Australian touring car racing has been shaped by the Holden versus Ford rivalry. Drivers have come and gone, but those two brands have battled through the decades for supremacy. In the early 1970s, it was a Ford that wowed fans and brought a new level of professionalism into the Antipodean racing scene. And it took a Canadian to do it.
Allan Moffat (see sidebar) had moved to Australia with his family and caught the motor racing bug by witnessing the opening race meeting at Melbourne’s Sandown Park in 1962. After a spell in America as a gofer for Team Lotus, connections made helped him to get his hands on a Lotus Cortina and then garner useful contacts with Ford in Detroit. He raced in the USA, won in the USA indeed, but no drive was offered to the peripatetic Canadian and so he elected to return Down Under to work for racer and ruthless businessman Bob Jane.
With his contacts in Detroit, Moffat was useful to Jane and he set Moffat the task of getting him a new Trans-Am Ford Mustang to race in Australia. Moffat obliged, expecting
