To All Intense   Michael Stahl - 1994   Used with permission of Michael Stahl – as appeared in Wheels, 1985       Quietly, he gulped back the words and was silent for a while. I briefly saw his eyes dampen before he looked away, contemplating the red emptiness of the Northern Territory desert. The speedo didn’t flinch from 220 km/h. Neither of us could have known that, just four weeks later, Allan George Moffat would look with much sadder eyes across the same desert when a pall was so violently cast over his Cannonball Rally.       I had never seen Allan Moffat looking sad before. Never seen him look especially happy, either. Never saw much other than the granite race-face at the circuits, with its ever-present incendiary threat; never heard much other than the jagged-edged Canadian accent, the smug, withering retort to a journalist’s naive question. Moffat had just related a kindness recently shown to him by none other than Peter Brock. On the Tuesday before last year’s Bathurst race, Brock, conscious of the immense effort and limited budget behind Moffat’s Cenovis Falcon entry, had offered his old arch-rival the use of anything - oil, brake pads - he might need.       “It was just the most, uhh... magnanimous gesture,” said Moffat, after the silence. Both drivers first went to Bathurst in the same year, 1969. Today the difference is that Brock, six years younger, is still doing it.       As Moffat stared into the void ahead, he seemed like a man who had made a leap of faith and was uneasy with the sensation of air beneath his feet. After some 25 years as one of Australia’s most intense and fearless racers, Allan Moffat was handling retirement with great trepidation.       He retired from race driving nearly five years ago. He just didn’t tell anyone. “It was a very personal thing to me,” he says. “I didn’t feel that I needed to make a big act out of it, it was hard enough just going through it. I couldn’t even face the word, ‘retirement’. I still don’t like using it. I felt like less of a person, because that part of my life that required going fast in a variety of cars, that intensity was removed immediately, although because I was always so close to the preparation of the cars I could at least stay tight on that. That’s obviously why I continued to spend so much money on the Sierras, keeping them going.”       He admits that he had to force himself not to renew his racing driver’s licence. Moffat knew that, come every October long weekend, there might be brake pads that needed bedding-in, some final suspension adjustments, this is how it should be done… The environment, inevitably, has that effect on him; it turns him into the only Allan Moffat most of us ever got to see.       The last race was the Fuji 500, at Japan’s Mt Fuji circuit. Partnered by Klaus Niedzwiedz in an Eggenberger team Sierra Cosworth, Moffat drove the final stint to take victory by just 50 seconds. He came back to the pits, handed his helmet to one of the Eggenberger mechanics and said, “Thank you.” It was November 11, 1989 - the day after Moffat’s 50th birthday.       “I knew - nobody else knew”, says Moffat of his retirement from racing there and then. “I had a great deal of difficulty saying, ‘where have the last 30 years gone?’ It seemed like 30 seconds.”       Moffat had departed motor racing with no worse than a scar on the back of his left hand signalling his smashed knuckles from Surfer’s Paradise in 1984, the last year of the Group C tourers. At full warp on a rain-soaked track, Moffat’s Mazda RX-7 was nudged by a lapped car and sent skating across the slick grass, thudding awfully into a tree.       “I was hanging onto the steering wheel, and when I hit the tree, the wheel bent all the way forwards into the dash,” he said. “Apart from that I’m okay. Oh - and I broke my sternum at Phillip Island in about 1972, when a tyre blew in the 500 mile race. It (his Falcon GTHO) did a barrel-flip at the end of Southern Loop and stopped about eight feet from falling into a lake. I was bloody lucky.”       At the workshop and at the wheel, Moffat has largely made his own luck; thinking, planning, doing all within his control to predetermine the results of his efforts. Inevitably, however, some elements will fall beyond his control. Thus it was when four lives were lost in the Cannonball Rally. At the time of writing, Moffat was unable to comment on the tragedy in the Cannonball, due to a Northern Territory Coronial Enquiry and a CAMS Commission of Inquiry in progress. Suffice to say, Moffat may not be able to bank on the Cannonball Rally as his chief activity in retirement.       He had been preparing for his retirement since May, 1966. The 26-year-old, budding tin-top talent was working for Goodyear as a “tyre boy” at the Indianapolis 500. The deadline Moffat that had set for himself exactly two years earlier, while spectating at the same place, was up. And Allan Moffat was almost a professional racing driver. But he had already realised he wouldn’t be forever.       “The number of 45-plus year old drivers at Indy really struck me. There was this one driver, Jim Hurtubise... He was a real flier, he was a hero of the day but he got in a real fiery crash (at Milwaukee in 1963). The surgeon had told Hurtubise he could fix his hands any way he liked, but they’d have to stay that way. Hurtubise told him to fix them in a steering wheel grip. And here he was, walking around like some kind of chimpanzee. I just didn’t see the need, just didn’t like the idea of doing that all your life. I was totally committed, but I was aware that I was not going into the corporate world, I was going into another world. I had to make it work, but I figured there should be a stopping time. And 50 was enough.”       Few know that Moffat was an Australian before he was a racing driver. He first came here as a 19-year-old when his father, the Detroit-based marketing director for Massey-Ferguson tractors, was offered a transfer to Melbourne. It was just another shift for the Moffats, who had already lived in Canada, North America and, for five years, South Africa. Allan, who was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, says he “went to more schools around the world than I spent years in school.” Moffat was excited to be in Australia during the early 1960s. His first exposure to motor racing came as a spectator at the inaugural Sandown meeting in 1962, where the motor racing bug seemed to be breeding in the warm weather. That was another attraction.       “I was very happy with this country - loved the fact that there was no snow. I used to deliver papers in it all the time. In Alberta, where we went to school, it got to 40 below zero. In fact, 40 was the magic number - if it went below 40, they couldn’t pump enough heat through the school furnace and y’had the day off.”       After only two years in Australia, Moffat Snr announced he’d been posted back to Detroit. “And that time around, I said, ‘Fine, that’s the last trip for me. I’m becoming a new Australian, thank you.’”       Allan got a job as a marketing cadet at Volkswagen Australia, which helped pay the hire-purchase on the Triumph TR3 in which he had his first race at Calder in 1962. More races followed on the still-new circuits around Victoria - Sandown, Winton, Hume Weir, Phillip Island. The history books briefly list the name of A. G. Moffat alongside a Volkswagen. His developing dream to become a professional driver clashed with his meagre income, and CAMS’ ban on advertising.       “I truly did want to become a professional driver, but there was no way it was going to happen. I was very aware that if you’re going to get anywhere, you have to drop everything, you have to focus on it totally, you have to beg, borrow and steal everything you can to do it.”       He made precisely that decision while spectating at Indianapolis in May, 1964, having “weakened” and returned to the US the previous Christmas.       “I was just kinda sucking my thumb, reflecting on what I was gonna do. I realised fast that, if I didn’t do it full-time, if I didn’t drop everything and apply myself 100 per cent, I wouldn’t make it. I was 24 years old and I knew I was running out of time. On that day at Indianapolis I gave myself two years. I said, ‘I will waste two years of my life. If it doesn’t work out, too bad, I’ve tried. But I’m gonna try seriously.’”       Six weeks later, Moffat was pressing his face through the fence at Watkins Glen. There, Team Lotus was fettling the works Lotus Cortinas for Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart. Moffat offered to work for free. “As far as I was concerned, I spent four months in the most expensive university in the world, learning gratis.”       At the end of the 1964 season, the Team Lotus Cortinas were put up for sale. Suddenly, the young team gopher put up his hand for one. “The Ford team’s co-ordinator, an Englishman named Peter Quenet, just looked at me and said, ‘What do you think you’re gonna do with a bloody Lotus Cortina?’ And I said, ‘I sorta know where to take it...’       The mid-1960s moulded much of the Moffat character. He went to-and-fro between being a novelty-novice with his own Cortina in Australia to being a Ford-supported privateer in the US, where he’d been granted the use of the two remaining ex-Lotus cars for the new Trans-Am series.       Mazda Racing Team manager Alan Horsley, who would later work with Moffat in the early-1980s, was managing the Hume Weir circuit during Moffat’s occasional Aussie sojourns. He remembers arriving at the circuit one frosty June morning to find Moffat sleeping in his Lotus Cortina at the gates.       “He spent every cent he had on motor racing,” Horsley says, “and that never changed. Three words describe Moffat: dedicated, dedicated and dedicated.” Horsley saw several sides of Moffat denied to the public. “I never had an argument with the guy, and I learned a hell of a lot. What always amazed me was his patience in testing - he could do the smallest thing for hour after hour until he got it right. I think that’s what always gave him the edge. Our RX-7 never had the factory engines or gearboxes we were rumoured to have,” Horsley says. “It just handled and it was reliable. That was it. And that was him.”       Money-robbing mechanical failures from his early days determined Moffat’s character throughout his career. His face sets hard: “One objective was clear to me very early: It wasn’t a hobby, this was going to be my life, and if I was going to succeed in it I had to do it well. The definition of ‘doing well’ is, you have to get results.       “I think it’s because my early career was in distance racing,” he continues. “There was always this necessity to have good preparation, otherwise you weren’t gonna go much of a distance. The objective is, you win by having the car running. It’s like saying to an accountant, ‘Look, gimme a balance sheet, but the figures don’t really have to add up.’ Okay, fine, why am I an accountant, then? Winning, in my career, just broke even for all the effort that went in. There was no great ecstasy in winning, no great degree of personal satisfaction - you can’t bank that. Winning only justified all those bloody weeks and hours of preparation that went into every car.”       Shortly after Indy in 1966, and two years after he began his two year plan, Moffat entered a Trans-Am race at Concord, New Hampshire (US). Today he insists that, had his two-year plan not worked out, he wouldn’t have been a club racer, wouldn’t have been happy with halves. “But that day, I can say that I became a race driver.”       Moffat had fought back from a dozy warm-up lap (it was actually a flying start) to win outright, helped to a large degree by the expertise of six Goodyear tyre technicians - among them, a youthful Howard Marsden. In the process, however, Moffat had beaten the Ford works-supported Alan Mann Racing Cortinas, featuring Frank Gardner. Mann’s team insisted that Moffat’s engine be sent to England for dyno testing, and things turned ugly. Any case, Moffat’s engine turned out to have five horsepower less. Thirty years later, it may as well be only 30 seconds where Moffat’s concerned. “It is possible to carry a grudge a long time,” he says. “I am a Scorpion, and I’m afraid I can’t get rid of these feelings.”       After a stint with Roy Lund at Car Craft in 1968, working on Ford factory Trans-Ams and the Le Mans cars, Moffat longed to return to Australia for a crack at the touring car championship. He came back penniless, with an aging Lotus Cortina and nothing else to his name. Desperate, he wrote a letter to Jack Passino, head of Ford’s international motor sport and a Moffat fan since the New Hampshire win. “Is there any way you can help me get a Trans-Am Mustang? There could be an old Shelby car lying around somewhere, just to help me get off the ground in Australia”, Moffat wrote. Passino replied that he should come over to Detroit. He got $3500 for the ex-works Cortina, spent $1500 on an air ticket and sat for four days in a Detroit motel, waiting for the phone to ring. Eventually, Passino told him, “They’re working on a Mustang down at Bud Moore’s. When it’s finished, you can consider it yours.” Moffat is again moved. “They’re not a benevolent society, they don’t just give things away. It was just truly one of those gifts of a lifetime that, to this day, is the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”       Several, classic Moffat victories followed in the Mustang, more than its 101 wins on the race track. It took a clean sweep of wins at Sandown in May, 1969. It carried the first non-automotive racing sponsorship in Australia, with Coca-Cola. And it whipped the locals who had given this intense “foreigner” a somewhat cynical reception. Moffat had never seemed like the sentimental type. And yet his eyes warm when he talks of the Mustang, of its flying from Detroit in the belly of the 707, Moffat one deck above but “almost wanting to climb down there to be with it.” He retired the car when the Sports Sedan rules were introduced for 1973 because he refused to cut it up to make it competitive.       “Right at this moment the Trans-Am, my Trans-Am, is sitting in North Carolina at Holman & Moody’s,” Moffat smiles. “Last weekend it was on display in Charlotte for the 30th Anniversary of the Mustang. I’ve had it over there, unfortunately with a view to selling it. I’m happy to say it hasn’t been sold, and we’re currently working on a little scheme, or scam, or both, that will get it back in Australia. We’d really like to keep it here.”       He never won an Australian Touring Car Championship with his beloved Mustang. Moffat knows he’s most strongly identified with the Falcon era, but he adds, “in my post-factory involvement”. Indeed, only one of his eventual four Australian Touring Car Championships - the first, in 1973 - was won in a works-entered Falcon. The last, fully 10 years later, was with Mazda. When Ford Australia pulled out of racing for the 1974 season, squeamish at the forthcoming V8 Toranas, Moffat privately shipped a Falcon GT across to his former employer, Car Craft in the US. He says this plan took three years to pay off, which it did with the famous Bathurst one-two finish in 1977.       “There were some terrible, intrinsic problems with the Falcon, with the Ford sumps we had to run,” he explains. “The main part of the reservoir on the Falcon is at the front. And on the GM products, it’s at the back. When we accelerated out of the corners, all the oil would go to the back and blow the engines. We tried everything known to man and truly, the one-two finish in ’77 was the eventual reward for the energy and effort that had gone into it.” Moffat believes he had Holden - and its ace team leader, Peter Brock - running scared again. “The feeling in the GM boardroom at the end of ’77 was exactly the same feeling they’d had in ’73 - ‘Let’s get rid of these guys once and for all’. I warned Ford that if we didn’t have more financial support we were gonna get blasted off the face of the map. ‘Oh, you’re just trying to con us out of more money, Moffat, we know the story...’ And if you check your history books, we went from the high-level mark of ’77, straight down a mine chute.”       Soon, Brock and the Commodore could do no wrong. Moffat has always held tremendous respect for his rival, but admits he never used to let it show.       “I used to keep myself to myself and just raced against him,” Moffat says. “I respected him enormously on the track, he never punched me, I never side-swiped him, we had great regard for each other’s abilities. But he was in this camp, I was in that camp. A little bit of a wave in the pits, but no, we were not buddies. Over the last five years, Peter and I have made up for 20 years of indifference,” he shrugs. “When I went to work for him in ’86 my whole attitude towards him changed. We’ve had a very pleasant relationship since... We (himself and Brock) both made more mistakes than we want to catalogue, but he’s there and he’s still doing it. Both him and Dick have got the same decision in front of them that I’ve had to make and swallow, and I’m sure they’ll do it in their own way.”       One can’t help but point out that Dick Johnson - who effectively stepped into Moffat’s Ford shoes in the early-1980s - is heading one of the biggest shows in touring car racing. Meantime, Moffat’s small Cenovis team fielded its carburetored Falcon at Bathurst last year, only to have it retire by the roadside.       “The catastrophe of Bathurst for me last year was not that something can fail,” Moffat counters. “I mean, we’re not unique to failures out there. In nearly 25 starts we only won four times, so there’s been a lot of other times when things weren’t too cheery. What really hurt me was that we weren’t allowed to get the car back to the pits. We could have replaced the gearbox, disconnected the cooler and she could have run the rest of the race and still finished quite reasonably. See, the definition of success at Bathurst has changed so much. The television audience is so large and the coverage is so good, that to be sidelined is criminal. When people give you money to do a job, it’s your responsibility to give them a return on their investment. And at Bathurst, that return on investment is (being out there) circulating.”       Despite his plans for future Cannonball Rallies, Moffat says he still feels a retired guy. I note he even wears an engraved gold Rolex watch - a fairly standard sort of retirement gift?       “Oh, that!” Moffat laughs from behind the wheel. “No, I’ve had this watch since 1976. This was my 1976 Touring Car Championship present to myself, and I’m happy to tell you that it’s still going strong. I bought it in the days before Fringe Benefits Tax, of course…”