Climbing the Mountain by Allan Moffat

Author:Allan Moffat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

At the end of 1976 I pulled off the motor-racing coup of the decade. I swooped on Colin Bond and stole him away from Holden. It was quite deliberate on several fronts. Colin was mightily impressive as a front runner. After Peter Brock he was the best of the rest.

It was only years later that people asked me: ‘Why not approach Brock, instead of Bond?’

It’s not something I ever considered. Brock to me was a genuine icon—far removed, in my mind, from any possibility of joining my team. Honestly, I would not have known how to approach him.

Colin, on the other hand, was in my stratosphere. And what a catch! As well as winning the ATCC, winning Bathurst on debut, winning Sandown and being the rock for Holden’s northern motor-racing operations, he’d also won three Australian Rally Championships for Holden. Harry Firth would probably never have admitted it publicly but compared to the volatile, mercurial Brock, Bond was just about the best team player he could ever have exploited.

They were rough-and-tumble days, played to cowboy rules.

Brock and Bond had the best drives in the country, but they were also on call to ‘H’ to do spanner duty in the workshop. They were paid menial wages while their labour was charged back to Holden at far greater mark-up. Far greater. They knew that but were powerless to do anything about it.

The deal was they got the prize money but, when they went to pick it up from circuit promoters, they sometimes found the purse was minus the entry fee, because Harry hadn’t paid it. In the case of one circuit, they discovered the team had taken up-front appearance money instead of prize money and they didn’t share in that at all.

Initially they received no salary. It was only when Robyn Bond, Colin’s wife, alerted a surprised Holden executive to that fact (‘We didn’t know,’ he said) that a back-door deal was arranged with sponsor Castrol to pay Peter and Colin with Holden money. Why that circuitous route?

According to Colin, ‘GM’s global policy was still no motor racing so Holden couldn’t pay us directly’. Rallying, however, was okay, which legitimised the workshop. ‘Whenever a visiting executive wanted to have a look at the team, there’d be a mad scramble on the shop floor to put rally lights on the race cars.’

No wonder Peter left, and no wonder Colin was open to a reasonable offer.

‘I went for the money,’ Colin said. ‘Moffat offered me a signing on fee well beyond anything I’d ever earned and a split of the prize money which was reasonable in the circumstances. I knew I wasn’t going to be winning unless he crashed or broke down, but that was okay.’

Colin’s motivations ran a bit deeper. His first love had always been rallying, and moving to me was also a move to Ford, which didn’t have an Australian rally team. Within a year, in a separate deal well away from me, he was preparing and running a Ford Escort rally team.

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