or Peter Molloy in 1979, the battle was
personal. The noted engine whiz/race
engineer was making a return to touring
car racing after what had been an
acrimonious split with Allan Moffat after
eirsuccessful 1977 season together. And he
d Moffat in his sights.
“I wanted to knock those bastards off,”
olloy says, “I wanted to get back at Moffat,
er the way he had treated me and my crew,
ndI wanted to knock off the HDT at the same
me. Bob [Morris] didn’t know that at the
me, but that was my motivation for getting
nvolved.”
In the meantime in 1978, Molloy had kept
himself busy running Bruce Allison’s Formula
5000 Chevron. That year in the Molloy’s
Sydney workshop, he and his crew put up
a special ‘Moffat’ whiteboard on the wall of the
engine room.
“We made a point of writing on the
whiteboard what the Falcons did after we left
Moffat, just to make a note of it. There wasn’t
too much writing on the wall! That was when
we decided that we’ve got to come back and
beat these bastards.”
Molloy is best known as a race engine
builder, and indeed he had been responsible
for the 351 Cleveland V8s in Moffat’s Falcon
Hardtops in ’76 and ’77. But to pigeonhole
Molloy as an engine man is to sell him short:
Molloy sees himself rst and foremost as a
chassis specialist – and he has a record to
back it up. It’s often overlooked that Molloy
was responsible for the cars, and not just the
engines, of Niel Allen in the 1960s and Warwick