‘YoulookafterMoffatandI’lldoBob’scar’.That
AMSCAR series, I was just glad to get out of that
and piss off.”
At least he could console himself with the
fact that the only reason Moffat was there was
because his Falcon team had been completely
crushed under the weight of the dominance of
Molloy’s Hodgson (and the HDT) Toranas...
Meanwhile the serious business of the
title ght was ongoing. Wins for Brock at
Wanneroo and Surfers Paradise matched Morris’
consecutive wins from the previous Sandown
and Oran Park rounds as they headed into the
nal two races. Brock was winning the war in
qualifying with a string of pole positions, but
fortunes were much more evenly spread when it
came to the races.
Molloy puts Brock’s qualifying pace down to
the HDT’s Bridgestone tyres.
“Bob kept saying, ‘They’ve got the
Bridgestones’, and I said, ‘Look, the Bridgestones
renobetterthantheDunlops.It bothered
ob that Brock was faster than him in
ualifying but I said to him, ‘Don’t bother
about Brock until the races. They’ll always
be quicker than you in qualifying because
f their special tyres, because they had
qualifying tyres’. We didn’t have those. We
were running off-the-shelf Dunlops.
“They might have been fast in
g but they had to go back to their race
tyresforthe race. And because their car moved
around more than ours, they would wear out
their tyres faster than our car.”
Just as had been the case 12 months earlier,
it came down to a nal round showdown at
Adelaide International Raceway.
“At Adelaide I just said to Bob, ‘Look, you’ve
just got to sit behind him and don’t worry about
it. His car will go off in 10 laps; he’ll be bouncing
all over the road’. And that’s what happened. I
used to watch the other cars out on the track and
assess them – I mean, you’ve got to know what
your opposition’s doing.
“When the car was really good, Bob drove
very well – he was very hard to beat. Brock
was a pretty good driver but a bit overrated, I
thought. He panicked a bit when we put him
under pressure in the nal round at Adelaide
when the championship was on the line. I was
watching him early in the race and the car’s
moving all over the place. I just knew he wasn’tgoing to have any tyres left at the end. It was
very satisfying to win that because I was able to
achieve what I had set out to do.
“But it was embarrassing. We had [scrutineer]
Harry Firth pulling us down again, as he did
after every bloody race, and he kept us and
our car and Sheppo with his car in parc ferme.
So Sheppo and I are in there and we’re talking
about the race, and Harry left us there for ages
while everyone else is getting on the piss, and
eventually he comes and says, ‘Righto, you can
take your cars away’. Anyway, John says to me,
‘Come over and have a couple of beers’ – he
was like that, John was OK. So we went over
to the HDT tent and Brocky’s in there up on the
stage shooting his mouth off. He saw me there
talking to Sheppo and he sung out at the top of
his voice, in front of all his crew, ‘You’re working
for me next year, you!’, and I just gave him the
middle nger. Not likely, mate!
“It was a very rewarding year. I like strong
opposition, and Sheppo was a strong opponent.
He was an ex-openwheeler guy like I was, and
he was very competent.”Bob Morris’ fi rst ATCC was also Ron Hodgson’s
fi rst – the team owner never managed better than
third in the title as a driver.