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...