Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2022 i Street Machine

BRENDAN Akhurst, one of Australia’s leading illustrators and cartoonists, passed away earlier this year after a brief battle with cancer. He was 73. As BJ Akhurst, he was best known to Street Machine readers as the creator of the long-running Wayne & Vicky comic strip and countless other illustrations. His iconic image of Wayne’s XP Falcon and a souped-up A9X hatch facing off at the lights (pictured above), which appeared on the cover of our 30th-anniversary special, is as recognisably Street Machine as our masthead. The adventures of Wayne Clodpole, his voluptuous girlfriend Vicky and their Holden-baiting XP coupe were the perfect reflection of our homegrown modified car lifestyle, viewed through a screen of healthy, self-deprecating humour. The cars are beautifully drawn, instantly recognisable, but stupidly tough. You can almost…

SO MANY PEOPLE OF ALL AGES EXPERIENCED THE OTHERWORLDLY THRILL OF NITRO DRAGSTER RACING FOR THE FIRST TIME TO slightly misquote the 1989 Kevin Costner-starring flick Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come”. Such was the mantra for new Heathcote Park Raceway owner Lance Warren, who got the keys to the facility on 31 December last year. Not even six months later, the track was hosting the very first Victorian Summernats Slam, headlined by a six-car Top Fuel field. Rather than closing the gates for a ground-up rebuild, Lance chose to make continual incremental improvements to the facility throughout the year, with racing only stopping three weeks prior to Summernats Slam to resurface the track. “It is a massive property – 116 acres – and it required…

CHRIS Vassilis shares a unique relationship with his good friend and childhood neighbour, Bill Kaglatzis, owner of BK Race Engines. “If it wasn’t for Bill, I’d probably have bought a few houses by now,” he laughs. “Bill is definitely responsible for my love of cars. As a kid, I rode my bike around to his house one day and saw him piecing together an engine covered in Speedflow fittings and with two giant turbos hanging off it. That day the Lamborghini and Mick Doohan posters came down from my bedroom walls; I fell in love with tough V8s!” Even so, it would take almost two decades for Chris to snag a muscle car of his own. Easily distracted throughout his teens and 20s by rotaries and motorbikes, he eventually outgrew…

CLINTON Leayr’s 10-year journey with his beautiful, home-brewed XL Falcon started rather frantically. “I’d been looking for an XL for a while, and one afternoon on my way home from work my brother-in-law let me know this one had popped up for sale,” he says. “There were already three other people looking to buy it, so we raced down there with the cash and managed to grab it.” That purchase unintentionally kicked off what would become one epic home-built street machine. But it went through a number of changes before culminating in what you see today. “I drove it around for a while in its original blue paint and with the 221ci six-cylinder, but then that spat the balancer off one day,” Clinton says. “A mate of mine had my…

RESTORING a piece of history to a specific moment in time is a huge and painstaking undertaking. Thankfully, Jack Perkins grew up around these cars and has been able to work with many former employees, team members and devoted fans to fill in any gaps he found. “When you restore these cars, you pick an event and stick to it,” says Jack. “Even the decals can change between events, so understanding the specifications of the car on race day comes through a series of documentation. We relied on a lot of our parts drawings for hardware, as they were dated. A lot of hardware, like engines, brakes, diffs, suspension uprights and the like, all got Perkins Engineering numbers.” For the VP’s restoration, 1993 was the first year for the CAMS…

WHEN your dad is former Burnout Masters winner Brett Battersby, pilot of the insane BLWNLUX HiLux, you’re pretty much destined to find yourself skidding your own beast at an early age. That’s exactly the case for Brett’s 17-year-old daughter Sarah, who has been making a name for herself in her SUSLS1 VT Commodore SS. We caught up with Sarah at Brashernats in Sydney to talk cars and burnouts. When did your love for burnouts start? Growing up with Dad being a big part of the sport meant I was around it ever since I was a kid. From about the age of 12, I wanted to skid in my own car and get involved behind the wheel. How did the VT come into your life? We found the VT and…

IN EXPRESSION Session, I really enjoy taking new ideas and imagining what they could look like as a finished car. But so many awesome ideas already exist that were executed years ago and haven’t been revisited since. So, what if we took on an old concept or build and imagined what it could look like if it were built today? SM reader Roger Shamrock has been thinking the same thing, and that’s what made his concept so compelling – a modern take on Alan Cooper’s insane, SMOTY-winning BLOBAK ute. The original BLOBAK was a crazy HQ ute with a blown SBC mounted in the tray, using a Cadillac transaxle to get the power to the rears. It sported classic 80s styling and modifications, including a rear wing integrated into the…

LETTER OF THE MONTH UNFAIRLY TARGETED WHEN I read about how car enthusiasts had their registration numbers recorded as they left car shows and were then sent letters telling them to front up for roadworthy checks (News Front, SM, Jun ’22), it dawned on me that ignorance has no bounds. As street machiners, we invest hundreds if not thousands of dollars into our vehicles. While doing so, we create ongoing work for an abundance of shops doing it hard in these current times. If not for us, where would all the panel/spray, automotive trimming, engine parts, panel parts, wheel, tyre and suspension shops be? Not to mention the engineers who verify that these cars have been done to a level equivalent if not superior to factory standards. The amount of…

THE line between a show car and a street machine has blurred over the past decade or so. People still build finely detailed, beautifully crafted vehicles to be displayed at shows, but now the engineering underneath them is often focused on being able to enjoy all the hard work, money and time wrapped up in a classic car build – you know, actually driving the thing. Freshly unveiled at Rockynats 2022, this epic Torana treads that fine line between immaculate Elite show car and ballistic streeter. And it was built off a genuine six-pot ’69 LC GTR! Called BUCKL UP, the Dart LS-powered LC has so far made 730rwhp with just 6psi of boost on pump fuel, though it has been built to withstand 30psi on methanol. But there is…

WE ARE not quite sure what the officials said to the mass of black hoodies gathered on a frosty Saturday morning for the burnout drivers’ briefing at Summernats Slam. But with three Burnout Masters tickets on offer, the theme of the weekend for the competitors seemed to be ‘go hard or go home’. Attempts to red-flag those taking their time were futile – for many, this was a game of rims or rods. Even the venue itself had a post-apocalyptic, Beyond Thunderdome feel to it. While Lance Warren and the team have cleaned up the pad area beautifully, it is located within the bones of the old speedway. Competitors enter via a break in the concrete walls – real gladiator-type stuff. And talk about a high-quality field. First out on…

WE’RE a broad church, us car enthusiasts. But old rivalries die hard, so it’s rare to have restored classics, traditional rods and customs, and elite street machines all on display next to each other. This is one reason the Sydney Hot Rod & Custom Auto Expo has been such a surprise hit. The Rosehill Gardens Racecourse was teeming with awesome cars and thousands of punters over the last weekend in May for the 2022 Auto Expo. Spectators were rewarded with a hall crammed with stunning builds, both freshly unveiled and old favourites, while Nostalgia Lane was wall-to-wall packed with awesome old-school hot rods and some truly mind-blowing customs, not to mention US custom legend John D’Agostino as guest of honour. As well as legendary Aussie offerings like Michael Morris’s Chev,…

WHAT I’ve always found interesting about the cars we feature in Street Machine is the back-story: how the owner found the car, why they built it the way they did and what influenced them. To me, that’s more important than how many thousandths of an inch the engine was bored out or what the diameter of the sway-bar might be. So once I started reading Mat Lloyd’s tech sheet about his stunning VK Charger, I knew it was going to be a cracker of a story. Mat’s relatively young at 31 years old, but he’s had some good influences in his life. When his older brother Mike brought home an XY GT replica, Mat knew he had to get a muscle car as well. Since he couldn’t have a GT,…

EASTER long weekend 1975: Tony Ross and his buddies Glenn Halliday and Graham Rawlie head out of Adelaide in Tony’s pin-sharp FC Holden, DREAM ON. Their destination? The inaugural Street Machine Nationals hosted by the ’55-’56-’57 Chevrolet Club of NSW in Griffith. Little did they know that the FC would finish the event with a bunch of trophies, including the big one: Top Overall Street Machine! “We had very few aspirations; for us it was more of a great road trip,” Tony recalls. “I remember having a lot of fun in the driving events; I won the go-to-whoa and was very happy to finish second to a Mini Cooper S in the slalom. I also won Top Sedan and Best Standard Paint, but I was in total shock that out…

DYLAN RICKARD XB FAIRMONT “MY UNCLE Steve bought this XB Fairmont GS back in the late 80s when it was a GT mock-up in the original Apollo Blue. After a few years and a few different issues, it got stripped back to bare metal, bogged up and put in primer, then put in the shed for 23 years. But in 2011, Uncle Steve passed away. At the age of just 13, I begged my mum to let me have the car, and after a lot of persuasion my aunty gave it to me to eventually get it back on the road. I got a job in mid-2014 that meant I could start work on it, and that’s about when Mad Max: Fury Road came out. That gave me the inspiration…

FULL-size pick-up trucks are possibly the hottest vehicular trend going right now, and the response to Pickup Trucks Down Under’s (PTDU) first Sydney meet-and-greet sure backs that up! PTDU’s John Flanders enlisted the help of 2020 SMOTY winner Aaron Gregory and Oxytech Powder Coatings’ Scotty Barter to gather all their mates with off-tap commercial vehicles, resulting in 110 trucks of all descriptions pre-registered for the informal gathering on 26 June. “John and the PTDU crew held a Melbourne meet-and-greet recently, and the success of that inspired them to reach out to Aaron and I about putting one together in Sydney,” Scotty explained. “We didn’t want it to be a show, but we wanted a cars-and-coffee vibe so it wasn’t just standing around in the work car park.” The clear –…

IMAGE Conversions bossman Michael Ellard never really planned for his KE36 Corolla to be a MotorEx hero, but the boosted BEAMS-powered beasty snapped plenty of necks at the Melbourne event earlier this year. The project began in earnest about six years ago, shortly after Michael pulled the covers off his ‘Severed Ruby’ Rodeo (SM, May ’16). The ute was a resounding success, but when Michael and wife Lani’s family began to grow, the two-seater became less than practical. “I had a little Toyota motor I’d built years ago and it was just sitting there, so I’d always wanted to get another Corolla,” Michael recounts. So began the hunt for a more family-friendly weekender, Michael finding this neat one-owner panel van six months later in Menai, NSW. “It belonged to an…

IF YOU don’t mind our saying so, Street Machine Drag Challenge has been a runaway success since its inception in 2014. Everyone who tries it loves it, and that extends to our valued sponsors, most of whom have been supporting the event for a good many years. One such sponsor is Tuff Mounts – purveyors of fine, Aussie-made engine mounting hardware – and while proprietor Jason Waye has been a keen backer of Drag Challenge since 2016, he has never been content to sit on the sidelines. “I love Drag Challenge because it’s relatively fresh here in Australia, and it provides a platform to prove that our products really work,” Jason says. “It helps competitors understand what we’re about, and there’s a great sense of camaraderie that only comes from…

CHRIS Dicker is a serial offender when it comes to getting his cars featured in Street Machine. The first was an HQ Monaro coupe (SM, Aug ’07) which was silver with orange stripes; then ‘Sandbarra’ (SM, Nov ’18), the polarising Barra-powered HZ Sandman tribute, also with orange stripes. There was also a VS ute that made the cover of Custom Utes & Vans and was – you guessed it – silver and orange, this time in a two-tone scheme. Chris’s latest creation is this HQ Kingswood, a throwback to the wild 80s pro street monsters he drooled over as a teenager. It carries on that silver/orange theme but incorporates it into 80s-inspired graphics. It all started when Chris had a hankering to build some kind of events car – he…

THE HOLDEN and Ford rivalry at the Bathurst 1000 is as Aussie as koalas, servo pies and wanting anyone except the English to win at sport. Nearly 30 years ago, it was Holden’s turn to dominate, with Commodores grabbing the top five spots in the 1993 running of the Great Race. But that event was significant for another reason: Larry Perkins’s winning VP was the last car to take out Bathurst with a Holden V8 for power. Back in ’93, critics laughed at the Formula One veteran and noted engineer for using an Iron Lion in his VP. At the time, the new Chevy V8s were the hot gear, and everyone thought the Perkins Engineering team was bringing a knife to a gun fight. But Larry and the late, great…

HAILEY Murphy’s thongslapper-motivated 1971 LC Torana is one schmick streeter. Doused in fresh Electric Teal paint, rocking Sandalwood factory trim and rolling on 15-inch Sprintmasters, it’s a great example of a well turned-out ride and something that Hailey’s rightfully proud of. So, Hailey, the LC was your first car back in 2010 – tell us about that. I was turning 16 and was thinking of what car to buy, and I’d always thought Toranas were cute and small. I bought the LC off a friend; it was untouched and original, with rust, dents and shocking crow’s feet. She had a dark green body with a bronze roof and bronze stripe, so I gave her the name Vicky because she reminded me of a VB can. When did you do her…

JORDAN MUSARRA HQ ONE TONNER “I’VE HAD my HQ Tonner for 10 years. It was my first car, bought for me by my parents for $1000. I had always been interested in modifying cars, having grown up watching my dad build his ’34 roadster. When I got the Tonner, it was running a 202 red motor and an Aussie four-speed. I began a nut-and-bolt resto on the car eight years ago by stripping it down to a bare chassis. After getting the chassis powdercoated satin black, I restored all of the suspension components with Pedders springs and Competition Engineering shocks. I then decided to replace the old and tired 202 with a modern LS2 6.0-litre. I wanted the motor to look more old-school, so I swapped out the stock intake…