Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i Street Machine

PACKED with some small-screen legends of the 1960s and young TV stars of the late 70s and early 80s, High School USA is heavy on the resultant nostalgia but sadly very light-on when it comes to entertainment. The premise is simple: Excelsior High School’s senior class clown, JJ Manners (Michael J Fox), accidentally bumps into the ‘cool group’ queen Beth Franklin (Nancy McKeon) and falls madly in love. Unfortunately, she is the main squeeze of head jock and class president, Beau Middleton (Anthony Edwards). Beau may have the school faculty and various parents convinced that he’s the quintessential Mr Nice Guy, but he is actually a prick to his fellow classmates, especially JJ. In the meantime, JJ is hard at work managing the daily lives of his close friends: boy-genius…

AS PART of our weekly auction trawling, we found this mint HSV VN SV3800 (yep, the V6 one!) on Grays. Given the fact that it was in good nick and build #001, we thought we’d share the auction listing on our Facebook page. The six-pot sedan got quite a reaction from you all, so here’s a snapshot of what you had to say about HSV’s V6 VN. Shane Calleja – I remember doing pre-delivery services on those cars when they were new. One of the most unusual SV5000s I serviced was an Emerald Green one built for Carlton United Brewery that had a VB logo stitched into the seats! Ben Brook – One of my girlfriends’ dad had one and he used to let me drive it. Not a bad…

DANNY DEBONO’S NINE-SECOND, 975HP BLOWN XT FALCON IS BURSTING WITH PRO STREET ATTITUDE THE old adage that a project car is never done can’t ring any truer for Danny Debono. His tough-as-teak XT Falcon spent more than a decade copping plenty of enthusiastic use before he decided to give it a small birthday, which ended up being a rather more extravagant celebration than he’d planned. “I painted the car white with GT stripes 12 years ago, and after 10 years of smashing tyres off it at Summernats, Powercruise and Supernats, it was due for a freshen-up,” Danny explains. “I spoke with Kresi Basanovic [SM, Aug ’14] and we decided to just give it a quick tidy-up and a fresh coat of white, so I stripped the car in my shed…

IT WOULD’VE BEEN A LOT SIMPLER IF I’D USED A WINDSOR, BUT I ALREADY HAD THE LS THERE, AND I KIND OF LIKE ANNOYING FORD GUYS AS YOU probably know, they only built six original Shelby Cobra Daytonas. Even if you do find one for sale, it’ll cost enough to cause a heart attack, so if you want one of your own, your only option is to go down the replica path like Gavin Irvine did with his stunning, LS-powered Factory Five Shelby Daytona. This isn’t Gavin’s first time with a Shelby kit car, having already built an LS1-powered Shelby Cobra for himself. Unfortunately, that car met a nasty end on track, which prompted Gavin to build the Daytona you see here. “I always liked Daytonas when I still had…

TRIAL BY FIRE NASH PASQUAZZI HJ KINGSWOOD “THIS is my HJ Kingswood build. It started life as a 202 and three-speed manual, and I bought it in 2019 out of a shed, where it had been sitting for about 10 years. I drove it around for a year or so exactly the way I found it, but eventually I got tired of the underpowered 202 and built a nice little 355ci Holden V8 for it, matched with a TH400. Unfortunately, after only a few short drives, I had an engine bay fire and burnt the majority of the car (right). It then sat untouched for six months while I decided whether to rebuild it or throw it in the scrap heap. I bought a complete HJ for a donor car…

SHORT STACK SOME philosopher once said, “Change does not come from a place of comfort.” But he was wrong. I’m always finding loose coins in my couch. HICKORY dickory dock, two mice ran up the clock. The clock struck one; the other escaped without injury. I WAS once kidnapped by a gang of mimes. They did unspeakable things. AN archaeologist dated a woman. She was 3000 BC. I’M afraid of negative numbers. I’ll stop at nothing to avoid them. WHAT do you call a hippie’s wife? Mississippi. I WAS at an ATM and this old lady asked me to help check her balance. So I pushed her over. I JUST applied for a job hanging mirrors. It’s something I can see myself doing. Dadge Oaks, email FUNNY FOTO And why…

MATT McIntosh’s HQ Statesman set tongues wagging at Street Machine Summernats 35, and it wasn’t just the punters’ attention it caught following its debut as part of the Great Meguiar’s Uncover. The judges must’ve taken a liking to the 70s luxo-barge too, because it took home trophies for Top Engineered, Top Bodywork, Top Undercarriage/Driveline, Top Engine Bay, Top Pro Custom, and the big one: Top Judged Elite. Luckily, Statesmans have a big boot! The build took Matt around five years, which might seem like a long time, but once you see how much work went into it, you’ll probably wonder how he got it done so quickly! Of course, it helps if you have your own automotive business, which in Matt’s case is the Echuca Service Centre. They were able…

MOTORVATION 37 WAS HOT, SMOKY AND TASTY, AND THE WEST AUSSIE CROWD ATE IT UP IT WAS a warm and sticky start to Burson Auto Parts Motorvation 37 at the Perth Motorplex, with the temperature peaking around 35 degrees by mid-afternoon on the Friday. There was a bit more breathing space between Street Machine Summernats and Motorvation this year due to the latter event moving to 3-5 February, which explains why burnout legend Peter Grmusa was able to drag his ATRISK XR Falcon across the Nullarbor to give the West Aussies a look at one of the wildest burnout cars to ever turn a tyre. Unfortunately for Grmusa, the unfamiliar pad combined with the massive amount of smoke the car produces saw him nudge the limestone wall pretty hard. The…

WHEN you spend your formative years helping your dad work on his beloved HR in a shed decorated with Holden imagery, you can be fairly sure that, when the time comes, the logo of the lion and the stone will adorn your chosen ride. That was certainly the case for young Mark Bartyn, whose immaculate HK Kingswood you see here. “I can appreciate a good Ford, but I do prefer the Holdens,” he says. Mark’s car journey started young, apparently pretty much as soon as he could walk! “I was always helping Dad or getting in his way,” the Sydneysider recalls. “It’s something that was born into me, with my pops being into cars as well.” Once Mark finished school and gained himself an apprenticeship as a plant mechanic, the…

WE SPOTTED Taylah Louise cruising her tough plastic powered VK Commodore on the Summernats 35 cruise route and were blown away when she told us it was her first-ever time there! On the Friday morning of the event, she filled us in on the car and her debut ’Nats experience. How did you get involved in cars? My boyfriend, David; he really pushed me toward it. When we started dating, he showed me some VKs and I just fell in love! It was my first car; I got it when I was 16 as a factory six cylinder auto. I drove it daily for six or seven years, and then we decided to finally take it off the road and redo it. Was the car all together when you got…

01 COOL RUNNINGS THERE’S no point having a bunch of horsepower if it just goes up in steam after a stab of the loud pedal, which is why Proflow’s Ultra Cool electric water pumps are a must for high-performance vehicles. Electric water pumps not only run extra cool but also mean less work for the engine’s pulley system, which consequently means less work for your mill. The Proflow pumps have billet-aluminium housings and suit all LS engine platforms. They come in a hard, black-anodised finish and flow a maximum of 132 litres per minute. To find out more, head to vpw.com.au. 02 POSITION, POSITION, POSITION THE team at Haltech truly are wizards when it comes to bringing ground-breaking technology to the aftermarket, and one of the latest additions to their range is…

MANY in the hot-car scene have learnt that, once family and life commitments take a healthy slice of your weekly hard-earned, you need to find ways to keep pursuing your passion on a very limited budget, both financially and time-wise. Dan Auswild knows all about that. The 34-year-old has been diligently chipping away at a number of cool rides in between life with his better half and raising two young boys. “I grew up on car forums such as Street Commodores and the like, following the build threads of others and trying to familiarise myself with skills and methods to help me achieve my own car dreams,” he says. “I can appreciate anyone’s car build and have no real brand allegiance; I just like what I like.” 1: DAN was…

HUGE congratulations to Harry Haig and the Haulass Garage lads (pictured right) for going two in a row at Drag Challenge! There’s something that tickles my brain about that car pantsing some huge-dollar builds. No offence to those super-flash cars, of course, but Harry’s living proof that you don’t need massive bucks and acres of premium fab work to win. On the note of money, let’s remember why people sign up for Drag Challenge in the first place. I’ve recently seen a bit of Facebook drama brewing over certain ‘rule breakers’ in US drag-and-drive events, ending with hundreds of comments about what should and shouldn’t be allowed. If people were vying for big cash prizes, sure, but at the end of the day, I think people are in it to…

IN 1988, Bill Felstead visited the JT Fossey dealership in Tamworth to buy a brand-new, Monza Red XF S-Pack. Bill’s grandson, a five-year-old Mick Matthews, tagged along on the day, sparking a decades-long connection with the Falcon. “I’d often go with him in the car on holidays, towing his Viscount caravan, or he’d take me and my brother to the golf range,” Mick recounts. “He used to say it was too powerful for me, being a 4.1-litre four-speed with fuel injection, but I would always hassle him that I wanted the car someday. Pop was a well-known greyhound trainer around Newcastle and would drive the car everywhere around the country to race his pooches in the early 90s. So, it was only fair that we called the car the Greyhound…

SYDNEY drag racer Carolyn Hayes was front and centre for our first-ever Street Machine Drag Challenge event in 2014, but subsequently parted ways with her 800hp all-motor LX hatch. Aside from crewing for her other half, Aussie pro street legend Mark Hayes, Carolyn has been on the bleachers ever since, but this nitrous-huffing LH Torana is set to put her back in the driver’s seat. “Back when I had my old hatch, I was all about driving it to the track, racing it, and driving it home – I’m not a dedicated race car kind of person,” Carolyn says. “I did the first Street Machine Drag Challenge event and came runner-up in the aspirated class, and I drove the car to Melbourne and back to do it. Then Mark and…

SUBURBAN Australia in the 70s and 80s was awash with locally manufactured daily drivers. So it makes sense that as the young ’uns of that era went on to score their paper licences, they would acquire the cars they’d grown up around. Adelaide’s Scott Lawrence was one of them. “I have loved muscle cars since I was a kid, but I swayed towards Chryslers,” Scott says. “I was 20 years old when I bought my first Chrysler – a V8-powered CL Sports Pack panel van.” Over time, Scott bought and sold a few more tidy chrome-bumper rides before eventually nabbing himself this 1972 Chrysler By Chrysler in the early 2000s. “I’d wanted one for a while and would check the Trading Post each week,” he says. “When this came up,…

KING of kings. That was the headline for our October-November 1987 feature story on Mark Grimes’s Chevy Malibu, PRO ONE – and with good reason. At the time, the blown, 427ci big-block Chev-powered ’65 had just won Best of Show at the 1987 Street Machine Nationals in Du Quoin, Illinois, which in many people’s eyes made it the best street machine on the planet. The good news is that the Malibu still looks killer today, just as it did when snapper Warwick Kent took those photos some 36 years ago. No wonder it made such a splash at the 2022 edition of the Street Machine Nationals! We caught up with Mark Grimes, along with the Malibu’s current owner, Rob Bennett, for the inside story on this legendary pro streeter. Mark…

MATTHEW STORACE HQ HOLDEN “THE build on my HQ SS started in 2013. It was stripped down and bare-metalled for body and paint, and the chassis was removed for a full nut-and-bolt rebuild, including blasting and powdercoating to complete the front end. Between October 2015 and November 2018, it was basically untouched while life took over, but it did get the Houndstooth trim done, ready to fit once the car was painted. In November 2018, the shell was painted, but then the car sat for another year while I decided what engine to put in this beast. I ended up going for a turbo LS running Higgins heads and a GTX42 turbo, backed by a Turbo 700 auto and a Truetrac nine-inch. The mill has been tuned to a safe…