rown’s Formula 5000s in the 1970s (inset left).
“I always said, ‘Engines don’t win races’.
’s the platform that the engine is in that wins
aces. The driver? He’s about 10 percent. But
a good engine won’t do the job without a good
hassis.”
The 1979 arrangement between Molloy and
he Morris/Hodgson out t would turn out to be
highly fruitful, even if things took a while to gel,
ccording to Molloy.
“It was a difficult year because Bob could
be a very difficult person, always criticising
what we were doing. But Ron Hodgson was
no different. I ended up having a meeting with
Hodgson, and I said to them, ‘You either do it
the way I say, or I’ll just go – I’m easy’. So they
decided to do it my way.
“They didn’t have the car right, and what
made that worse was the trouble we had getting
homologation updates from the HDT. They didn’t
want to give us anything.
“At Lakeside they brought out a new 3.9:1
diff, and other people had one but we didn’t. ‘We
sent you one’, they told us. Ours had ended up in
Darwin or somewhere.
“I complained to the scrutineers and they
nally gave us one – and I didn’t use it. I found
it was wearing the tyres too quickly. I made out
that I changed the diff; we pretended to change
it – had the car up on stands in the pits with the
banjo out making it look like we were changing
the diff.
“It was an extremely difficult year. They made
it as hard as they could, and that’s one reason
we were determined to knock them off. I don’t
blame Sheppo, because he had to do his job, but
they were also running other cars (John Harvey’s
sister car, with Wayne Negus making it a three-
car HDT attack at Wanneroo) against us.”
“We just had a better setup with springs and
shocks. With the way they were homologated,
you weren’t allowed to change many things, so it
was all about how well you set it up.”
Of course, Molloy took over on the engine
development side, too. To that end, Molloy
deliberately sacri ced horsepower in the search
for better low-down acceleration – which he