Nice portrait of Allan Moffat during the September 9, 1979 Sandown 400K (Hang Ten 400) weekend.
Moff, Colin Bond and Carroll Smith had a season of incredible Australian Touring Car Championship/Championship of Makes/Bathurst 1000 dominance in 1977 with their Ford Falcon XB GT351/XC GS500 Hardtops but The General (General Motors Holden) changed all that with the introduction of the Holden Torana A9X 308 later that year – the car won on debut at the 1977 Hang Ten 400 driven by Peter Brock.
The Holden LX Torana A9X SS Hatchback was the ultimate Oz Group C era car. It addressed all of the weaknesses of the L34 Torana, not that those machines were exactly short of success.
The first three cars home at the completion of this ’79 Australian Championship of Makes 401km, 129 lap Sandown race were, inevitably, the A9X’s of Peter Brock, John Harvey and Peter Janson/Larry Perkins. Murray Carter was fourth in a Ford Falcon GS500 351, his machine was the only one of nine FoMoCo GS500s to go the distance. It wasn’t a happy time at all for we Ford fans!
Moffat and crew attend to the 351 Cleveland Ford V8 of the XC Falcon GS500 in Sandown’s pitlane. The ‘old’ Sandown pits were snug – fantastic for spectators – and dusty or muddy for the crews depending upon the mood of Melbourne’s weather.
Who was chief mechanic at this stage? Was Peter Molloy still building the engines?
Credits/Tailpieces…
Rennie Ellis – State Library of Victoria.
Rennie was a well-known ‘society snapper’ in Melbourne at the time, but he was pretty handy at a race meeting on the odd-occasion he slummed-it, as the two shots below taken during Sandown’s 1972 Gold Star round – the Victoria Trophy – on April 16 show.
The first shot shows Kevin Bartlett, Lola T300 Chev leading John McCormack’s Elfin MR5 Repco-Holden into Shell Corner – now excitingly called Turn One – while the one below is Clive Millis ANF2 1.6-litre Elfin 600B Lotus-Ford twin-cam. Frank Matich won the race, and the Gold Star that year in his Matich A50 Repco-Holden. McCormack was third, Millis eighth and KB suffered an ignition caused DNF.
Finito…
primotipo... 
Peter Molloy in ’79 was working with the NSW crew of Bob Morris that year .