Australia's mightiest race meeting

It’s a race meeting that’s still talked about, even half a century on. It was the day Allan Moffat took on Bob Jane at Oran Park’s Australian Touring Car Championship winner-take-all final round, in front of a crowd so big it gridlocked the southwest Sydney region for most of the day. Oran Park would host the ATCC each year for the next 37 years but none of those subsequent ATCC encounters topped this one for action, excitement and the sheer sense of occasion. For some who were there on August 8, 1971, it remains the greatest day in Australian motor racing. Images: Ray Berghouse, Paul Cross Collection, Peter Schell, Chevron Archive, Jeff Nield, Lynton Hemer

Story: Steve Normoyle

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It wasn’t just the finest race meeting ever held at Oran Park, according to Racing Car News: it was ‘Australia’s mightiest race meeting ever’. Half a century on it’s a day that’s still talked about. It might even today still be our ‘mightiest race meeting’.

As the final round title decider, it culminated in a straight fight between two of our all-time touring car greats, Bob Jane and Allan Moffat. But there was more to it than simply two great drivers competing for a title. The rivalry that had developed between these two fiercely competitive men was personal and it was bitter. Any time in the early ‘70s when Moffat faced off against Jane was one not to be missed; there was always the feeling when those two met on track, that anything might happen. And when the was a championship at stake…

They were matched like a pair of heavyweight prize fighters; the brooding intensity of Moffat versus the extroverted aggression of Jane. Fittingly the machines they took to the fight were themselves heavyweight contenders: two of the all-time greatest Australian touring cars in Moffat’s Trans Am Boss Mustang 302 and Jane’s 7.0-litre Chev Camaro ZL1.