Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 i Street Machine

THE Albury Wodonga & Districts Car Club (AWDCC) has announced it has taken over the lease to Victoria’s Wilby Park Raceway. Situated just south of Yarrawonga in northern Victoria, Wilby Park is known for its grassroots motorsport alongside popular events like the Lake Mulwala Rod Run’s Nostalgia Drags and the Retrospeed Sprints. AWDCC club president David West told Street Machine the lease deal had been in the works for about 12 months, after the Wilby Car Club approached the new lessees. “[They] had run out of enthusiasm and membership, and were done with running events there,” David explained. “COVID didn’t help, but there was no new blood coming through. Our club is very fortunate; we’ve got a long history with motorsport as the founders of the Hume Weir circuit, and…

COOL FLICK FACT: An accomplished recording artist prior to his film career, Jerry Reed (left) sang the title song. He would later achieve great success with his tune East Bound and Down for Smokey and The Bandit. BREAKDOWN VEHICLES: 1975 Plymouth Gran Fury, 1975 Lincoln Continental, 1963 Ford F100, 1972 AMC Hornet Sportabout, 1971 AMC Matador wagon, 1966 Buick LeSabre convertible, 1964 Cadillac DeVille, 1967 Chevrolet Impala STARS: Burt Reynolds, Jack Weston, Jerry Reed, Lauren Hutton, Dub Taylor, Alice Ghostley, William Engesser, Lori Futch DIRECTOR: Burt Reynolds ACTION: The car stunts are fairly tame and mostly standard fare; it’s the on-swamp boat action that’s the real feature. Still, the F100 roll-over – complete with stuntman being launched from the vehicle – is very cool PLOT: A twice-incarcerated moonshine runner is recruited by federal…

DARWIN’S Hidden Valley Raceway may host a yearly Supercars round, but if you’re keen to see massive horsepower driven in anger in the Top End, Gazzanats is really the one to mark on your calendar. Organised by the burnout-mad Myers family, this year’s gig at Hidden Valley expanded to two full days of tyre-smashing action across track cruising, roll racing, powerskids and monster burnout pad sessions. With financial support from Gary and Deby Myers, fully laden transporters rocked up from as far away as WA and Victoria, contributing to a bumper number of entrants, including over 40 blown burnout contenders – an unprecedented turnout for Darwin. While our man from the west, Boris Viskovic, would normally jet over from WA to soak up the atmosphere, this year it was my…

LET’S address the elephant in the room first. Yes, this EA Falcon has four alloy wheels wearing eight individual tyres. To learn why, read on, because as weird as that is, there’s so much more to this strangely alluring beast. If you’ve never heard of a TSS Falcon, you’re certainly forgiven; the XF-EA Falcon era spawned some peculiar aftermarket specials, and the TSS Falcon by GP Sportscars was merely one of them. Some companies added simple boltons like headers and exhausts, while others cracked open the donk to insert a bigger bumpstick. And in those seminal years of forced induction, the intercooled turbo kits that were available could really get the EA going. The TSS Falcon went a different forced-induction route, though, using a sealed Sprintex twinscrew supercharger built by…

DYLAN WELSH XW FALCON “THIS 1969 XW GT replica was my dad’s car for about 22 years, up until January 2020, when I purchased it off him. It’s pretty sentimental to me, as I used to get dropped off to school, soccer and work in it, and do all the swap meets in the car. It started life as an Imperial Burgundy Futura with a brown interior. By the time my dad bought it, it was a custom dark green metallic with black interior. Eighteen months ago, I bought the car and put it through a spruce-up. I used to be a spray painter by trade, so I did a complete colour change from the green to Brambles Red. The colour moves from red to a bright orange depending on…

Send your photos of fun with cars to: Sunday Too Far Away, Street Machine, Locked Bag 12, Oakleigh, Vic 3166, or email high-resolution images (1mb+) to: sundaytoofaraway@wheelsmedia.com.au. Please send copies of prints as we are unable to return your photos.…

WITH the announcement that Ford plans for its Mustang to remain piston-powered even beyond the life of the upcoming, seventh-generation S650, Blue Oval fans have plenty of reasons to be excited for the future of the iconic pony car. This includes a homologation version of the new Dark Horse variant, which Ford hopes will make the Mustang competitive with the likes of Porsche and Ferrari at Le Mans. But one piece of news is sure to cause some furrowed brows for prospective S650 owners – particularly those hoping to tweak their new purchase in the way the Lord intended. Ed Krenz, the Mustang’s chief engineer, told the Ford Authority website that the new model will be “much more difficult” to tune than previous iterations. The culprit? The Mustang’s encrypted electrical…

> LETTER OF THE MONTH CHALLENGING TIMES YOU guys just can’t catch a break with Drag Challenge, can you? First you get done by COVID a few times in a row, and now the heavens open up all over Victoria [see Broadcast on page 5 for more on the Drag Challenge postponement – Ed.]. Props to Scotty and you guys; I’m sure it was a tough call to make to postpone the event, but it seems to be the right one. Roads everywhere are hammered, with thousands of potholes, and any grassed spaces at the tracks will be mud pits. Just not a fun way to spend the week. Can’t wait ’til it finally happens in January, assuming the curse doesn’t continue and give us bushfires! If there’s one upshot from…

I BUILD SHOW CARS, BUT THEY ALWAYS HAVE TO BE USEABLE, AND THEY’VE GOT TO HAVE PLENTY OF POWER FOR THE STREET RAY Elia’s name may well be familiar to Street Machine readers, as his white VK Calais, KNGHDT, was featured alongside his brother Tony’s blue VK in Street Machine Commodores in 2018. But as beautiful and tough as that blown 355ci Calais was, Ray’s latest Commodore, this stunning VN known as KING GRP A, is a real game-changer. “I’m really critical of the cars I build,” Ray says. “This car, however, I can’t stop looking at. It’s perfect to me; I wouldn’t change a thing.” Ray and his brother Tony grew up car-mad in Sydney’s western suburbs, and while Ray longed for something V8-motivated, his conservative father tried to…

LOOKING at Adrian Haynes’s elite-level, LS3-powered, six-speed LX Torana hatch, you’d never believe it came into his life as an utter basket case. Canberra-based Adrian and his dad, Robert ‘Bluey’ Haynes, picked up the hatch 10 years ago from an owner who’d realised he’d bitten off more than he could chew. Aside from being full of rust, the car had been rear-ended and subjected to the world’s dodgiest repair job. “A quarter panel had been put over the top of the original quarter panel, leaving all the spot-welded sections in place,” Adrian says. “It was very badly bent out of shape and needed to be put on a rack and pulled straight.” A second bare shell provided much-needed rust cuts and repair sections. “In hindsight, I should’ve bought a better…

IN STREET machining, there are pretty much two types of people: those who love the challenge of building a car but sell it as soon as it’s done, and those who are long-termers, having owned the same car for decades. Brad McGill is definitely the first type, never holding on to anything for too long and always looking for the next project to do a quick freshen-up on. Brad assumed that this ‘build it up, sell it off’ formula would hold when he purchased this ’68 bumpside F100 in 2016. For those not in the F-truck mafia, ‘bumpside’ refers to the ’67-72 F100s that feature a concave contour on the beltline. After ’73, the contour became convex, and those trucks are known as ‘dentsides’. However, after spending a year doing…

WE ALL love a sleeper, but in the history of Australian street machining, one sleeper stands above them all: Shane Bridge’s Mk1 Cortina (SM, Apr/May ’90). We thought it was time to chat with the creator of this little weapon to see how this all unfolded more than 30 years ago. What got you interested in cars in the first place, Shane? I started out like most of us do, I think; I was just a young kid watching my dad and helping him out. I was amazed at what he could do with his hands and the things he could do and fix with limited tools. He loved his cars – especially large American cars with big engines – and I guess it got me hooked. What was your…

GAG OF THE MONTH BIG DATE A WOMAN is sick of the fact that all the men she dates turn out to be losers. So she puts an ad on a dating website, simply saying, “I want a man who will never beat me, never run away from me, and is good in bed.” A few days later, the woman hears the doorbell ring, and opens it to find a man in a wheelchair who has no arms or legs. “Did you read my ad?” she asks. The man replies, “Of course, and that’s why I’d be perfect for you. I’ve got no arms, so I can’t beat you, and no legs, so I can’t run away.” The woman thinks for a moment and asks, “Okay, but are you good…

WHAT Ford did in the late 1960s with its original GT40 Le Mans racers will forever be ingrained in history. These GT40s chalked up four Le Mans wins on the trot (1966-1969), and in the process gave a good nose realignment to a certain snooty Italian racing team that had previously dominated. Racer, constructor and team owner Daniel Gurney played a big role in the engine department of those GT40s after Ford pulled out of the program, driving the creation of the Windsor-based Gurney-Weslake engine that was designed and developed by Weslake Engineering in the UK. The GW mill powered the GT40 to its final two Le Mans victories in ’68 and ’69. The era was a vital chapter in Ford’s racing heritage that lives on in the Gurney Eagle…

THIS year’s Milwaukee Street Machine of the Year field was one of the toughest in recent memory. We’re talking about four cars from the Street Machine Summernats Elite Top 10 and two from the Top 20, just for starters! Among the elite crew were some hardcore muscle cars that are already iconic in their own right, including Jason Mansweto’s Grand Champion and People’s Choice-winning XW Falcon, Trent Carter’s Top Judged Barracuda and Jovan Batar’s exquisite HK Monaro. There were a few less-conventional SMOTY finalists in the pack too, including Michael Ellard’s spunky Corolla, Simon Birch’s Motorvation Grand Champion-winning Suzuki Mighty Boy, and Anthony Fuller’s outstanding wild custom FJ Holden coupe. The winning vehicle – Jasmine ‘Jazzy’ Green’s HiLux – has both elite and unconventional credentials, having placed in the Top…

A PORSCHE winning Top Street Machine Overall at Meguiar’s MotorEx? Say it ain’t so! Yet that’s exactly what this incredibly well built and immaculately detailed 1978 911 SC managed at the 2022 event. And not only that, it also bagged three gold medals (Engine & Components, Design & Execution, Undercarriage & Driveline) and two silver (Bodywork and Paint) to boot! Yep, this remarkable machine truly was a slinky Deutsch cat among the Street Elite pigeons, created by the talented crew at Real Steel Group in Queanbeyan, NSW for their customer Livi. “At MotorEx, it was interesting watching people’s reaction,” says Real Steel head honcho Steve Mommsen. “Initially they’d give it a quick glance, but then would come back again and again, each time for a little longer as they began…

IN THE modified car game, most things have been done before and done well, so it can be challenging to create something truly unique. Often, if you set out to be different for different’s sake, the end result isn’t favourable. But Matt Hourigan’s ’71 Mercury Comet GT is the good kind of different. Matt was on the hunt for an early Mustang when he stumbled across this Comet and reasoned that it could form the basis of a far more unusual project. We certainly don’t see many of them here in Australia, and in this instance, the road less travelled has led somewhere awesome. WHEN WE TOOK THE COMET TO SUMMERNATS, MOST PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS A CAMARO, A FALCON OR A MUSTANG! “When it was finished and we took…

AS YOU can imagine, it was pretty hard to miss Ian Wood’s bright orange EH panel van in the unveiling hall at Meguiar’s MotorEx earlier this year. At first glance, that eye-popping colour might seem like the van’s main party piece, but it’s what lies beyond the shiny hue that makes it truly special. Ian has had a passion for custom panel vans since his teenage years, reading every issue of Van Wheels while rocking his 1980 Escort Sundowner. “I loved those vans from the 80s, and I’d always had a soft spot for EHs, as I learned to drive in an EH ute on the farm when I was nine,” he says. A proper custom van had always been on Ian’s wishlist, but at the time the maths just…

BUILDING an engine for your ride isn’t exactly cheap or easy right now thanks to supply chain issues, so if you’re after a quick and simple solution, a brand-spanking-new crate motor could well be the ticket. After all, we live in a time where manufacturers will happily sell you the biggest, baddest muscle car engine they make, brand new and with a warranty. GM, Ford and Chrysler have all upped their aftermarket speed parts game over the past 20 years, arguably thanks to the success of the LS crate engines. While the LS and earlier Gen I SBC will likely always form a part of GM’s crate motor family, lately the company has been pushing the Gen V LT direct-injection crateys as the number of production cars running LS mills…

SHENAYE Blake was only a young lass when she first spotted a Torana in the wild. It was the proverbial love at first sight, and that natural affinity for these smaller-bodied Holdens has remained with her ever since. Happily, Shenaye’s dream of Torry ownership has recently become a reality, with a stout, kitted-out LH sedan to call her own. How’d you come to own your dream car? My hubby Joel and I were scrolling though Gumtree around August last year and saw this for sale. It was a painted roller with the interior half-done. I saw the Orchid Pink and fell in love. Pink is my favourite colour, and I like that this is not a bright, Barbie kind of pink but a much nicer factory colour. After loving Toranas…

01 EASY RIDER A SUREFIRE way to bring the driving dynamics of your chrome-bumpered Holden into the 21st century is with some fresh suspension, which is why Castlemaine Rod Shop offers complete coil-over conversions for early Holdens. These kits will suit any HK-HT-HG, or any car with an HD-HR front end. The kit uses Viking dampers, which have 19 independently adjustable compression and rebound settings, giving you a total of 361 possible valving combinations. That means it can be set up for daily driving, track use or anything in between. On top of that, you’ll also be able to lower your ride as much as one inch compared to factory for that nice low stance. To find out more and order your kit, hit up The Rod Shop on (03)…