VL Group A, as it tended to create lift at the front end to the point of almost negating the effect of the air dam. New side-skirts were developed to help channel fast-moving air under the car and improve downforce. The skirts featured three vents on either side, which allowed a controlled leakage of air out from under the car. These vents allowed a good balance between low drag and racy downforce.

It was aft of the B-pillar that Holden's race special looked the most radical, however. The VL’s sixth window – the one that had been such a key to the success of the VK – was covered by a one-piece panel that extended aft of the C-pillar to form a "fence" on either side of the raised boot lid. This panel markedly improved the air flow around the C-pillar, although Lindell admitted at the time that it had taken quite a battle to get it accepted by Holden's styling department. It was claimed that together Walkinshaw's fibreglass panels dropped the Cd to a slippery 0.34, an improvement of about 25%, correspondingly lifting its top speed to 235km/h and making it far more stable at speed than its red predecessor.

Another via Facebook page, "VL SS Group A SV - Walkinshaw."

So it did the job, but TWR's elaborate body additions were a challenge for local suppliers, and not for the "official" reasons given. The Walky was largely built on Holden's Dandenong line, where the upgraded mechanicals and different interior trim, which included an all-new Holden sports seating package to replace the Scheels favoured by Brock, were fitted to standard VL bodyshells. The cars were then transported to the HSV factory in Notting Hill to have the aerodynamic bits and pieces fitted and finished. That the bodykit didn’t really fit has long been common knowledge, and traditionally it was blamed on the fibreglass pieces themselves. Because of the rush they were actually made in Britain by a firm called Dove Plastics, and at this time British manufacturing quality was proverbially awful, witness jokes about Lucas, Rover and Jaguar. But we had the wrong end of the stick entirely: the real problem was that Holden's antiquated build processes were delivering VL bodies that varied in critical dimensions by centimetres, when TWR's aero parts were designed to close up all the gaps. Poor Dove had actually supplied TWR with the components for its factory-approved Jaguar bodykits, so the quality was top-notch, but they ended up wearing the blame for a bodykit that nobody liked.

By My Deeds I Honour Him: V8
Thankfully, Holden made up for it with the engine, the latest version of their special 4.9-litre V8. By now there was no disguising that it was an iron-block, carb-fed, pushrod-activated throwback trying to compete in a turbocharged, computerised, DOHC world. It might have been well-developed and battle-hardened, but as a concept it was much more classic Trans-Am than modern BMW M division, let alone something that – god forbid – was now going to be hanging around well into the 1990s. It was well past time it was modernised.

Tom Walkinshaw had previously added fuel injection to the SD1 to create the Rover Vitesse and Vanden Plas, the cars the SD1 should've been all along, so he was well aware of the gains that could be made with this more modern and precise method of fuel delivery. This aspect of the project, however was all-Australian, the hard work done by a local team under the direction of Holden Engine Company engineer Warwick Bryce, with the dyno work to fine-tune the fuel injection system and inlet manifold design undertaken by Larry Perkins.

Early experiments from Bryce included this twin-plenum setup on vertical rams. (Source)

Mods to the engine started with a strengthened block with four-bolt main bearings – now cast iron instead of steel, as it was stiffer and easier to machine to the correct tolerances. The Formula 5000-based crankshaft was carried over from the previous model, as were the strengthened conrods (fun fact: rewind the clock far enough and the V8 would trace its lineage back to the L34 engine of 1974, which had been crafted by Repco based on their thunderous Formula 5000 engines, at a time when memories of Jack Brabham's two F1 World Championships were still fresh).

At the heart of it though was the new Bosch/Delco multi-point fuel injection system, featuring a totally different cross-ram inlet manifold with twin throttle-bodies (one for low rpm, one for high). Apart from provision for injector nozzles in the combustion chambers, the new heads featured a slightly different valve arrangement: hitherto the exhaust valves for the middle two cylinders on each bank had been set adjacent to each other. With the fuel injected engine, this was changed so that exhaust and inlet valves alternated all the way along the head, thus allowing for a more even distribution of heat through the heads.

In addition, new exhaust extractors were developed in conjunction with HM Headers (the same people who’d supplied the Phase III) to handle the flow of exhaust gas from the differently-configured cylinder heads. The new headers featured a two-piece version of the high flange developed for the previous year's Group A SS, which allowed race teams significant freedoms in exhaust design and development – the rules said exhaust systems were free after the first join, so once again Holden made that first join as early as possible to give the teams as much freedom as they could. A 65mm pipe, new three-way catalytic converter and a reworked muffler completed the road car’s exhaust system, however, damping down the power but meeting noise limits down at the RTA office.

Under-bonnet view wasn't exactly a work of art, but it all worked just fine. The boxy inelegant plenum was working around intake architecture designed for a carb. (Source)

In road trim the engine developed around 180 kW at 5,200 rpm, and a claimed 380 Nm of torque at 2,800, both healthy increases over the previous Group A's 137 and 345. It wasn't the most powerful Holden ever made – it couldn't be, in those emissions controlled, post-ULP times – but it was the most powerful in a long, long time. Which sounded promising, but the extra power had largely been eaten up by the weight gain: 0-100 remained a claimed 6.5 seconds (more like 6.9), and times over the standing-quarter hovered stubbornly around the 15-second mark (14.95 measured at one point), no better than the old VH "Brockmobile." In the brochure Holden also claimed the Walky would do a combined 9.2 litres per 100km – yeah right, on a long downhill, maybe. Call it 14.5, guys, and then we’ll talk.

All that said, there’s more to performance than volcanic power. HMS also spent a lot of time looking underneath Les Small's racing Commodores to see if there were any useful changes they could adopt, but in the end it was decided to leave the Group A's suspension unchanged from the previous model – meaning stiffer springs, stabiliser bars, and Bilstein gas-filled shocks all-round. They kept the previous car's 16x7 wheel dimensions, although they were not the Momo star pattern favoured by Brock, and fitted with sticky Bridgestone RE71 tyres. The drivetrain scored a higher-capacity clutch to handle the extra torque of the new engine, Borg Warner's excellent BT5G 5-speed manual gearbox, and the ever-reliable 3.08:1 final drive ratio with four-pinion limited-slip diff (made slightly more reliable by shot-peened gears). As long as it had some well-chosen ratios, the Walky felt fast and fun, able to outrun anything in those days that wasn't expensive and Italian. Compared to the wallowing donor car, which could spin an inside wheel even in the Maccas drive-thru, the Walky was a much tidier, more responsive beast. "Nor," promised the brochure, "is it spartan. This Group A is the most comfortably furnished ever, with luxury equipment such as power windows, power door locking, 4-speaker stereo AM/FM radio-cassette, air conditioning and a security system. Each car complies fully with Australian Design Rules, and carries a full Holden warranty."

Interior was functional but a bit bland, with none of the character of a Brock. (Source)

Despite that, it was still a difficult sell. After the spike of the early 1980s, petrol prices were now definitely coming down so there was a growing market for performance machines, but this one seemed especially hard to swallow. For starters, it was a Walkinshaw Commodore, not a Brock Commodore, and the price was almost as over the top as the gregarious bodykit, with an initial asking price of $47,000 (almost $100,000 in 2015). That really was ludicrously expensive for a Holden, beating the previous record-holder (the original VC-based Brock) by nearly twenty grand in contemporary dollars – and the VC had been an ultra-low volume special aimed at doctors and lawyers. When initial demand was strong, HSV made the mistake of adding another 250 units to their initial planned batch of 500, taking the total to a whopping 750. But the Walky, slated for release in November 1987, didn't actually enter production until 10 March 1988, with homologation not approved until 1 August. By then, the rival EA Falcon had arrived and made VL Commodores – all VL Commodores – look decidedly out-of-date. Everyone knew the next generation wasn't far off, and after the VN arrived in August, most of the second batch stayed on dealer forecourts (some of them for years) until sold cheap, or were even stripped of the bodykit and resprayed to hide the fact they were unsold Walkies. (Of course, since then they've become quite collectable, and the original, No.001 – which was given away as a prize at Bathurst later in the year – is now valued at up to $300,000!)

Early Days Are Always Strange
A bit off-topic, but it's so delightfully weird I just have to share. In the early days HSV had trouble getting enough cars together to satisfy their 50-plus dealers around the country – the fuel-injected V8 wasn't available for lesser models until April 1989. To fill the gap, HSV set about creating a more sedate Calais SV88 model, which was released in May 1988. Using the standard Calais V8 as a donor car, they added the last of the V8 carburettor parts originally intended for various Brock models, eking out just 136 kW, and then made it worse with a 3-speed Trimatic ("Traumatic") auto, the only driveline that was available. On the exterior, new front and rear spoilers were fitted, along with a louvered grille and a set of HSV alloys. The acres of fuzzy velour on the interior were too little to really justify a price tag above $40,000. Since it was aimed at the businessman in a hurry, it had Australia’s first onboard car phone and fax machine as a staggering $3,300 option. Only 150 were ever produced.

Later, HSV released their weakest and most hilarious offering, the SV1800, a rather tepid tweak on the LD Astra hatchback (which in itself was really an N13-series Nissan Pulsar). A part of the Button Plan jigsaw aimed at getting volumes of individual models above 40,000, the Astra/Pulsar had dropped in sedan and hatch versions in 1987, powered by Holden’s 1.8-litre Family Two engine, putting out a respectable 79 kW. There was no sports model in the lineup, leaving the door open for HSV to work its magic. Sort of. The engine wasn't touched, and instead the SV1800 came with a bodykit, new wheels, tweaked suspension and some stickers. That was all. 0-100 in 11.7 seconds and a 400-metre time of 17.5 was slower than the standard car, and a world away from the 9 seconds claimed by HSV. Braking was compromised by rear drums – unforgivable when the Pulsar came with discs as standard. In the end only 65 of the "Baby Walky" were produced before production ceased in early 1989, an obscure footnote in HSV's history.

Never mind that, what was the real thing like on the track?
As a racecar the Walky held a certain amount of promise. In race tune the V8's 180 kW would become more like 335, achieved at a bellowing 7,000rpm, roughly the limit of valve spring technology in those days (and as per the rules, its kerb weight would become a slightly lighter 1,325kg). Late in 1987 Larry Perkins and Allan Grice had started receiving support from HMS, part of the new branch's efforts to ensure privateers had access to all the latest homologation parts and data. John Lindell believed Perkins and other top Holden race teams such as Les Small's Roadways would ultimately develop their own fuel injection electronics using the Bosch/Delco system as a base. Privateers, however, would be able to buy a range of microchips from HMS which enabled them to tune the standard system to suit varying circuit, ambient temperature and altitude conditions. (This sort of thing, by the way, is why you still see so many more Commodores on the Supercars grid than Falcons – 8 to 14 at the moment, which is still more Blue Ovals than we’ve seen on the track in a long time. HMS will look after you, keep your team supplied with parts and technical data even if you're regularly finishing 22nd. By contrast, with Ford you're more or less on your own.)

But fuel injection fundamentally changed the character of the engine: the carburettor versions had bags of torque low down, but while the fuel injection gave it more top-end power, torque was not as much improved as it should have been. Peak power and peak torque were also felt to be too close together. That said, the V8 remained responsive to exhaust system modifications, so this was still an area where a privateer team, if prepared to do a little homework, could find some useful power gains. Race teams also typically used the Ford 9-inch diff (as used in Johnson's Sierras and Brock's Bathurst-winning VL the previous year) rather than Holden's LSD, because it was tough, inexpensive and ratios were easy to come by – and as long as it fit in the standard housing, the Group A rules said you were all good anyway.

Would a Walky have made a huge difference to Perkins' ATCC campaign? Doubtful. Would he have turned down the extra performance it offered? Also doubtful!

Chief among these teams would of course be the official factory squad. The name "Holden Racing Team" first appeared in 1988, but it wasn't the same entity as the later Lowndes/Skaife golden age. The task of setting up HSV was so vast it was too much to ask Tom to run a race team as well, so the job had been farmed out to Larry Perkins, who ran a single-car team for the 1988 championship. The car (chassis PE 004) ran a splendid but not classic red, white and black livery with "Special Vehicles" along the sides, but Perkins' own sponsor Castrol on the nose. Under the skin, this HRT was actually Perkins Engineering, who was contracted to build and run the cars for two years on behalf of HMS with a handful of people from HSV and TWR helping out. So although this was the "factory" team, Holden was really only on board as a sponsor.

The Walky made its race debut in Australia in September 1988 – unless it was in August, or possibly July, and not in Australia after all. Yeah, it's like that. Everyone remembers Sandown as its first dance, but I'm afraid the reality is messier and less patriotic than that. Ideally it would have made its debut in the hands of Perkins early in the 1988 ATCC, but it was delayed in the changeover from HDT to HSV. Instead, as recently recounted in Australian Muscle Car #102, the car made its world racing debut at Amaroo Park in early July.

(Source)

The word "car" is doing a lot of lifting there, however – it was a tube-framed Sports Sedan, not a Group A touring car, and it had started life as a Torana A9X. In the tail of 1987, owner-driver Bob Tindal had simply decided he wanted to upgrade and went with the upcoming Walkinshaw VL. A set of the fibreglass panels were "found" (ahem) and the team took moulds of them to make their own copycat panels (interestingly, the fibreglass originals were felt to be too heavy for a Sports Sedan), before Tindal returned them with sudden and suspicious haste. Where he borrowed them from has never been established, but we know that when the car was taken off the trailer for its first hit out at Amaroo Park, Round 3 of the Toledo Tools Sports Sedan Series, HSV's people went white and threatened to sue. Tindal called their bluff and raced anyway, preparing to argue that it was just coincidence and his car couldn't be a Walkinshaw because he'd never seen one, they hadn’t been released yet, and got lucky when their bluff really was just a bluff.

It's a good story, but a curious footnote rather than real history. The debut of the car proper, not just the panels, came on 21 August in Round 10 of the 1988 Dunlop British Touring Car Championship, held at Brands Hatch in Kent. At the wheel was BTCC regular Mike O'Brien, who'd been driving this particular ex-Allan Grice VL for Alan Docking Racing for several months now. (The forum experts reckon it was the VK Gricey had brought to Europe for the 1986 ETCC, but I disagree. I'm guessing it was the orange Bathurst car from 1987 – in a test drive, the Motor Sport writer expressed surprise over its power steering system, which also caught out Win Percy at Bathurst, and surely you wouldn't fit power assistance to a racecar on a whim, especially one destined for the sprint-based BTCC. The interior trim in the Motor Sport article looks more like Grice's '87 car than his '86 as well, but these things can be changed. And of course, I could just be wrong.)

(Source)

O'Brien had taken the car to many and varied – but never consistent – results, a pole at Oulton Park and a win at Snetterton rather offset by carburettor woes that refused to let the car run cleanly and cracked cylinder heads that led to frequent overheating. Upgrading to Walkinshaw spec was a welcome break, as was gaining full Autoglass sponsorship, who provided the rather attractive red-on-white #7 livery. With the upgrades O'Brien found an improvement of 2.2 seconds a lap compared to his previous visit in July, but such was the pace of development he was only one place further up the grid. He eventually steered it to 13th place, which was okay for a brand-new car but well off the pace of the dominant Sierras. What the car really needed, the Docking team decided, was a thorough testing and development programme, but that was something they were not in a position to undertake – literally, as their position was the U.K. Holden was fairly apathetic, and even the token assistance they got from Vauxhall apparently kicked up a fuss within GM. Go figure.

Tom Walkinshaw himself got to drive his new toy a week later at the Birmingham Superprix, Round 11 of the BTCC, on 29 August. His mount was TWR 022, the car he'd first raced as a normal VL at the Nürburgring WTCC round the previous year. Now it was upgraded to Walky spec (indeed, the photos pretty strongly hint it had been the prototype), still dressed in the same yellow-and-purple #12 Herbie Clips livery. The headline event at the Superprix was an open-wheel race, in this case for FIA International Formula 3000, but like our Gold Coast Indy the crowds were really there to see the tourers.

The new Commodore brought in plenty of excitement around the narrow turns of the street circuit especially with Walkinshaw behind the wheel. He did really well considering he took a year out earlier on and his Holden was missing fourth gear. Also he never used his Yokohama qualifiers so his 5th place on the grid was very impressive. – 8w, Birmingham Superprix – Britain's most controversial circuit?

Note that Walkinshaw only qualified the car: he never got to race it. Formula 3000 driver David Hunt (brother of James) lost control of his Lola at Loctite Turn and had, in his own words, "a monster shunt." The car tore right through the tyre barriers and punched a hole in the brick wall of a wholesaler; thankfully Hunt walked to the ambulance under his own power to be kept overnight with concussion (he remembered nothing of the day prior to being in hospital), but the car was carried away on two separate recovery vehicles. This, plus another shunt that triggered lengthy delays, ultimately saw the other two races including the BTCC round cancelled, as the organisers were legally obliged to return Birmingham’s streets to the public at 6pm. Still, 5th on the grid against Sierras, without sticky qualifying tyres and missing a gear? That was pretty solid verging on impressive.

Fast, narrow and dangerous: Birmingham had a few things in common with Bathurst. (Source)

On the same day (but slightly earlier thanks to timezones), the Walky made Australian racing debut in Oran Park's Pepsi 250 enduro. Unusually, there was only one Sierra on the grid, a new one dressed in the colours of Colin Bond's Caltex team. No longer leasing MM1, the ex-John Giddings car, this was a new one put together by Bondy himself, chassis CXT1. As a brand-new car it wasn't quite ready for the event, demonstrated by it failing with just 15 laps done, which couldn't have impressed co-driver Alan Jones much.

With none of the big Sierra teams fronting, the 100-lapper became a race between the Peter Brock/Jim Richards BMW M3, and the GTS-R Skyline driven by George Fury and the rising youngster Mark Skaife. In the event the Mobil team made their one pit stop and got the #05 M3 back on track quicker than the Gibson crew, and Skaife couldn't quite pedal the Skyline quickly enough to make up the difference. Peter Brock took the win, his first and only in the BMW, and his first on the road since Wellington 18 months earlier.

A race so minor, the only image I could find was a Pressreader sample of an AMC listicle.

Garry Willmington meanwhile shared his #50 Walky with John Leeson, qualifying only 14th and then suffering a DNF after just 4 laps. That the car could do a lot better, though, was revealed by its fastest race lap – 1:18.02, or more than six-and-a-half seconds faster than its qualifying time! That was a warning for the future if ever there was one, but few were there to see it – with the Australian Endurance/Manufacturers Championship not running this year, this was a minor, stand-alone event that had drawn a tiny 17-car grid and crowds to match.

Just five days later Tom got his second chance to drive the Walky in anger, this time in the RAC Tourist Trophy at Silverstone, Round 10 of the ETCC. His car was most likely TWR 022 once again, still in its Herbie Clips colours but this time with the #46 on the doors, because the ETCC of course was a different series. Tom and co-driver Jeff Allam qualified 9th but had a disappointing race, running behind most of the Sierras with the M3s to finish 15th overall. Walkinshaw found the Commodore's performance level to be about the same as the factory Nissan Skyline GTS-R, which was a pretty good sign considering it had about the same power, but was much heavier – clearly, that low-drag bodywork had done its job. With all the Sierras buzzing around they'd also set the tenth-fastest lap of the race, which was faster than all the BMWs and some of the Fords, but not the sort of thing you could spin to sponsors. Nevertheless, Tom must've felt at least somewhat confident: this was surely the car that would deliver him that longed-for Bathurst win.

(Source)

With that though, the foreplay was almost at an end. Next on the calendar was no standalone minnow, nor some exotic overseas venture, but a major local event sure to bring out the best in Australia – and perhaps more than just Australia. Next up was the Sandown 500.

Allan Moffat's Most Excellent Trans-Am Adventure

So for my birthday this year I was given Allan Moffat's new book, Climbing The Mountain, and it's pretty damn good if I may say so. The life and career of the first of Australia's great Ford heroes was always going to be an interesting read, and although I'm not even close to finished, I have to recommend it. Whether you lean toward Ford, Holden or neither, it's a ripping read that's already done a marvellous job of clearing up some of the more confusing parts of his career.

This post not sponsored by Allen & Unwin, though I'm open to offers, Allan. Er, "Allen..."

I mean, let's be honest here: we all know he came to Australia because his father worked for (no muscle car jokes, okay?) for Massey-Ferguson, who transferred Moffat Sr around the world as needed. And we all know he burst onto the local tintop scene in early 1969 in that iconic Coca-Cola Mustang, a modern Athena seemingly born fully-armed and ready for war. But in between is half a decade where it gets awfully tangled thanks to his habit of flying back to the States whenever the opportunities ran out here. If you're only reading the Australian race reports he seems to flit in and out like a ghost, contesting this or that important weekend and then disappearing again for months – not well-known enough for his absence to warrant an explanation, and therefore simply not mentioned, as if he never existed.

But that mid-1960s period, with one foot on each side of the Pacific, is probably the most interesting stage of Moffat's career, and it just happens to tie in with the silver age of Indianapolis and the early days of Trans-Am, two of the greatest racing eras the world has ever seen.

1964: Birth of a Dream
Moffat was bitten by the racing bug before he even moved to Australia, while his father was still working in South Africa: his first taste of motorsport came at Grand Central Circuit near Johannesburg, an outdated track soon to be replaced by Kyalami. In Australia, he had his first actual steer in a Triumph TR3A in 1962, though this was strictly as a hobby while studying at the newly-opened Monash University (named after Sir John Monash, the famed Australian general of the First World War – had the war continued into 1919 he'd been tipped to receive a Field Marshal's baton and become the next supreme Allied commander, and his plans for that campaign season apparently looked a lot like blitzkrieg, but that's another story). After failing in his studies he was booted out of the university and limped back to Canada, where he worked door-to-door selling cookware.

Moffat's TR3 chasing Rocky Tresise's MGA at Calder Park. Holden might've conquered the mainstream, but in 1963 a performance car was still British. (source)

But then in May he took a trip to see the Indianapolis 500, and his fate was sealed. On the grid that year was our then-double F1 World Champion, Jack Brabham, driving the John Zink-Urschel Trackburner (an Offenhauser-powered derivative of his latest Brabham F1 car). Far ahead of him on the grid was the reigning World Champion Jim Clark and his teammate Dan Gurney, driving the Ford-powered Lotus 34. Indy stars like A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones and Rodger Ward also littered the entry list. But the race is probably best remembered for the ghastly fate of Dave MacDonald and Eddie Sachs. Early in the race MacDonald, driving one of the awkward slow-slung Mickey Thompson roadsters, lost control in Turn 4, hit the wall and rebounded into Sachs; MacDonald was killed instantly, while poor Sachs – the "Clown Prince of Indy," with a knack for improv comedy that just begged for a tape recorder – suffered for several days before dying of his burns. That all happened only a hundred or so metres from where Moffat was sitting, so it speaks volumes about his commitment that this didn't deter him from his motor racing dreams. Instead, he remembers that as the day they were set in stone.

I can clearly remember the day I decided motor racing was going to be my life. I was sitting in a grandstand at the Indianapolis 500 in May of 1964, just a Joe Blow nobody, and Jimmy Clark was driving there for Lotus. The right-rear tyre blew on his car, practically in front of where I was sitting, and I couldn't get over what a fantastic technician he was to keep it under control, drift it down and bring it safely to a stop.

I made up my mind, sitting there in the grandstand, that I was going to become involved in serious motor racing. Ultimately, the idea was to be driving. I just didn't know how I was going to do it. – Allan Moffat, Australian Muscle Car #77/78

Brabham's Indy campaign that year was more curious than glorious. Interestingly, Moffat's book corroborates the claim that Jack drove through MacDonald's fireball, even though the footage apparently shows he didn't.

Not knowing what else to do, Moffat simply went to the next race meeting, found the teams working on the cars, and hung around until they noticed him. That meeting was probably the Watkins Glen round of the U.S. Road Racing Championship on 28 June, which included a GT class for cars under 2-litres. That sort of displacement wasn't exactly America's forté, so to represent them in this class Ford called on their partners from across the pond.

I went down to Watkins Glen, about 500 kilometres from home in Canada, and I decided to stand all day at the cyclone fence and watch. Ford of Britain had sold lefthand-drive Cortinas to Ford of America to promote the new Cortina and I noticed the fellows in the green Lotus uniforms were always walking up to the water tap to wash their hands. So I started asking questions. One of them eventually asked why I was asking the questions and I said, "Tell me where you're going next and I'll show you what I can do."

Well, wouldn't you know it, the next race was 2,500 kilometres away, at Des Moines in Iowa, and when I arrived Ray Parsons, who was an Australian, told me to find some pails and water. I was in the best university now as far as my future.

After four or five months, at the final race of the season, I asked the Ford representative where they were storing the cars over winter. He said they were being sold. That was Peter Quenet and I asked if I could buy one. He said "What are you going to do with an ex-Jimmy Clark Cortina?" and I said I would ship it to Australia and try to win the touring car championship. But the cars were $4,500 and my savings from the saucepans was only $1,500.

If I thought it had been hard standing at the back of the pits for a day, it was nothing compared to talking sweetly to my dad and asking for $3,000. He said, "You're wasting your time," but he lent me the money.

Quenet was so impressed that I got the money together, he said Ford would send my car to the Canadian GP meeting at Mosport and I could participate. It was a 12-lapper or something and I came third. – Allan Moffat, AMC #77/78

And that was how Allan became the proud owner of a Lotus Cortina, a fairly elite club in 1964. He entered his new toy in the inaugural Sandown 6 Hour in late November, which he could've won if he'd had just a bit more experience: upon finding himself in the lead, he suddenly realised he had no idea what to do next, and promptly crashed. Nevertheless, that year Big Pete Geoghegan had emerged with the first of his record five championships in a standard Cortina GT (not a Lotus), so Moffat wasn't merely being over-optimistic in thinking he could become champion in an ex-works car. And maybe he could've, had it not been for the sudden rule changes that came in 1965.

1965: The Water Boy
What happened in 1965 was the Mustang. CAMS imposed a raft of rule changes that included a strict limit on cylinder overboring, which meant you needed something that came with a big, powerful engine to start with – something like the new V8-powered Ford Mustang. A Cortina, even an ex-works Lotus Cortina, was now just a class car – and even then he was sharing the class with Jim McKeown, who was rapidly turning his Cortina into the fastest in the world. Moffat finished 6th overall in the ATCC race in April, 1.8 seconds behind McKeown. He also played a part in the famous 70,000-Mile Durability Run, the reckless gamble that saved Ford Australia, where he proved solid but unspectacular – which is not a criticism, as solid-but-unspectacular was exactly what the Run called for. But it was no way to get noticed.

At the wheel of "The Dreamboat," an XP Falcon Hardtop with 200ci Super Pursuit six. "Moffat came, drove, did okay but wasn’t outstanding," was Harry Firth's recollection. "He was a bit rough, but he was young and still learning at that point."

So, weighing his options, he left the Cortina in Melbourne and returned to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This year he was at least on the right side of the fence, having talked himself onto Team Lotus just as everything came together. Their driver Jim Clark had already won the South African GP on New Year's Day, then the Tasman Series in Australia and New Zealand over the northern hemisphere winter. Clark was also due to win the Belgian, French, British, Dutch and German GPs in succession to claim his second F1 crown, as well as the British and French F2 championships. Now, at Indianapolis in May, he was also about to become the first non-American to win the 500 since 1916. The team also had the advantage of Colin Chapman's innovative new car, the Lotus 38, fitted with offset suspension for left-turn-only oval racing; they had the powerful quad-cam Ford V8, which was making 500hp on its USAC-spec methanol fuel; and they had the skilled pit work of the Wood Brothers pit crew from NASCAR, lads who could get a car refuelled and re-tyred faster than anyone else in the world. It was, almost literally, an all-star lineup.

And Allan's job in the midst of all this glittering talent? He was the water boy. No, literally. His job in the pit stops was to hang out a modified broomstick with a paper cup on the end so Clark could rehydrate himself in the midst of what was then a three-and-a-half hour marathon. "There's a photograph of the team on the grid," wrote Moffat in Climbing The Mountain: "Jim in the car, Colin Chapman alongside and me at the rear quarter." Well, here is that photograph:

Yep, the dweeb with the glasses, second from the right.

Having been involved in one of the biggest motorsport coups the company had ever pulled off, Ford was ready to grant a favour. When Ford racing coordinator Peter Quenet hinted his Lotus Cortina might be welcome Stateside, Moffat didn’t hesitate.

My racing in the U.S.A. began with a telegram from Quenet at Ford, asking if I’d like to base myself in Detroit with the two sister cars to my Cortina. It was Sports Car Club of America racing in 1965 and I had a fee. Are you ready for this? It was $300 a weekend. “You don’t have to win anything, that’s your starting money,” he told me. – Allan Moffat, AMC #77

Moffat was now, pinch yourself, a paid racing driver, albeit in fairly minor events that weren't too far from Detroit.

First time out at the Detroit track, Waterford Hills, my Lotus Cortina blew away the local Chevrolet Corvair heroes Don Eichstaedt and Jerry Thompson. The win was made even better because both were engineers in the General Motors technical centre. The Ford guys at the track were ecstatic. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

He also took part in the U.S.'s most important sedan-based road-course event, the Marlboro 12 Hour. Confusingly this had nothing to do with the cigarette giant, taking place at the tiny Marlboro Motor Raceway in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Moffat and his vaunted co-driver Bob Tullius finished well down the order, however, when Tullius preferred walking back to the pits rather than getting a broken Cortina moving again. After that it was back to Australia for another attempt at the Sandown 6 Hour, again coming agonisingly close to victory but failing to finish thanks to a broken diff. But as the curtain fell on 1965, the days of close-but-no-cigar were almost over for Allan Moffat.

1966: Tilting at Windmills
And here we come to it, for in 1966 the Sports Car Club of America inaugurated the Trans-American Sedan Racing Championship, or Trans-Am. After the release of the original Mustang in 1964 summoned the pony car market into being, Ford’s rivals had scrambled to catch up – Chrysler with the Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Dart, GM with the Chevrolet Corvair Monza – and it occurred to the Sports Car Club of America that here was a golden opportunity to escalate Detroit’s pony war with motor racing. For 1966, they organised a new production-based category for cars that met a 1,315kg minimum weight, a 116-inch minimum wheelbase, and most importantly, a 1,000 minimum sales figure, divided into two classes – Group I for engines under 2.0 litres (colloquially known as U2); and Group II for those under the absolute limit of 5.0 litres, which actually was a restriction by American standards (NASCAR still allowed 7-litre monsters), usually known as O2. Since the SCCA was mostly interested in sports cars, obviously, each race would have a minimum duration of 2½ hours, throwing the focus squarely on endurance.

To win the inaugural Trans-Am championship, Ford boss Lee Iacocca had hired Carroll Shelby to prepare a special version of the ‘66 Mustang. Shelby was the right man for the job, having made his name putting Ford’s 221ci small-block V8 into the AC Ace to create the Shelby Cobra, and last year had built the GT350R Mustang for competition in other SCCA classes (and provided the parts to Australians like Pete Geoghegan). Shelby still knew his business, and converted an initial 252 K-code Mustang into Shelby GT350s (no longer officially badged as Mustangs) for homologation, with another 1,100 or so following just to top up the kitty. The rival Plymouth Barracudas were in trouble: even if their 273ci displacement wasn't so far behind Ford's 289, Chrysler's LA V8 was a much heavier design than Ford's Windsor, and the relatively staid 'Cuda had none of the quivering sex appeal of a GT350.

The Rainville/Johnson "Team Starfish" Barracuda at Green Valley, Texas. (source)

Not that any of this was Moffat's concern, of course. As the year began he was not racing a muscle car, and for that matter was not racing in Trans-Am. Moffat's mission at this point was to race his Lotus Cortina in the SCCA's lower Central Division, or CENDIV, which basically meant the Midwest including the Michigan peninsula but minus the rest of the Great Lakes. It was a tough but rewarding period in his life, where money was tight but the results were coming, and with success he cast his eyes upon higher things.

Ford's works team in Trans-Am's U2 class was Alan Mann Racing, a team on the rise in the British Saloon Car Championship and basically making a cameo in the States for the money. Their red-and-gold Cortinas certainly looked the part, but despite high-calibre drivers and upgraded BRM-tuned Group 2 engines, the Sebring 4 Hour, the inaugural round of Trans-Am, had been won by Jochen Rindt in the excellent Alfa Romeo GTA. After that, Moffat reasoned that surely Ford wouldn't mind if the works team had a little backup? Not waiting for permission, Moffat loaded up his car and spares and headed for the Mid-America 300, Round 2 of Trans-Am, completely forsaking the next CENDIV round.

The Alan Mann Cortina of Sir John Whitmore and Charlie Barns, as seen at Green Valley, Texas.

The now-defunct Mid-America Raceway was located near Wentzville, Missouri, and it was a tricky beast, 4.5km around with lots of right-angle turns, all surrounded by tall pines. Nothing daunted, Moffat arrived several days early and spent that time pounding around in his Econoline tow van, getting in as much practice as his petrol money would allow. His extra laps paid off when he took U2 pole position, faster than the Alfas, and faster than Alan Mann's driver, our own Frank Gardner. That performance won him the admiration of one Mike Babich, 2IC in Goodyear's racing activities. Unfortunately, when Babich ask the Mann team if they'd mind awfully loaning Moffat a proper set of tyres for the race, it earned him the enmity of their team manager – none other than Howard Marsden, who curtly refused to give up any of his spare rubber. That was for the best though, as Goodyear overcompensated like hell at the next round.

The next race was in New Hampshire in about five weeks and Mike said to me, "We'll get a truck that’s twice as big as those English guys and fill it up with tyres just for you." – Allan Moffat, AMC #77

Meanwhile, the class win at Mid-America had gone to an Austrian racing under the Australian flag, a Cooma-raised, Chicago-based driver by the name of Horst Kwech (I swear, early Trans-Am was as overrun with Australians as Hollywood is today). Like Moffat, Kwech was a privateer living hand-to-mouth, racing against the factory in one of the fourteen aluminium-bodied GTAs Alfa Romeo had built especially for Trans-Am. Like Moffat, he was dipping in and out of Trans-Am and CENDIV at need, and their careers were due to cross and re-cross like figure skaters over the years ahead. They raced each other again at Grattan Raceway, Michigan, the next CENDIV round, and this time Moffat emerged the victor.

Kwech's Alfa at Round 4, the Virginia International Raceway, where he shared the drive with Gaston Andry.

Then came the big one – Moffat’s second-ever Trans-Am start at Bryar Motorsport Park in Loudon, New Hampshire, on 10 July 1966. "It had been a go-kart track until its owner, Keith Bryar, a Baptist minister, extended it to 2.5 kilometres," Moffat wrote. "Alan Mann arrived with three cars and Jacky Ickx, Sir John Whitmore and Frank Gardner but, long story short, who do you think is the fastest Cortina in qualifying?" And it only got better on Sunday, when Moffat won the race – not his class, the race. He took on Plymouth Barracudas, Dodge Darts, Shelby Mustangs, Alan Mann's Cortinas, Kwech's Alfa, and the works Alfas, and flogged the lot of them. "I won the race and got a cheque for $1,200, which might as well have been $12 million," he said. Moffat had been so successful in fact that it triggered a protest from Alan Mann Racing, who refused to believe their works-backed car, driven by reigning British Touring Car Champion Frank Gardner, could be beaten by a nobody. They demanded Moffat surrender his engine for checking by BRM Competitions U.K., but it came through clean as a whistle.

Indeed, by reacting like a team under pressure Alan Mann Racing had only raised Moffat's profile even further, and after the Bryar result (while in the U.K. to ensure BRM did nothing funny to his race engine), Moffat was able to convince Team Lotus linchpin Ray Parsons to join him. That was a brilliant coup, because Parsons was also the Lotus team manager in Trans-Am, a job he did basically by default as he considered himself first and foremost a driver. By hiring him, Moffat effectively halved the number of works Ford teams on the grid, which was sure to make the company far more amenable to supporting his own burgeoning operation. With Parsons on board he needed a second car, so they acquired a spare Cortina body, fitted it out with all Ray’s special parts, painted it gold with a green stripe and roof, and took it racing in the Marlboro 12 Hour.

Moffat/Fisher, again at Virginia.

That hit a stumbling block when they finished nowhere after finding water in their fuel, something Moffat refuses to consider an accident. But he was now basically a team – Allan Moffat Racing was in business – and Peter Quenet was keen to have him in the field for the final two races of 1966, the six-hour Pan-American Endurance Race at Green Valley Raceway, Texas, and the Riverside 4 Hour in California. Four cars was definitely better than two with the Alfas to contend with. To maximise his chances, Moffat made the radical suggestion of getting some help from back home in Australia – Jon Leighton, Moffat’s co-driver from Sandown in '64, and the Grey Fox and then-Ford hero, Harry Firth.

The Trans-Am thing came about like this. Moffat talked to Ford, because I had a contract with Ford, and asked them could he borrow me for a couple of races over there. So they said yes, but that he’d have to find the wherewithal to run it. I was able to help a bit, because you have to remember that by then Queens Avenue was well up and running and we had already done the GT 500, so I knew a fair bit about Cortinas. – Harry Firth, AMC: Ford and I

Green Valley Raceway was basically a drag strip with aspirations: the main feature was its long front straight, which was of course the drag strip itself and provided ample racing room – but the circuit looping back around to the start/finish line was just the dragster return road, which was far too narrow. The two straights ran parallel only 20 metres apart – cars would be nudging 200km/h going one way, while those on the return leg would be doing similar speeds in the opposite direction only a few metres away, with no barrier between them. There was also a major hump in the main straight where the cars would frequently get airborne. This was where the SCCA planned to hold a six-hour day-to-night race, starting at 4pm and finishing in the darkness of 10pm. And it was raining heavily. It's a miracle no-one was killed.

Green Valley Raceway, outside Forth Worth, Texas, was a combination drag strip and 2.6-kilometre road course. It lacked drainage, relied on hay bales for safety and the rubber laid down by drag cars made grip questionable. And it rained. I aqua-planed off and hit one of the hay bales. It was a big lesson.

Harry Firth was fantastic. The race was half-day and half-night and, when darkness fell, he drove like the rally star he was. He pulled back four of the six laps I'd lost and brought us up to second in class behind Kwech's Alfa. Then a throttle cable fell off and he dropped another six laps and had to start again. This time he got into "man possessed" mode. On a track with questionable grip, in the pitch dark, he set a new under-2-litre lap record. We finished 4th in class and 9th outright. Ray Parsons with Jon Leighton was 3rd in class and 7th outright. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

The seven-race calendar was pretty compacted at this stage of the year however, so there was no time for licking wounds.

One week later, on 18 September 1966, we were racing at RIR, Riverside International Raceway, the race track stuck in the middle of a Californian sand dune.

To get there we drove 2,200 kilometres across the bottom of America in two days and then Harry surprised us again. He removed the cylinder heads from both our cars and took them to a local machine shop where he performed some magic. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

They put brand new BRM Group 2 engines in the Lotus Cortinas. I took their last year's Lotus, took it to pieces and gave it a bit of a fix. I took the cylinder head off and changed the inlet ports and combustion chambers, and changed a few other things on the car – and it passed theirs in a straight line at Riverside. – Harry Firth, AMC: Ford and I

Having worked his magic however Firth came down with the flu, leaving Moffat to drive without relief, which wasn't enough to play the spoiler for Ford. Frank Gardner won the U2 class for Alan Mann Racing, the factory team at last claiming a win. Horst Kwech's 2nd place gave Alfa Romeo everything they needed to take the U2 manufacturer's title – a sting for Ford, but a minor one. Shelby's Mustangs had done the job in O2, seeing off the Barracudas and Darts to bring the first Trans-Am title home to Dearborn, but only by a whisker – only a final win at Riverside for Jerry Titus had put them over the line. Ford took the lesson to heart: for 1967, the factory team would have their full support.

1967: Cougar Love
To be honest, 1966 was the peak of Allan Moffat's Trans-Am activities, as everything from here on would be a series of cameos. The reason was, of course, when Ford swore to give the works team full backing for 1967, they weren't talking about the U2 works team. The Cortina was already losing its edge to Alfa Romeo, and now Porsche had convinced the FIA that their 911 Carrera was actually a sedan. There was no point investing in a class that was getting ever more competitive yet brought no marketing benefits, so Dearborn basically forgot the U2 class existed, benching Alan Mann Racing and merely offering $300 "incentive" to each Cortina entered in a Trans-Am race.

One of Moffat's Lotus Cortinas at Texas.

America of course had fallen in love with the big V8s racing at the front, so that's where Ford focused their attention and dollars. In fact, they might've overdone it. Shelby American had just coughed up the '67 Shelby GT500, a car you might know as Eleanor, but this time his operation wouldn't be the only game in town. For reasons known only to themselves, Ford also brought in Bud Moore Engineering from NASCAR and asked him to prep a couple of the new Cougars from the Lincoln-Mercury division, basically an "up-market" Mustang. This ignited a season-long battle between Shelby's Mustangs and Moore's Cougars, despite the fact that under the skin they were virtually the same.

Moffat was grateful for Ford's $300 starting money, of course, but it wasn't really enough to get ahead. With Trans-Am expanded from 7 to 12 rounds, the new season-opener was a 300-miler at Daytona Speedway's infield road course, not exactly friendly to a piddling 1.6-litre Kent engine. To maximise his chances he called on his bitter rival in Australia, Jim McKeown, and basically asked if he could borrow his engine. Exactly how good McKeown's Lotus Cortina was is a story for another day, but suffice to say Lotus quoted an official power figure of 78 kW at 5,500rpm for the engine in stock form. A Jim Clark factory race engine was more like 127. McKeown's homebrew modified engine peaked at no less than 145 kW. Moffat had now raced against the very best in the world, and he'd seen with his own eyes that McKeown's was the fastest.

Jim was cagey, but agreed on the basis of "take my engine, take me." Sadly the race at Daytona ended with a silly mechanical failure, which put paid to any hope of convincing Peter Quenet he needed a U2 works team this year, leaving Moffat struggling. To maximise his earnings Moffat entered three cars in every race, taking pay drivers to handle them (a false economy, as they drove so hard their money was usually eaten up in repairs), and even took to transporting high-octane race fuel for the other teams. But the Lotus Cortina failed to win its class all year as the dynasty of the 911 began in earnest, leaving Moffat and his team living virtually hand-to-mouth.

It wasn't until Round 5, at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, that he had his next big break. One of the Mustang owners had turfed his regular driver (for reasons unknown), and needed a seat-filler at short notice. Moffat didn't need to be asked twice: 300 miles later, they'd finished 3rd outright, only to be disqualified for refuelling with the engine running.

His new boss wasn't fazed, however. He entered Moffat in the Manufacturers' Challenge, a non-championship round at Watkins Glen, where the main opposition was Roger Penske's new Chevrolet Camaro Z28 driven by Mark Donohue. Later, in 1972, Donohue was to deliver the first of a record number of Indianapolis victories for Penske, and his close partnership with Penske would carry over to Europe when Roger started his own Formula 1 team in 1975. But in 1967 they were merely GM’s leading lights in Trans-Am – largely thanks to Penske's eternal quest for "the unfair advantage."

And didn't it look sumptuous in that Sunoco blue. (source)

It wasn't until the end of the season, after Donohue had steered it to victories in the last two rounds in Las Vegas, Nevada and Kent, Washington, that it was discovered this car had been illegally acid-dipped at Lockheed Aerospace in California. That reduced its weight from 1,325kg to less than 1,200, but it left the panels virtually see-through. Concerned with the structural rigidity, Donohue pointed out that he was being asked to risk his hide in a vehicle now made of tinfoil; Penske responded by fitting a NASCAR-style roll cage, the first ever seen in Trans-Am.

That's how Roger Penske rolls. I mention it here because, although Moffat doesn't outright state it was Donohue who won the race at the Glen, and was subsequently disqualified when it emerged they'd run a 5.7-litre engine in a race limited to 5.0, it does come right after a page describing his first meeting with Roger, and how he gave himself away as an arrogant prick. Being such a minor event, I can't find any results listed elsewhere to check it out. But either way, the first car across the line copped a DSQ, leaving the 2nd-placed car – Moffat's – the real winner.

After that, his phone never stopped ringing, so he was among the first people called up when Ford started looking for extra drivers in the tail end of the season. Chevrolet's new Camaro hadn't had a great start to the season, getting up to speed only slowly, but because the Mustangs and Cougars had been competing as separate brands, taking points off each other, only a couple of wins would be needed to make Chevrolet champions. A panicked Ford had put up the bat signal, calling for every driver they could get.

Towards the end of 1967 I was back in the States and I got a call, asking if I'd like to drive a Mercury Cougar in the last four rounds of the Trans-Am Series. It turned out every Ford car was needed in the field at Kent in Washington to get in front of Mark Donohue in a Camaro.

I painted the Cougar up in Aussie colours, green and gold. I was running 5th and when he came up behind me I knew the job was to make my car a bit wider. I held him out for two laps and then he did some crazy kamikaze dive-bomb to get past me.

That night I'm at the dinner table with the mechanics and Bud Moore is at another table. I see Donohue coming, and can see the glare in his eyes and he says to me: "Been in this business long?"

I said: "I'm learning every day and I've had a few successes."

Donohue replies: "If I can make a suggestion, if you think you're going to get anywhere, you're wrong. You’re just an asshole."

I went over to Bud Moore and told him what Donohue had said, and Moore said, "If you hadn't done it, then I would have called you an asshole." – Allan Moffat, AMC #77

Admittedly, however, this end-of-season stint riding a Cougar didn't exactly cover him in glory, with three DNFs in four races. Only in the finale at Kent did he manage to finish, and that was out of the points. But the Fords had done it, Shelby's Mustangs taking a narrow 2-point victory over Moore's Cougars, leaving the Camaros outclassed.

1968: Kraftwerk
Trans-Am had enjoyed a meteoric rise in status, so for 1968 GM would be providing “back door” support (to get around GM’s corporate racing ban) to several private teams running Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds. Plymouth’s Barracudas would meanwhile be supplanted by a new fleet of Dodge Challengers, and later, in March, the American Motor Corporation (AMC) would have a brace of their new Javelins ready to roll.

Having learned their lesson – again – Ford wisely shut down the intra-brand fighting for the 1968 season, electing to have both Shelby and Moore run Mustangs. That left Moffat competing with the other late-season ring-ins for one of the four factory seats available. There was a chance, a slight chance, because at the first two rounds of 1968, those four seats technically became eight: Round 1 was the Daytona 24 Hours, run concurrently with the World Sportscar Championship, while Round 2 was the 12 Hours of Sebring. Such long events would require co-drivers, so at the Shelby team, Moffat was paired with – of all people – Horst Kwech in the white #2 Mustang, while the red #1 was entrusted to Jerry Titus and Indy (and F1) driver Ronnie Bucknum. Bucknum however had made it clear he wouldn't be sticking around after the opening long-distance races, so there was every reason to try and make a splash.

Thankfully, this is now getting into an era with copious documentation, so there's no shortage of YouTube gold to dig up. Here's a rundown of the '68 Daytona 24 Hours – Moffat shows up at 10:00, just don't blink!

Although the Titus/Bucknum car went on to win the Trans-Am portion of the race (and finish an amazing 4th overall, behind only the Porsche 907 Long Tails that staged a formation 1-2-3 finish), the Moffat/Kwech sister car didn't last the night after a spring tower tore free. The problem first appeared during Kwech's stint, but he cunningly made sure Moffat was at the wheel when the car stopped.

Well, off we go, and the start the race about two in the afternoon from memory. In the dark, I'm up, Horst gets out of the car and doesn't say anything to me. But I noticed that the steering was a bit wiggly.

Off the back straight, I hit Turn 3 and I see this shoot of sparks coming from the left-front fender – it's like Guy Fawkes night. I couldn’t come in after one lap, so the second time I get up there and not only are there sparks coming out but I'm sliding up the centre lane. A Porsche 917 [sic] went by me and, I’m not kidding, missed me by one centimetre.

I got back to the pits and I said, "What did you think, sending me out in that wreck?" At the front, the spring had broken away. That was the only time I drove for Shelby. Horst chatted himself into the drive. But, as it turned out, it was a blessing in disguise for me, given the engine problems they’d have that year. – Allan Moffat, AMC #77

Things didn't go any better at Sebring, though at least Kwech was the one behind the wheel when the engine blew. Sadly however, that pretty much set the tone for Ford's 1968 season. They'd won Daytona by sticking to the powerful and reliable 289ci Windsor V8, which had almost never gone wrong in the previous two seasons, but now the factory was insisting they use a brand new and untested engine design.

That engine was a new 302ci "tunnel-port" V8, and it was here that the trouble started. The key was the new tunnel-port heads, so named because the inlet tracts were arrow-straight and so big that the pushrod shafts had to literally "tunnel" through the centre of the ports, rather than between them. The intention was maximum airflow at high rpm: the reality was a complete absence of low-rev torque, meaning the drivers had to rev it like crazy to make it work (8,500rpm shift points were standard, with occasional blasts to 9,000), which exacerbated a hidden oiling problem that led to catastrophic engine failures. The factory shipped the crated engines to Shelby to install directly in the two team Mustangs, leading to what team manager Lew Spencer called "six-engine weekends": both team cars would usually blow an engine in practice, qualifying, and the race – each.

Who the hell thought that was a brilliant idea?

That left the races to Mark Donohue, again driving Roger Penske's fast and reliable Chevrolet Camaro Z28. One of the team's two cars was last year's acid-dipped cheater, affectionately nicknamed "The Lightweight"; the other was a '68 model that was legal, having never been near an acid bath. SCCA had warned the team would face the banhammer if they brought the Lightweight to the track again, but Roger Penske did what Roger Penske wanted.

"So we pulled a tricky stunt," Donohue later recounted to Chevy engineer and author Paul Van Valkenburgh. "I carefully shaped the number circles so they could be easily interchanged between the number 16 for one car and number 15 for the other. First we went through [tech] inspection with the heavy [and legal] number 15 car, then we went back to our garage on the far side of the track, put the number 16 on it, and went back through inspection again. Nobody said anything."

"By changing the numbers around again," Donohue recalled, "and entering the track where our garage was, instead of through the pits, we even used the dipped car to qualify for both cars. Funny to think we could put one over on them like that." – The Lightweight Camaro, caranddriver.com

As a result of these and other little hoodwinks, solid prep and operation, and Fords blowing up left, right and centre, Donohue won an astonishing ten out of twelve races that year, including an incredible run of eight in a row from Sebring to Bryar. The 1968 Trans-Am trophy went convincingly to General Motors. Apart from the Daytona 24, the Mustang teams won only one other race, the second-last at Riverside (courtesy of Horst Kwech).

Yes, Moffat was well enough out of it. Without a race drive to pay the bills he was effectively unemployed, until a chance meeting with Roy Lunn got him his next foot in the door. Lunn was the head of Kar Kraft, a Ford-owned but virtually off-the-books high-performance skunkworks that had been instrumental in the development of the GT40. He offered Moffat a job as a test driver virtually on the spot.

In his book, Allan was at pains to point out that what most people think of when they hear "test driver" is Fiorano, Ferrari's storied on-site test track in Maranello. In the U.S., where industry is done on a geographic scale, things weren't such a quaint artisanal setup: Ford's River Rouge plant covered nearly 385 hectares, had its own docks on the river and included its own interior railway, electricity plant and steel mill, making it capable of turning raw materials into fully finished cars in a single location. One-and-a-half kilometres away, you'd find the tarmac of Ford's Dearborn Proving Ground, originally built as Ford Airport, the only privately-owned permanent dirigible mast in the world. Because Henry Ford was rich enough to live in a steampunk fantasy-land, he tooled around in his very own zeppelin, and needed somewhere to park it.

Just the kind of personal transport you'd expect of the man who dreamed up Fordlandia.

So Moffat spent the bulk of 1968 testing Ford prototypes, which was better than it could have been, but probably less exciting than you're imagining. He was working on some very sexy machinery – the upcoming Boss 429, Boss 302 and Mach 2 Mustangs for example – but all the same, it wasn't racing. "The engineers are in control, not the driver" he wrote, and added that, "sometimes you're doing nothing more than mileage accumulation, hour after hour." Then again...

At least I was revenue positive. For four months I worked hard, paid off my debts, got bored. It was mid-summer in Detroit, stinking hot and I was pacing the cage. – Allan Moffat, Climbing The Mountain

But – the really crucial detail – the job meant he was visible and known to company heavies like Jacque Passino, then-head of Ford's motorsport activities. It was Passino who exerted the pull to gift Moffat that stunning Boss 302 Mustang that looked so good in its red Coca-Cola livery...

...but that's a story for another time. 101 victories from 151 starts needs no elaboration.

So now you know. When Allan Moffat emerged from the U.S.A. in early 1969 with that piece of glory on his trailer, it wasn't lightning out of a clear blue sky: it was the culmination of years of hard work and yes, luck. I've come to despise the attitude that says luck doesn't mean anything, it's all hard work; that makes about as much sense as claiming it's all the other way around. In reality you need both: luck is striking oil in your backyard, hard work is having a bucket ready. In those hard years through the mid-1960s Allan had plenty of both, and maximised it. Most of all, I think the tale of this time helps dispel the traditional myth of Brock's raw talent versus Moffat's dogged hard work and technical nous. Yes, Allan had to work hard at his craft to get good at it, but so too did Peter – we forget that he was often less than brilliant during his first stint at the Holden Dealer Team, that Colin Bond was the team's real golden boy in those days. Allan just had the good fortune to serve his apprenticeship away from our eyes, in the U.S. of A. As Harry Firth wrote before his death:

That Trans-Am experience really put Moffat on the map in terms of driving. It was extremely competitive, cutthroat racing. At Riverside I spent two days going through things with him. You put a marker 100 yards before a corner, and 50 yards after. And you keep attacking that corner in all different ways until you get the ultimate quickest time around it. You do it on your own, or as if you were on a different part of the track trying to pass someone. He was a good pupil. He brought that back to Australia with him. – Harry Firth, AMC: Ford and I