little buggers the faster they’re going to go.’ So we
started revving it to eight, it improved. Eight- ve,
it improved. We checked the engine compression
and it was still perfect. So we started revving it to
nine, nine- ve, nine-eight. I think we nished up
running the 12As to ten- ve.”
It paid off with pole position for the
opening round of the Australian Endurance
Championship, but a broken throttle cable
meant they left Oran Park with no points.
Three wins from the remaining four rounds – at
Sandown, Surfers and Adelaide – saw Moffat
claim the drivers’ title, but sadly for Mazda the
manufacturers’ award went to Nissan thanks to
class wins.
Even more sadly, the other non-win was
Bathurst, despite building two new left-hand-drive
RX7s for the anti-clockwise circuit.
New team rebrand Lucio Cesario wrecked
one car in practice and was sacked, then a new
front brake system – designed to eliminate a
pad change – let them down in the race and a
disastrously slow stop dropped Allan and his new
teammate, Mazda factory ace Yoshimi Katayama,
to a sixth place nish.
There was another innovation at Bathurst,
too, but one that was kept secret. Knowing that
the challenge at Bathurst was getting up the
mountain, Webb revived an old trick he learned
with the Stillwell Escort – tting an extra gear in
the gearbox!
“The six-speed came about after the rst year
at Bathurst. We had a super-reliable car and we
could run it at for the whole race; it just lacked
that little bit up the hill. I said to Allan, ‘Well, the
only way to alleviate that it to put another gear
in it. Let me talk to Peter Hollinger because
he’s a wizard.’ So I called into Pete’s house in
Warrandyte on the way home and we went
through it.”
They couldn’t modify the housing because
it had to look the same as the homologated
ve-speed, but they replaced reverse gear with
another forward gear in the main case, then put a
tiny sprocket in the extension housing so the car
could be (very gently) driven in reverse.
“Fourth was direct drive and fth was an
overdrive and sixth was a bigger overdrive. I think
we ran a 5.3 diff ratio, which was super low, so
we had the acceleration in rst, second, third and
fourth up the mountain, and then used fth and
sixth down Conrod. It was fantastic really, and
it worked perfectly. But we only ever used it at
Sandown and Bathurst.”It had been a contentious year, and none
more so than at Sandown, where Allan was
black- agged for speeding in pit lane – even
though there was no set limit. He pitted, but the
officials had neglected to tell the team what the
black ag was for, so he was sent back out,
still in the lead. “The car lobbed and I had no
directions from the officials, so we just let it go,”
team manager Horsley says. “There was no
alternative to what we did. Well, the alternative
was just to sit there!”
Again the black ag came out, and this time
Allan duly ignored it to take the win. It was a
complete shambles, and the crowd booed Moffat
wildly when he parked in front of the grandstand,
only to be told Allan Grice had been declared the
winner. Months later, a court upheld his appeal
and the victory stood.
But there was unreported fallout from the
controversial weekend. According to Webb,
they had secretly used some new stiff-wall rear
Dunlops, though with Goodyear stenciled on the
side in deference to his long allegiance with the
company. However, in the turmoil of that chaotic
nish, “someone jumped up on the rostrum and
put a Dunlop hat on Allan’s head, and Goodyear
in Akron had the photographs within 48 hours