Allan Moffat and Al Turner   Graham Smith - 2001   Used with permission of Graham Smith – as appeared in Unique Cars, March 2001       Although neither knew it when they each arrived in Australia late in 1968, within a few months Allan Moffat and Al Turner would be thrust together in a relationship that would become one of the most powerful, and successful, in Australian motor racing history. Moffat had arrived back in Australia, after four years honing his craft on the race tracks of America, with the burning ambition to be a professional racing driver. Turner had been sent out here to help give the Falcon an image that would appeal to Australia’s power-hungry youth. Together they would reshape Australian motor sport.       When he first went to America in 1965 Moffat raced Lotus Cortinas, loaned to him by Ford in Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and Trans Am races, establishing a reputation as a gifted driver with the savvy to look after his cars. In 1967, after two years racing the Cortinas in just about every race he could in America and his native Canada, Moffat began working as a test and development driver for the Kar Kraft division of Ford.       Based in Detroit, Kar Kraft was responsible for all of Ford’s racing programs worldwide except for Formula One, which was handled out of England. Moffat was employed on the Mustang program, developing the cars that would race in SCCA championship and Trans Am series. Kar Kraft’s role was to develop the cars, then hand them over to teams to race. Although eh didn’t have a regular drive, he was often called up for the big races, like the Daytona 24-Hours or the Sebring 12-Hours, when the teams needed extra drivers. He wasn’t a ‘star’ on the American scene, but his work with Kar Kraft marked him out as a driver of some considerable talent.       When Ford’s marketing whiz, Bill Bourke sent a request to Detroit fro a manager to run the company’s new Ford Special Vehicles operation, Kar Kraft’s boss Jacque Passino, put Moffat’s name forward. By then Moffat was back in Australia trying to kick-start a professional racing career in a country where the top drivers ran businesses through the week to fuel their racing passion. Moffat didn’t get the job at Ford; according to Turner, the Ford bosses probably thought he was too young and too inexperienced in the ways of the company. The job went to Turner, then a 25-year veteran of the Ford system having started with the Lincoln-Mercury division in 1954.       “Aren’t they lucky they didn’t hire me,” laughed Moffat when told he’d been a contender for the job all those years ago. “Al was perfect for the job.”       Even if he’d been offered the job he would have turned it down, just like he did two years later when he was offered the opportunity to replace Turner when he moved on in 1971. Moffat was intent on building a career as a professional racing driver, and the Ford job would have been an unwanted diversion for him.       “Allan was a very dedicated, hard working young guy,” Turner recalls. “Everything went into what he was doing, so much so that there were times I thought he was too focussed. He was consumed with racing, and at times I think he let it consume him.”       Turner had been working on drag racing programs for Lincoln-Mercury, where he’d been instrumental in developing Funny Cars. Although his work was in the motor sport arena, he hadn’t met the young Canadian driver working on the Mustang program. When he was appointed to the job in Australia, Moffat was recommended to him as a talented driver worth considering for his new race team.       “Allan was highly recommended to me by two of the young engineers he was working with at Kar Kraft,” Turner said while on a visit to Australia late last year. “They had a lot of faith in him and that’s what I went on.”       Turner’s brief when he arrived in Australia to work with Bourke was to develop cars that would capture the youth market. Bourke felt that Australia was ripe for a musclecar revolution, like the one that had swept across America five years or so earlier, and set Turner the task of building a car that would cash in on the demand for power and performance. The Falcon GT was the model Ford would use to win the youth of Australia over to the blue oval brand, but the mighty GTHO would be the main weapon Turner would use to build the performance image Bourke wanted.       “Bill Bourke felt the Australian market closely simulated the American market,” Turner said, “and he thought it was ready for a musclecar program just like they’d had in America four or five years earlier. My job was to find out what it took to get the product in place and the marketing program up and running.”       Harry Firth had been responsible for Ford’s local competition programs but, within a month of Turner arriving, Firth left and started up the rival Holden Dealer Team.       “I have a lot of respect for Harry, he’s a very talented guy, but with his personality being what it is, and mine being what it is, we couldn’t have worked together,” Turner says.       With Firth working on the other side of town, Turner began to build the team that would field the factory Fords he was planning to build. It would be the most professional racing team ever assembled in Australia. When Turner approached Moffat to join his team as its test and development driver, the young Canadian was fully focussed on winning the Australian Touring Car Championship in the Trans Am Mustang Ford racing boss Passino had arranged for him to have. The deal with Turner was perfect. He could run his own operation with the Mustang, and simply be a plug-in test driver and racer whenever Turner needed him, without carrying any of the other responsibilities that went along with running a team.       “I was just a jockey,” Moffat recalls. “I didn’t have to worry about anything else but driving. AL set up the factory, which was similar to Kar Kraft, and it worked very well. I didn’t have to go to the factory all the time, they’d just phoneme when they needed me to go testing and I’d meet them at the track. It was great because I ran the Mustang from my factory, and they ran the Falcons from their factory.”       When he first started with the Ford team, Moffat was under no illusion that he was the rookie who had to earn his stripes in a team of stars, like the Geoghegan brothers who’d been driving factory Fords in the Firth era.       “The Sydney boys were the Aussies on the block, and I was a foreigner,” Moffat recalls, “but all that went out the door quickly once we started racing.”       Moffat was based in Melbourne, and was just a phone call away whenever the team wanted to go testing. So when it came time to go racing Moffat, although the junior member of a star-spangled team, had more miles aboard a GTHO than anyone else. It was this experience, plus an innate ability to nurse a car while at the same time extracting the utmost performance from it, that made him the dominant driver he would become in long distance endurance races at places like Bathurst.       “Allan was very smooth,” recalls Turner. “He could feel the car like few other drivers, and never abused them.”       It was this ability to be smooth that cost Ford, and Moffat, a win at Bathurst in 1969, according to Turner. Bathurst 1969 is remembered as the race Ford lost because Turner made the radical decision to use Goodyear racing tyres on the Phase I GTHOs instead of the Michelin radial-ply tyres that were the accepted norm on a track that was notorious for tearing up tyres. ‘We were feeling a little deflated’ screamed the full-page ads Ford ran in the newspapers the next day, with pictures of piles of blown Goodyears to make sure the tyre company copped the blame for Ford losing the ‘unlosable’ race. It wasn’t a tyre problem that caused the Falcon’s fall from grace that day. It was the failure of his star drivers, with the notable exception of Moffat, to understand that they had to be smooth and easy on the cars, which were very much production cars and not purpose-built racing cars like many of them were used to driving.       “He is the smoothest driver I’ve ever seen,” Turner says of his star driver. “He’s the easiest on brakes, easiest on tyres, easiest on the power train, easiest on everything.”       Turner had used Moffat for all the testing of the GTHOs, and the Goodyear tyres passed every test with flying colours. But Turner hadn’t counted on Moffat’s super-smooth driving style being so much at odds with the less sympathetic styles of the other drivers in the team.       “I cost him the race in 1969,” Turner admits. We’d done over 1000km of testing preparing for Bathurst, and we did tyre wear checks in practice, and everything checked. So I decided to go with the Goodyear tyres even though some of the drivers wanted me to fit Michelins to their cars.”       When one by one, the cars began to suffer tyre blowouts, some crashing as a result, Turner took the decision to call Moffat in for a precautionary tyre change, even though the tyres on Moffat’s car weren’t showing any signs of distress. The extra pit stop put Moffat out of contention, and try as he might to regain the lost time, he had to settle for fourth behind the winning, Harry Firth-run Holden Monaro GTS 350. Had he not brought Moffat in for the extra pit stop, Turner believes Moffat would have won that race.       “We lost about four minutes changing tyres, and Allan finished about two minutes behind the wining car,” Turner says, “you don’t have to be Einstein to work out that he should have won.”       Even though he didn’t win, his performance in coming fourth in a car the so-called stars left wrecked beside the road, was enough to cement his relationship with Turner and the Ford team. He went to Bathurst the lead driver in the team’s third car, but left the mountain Ford’s rising star.