Allan George Moffat (10 November 1939 – 22 November 2025) was a Canadian and Australian racing driver known for his four championships in the Australian Touring Car Championship, six wins in the Sandown 500, his four wins in the Bathurst 500/1000 and his win in the 1975 12 Hours of Sebring. Moffat was inducted into the V8 Supercars Hall of Fame in 1999.
Moffat and his long-time friend and rival (and later co-driver) Peter Brock are the only drivers to have won The Great Race at Bathurst in both its 500-mile and 1000-kilometre formats.
In October 2018, Moffat was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.
Early life Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Moffat was the eldest of three sons from Evelyn and Arthur Moffat. Moffat's father was an executive at Massey-Harris, resulting in Moffat living in Vereeniging, South Africa as a teenager and Melbourne, Australia in his college years as his family moved around for business reasons. Moffat studied marketing at Monash University with a cadetship at Volkswagen, but abandoned his studies to contest amateur circuit races in a Triumph TR3 and later returned to Canada due to a lack of funds. After briefly working as a door-to-door salesman in Toronto, Moffat befriended some Team Lotus mechanics at the Watkins Glen round of the 1964 United States Road Racing Championship and joined the team as a gofer before purchasing one of their Lotus Cortinas at seasons' end.
Racing career 1964 to 1971
Moffat and Jon Leighton drove a Ford Cortina Lotus to fourth place in the 1964 Sandown 6 Hour International at Melbourne's Sandown Park. The race was the first of what would eventually become the Sandown 500.
Moffat first entered the Australian Touring Car Championship (ATCC) in 1965, driving a Lotus Cortina. Following this Moffat spent time in the United States where he drove in the new Trans-Am Series in 1966, showing his talent by winning the third round of the series, the Bryar 250, at the Bryar Motorsports Park, outright in an Under 2L division Lotus Cortina on 10 July 1966, leading home Bruce Jennings driving a Plymouth Barracuda by over a lap.1966 SCCA Trans-American Championship Results
Moffat returned to Australia but also spent more time in the US, continuing to drive the Cortina as well as Ford Mustangs for Carroll Shelby in Trans-Am with various Australian co-drivers including Trans-Am regular Horst Kwech and Ford Australia's, and future Holden rival, Harry Firth. Moffat's time in Trans-Am included competing with Kwech in the Trans-Am class at the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring and driving four Trams-Am races in a Mercury Cougar for Bud Moore Engineering.
By 1969, Moffat had returned to live full-time in Australia and from 1969 he had become a regular ATCC competitor and his bright red Coca-Cola-sponsored Ford Boss 302 Mustang, which was supplied brand-new to Moffat from Ford's American 'in-house' race car fabrication and engineering facility "Kar Kraft" and finished off by Bud Moore Engineering, was unmistakable at circuits around Australia. With the help of Tom Hamilton and chief mechanic Lou Mallia, he would go on to win 101 championship and non-championship touring car races from 151 starts in this car between 1969 and 1972, including the first-ever win by one of the seven factory Boss Mustangs built for racing in its debut at the Southern 60 at Sandown in May 1969, yet his dream of winning the ATCC in the Mustang eluded him. He failed to place in the top-ten in 1969, finished sixth in 1970, 2nd in 1971 and 3rd in 1972.
Moffat and his Coke Mustang were involved in two of the most memorable ATCC races on record. In 1971, he went into the seventh and final round at Oran Park only four points behind three-time ATCC champion Bob Jane in his 7.0 litre Chevrolet Camaro ZL-1. Both started from the front row (Moffat on pole) and entered into an enticing duel. At mid-race, Moffat was forced to slow in order to free a jammed gearbox but battled back to only be six-tenths of a second behind Jane at the finish. Then in 1972, he was involved in a race-long dice with Ian Geoghegan at the Easter round of the series (Round 3) at the 6.172 km Mount Panorama Circuit at Bathurst. Up against Geoghegan's more powerful, 5.8L "Super Falcon", Moffat, while being left behind on the long Mountain and Conrod Straights, was able to keep with the Falcon using its superior handling and brakes and again only lost by less than a second. Moffat drove for over half the race with his safety belts undone so that he could put his head out of the driver's window in order to see where he was going, the Falcon having a small oil leak which saw some oil sprayed onto the Mustang's windscreen. By his own admission, Moffat did the wrong thing and turned his wipers on which only made the situation worse as it smeared the oil over the window, and with the race only being 13 laps long he was forced to carry on. Following the race, Moffat protested Geoghegan's Falcon but the protest was dismissed after Geoghegan's crew had time to wipe away the excess oil before the scrutineers could examine the car.
Although Moffat and a number of other drivers raced Mustangs for ATCC competition - the five ATCC titles from 1965 to 1969 were won by Norm Beechey (1965) and Ian Geoghegan (1966–69) driving Mustangs - this car, modified to CAMS Improved Production Touring Car regulations was ineligible for the Bathurst 500 (later Bathurst 1000), which was restricted to standard production cars prior to 1973. Moffat, therefore, made his debut in that race in 1969 in a Ford works team entered Ford Falcon XW GTHO. He and co-driver Alan Hamilton finished fourth. Due to the severe tyre problems suffered by the works GTHOs, Moffat was called into the pits early to change tyres. To the amazement of Ford team manager Al Turner, Moffat's tyres were not as nearly worn as those on the lead Geoghegan brothers or the Gibson/Seton Falcons, showing that Moffat was a driver who could be kind to his car and still go fast. Moffat maintains the view that he never wanted to pit at the time and that had he been left "to his own devices", he and Alan Hamilton would have won 1969 500. Moffat had actually been near last on the first lap of the race after his Falcon became stuck in neutral as he was powering out of The Cutting. This turned out to be fortunate as it allowed him to avoid the Bill Brown rollover going over Skyline which blocked the track and took out approximately a quarter of the field who had no warning of the impending disaster.
The following two years would see Moffat come into his own as one of Australia's most dominant race drivers, and the Falcon GTHO as an almost unbeatable car. For 1970, Ford Australia had made significant improvements to the Falcon XW GTHO Phase II over the previous year's model and Moffat, racing without a co-driver, took the car to two crushing victories in both the 1970 and 1971 Bathurst races, and also the 1970 Rothmans 250 Production Classic endurance race. In 1971 he became the first driver to lead the Bathurst 500 from start to finish while driving the famed Ford Falcon GTHO Phase III.
1972
Moffat looked headed for a historic third straight Bathurst victory in 1972 when Ford unveiled plans for a "Phase IV" Falcon GTHO, even faster but more subtle than the Phase III which Moffat had taken to victory in 1971. Sydney-based motoring journalist Evan Green caught wind of these plans however and his article, with headlines across the country that screamed, "160mph Supercars on Our Roads!" created the Supercar scare. Facing pressure from the media and government not to produce this car, as entering it at Bathurst would also require at least 200 units to be sold at dealerships in Australia, Ford scrapped production of the Phase IV and forced Moffat and other Ford drivers to resort to year-old Phase III cars for Bathurst that year. Peter Brock won the race that year for arch-rival manufacturer Holden after wet weather and brake dramas hobbled the Fords. This race would be seen as the start of the Moffat-Brock rivalry that would dominate Australian touring car racing in the years to come.
1973–1980
In 1973, both the ATCC and the Bathurst endurance race were open for the first time only to the newly introduced CAMS Group C Touring Cars. These mildly modified cars replaced both the existing highly modified Group C Improved Production Touring Cars (which had contested the ATCC since 1965) and the virtually standard Group E Series Production Touring Cars (which had previously contested the Bathurst event). Ford, smarting from the Phase IV controversy the year before, withdrew their factory teams from the competition at the end of 1973. This left Moffat and other Ford drivers to form their own privateer teams, despite the Factory team and Moffat being victorious in both the 1973 ATCC - his first-ever - and the 1973 Hardie-Ferodo 1000 (with co-driver Ian Geoghegan). Moffat, Geoghegan, and Ford have the distinction of being the first winners of the Bathurst race following its conversion from a 500-mile event to 1000 km. The night before Round 6 of the ATCC at the Adelaide International Raceway, Moffat's GTHO Falcon Phase III was stolen from Stillwell Ford in the northern Adelaide suburb of Medindie. Rather than see Moffat out of the race (he was the series points leader at the time), Murray Carter loaned Moffat his GTHO Falcon for the race. Peter Brock won the race in his XU-1 Torana while Moffat kept his points lead by finishing second despite having to start at the rear of the grid. Moffat's stolen Falcon was later found abandoned in the Adelaide Hills, where the thieves who had taken it for a "joy ride" dumped it after running out of fuel.
Following the change from Improved Production to Group C for the ATCC in 1973, Moffat's Boss 302 Mustang was no longer eligible for that series. Moffat ran the Mustang in Sports Sedans in 1973 and 1974, though he refused to follow the trend at the time of moving the engine back in the cabin, later stating in a 2004 interview he "was never going to contaminate such a jewel", though he did replace the bodywork with fibreglass to avoid damaging the cars sheet metal. Following 1974, Moffat sent the Mustang back to Bud Moore in America where it sat for sale until 1995 when it was purchased and restored by Queensland based entrepreneur David Bowden (who other than himself and his sons has never let anyone other than Moffat drive the car, even turning down a request from the late Ian Geoghegan). The Mustang was voted the most popular 'Muscle Car' ever to race in Australia by readers of Australian Muscle Car magazine.
With Ford Australia pulling out of motor racing after 1973, Moffat competed as a privateer through the 1974 and 1975 seasons. He was only moderately successful in the Australian Touring Car Championship races, placing third in 1974 with two round wins and undertaking a limited campaign in 1975. Other wins included the 1974 Sandown 250 and the 1975 Rothmans 300. He failed to finish the Bathurst 1000 in those years. On 21 March 1975, he enhanced his reputation as an international class driver when he drove a BMW 3.0CSL with West Germany's Hans-Joachim Stuck, British driver Brian Redman and American Sam Posey to win the 12 Hours of Sebring for the factory-backed BMW Motorsport with many considering this win to be the 3.0CSL's crowning achievement in racing.
Moffat returned to drive his XB Falcon GT Hardtop full-time in the 1976 ATCC and won his second title. This occurred despite the setback of a transporter fire which destroyed his race car with several rounds left to run, forcing Moffat to borrow a car from rival John Goss for two rounds. Moffat also won the inaugural Australian Sports Sedan Championship that year, driving firstly a Chevrolet Monza and later a Ford Capri RS3100. He failed to finish Bathurst again in 1976 despite taking pole and leading comfortably with co-driver Vern Schuppan.