Saturday Sleuthing: The Last Moffat Sierra

Allan Moffat is undoubtedly an icon of Australian motorsport with four victories in the Bathurst endurance classic as well as four Australian Touring Car Championships to his name.

Many of his fans regularly associate him, with good reason, with the V8-powered Falcons that he took to Bathurst every October during the 1970s - cars including the factory-run GT-HO Phase II and IIIs, the Hardtop XA GT, XB GT and XC models, the latter giving him his ultimate glory at Mount Panorama in 1977.

But younger Moffat fans perhaps better recall his time spent in the late 1980s/early 1990s with turbocharged Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworth Group A cars and it’s one of the two cars he had during that period that we’ve focused on today.

Reader Carol Bryant is one of literally hundreds of Saturday Sleuthing readers that has emailed us in recent months with a specific enquiry about a particular car they’d like to read more about.

“With so much comment online at the moment about turbos coming back to Supercars racing in the next few years, many fans are thinking back to the last time the turbos were running in touring car racing,” she writes.

“My family has been regular Bathurst viewers for many years and, while we read plenty about what ended up happening to many of the Commodores and Falcons of the last two decades, we don’t read much about what happened to these Sierras.

“Given there were a lot of them back in that time, there must be plenty of stories to tell. We’d love to know what happened to the last Moffat Sierra, from memory he had two of them and one was barely ever used. What happened to it?”

Bathurst, 1990

Carol is exactly correct given Moffat’s #10 Sierra was so lightly used that it in fact only competed in four races in its entire Group A racing career in Australia - all of them at Bathurst.

Moffat’s ANZ team, bolstered by Swiss Sierra tuning guru Ruedi Eggenberger, had come very close to winning Bathurst in 1988, however their #9 Sierra failed while in a dominant position in the latter stages of the race with victory almost within sight.

Speaking of the #9 car, we featured that particular machine in Saturday Sleuthing a few years back, click here to read it.

In a bid to ensure no stone was left unturned in their bid to conquer Mount Panorama, a new car was built by Eggenberger for Moffat for the ’89 race with German aces Klaus Niedzwiedz and Frank Biela (a future Le Mans 24 Hour winner for Audi) handed driving duties of the brand new turbo Ford.

Moffat actually was nominated in the driving line-up for his team’s cars at Bathurst that year and drove in practice, however elected not to take the wheel on race day and let the two German aces shoot for victory.

Bathurst, 1991

Niedzwiedz qualified the car fourth behind the local Sierras of Peter Brock, Dick Johnson and Tony Longhurst and the #10 ANZ Ford ended up finishing second to the Johnson/John Bowe Shell car on race day - it was a case of close, but no cigar.

This particular car was dedicated to winning Bathurst for Moffat and his team and it returned with the same driver line-up in 1990. This time Niedzwiedz claimed pole position and led the early laps (though earned a one minute penalty for jumping the start!) before a cracked diff housing forced it to spend plenty of time in the pits.

Eventually the car resumed to finish 10th with the cross-entered Belgian Pierre Dieudonne joining the line-up when Niedzwiedz jumped across to drive the team’s #9 entry.

Moffat’s ANZ backing disappeared for 1991 replaced by Cenovis Vitamins and his team of Sierras sat parked all season until Bathurst where Italian Gianfranco Brancatelli and Charlie O’Brien handled the driving of car #10. They finished a fantastic fourth overall but were excluded post-race for diff ratios being minutely outside of the homologated measurements.

Bathurst, 1992

The end of Group A arrived in 1992 and car #10 was wheeled back out for one more race at Bathurst with Niedzwiedz and Gregg Hansford. Again the German made the Top 10 Shootout but the car’s final Mount Panorama attack was (like in 1990) plagued by diff dramas and it finished a delayed 19th.

With the Sierras obsolete at the end of that season given the arrival of the V8 Falcons and Commodores for 1993, the #10 Moffat car was sold to Malaysian businessman David Wong soon after but never raced in the 13 years it spent there before being acquired by Aussie Robert Ingram and brought back ‘Down Under’.

The car was given a mechanical restoration and since has competed in occasional Heritage Touring Cars historic race events in Ingram’s hands and then its next owner Duncan McKellar.

Queenslander Peter Jones acquired the car in recent years and it appeared with his son Harrison driving it in the Regularity category at the Phillip Island Historic meeting this March.

Albert Park, 2015

“It’s an original car, it hasn’t been painted and it hasn’t been tampered with and inside and outside it’s as it was completed by Ruedi and his team,” he told our V8 Sleuth this week.

“My son Harrison drove it recently and nothing has put as big a smile on a 17-year-old’s face as driving a Sierra around Phillip Island! When I first drove it I was expecting it to be a lot more intimidating to drive. It’s a really nice car to drive the way it has been set up.

“It’s in our collection as a car we will bring out for special occasions rather than being a full-on race car regularly out on the track. The originality influences that; a lot of other cars were crashed and banged over their time.

“Allan (Moffat) always said it was a special car for him and was built specifically for Bathurst. It had some great drivers in it over the years and is a top shelf car when it comes to Sierras so it’s pretty special.”

If you have a car you’d like to see featured by our V8 Sleuth this year, send him an email here or visit the website here to get in contact.