I'll have a scratch around the library here and see what clues I can find... certainly, in the piece that he wrote (or was ghostwritten) for "Motor Racing - The Australian Way", Ian opined that he was regarded as a veteran at that stage... I'd put that somewhere early in 1972. The same line mentioned Leo's (first) retirement, post-Improved Production, it would seem that he wasn't going to sink any more of his money into racing - the Super Falcon was traded to Kingsley Hibbard in exchange (at least partially or somesuch) for a boat I believe... it went on the market pretty cheaply. I'd think that most of his driving from that point was in Laurie O'Neill's gear, notably the Monaro Sports Sedan that Sheppo built.
I guess that the big fella might've been a bit selective about what he drove... surely there would've been offers...
His 1977 Bathurst in Bob Jane's A9X had potential - I believe that was a Sheppard car too - as he brained them in unofficial practice, but the car had dramas... in 1978, the same car was shared with Garry Rogers (his Bathurst debut?), but went out early, and Sheppo was of course the HDT king by then, taking the lessons he learnt from Old Tom to a new zenith.
Did he appear in 1979? Certainly he gave it a shake in 1980. Leo was quoted as saying that they started 12th, didn't pass a thing all day, and finished third when everybody else dropped out... the car was for sale, and so they weren't keen to mess up the paint scheme with a heap of signwriting and stickers - and lamented that they missed out on a good whack of conditional prize money.
Bob Muir engaged Pete for Bathurst '81 in the Army Reserve Falcon, which hadn't really done a thing before (or since). Ironically Kingsley Hibbard - who'd purchased the XY from Geoghegan nearly a decade previously - had shared the car with Muir the year before, and it only lasted a handful of laps then either.
Muir figured that whatever he could do in the car, the big fella would certainly eclipse by a good handful of seconds, but he said later that Pete wasn't any quicker in it than he was. And that was that.
While I don't doubt that Moffat would've given his eye teeth for someone as naturally gifted as Pete as a co-driver - at least circa 81-82 (although Derek Bell put in good drives, and I don't know that Katayama was a dud either), I'd say that there was no way that Moffat was going to ballast the Rx-7 by as much as he would by installing the big unit in it...
As far as the fuel injection/Moffat debate went, Moffat has said that his Mustang grew Webers when Geoghegan ran them on his Mustang - his contacts in the States were apparently bemused that he was fitting that setup as opposed to the single-carb setup they were running, but Moffat figured to beat Geoghegan and Jane, he'd be mad not to fight fire with fire. I don't know that Moffat actually would've spent up big on running the Mustang - after all, it hadn't cost him anything to start with, other than plane fares (which pretty much burnt whatever money he'd earned from selling the Cortina)... and while Bob Jane had set on a dependable package, I don't think he would've been crying poor anyway.
Of course, most of the contributors to this thread were there to see much of it first-hand, and I only have the accounts of those who cared to have it recorded...
Edited by Hank the Deuce, 18 July 2013 - 12:36.