Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i Street Machine

AFTER an unseasonably long break due to that bastard COVID cough, burnouts finally returned to Perth Motorplex on 17 October, with record spectator and entrant numbers rocking up for Burnout Boss. Our resident burnout filmographer Peter Flint was on the ground behind both the camera and the wheel, and reckons Burnout Boss was one of the biggest events he has ever seen at the’ Plex. “It was nuts; the atmosphere was insane,” he says. “Before COVID, they might struggle to get 3000 spectators for the whole event, whereas on the weekend there were 3500 people through the gates before the comp had started!” By the time the pros hit the pad after dark, 8000 spectators filled the venue – the biggest crowd there in 10-plus years. The entrant list was…

LETTER OF THE MONTH BACK IN TIME HEY guys, I’ve really been enjoying your new Time Machine feature. I always like revisiting the true legends of the sport like Rex Webster’s FJ and the early SMOTY cars, but I’m also really loving reading about some of the cars that don’t pop up as often, like Dave Hemsworth’s FJ ute (SM, Sep ’20). I always loved that thing and never knew that it became Garth Bell’s drag car. Same goes for Graham Schild’s twin-turbo Charger (SM, Aug ’20) – that was also ahead of its time. One car I’d like to see given the TM treatment is Mark Daniel’s TT LX hatch. The original feature (SM, Sep ’86) didn’t show much of the engine bay, and I’ve always wanted to know…

DANIEL Wickman’s gorgeous XM Falcon is known as Grimace because it used to be purple, but that’s also the face its occupants make when the 76mm Garrett turbocharger builds positive boost pressure and the full-house Barra hurls them at the horizon. It’s funny, but 1068hp at the hubs has that effect on a person. Daniel had relatively modest plans when he first fronted with the car at Sydney’s Image Conversions to chat about a rebuild. “I got the car in 2016, always with the intention to put a Barra in it,” he says. “I have four kids and I wanted a six-seater we could all cruise in.” Eighteen months later, the bench seats were definitely on-brief, but the scope of the project had expanded somewhat. THE WHOLE CAR WAS COMPREHENSIVELY…

THE road to creating perfect dream machines usually isn’t a smooth one. Cars tend to throw all kinds of inconceivable curveballs at us, even as we plead for the physical, emotional and financial bleeding to cease. But the upside to this is that continued perseverance usually results in a much better product than was originally planned, and that could certainly be said for Jeremy Spiteri and his ultra-tough XY Falcon GS. Jeremy got his hands on the car around six years ago in fairly good condition and still running a humble 302. “I actually wanted a Capri, but my cousin’s husband had an XY in good nick, so I ended up with that,” he says. Jeremy shoved the 302 aside for a Dart Windsor massaged out to 440 cubes, and…

HAILING from the beautiful Tauranga region on New Zealand’s North Island, Steve and Leanne Milne are proper car folk. The couple previously ripped eight-second quarters in Steve’s ’69 Camaro Doorslammer, but now they collect tinware with their highly detailed ’56 Chevy 210. “I got out of racing cars and figured it would be cheaper to build hot rods and street machines,” says Steve. “But I was wrong. Like everything else, building the ’56 cost a bit more than I first expected, but I’m very happy with how it turned out and the value for money.” Steve and Leanne managed to take arguably the most popular era of Chev and create something that boldly stands out from the crowd, and that takes quite some doing. Not only is this shoebox finished…

VICTORIA’S COVID-19 lockdown has kept Carnage presenters Kian and myself out of the workshop for the past couple of months. However, there’s still work that needs to be done, and the fans on YouTube are still hungry for content, so I decided that now was as good a time as any to mini-tub my 1968 VE Valiant Safari project wagon. The Lockdown Wagon rebuild started with a very rusty $500 wreck that had dents all over and massive holes in the floorpans, but I have been gradually cutting out all the rust and building it into a tough street-and-strip cruiser. With the rust all gone, it’s now time to start with the mods. Rather than split the existing tubs and weld strips down the centres, I decided to grab a…

01 BEARING FRUIT SPINNING tyres is fun, but spinning bottom-end bearings? Not so much. Upgraded bearings are great insurance to stop your engine throwing a leg out of bed, and Calico Coatings has now partnered with ACL, Mahle/Clevite and Durabond to provide high-performing coated bearings for the motorsports industry. They are coated with CT-1 dry film lubricant, which helps reduce friction and abrasive wear. It provides intermittent dry lubrication and is not affected by dust or dirt, meaning you can get more life out of your expensive engine build between tear-downs. You can find out more from the team at Performance Wholesale on (07) 3808 1986, or via email at sales@pwa-au.com. 02 TACKLE THE BIG JOBS ENGINE removals and installations can often be carried out with portable engine cranes, but…

FANCY a custom Chevy Nova built by one of the best in the business, and for less than the cost of a weekly grocery shop? Well, thanks to the boys at Customs 4 Cancer, you can win exactly that, and it’s all for a ripping cause. For just 25 bucks a ticket, Customs 4 Cancer is raffling off a 1970 Chevy Nova hand-built by Cooper Zahabi, the son of legendary car crafter and owner of Rides By Kam, Rob Zahabi. The car scored a feature in the November 2019 issue of SM and wowed the crowds at Street Machine Summernats 32, scoring 2nd Top Coupe in the elite judging. It’s a stunning ride, making it the perfect launchpad for the Customs 4 Cancer crew to get their new initiative off…

REMEMBER when international travel was a thing? Around 12 months back, some of the wildest gasser and fuel altered machines from across the country and around the world descended on Sydney Dragway for the first World Fuel Altered Challenge. One of those dedicated travellers was Dave Best, who shipped himself and his killer wheelstanding Model A gasser all the way from New Zealand to take part. What first got you interested in gassers? I’ve been into them since the early 70s. I saw the TV movie Hot Rod and got hooked on high-riding Willys coupes, and I now have a steel one I’m building, which will replace the Model A soon. How did you come to own the Model A? I bought the body back around 1986 out of Fresno…

WITH its stark black-on-white presentation, reverse cowl and tough big-’n’-littles stance, you can bet Matt Watts’s HQ ute snaps a few necks in this sad, beige world where car-buying decisions are often based on the number of nifty storage compartments. Matt originally set out to build something to carry a load of firewood and maybe chuck the swag in for an impromptu weekend trip, so cargo space was certainly near the top of the feature list when he went shopping for a new project car. He certainly didn’t intend to build the tyre-frying streeter the HQ is now. “I was looking for a stock-ish HQ or HZ ute,” Matt says. “My only real requirements were a bench seat and a reasonably solid body; I wasn’t fussed about the driveline.” After…

IT’S AN ANIMAL! IT TWISTS AND FEELS LIKE A BOAT – TO BE HONEST IT SCARES ME TO DRIVE IT WIND the clock back a few decades and the notion of a brown Kingswood being considered anything more than grandpa’s bingo runner would have been laughable. Yet while it’s not as if brown has made a fashionable comeback for 2020, Tim Harrison’s stunning HG Kingswood is a prime example of how you can make just about any colour look good with the right recipe. It should come as no surprise that Tim’s HG looks as stunning as it does, given he’s been in the panel-beating trade since he was 18. But an extreme makeover definitely wasn’t on the cards initially. “I got it from a mate with the intention of…

ONE of the biggest challenges of building a pre-1980s muscle car in this day and age is finding a good base to start with. Most examples either look like they’ve been parked next door to the Titanic or require re-mortgaging the house just for a rolling shell. Rob Tanti got lucky in that regard; six years ago he snared a complete and original V8 ’74 HQ Kingswood to use as the base for his dream street cruiser. “I had an HQ One Tonner in my early 20s that I built into a bit of a pro street thing, but I wanted something with more seats to take my mates and kids cruising in,” Rob says. “I got put onto this HQ sedan, which was fully grandpa spec with a factory…

BIANCA Cilia has been playing with classic American muscle since she was in primary school, just like her sister Chantelle, whose ’65 Impala we featured in Iron Maiden last month. Bianca’s current ride is a sweet 1973 Plymouth Duster, which she imported from the US herself for a delightfully different weekend cruiser. How did you catch the car bug? Dad has always had mad cars. He had a ’57 four-door and a whole bunch of other stuff when I was a kid, so all of my baby photos are of me in cool old cars. My first car when I was seven years old was a ’55 Chevy, and then I had a turquoise 1965 Mustang for 10 years. My dad is a spray painter, and I’d spend all my…

1929 FORD MODEL A COUPE MASON CAHILL BRISBANE lad Mason Cahill usually works alongside his dad Darren at Cahill Speed Shop, building affordable turn-key hot rods. But at the moment he’s doing some FIFO work in the mines to save up some extra bucks to finish off this crazy Barra-powered Model A coupe. This isn’t Mason’s first rodeo – his previous hot rod was a ’23 Model T roadster, powered by a Hemi six (SM, Dec ’16). He built the car to be P-plate legal, but it was also fast and nicely built, running 12.3s at the drags and collecting plenty of trophies at car shows. As for the’29, Mason is aiming for Drag Challenge duty: “I’d like it to be one of the quickest registered hot rods in the…

FIERY young punk Otto Maddox (a pre-Breakfast Club Estevez) is having a bad day in Reagan-era LA. First he loses his shitty gig at Pik N Pay. Then his girlfriend dumps him for his best mate in the time it takes to grab a beer from the fridge. And to top it off, his hippy parents have been zombified by a televangelist. Things take a wild turn when Otto falls into the world of repossession agents at the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation. Despite his initial distaste for the work, money talks, and repo veteran Bud (Stanton) soon takes Otto under his grizzled wing. Bud teaches Otto the tricks of the trade and waxes lyrical about the repo code, which includes such gems as: “I shall not cause harm to any…

BUILT in a mad three-month thrash, Aaron Gregory’s ’51 Chev ute, dubbed Memphis Hell, first broke cover at MotorEx 2012 and was promptly put to work cruising up and down the east coast of Oz. All those road miles didn’t stop it from making two visits to the Summernats Top 60 and scoring a swag of other tinware at shows all over the country. Aaron’s treated the truck to five genre-busting rebirths since then, most recently chopping both the roof and the hand-made tub and reinventing it as a corner-carving, pro touring marvel. Off the back of that rebuild, it scored another feature in Street Machine and qualified as a Valvoline Street Machine Of The Year finalist – and then you lot voted it the most popular street machine of…

AMONG many other things, bastard coronavirus has robbed us of opportunities to get our cars out, get together with our mates and bang tyres. No one realises this more than the gang at Summernats, so they decided to throw a socially distanced skid comp at Sydney Dragway, for no other reason than to give the burnout faithful a longawaited opportunity to let their hair down. Oh, and to hopefully qualify for the hallowed Burnout Masters showdown in March next year. Needless to say, the health and safety of everyone in attendance was paramount, so organisers developed a COVID Safety Plan and ensured that the event would comply with all relevant government guidelines and regulations. When the level of community transmission in NSW had not reduced to a level that the…

NEXT year marks Street Machine’s 40th anniversary, so we felt it was a great time to flick back through the archives and compile a list of 20 of our most memorable covers. The SM team will agree it was no easy task, with each of us pleading the case for our personal choices, whether it was the first issue someone bought, an image that exemplified a particular time in our sport, or just because the cover car was damn tough. Here’s what we came up with. Do you have a fave? Drop us a line and let us know why at streetmachine@bauer-media.com.au. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 1981 IN 1981, SM’s founding editor, the late Geoff Paradise, was given the nod to launch a new title from the ashes of Van Wheels, so the…

CAST your mind back to 2001. Fast fours like the Subaru WRX had been hot for a decade, a little film called The Fast and the Furious was laying them dead in the cinema aisles and the Auto Salon series of shows was a Big Deal. Auto Salon started as a gig for four-pots in 1996, with around 100 entries. It soon grew into a fully fledged national series for post-’86 cars that spawned a highly successful magazine and race events. The promoters had captured the zeitgeist, making the Auto Salon shows the biggest indoor modified-car events of their time – we’re talking more than 40,000-plus punters at the Sydney events. Auto Salon brought a new flair to the show scene. Rather than strictly points-based judging, Auto Salon rewarded showmanship…

WHILE at first it may seem like Graeme Horner’s ballistic VH Commodore’s main purpose is to light up the timing tower, a quick glance at the plates reveals a much deeper meaning behind the build for him. “It was supposed to be my younger brother Daryl’s first car, but sadly he passed away in 2008 when he was just 15 years old, so he never got the chance to use it,” says Graeme. “It’s got huge sentimental value to me because of that, which is why we went above and beyond with this build.” Graeme has previously contested Drag Challenge in his old VK Calais in 2015 and 2016, placing strongly on both occasions. “We took out the fastest unopened LS1 record in 2015 at Drag Challenge with the VK,…

MARK & JODY WILSON 1975 LH TORANA MARK and Jody Wilson’s Torana has undergone a complete ground-up, nut-and-bolt restoration. Mark bought the car in 2000 from its original lady owner. Wrapped in cracked and sunburnt Persian Sand paint, the car was running a nanaspec 202 and T-bar auto, but Mark and Jody immediately plotted a V8 swap. A mechanic by trade, Mark did the engine rebuild himself, with Jody by his side. A 308 from an HQ Statesman was sourced from the local wreckers, and then Mark performed his magic. A 750 HP Holley sits on a COME inlet manifold, flowing down to the COME 600 Series alloy heads and matching crank, which has woken the old girl up from a 308 to a lovely crisp 383. Power reaches the…