track in similar cars can damage relationships,
especially when one usually has the upper hand
and is not accustomed to being beaten. And in
1979 it quickly turned sour when the pair tangled
on only the second lap of the championship
through the hairpin at Symmons Plains.
The Hodgson team believed the dealer team
received special treatment from the factory, and
the MHDT in turn reckoned they were beaten
to the ’79 Australian Touring Car Championship
because their Sydney rivals were cheating. Brock
said as much at the time, and now Sheppard has
nally come out in agreement.
MHDT personnel at the time believed that
Morris’ engines exceeded the permitted 5.0-litre
capacity, at least at AIR. A quirk of the Torana
A9X was that the right-hand cylinder head was
more difficult to remove, so post-race capacity
checks were always conducted on the left-
hand side. It was therefore suspected that the
Hodgson Toranas were able to get away with
bigger right-hand bores and were consequently
more powerful than even the acclaimed Neil
Burns-built MHDT engines.
After the ATCC decider, when Morris famously
beat Brock to the line at Adelaide International
Raceway to clinch an upset title win, Peter was
livid. As he told me a few months later: “When
one Torana passes another Torana down the
main straight at Adelaide with sheer power,
there’s not very much you can do about it. Yet
two months later at Bathurst, that same Torana
wasn’t passing me down the straights. Those are
the facts.”
Sheppard at the time played the corporate
straight bat, publically paying tribute to a team
hat just happened to be owned by Holden’s
biggest and most in uential dealer.
“The best man on the day won the
hampionship, that’s all there was to it,” he
ld me a few days after the race. “As far as I’m
oncerned there was nothing wrong with our
arandPeterwasbeatenfairandsquare.Any
Sheppard today believes the Hodgson team wasn’t
playing with a straight bat. He was also unhappy with
his own driver’s performance, claiming Peter Brock was
distracted by the upcoming Repco Round Australia Trial.