Who do you believe?

[Ray Bell]

A little discussion in the '72 Tasman programme thread leads to this...

Let's just look at the salient points:

Michael Clark wrote:

I interviewed Allan Moffat a couple of times last year......

To my surprise he mentioned that not only had he never raced an open-wheeler, he's only done a few laps in a Formula Ford as part of a promotional thing - he said "I realised that I didn't have a windscreen and that after a couple of corners I came to a realisation - 'I really like windscreens'"

Terry S wrote:

Michael, I think you have to understand that with Moffat in any interview or written article that fact and fiction get very mixed together and overlap. It is difficult to take things as gospel.....

.....In August 1971 he was in a 10 lap “celebrity” race at Calder for top Australian drivers in Formula Fords. He drove a Wren.....

.....In mid 1968 at Warwick Farm he drove Bob’s Elfin 400 Repco V8 Sports Car and smashed it badly into a fence.
In September 1968 at the Sandown Gold Star meeting he drove Bob’s Brabham BT23A Repco V8 open wheeler and crashed it badly.

May I quote directly from his recent autobiography:

“The wheels fell off, literally, in a one-off appearance in the Lombard Trophy Race, a round of the CAMS Australian Gold Star Drivers Championship at Sandown when I was in the Jane Repco Brabham. Apart from another drive in the company’s locally made Elfin 400 sports car at Phillip Island, which I won, I was desk-bound and it was frustrating.

I was sitting at that desk in January 1969when Bob Jane himself walked into the office, threw $500 on the table and said “We haven’t been getting along very well”. And that was the end of my employment.”

One wonders if that last bit was true, and why wait until January?

And I added:

.....Which Phillip Island meeting was it, Terry? I find no mention. Oh, hang on, that's what Moffat wrote.

So we see that it's difficult to believe all that Allan Moffat might say. With regard to the Phillip Island 'win', it just didn't happen. Jane's Elfin 400 went to the Island at the end of '68, but the win was the start of Bevan Gibson's string of victories in that car.

Another driver whose responses to questions or stories are to be viewed with care was Frank Matich. Here I am not talking about faulty memories after forty or fifty years, but outright and knowing manipulation of the truth.

Why is it so?

Mostly, I believe, it is because we are dealing with some pretty large egos here. This is a prominent feature of a great number of racing drivers who strive to get to the top. And sometimes their pit crew, helpers and mechanics engage in this activity too.

As I spent about seven years writing for Racing Car News on a more or less full time basis, I struck this time after time. I had already known it as a spectator who jumped the fence to get into the pits and talk to the drivers over the previous decade and eventually I learned how to sort the wheat from the chaff.

But today a lot of this stuff is making it into books, features in magazine articles and is written up on the internet.

That's the issue we face as we try to determine what really happened way back then...

[khyndart in CA]

Ray,
I know two well known motor racing folk from back in my days of working in England 1972-73 and they have virtually no memory or don't want to remember any of those times and I know others that can remember every lap that they have driven, so it is a varied field out there, that's for sure.




(Ken H)

[Ray Bell]

I found that talking to Tyler Alexander, Ken...

But I'm not concerned about people not saying or people forgetting, it's the ones who deliberately tell porkies.

Often it's for no good reason. Many things can be checked up very simply, so they're not really convincing anyone, though these days with things going onto the internet it's hard to prevent them making fact out of fiction.

I am also concerned here about people who weren't straight with us at the time. For instance, I never spent any time asking Moffat for any information because he was very unlikely to tell me the truth. Frank Matich was partly that way too, but I'd known Frank a long time and he would find it harder to get things by me.

I remember, too, at Lakeside in 1966 I was talking to Graham Hill. We'd been listening as Jackie Stewart had been going through the kink in the straight without lifting off, something of a big deal those days, and Graham went to some trouble to explain that he was merely rolling off the throttle and he wasn't really slowing down at all.

[Oldfart]

The sad thing is that when people can't be checked, corroborated or whatever, it will later be quoted and then a bit later becomes repeated often enough that it becomes fact.
Slightly irrelevant, but apropos, my mum was an historian through the 40's until her death a few years back. As an example she kept a newspaper report from during the war when it was reported that a grass fire had broken out near a military gun emplacement and covered a substantial acreage (1500 from memory, perhaps 150). Reality was around 15 acres, if that. But, referring back to a newspaper of the day...

[Ray Bell]

A good example of that is the 'paint scraping' story about the Mercedes Benz Grand Prix cars in the thirties...

On TNF there has been a very long discussion about this, analysing the whole thing with photos and so on. Also one of Neubauer's stories about the lottery at Tripoli in the late thirties.

[Michael Clark]

I once interviewed a driver who was adamant that he was much quicker than his team-mate...despite the fact that he started behind him on the grid in a GP. I knew that but there was no point arguing the toss at the time - it was how he recalled it.

Generally I like capturing the story and then tidy up the facts once they can be checked.

[Ray Bell]

One good way of checking the facts is to go to the mechanics...

They know which drivers zero the tell-tales before they come back in!

[Oldfart]

One good way of checking the facts is to go to the mechanics...

They know which drivers zero the tell-tales before they come back in!

And piss in the seat!