Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i Street Machine

AS THE sun began to set over Bradenton Motorsports Park in Florida, the golden light caught Jarrod Wood’s Radial vs The World Corvette. To me, it looked like performance as sculpture, an artwork of speed. If drag racing has a reputation for vehicles that move as fast as they look, this Corvette looked ready to enter hyperspace. Jarrod was first drawn into drag racing when he decided to compete in Street Machine Drag Challenge 2016, and it didn’t take long for the Victorian to make an impression. He built an HQ One Tonner specifically for the event, and by week’s end he’d run Drag Challenge’s quickest-ever pass up to that time (see sidebar, page 63). The bug had well and truly bitten. “I’d had cars, but never drag cars,” Jarrod…

AFTER months spent at home social-distancing, it’s almost time to jump back in the car and hit the road for that dream regional or interstate trip. Road trip snacks? Check. Perfect Spotify playlist? Check. Destination? Check. Tyres? Get them checked! To that end, we chatted to Mitchell Golledge, Managing Director at Continental Tyres, to find out everything you need to know about checking your tyres and getting your car ready for your getaway. MOVE IT! Tyre flat-spotting is common after a car has been parked for a prolonged period. This happens when the tyre area in contact with the ground creates a flat spot in the rubber due to lack of movement. There are two types of flat-spotting: temporary and semi-permanent. The severity of the flat spot is determined by…

EK HOLDEN STEVE GALE “WHEN I bought my EK two years ago it was as stock as they come, and I won a trophy for Best Original at a car show. Then I got it tubbed at Ultimate Metalworks by Brad Grech and the team, in order to fit a 15x10 rim and 295/50/15 tyre under the bum. I drove it around for a while with the fatties and 138 grey motor, and it was a cool cruiser, but things have changed since then. It now runs an LS2 with RHD eight-stack injection, backed by a six-speed manual. I’ve also added a Rod Shop IFS front end and a custom four-link out back with Viking coil-overs, as well as a Competition Engineering anti-roll bar. There’s a Rod Shop transmission tunnel…

DRAG Challenge regular Andrew Natoli’s plastic-powered VK Commodore has always punched above its weight, reliably running into the 10s with a basic aspirated 320ci Holden combo that made a healthy 540hp with an offset-ground factory crankshaft. But when you count the lads at BG Engines among your mates, the temptation to step things up is ever-present. “I wanted to build Andrew a nice little LS for the VK, but I couldn’t get him interested in the idea – never late in a 308, he reckons!” grins Damian Baker from BG. So the new engine had to be Holden-based and make plenty of grunt, but it had to do it on a budget, and that’s not easy to achieve. But BG Engines has been mucking around with Holdens for years –…

MAN, have we missed car shows. And so it is with great excitement and anticipation that we can announce that one of our favourite events on the calendar, Red CentreNATS, is full steam ahead for 2020! As is tradition, Red CentreNATS will take place on the Father’s Day weekend, 4-6 September. And with Northern Territory borders scheduled to open on 17 July, interstate visitors will be welcome and indeed encouraged to attend – Alice is a town that depends heavily on tourism, and it hasn’t had much of that in recent times. Measures will be in place to ensure COVID-19 safety protocols are observed. The detailed program is still being finalised as we go to print, but organisers are confident that all major RCN drawcards will go ahead. That means…

TO PROPERLY tell the story of Peter Brock isn’t to just spin a yarn about a racing car driver who happened to win a particular motor race a few times more than the next bloke. It shouldn’t be about hiding the human flaws of a true icon of modern Australian culture, either – or hanging him for the same. Telling that tale of derring-do and dastardly deeds is a dilemma that’s been faced by writers and directors over the course of the past three decades – and it’s a subject that’s been treated poorly by some. Only now, 14 years after Brock’s death, has a film managed to walk the line between deification and denigration as finely and empathetically as Brock: Over The Top. This 105-minute doco was originally intended…

AUSTRALIA’S pro touring scene is really building momentum at the moment, with an ever-increasing amount of aftermarket support and the world’s premier pro touring event, the Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car, returning to our shores in 2021. With that in mind, we thought it appropriate to chat with one of the pioneers of Australian pro touring, Mark Sanders. Mark’s aluminium P76 V8-powered LH Torana (SM, Apr/May ’91) and stunning big-block HK Monaro (SM, Oct/Nov ’94) were both landmark builds back in the early 1990s and well ahead of their time – and he’s still tinkering today. TODAY’S PARTS WERE SIMPLY NOT AVAILABLE; FOR US IT WAS ALL ABOUT HOURS AND HOURS OF FABRICATION How did the car bug bite you? Although Dad wasn’t into cars, he took me…

IN MID-MARCH, the weekend before our nation was cast into lockdown, Motorfest unleashed what turned out to be the last gasp of unbridled smoky mayhem for a little while. Held at Lardner Park, a bit over an hour east of Melbourne, Motorfest offered a show ’n’ shine, drift demos, a Harley stunt show and, of course, burnouts up the wazoo. The 2020 event was the first following a three-year hiatus, and is now run by burnout stalwarts Clint Ogilvie and Steve Loader (the folks who put on the Ultimate Burnout Challenge) in collaboration with Johnny Pilla from Powerhouse Engines. They were keen to put a new spin on the proven Motorfest formula. “The event has been opened up to everybody – guys and girls are welcome in their $500 dungers…

NOW a rare and highly prized muscle car, the HDT VK SS Group A (or Blue Meanie, as it’s popularly known) is holding its own in the value stakes among the Monaros, Torries and Falcon GTs. Some low-kilometre examples command prices upwards of $200,000. Only 502 of these SS Group A Commodores were built, plus 48 Group A/Group 3s, so it’s generally only purists that are willing to make such a steep investment – these cars are simply too expensive and too scarce to chop up. It’s for this very reason that Mario Zahra’s perfectly executed Blue Meanie is a tribute build rather than the real deal. “I own an HSV and I wanted an HDT as well, because HDT built the foundation cars,” Mario says. “But I wanted a…

HIGH-end Mopar feature cars were thin on the ground back in the early days of Street Machine, so Chrysler-philes rejoiced in our story on Graham Schild’s twin-turbo VJ Valiant Charger in the March ’88 issue. While turbo V8s are common these days, they were a rarity in that era. “The turbo thing came about when someone told me that I couldn’t do it,” says Graham. “That was it!” At the time, Graham was a 24-year-old maintenance fitter for Coca-Cola, and he built the suck-through-style turbo set-up from scratch. “The turbo pipes were made from heavy-duty exhaust pipe, with brackets on the heads to support the weight,” he says. “The internal-wastgate turbos came from AIT. We reasoned that if one of their units was enough for a 4.1-litre six, two of…

RANDY NEOS VK CALAIS “I’VE had my Calais since 1991 when I was only 19. It runs a Holden 383 with a six-stage dry sump, COME alloy heads and VN Group A manifold, backed by a Turbo 400 with a 3000rpm stall converter, and a 3.55:1-geared nine-inch. I used it as my daily driver for many years, but two years ago I decided to take the old girl off the road and do a total restoration, as she was beginning to get a little tired. I stripped it back to bare metal in my shed and metal-finished each panel, including under the car. I’m a sheet-metal worker, so that made the job a little easier, but Lonsdale Paint, Panel & Restoration provided support during the preparation and did the paintjob…

WE FIRST encountered Port Adelaide footballer Charlie Dixon at Street Machine Drag Challenge 2018, where the two-metre-tall forward folded himself into Frank Marchese’s XW Fairmont for the week. History shows that the team won the event outright on their first attempt. “It was an awesome experience,” says Charlie. “Frank and I had been chatting on Instagram for a while and he invited me to hang out on DC. I thought I’d do a bit of filming, but man, we worked hard from the very first night.” The next time we ran into Charlie, he was in the driver’s seat of his CV8 Monaro at the 2019 Holden Nats. The stick-shift, single-turbo Monaro is a beast of a thing, making 860rwhp. His current project, however, is a Ford – namely a…

LETTER OF THE MONTH TEST CASES I’VE just finished reading the interview with Warwick Bryce (Legend, SM, May ’20) – great piece. In the interview he talks about factory engine-testing cars – a silver VK SS and a VL. It got me thinking that it would make a great article to find some of the other factory ‘specials’ and how they tested the new ideas in old models. I did a tour of the HSV facilities around 1999-2000, and was told of a black VS SS that the LS1 was tested in that got the boys in trouble when they were caught street-racing it. I would imagine the Ford guys would have some similar stories. I think it would be a real eye-opener to learn about some of the ideas…

NOT every car in the Summernats Top 60 Elite Hall has had every single panel customised and pumps out ridiculous horsepower from a chrome mountain rising from the bonnet. Sometimes, all it takes is damn fine paint, meticulous detailing and just the right amount of original brightwork to receive the judges’ tick of approval. Ben Grayland’s ’Nats 33 Top 60-placing XR Falcon is one such car. “It was supposed to just be a neat cruiser,” Ben says of his initial build plans. “Just a quick paintjob and get it on the road.” So much for that! Ben found the car for auction on eBay. “I think the guy I bought it off was using it for parts to restore a Fairlane. It was a rolling shell with no interior or…

THE LX HAS RUN 12.97@104MPH. PEOPLE DON’T REALLY BELIEVE IT’S NOT A V8 WHEN IT WHEELSTANDS OFF THE LINE IT’S like they always say: like father, like son. For Gary Low and his son Ash, using old-school six-pot power to upset the V8 crowd is a family tradition – one that has seen the birth of two stunning street machines. “It all started with Dad,” says Ash. “He’s had a lot of Minis and some V8s in the past, but really a lot of Holdens, and most of those were six-bangers.” As a teenager, Ash went through a couple of chrome-bumpered lions before settling on the LX Torana you see now. “It was supposed to be a quick tidy-up, but the car quickly went back to bare metal,” he says.…

WHEN it comes to engine swaps these days, it always seems to be ‘LS this’ or ‘Barra that’, and probably for good reason. Both engines are capable of some pretty amazing horsepower on a budget, and at Carnage HQ, we’ve certainly done enough of them to know. Yet we discarded both those ideas when it came to repowering our new VN Berlina project car, which we’ve nicknamed Supermang. Our plan is to boost a 3.8-litre V6 into a Barra-killer and slip it into a relatively lightweight VN. Some may ask why we didn’t just whack a turbo on the standard VN V6, but I’ve done that before, and while the result was a stout 11-second sleeper, I’ve always wanted to try it with the much stronger factory-supercharged V6. Finding an…

01 SHIFT UP MOUNTING aftermarket shifters can sometimes be a bit tricky, especially in loaded late-model interiors, but the boys from Muscle Garage now have a mint solution for VE-VF Commodores. Their shifter plate bolts right in place of the factory hole for easy fitment, and the nice flat surface, finished in powdercoated black, gives you plenty of room to mount the ratchet shifter you’ve always wanted. You can grab one now from musclegarage.com.au. 02 TWIST’N’ SHOUT UNWANTED axle twist is a real bastard of a thing, and traction bars are an easy way of sorting that. Summit Racing now offers a huge selection of CalTracs traction bars for most common chassis combos, including Falcons, Camaros, B-body Mopars, GM and Ford trucks, and heaps more. They bolt to the front…

CLAIM TO THE THRONE A CAT and two dogs – a Collie and a St Bernard – appeared in heaven and were seeking admission. God himself decided to hear their appeal from his judgement seat. The St Bernard said: “I was a valued rescue dog and helped find those nuns after the avalanche.” “Wonderful, you are accepted into heaven,” said God. The Collie said: “I was always faithful to my master and brought the family together when they were down.” “Sounds wonderful,” said God. “Welcome.” Then it was the cat’s turn. “Why should we let you in?” asked God. The cat replied: “You’re sitting in my chair.” FiLyne, email SOUND REASONING AFTER failing his logic exam, a uni student angrily confronts his lecturer about it. “Sir, do you really understand…