Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i Street Machine

RED CentreNATS 11, presented by LMCT+, is coming up fast, 5-7 September in Alice Springs, and this year there are a stack of new features and improvements to the program to make the show even more epic for spectators and entrants alike! The big news for entrants is that the cruising ‘red zone’ for approved permit-holding unregistered monsters will be extended to cover all the big caravan parks – meaning that entrants can cruise their blown toughies from their accommodation, out to all of the activities at Alice Springs Inland Dragway, into town for the Fringe Festival or a Macca’s run, and back out to Lasseters Centre of Entertainment. Speaking of Lasseters, it’s set to play a much bigger role this year. While it’s long been the venue for Red…

AWKWARD high school senior Danny (Ben Mendelsohn) is struggling with the pressures of school, an odd-bod family and the opposite sex – especially the latter – while earning a part-time crust as a carpark attendant and dreaming of Jaguar ownership. With best mates Vangeli (Angelo D’Angelo) and Mark (Damon Herriman) egging him on, Danny finally musters the courage to ask school hottie Joanna (Claudia Karvan) on a date. However, in a blind fit of desperation, Danny brags to Joanna that he’ll pick her up in his new Jag, and when she agrees to the date, he’s left scrambling to save face and find the right car in time. Danny soon finds himself at the dodgy Geoff Mullens Motors caryard, where the world’s sleaziest used car salesman, Gordon Farkas (Steve Bisley)…

A DIET OF E85 SEES THE ’ZILLA CRACK THE FOUR-DIGIT BARRIER WITH 1090HP AT THE CRANK TIM Cross is one of those peculiar nutjobs who just can’t bear to be without a project on the go at all times. “I like to buy project cars that are half-done and finish them off,” he laughs. “I reckon I’ve done 30, and then there’s more that I’ve bought for a bit of fun and got rid of.” However, not all of Tim’s cars pass through his shed doors so quickly, including this 1969 Ford Capri. Fifteen years ago, Tim bought the car from Lee Bloom of Real Dyno Performance, painted it VE Commodore Morpheus Purple and dropped a turbo 360-cube Dart Windsor in it. After a few years of racing, that combo…

IT’S EASY in this ultra-high-tech age of car modification to get lost in a world of four-figure grunt, single-digit timeslips and billet everything. Bruce Stephens wasn’t interested in any of that malarkey when creating his dream classic Falcon cruiser. He simply took an XT ute shell, pilfered a 5.0-litre Coyote from a Mustang and enlisted Robi Fekete of Fekete Fabrications in Central Victoria to put the two together. “I inherited a different XT ute shell, but it was pretty rusty, so I then got word of a rust-free shell locally, which I didn’t really believe,” Bruce says. “But we went and checked it out, and it was solid, so I took that to Robi and the build started from there.” Robi Fekete was a wise choice on Bruce’s part; not…

MICK Coughlan says buying this HG panel van nearly 25 years ago was the best decision he ever made, and judging by the evidence on these pages, it’s easy to see why. Of course, back then the van wasn’t anywhere close to being the beautifully presented, 540hp marvel it is today, and nor was it ever supposed to be – but you know what they say about one thing leading to another. Back in 2001, Mick was just 21, fresh off his P-plates, and chafing at the bit to buy his first car. “My mates had Monaros and stuff like that, but I wanted to be different from everybody else and was specifically looking for a wagon or panel van,” Mick says. “You don’t see many vans around, and I…

BURNS’ UNIT ANTHONY BURNS XG FALCON UTE “I PICKED up this tidy 1996 XG ute around four months ago, but even when it’s an XG, I can’t do XF front ends, so I stuck a spare XD Falcon front on it and gave it a lick of Bionic Blue from a BA Falcon. It’s not the first time I’ve painted an old Falcon in Bionic, having done an XY ute in that colour around 10 years ago. I’ve kept the driveline standard, because the idea is to run it on the wrecker fuel we pull out of the cars at my business, Harcourt Auto Wreckers. A shop ute needs signage, so I had Steve White design up the S Pack-style signwriting and logo, which was printed and stuck on by…

Email your favourite funnies to gday@streetmachine.com.au. > GAG OF THE MONTH AUSTERITY DIET AN ELDERLY retired couple found themselves hard up for cash, and one day, the husband came home with some tins of dog food. “What did you buy those for?” his wife scolded. “We don’t have a dog.” “Well, since money’s so tight, I thought I’d give it a try. Think of the money we’d save on food,” the husband replied. “Well, I’m not eating it,” his wife huffed. The following week, the wife was doing the shopping and ran into a friend. Noticing all the dog food in her trolley, the friend asked her, “Did you get a dog?” “No, it’s for my husband,” the wife replied, rolling her eyes. “What? That stuff’ll kill him,” said the…

THIS year’s Street Machine Drag Challenge will be the 10th running of the full-fat, five-day drag-and-drive extravaganza, and it is gonna be our biggest event yet. And hoo boy, do we have some cool rides coming! In terms of outright speed, we have some proven six-second cars in the mix, including reigning overall champ Adam Rogash in his Capri, current Radial Blown title holder Keith Hards in the 2018 DC-winning XW Fairmont, and 2023 winner Mark Drew in the ‘Crusty’ Torana. Mark Whitla – winner of the 2023 Outlaw Blown class and so far the only racer to crack the six-second mark during a DC event – has thrown his hat in the ring too, though he hasn’t decided what car he’ll bring just yet. A stack of seven-second cars…

EMAIL your missives to gday@streetmachine.com.au. Keep it short and sweet! > LETTER OF THE MONTH DREAM COME TRUE WOW! You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I saw Dino Pietrobon’s hybrid Fairlane/XY GT hardtop (pictured right) in your MotorEx story in the June Street Machine. Back in the 90s, Custom Rodder magazine published some of my drawings of ‘phantom’ cars in their April-May ’92 issue – basically my ideas for cars that ‘could’ve been’, which included US ’66 Fairlane hardtops turned into Aussie ZA and ZD hardtops, as well as XR GT and XY GT versions (pictured below). Great minds and all that, eh? Phil Minns, email WAYNE’S WORD I WAS sitting in a towbar fitting centre, getting one added to my 20-year-old Camry, when I picked up…

THE 1960s was undoubtedly the golden era of American muscle cars, a time when manufacturers created numerous low-volume special editions that could run way quicker than the regular models prowling Main Street, USA at the time. Today, the COPO Camaros, Ram Air V Pontiacs and Stage 1 Buicks from that decade are well known, but only the most diehard Mopar fans have heard of B029 Barracudas. Packing fibreglass body panels, stripped interior, and a solid lifter-equipped 426 Hemi with 12.5:1 comp, the 1968 B029 Barracuda possessed all the heat needed to run 10-second quarter-mile times off the showroom floor. It’s thought only 50 of them were built, which makes them as rare as honest politicians, so they’re highly prized by collectors today. It was definitely a model that Victorian Rodney…

ONCE the staple of the Aussie street machine scene, the iconic FJ Holden has faded a bit in recent years. That’s a shame, as while we love seeing tough, clean 70s and 80s builds, the nostalgic hit you get when you see a humpy riding low and clean on fat wheels is hard to beat. And when you see an FJ as clean and well-built as Jason and Sam Evans’s example, it shows what a great piece of design Holden’s second-ever model was. With carefully smoothed-out lines above and below the car, a sumptuous interior, and a grumpy, triple Weber-fed 202ci Holden six under the curvaceous bonnet, the Evanses’ sedan drips with details. “We got the car from my wife Sam’s grandfather after he passed away,” says Jason. “It was…

THE iconic Volkswagen Beetle remains a hugely popular project vehicle for keen tinkerers worldwide. That’s despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that it’s a mechanically odd shitbox, with its squashed-flat, air-cooled, mostly alloy engine up its bum and a body design that hardly changed for 70 years. Of course, plenty of folks are into Beetles just because they reckon they look cute, but that’s not a word you’d associate with this monster Bug built by Rob Downing. Rob, a Queensland-based mechanic and auto electrician, has – like many of us – been sniffing petrol for a long time. The first car he tinkered with, a 1964 EH Holden, remains in his possession nearly 30 years after he rebuilt it, and he clearly recalls the first Beetle he worked on.…

NO MOTORSPORT event has had as profound an influence on Australia’s automotive culture as the Bathurst 1000. Over the past six decades and counting, the Great Race has fired the imaginations of millions of Aussie petrolheads, including that of Goulburn’s Michelle Jellicoe. Her young heart was captured back when square-bodied Toranas terrorised the track, so she was always destined to own a Bathurst-style steed of her own in the form of this tidy LX SL/R 5000. I WANTED IT TO BE A ROAD-LEGAL, BATHURST-STYLE CAR WITH A 355CI STROKER, AS I LOVE POWER! Tell us about your early revhead influences. Other than our yearly gathering around the TV to watch Bathurst with family and friends, it was my primary school teacher’s LX SS hatch. I’d chat with him about the…

THE news might be full of doom and gloom, but we can take heart that we live in an epic era for horsepower, as this 434ci Clevor combo from EJR Performance proves. Sucking through a single Holley carb with a hydraulic-roller cam, this small-block Ford thumps out 710hp at 6500rpm, and EJR’s Ed Johnson says he designed it to be as simple as possible. “I wanted to cater to guys who want a good, reliable street car engine that doesn’t need big maintenance or to have the valve covers off every weekend,” Ed says. “We developed it with the team at Cylinder Head Innovations [CHI], as they’d always wanted to see if their 225cc heads could make 700hp naturally aspirated with a roller cam.” Based around a 9.5in-deck-height Dart block,…

CRAIG DESCRIBES THE MONARO AS “A DOORSLAMMER-SPEC CAR FOR THE STREET” AT FIRST glance, you might think this is just another HQ Monaro with a flash set of wheels. But don’t let that flat bonnet fool you – there’s enough hardware hiding under there to make close to 3000hp! But it’s not just the stonk and the incredible finish that makes this Quey so special; it also serves as a rolling tribute to the late Nigel Warr. Nigel had begun the project and worked on it for around three years, but following his tragic passing in a motorcycle accident in 2023, Craig Glassby and his crew at Shields Garage decided to finish it off in his honour and debut it Red CentreNATS 10 – Nigel’s favourite event. From the outset,…

AS WE drove the twisting mountain roads from Cairns to Springmount Raceway, just south of Mareeba, it became pretty clear how special it is to have a drag strip in such a bloody beautiful part of the country. You’d struggle to find anywhere else that boasts views like this as the backdrop for tyre-frying action and cars nudging 180mph! But that’s exactly what’s on offer at the Northern Nats, the annual three-day hoedown of horsepower that brings further heat to these already steamy Far North Queensland environs. This year not only marked the ninth time ’round for the event, but also the second year running of the Summernats crew teaming up with the Springmount Raceway folks to help run it all. As always, there was plenty on offer over the…

TASMANIANS love their cars. Per capita, they’ve got more of ’em than any other state in Australia. Even so, you’d figure a Tassie-based car show that focuses only on one make – and one body style within that make – might have limited appeal. Not so when it’s the Hardtop Anniversary, celebrating the mighty Aussie XA-XB-XC Falcon coupe! Held every two years since 2007, the Hardtop Anniversary has previously taken place in Echuca, Victoria, as well as the hallowed ground of Mount Panorama, Bathurst. This year, it was Tassie’s turn, with Falcon coupe enthusiasts coming from all over the country for a three-day celebration of 100 years of Ford Australia and 50 years of the iconic Falcon hardtop, with driving events, plenty of cruising and a show ’n’ shine on…

WE PILED BACK INTO THE CARS AND HEADED NORTH, BLOWING INTO THE TEA GARDENS HOTEL BY LATE AFTERNOON I THINK former SMOTY champion Aaron Gregory said it best when he referred to the Oxytech Pub Run as a men’s mental health retreat. After all, it’s kinda hard to have the shits with life when you’re fat-arming it up the coast in your pride and joy alongside a couple of dozen like-minded lunatics on a Friday afternoon, bound for a pub. Pub Run was the brainchild of Oxytech frontman Scott Barter, and each year it sees a tight-knit, invite-only group of automotive industry peeps park their responsibilities, pile into their many and varied jalopies, and point them toward the northern horizon. The destination is the always-awesome Tea Gardens Hotel, a beaut rubbity-dub…

FEW would have expected a 19-year-old from a tiny town in Victoria to roll into last year’s Street Machine Summernats with one of the coolest and most surprising Toranas at the event, but Nintingbool panel beater Seth Fuhrmeister clearly pays little mind to others’ expectations. For proof of that, look no further than his eyebrow-raising choice of powerplant for his LC: a 400rwhp turbo RB30. We had a chinwag with Seth to find out more about this Monaco Maroon Torry’s brutal blend of old-school muscle and new-age smarts. How did you come to own your LC? I got it as a shell when I was about 14. It was sitting under a tree at some dude’s house who had listed it on eBay. My dad surprised me with it –…

WANT your pride and joy featured in the mag? Just send some photos of your car (minimum file size 2MB each) and a few details of what went into the build to readerscars@streetmachine.com.au. NICK EDEN HG MONARO GTS “THE ‘Monarat’ is a 1971 HG Monaro GTS that I got from a local bloke in 2011. It had a two-shiddy-three in it and an Aussie four-speed, but it came from the factory with a 186S, so it is a genuine GTS. That 253 didn’t last long. I had a 350 in it for a while, until it started to blister the blue paint it was wearing, so it then spent a bit of time in matte black, which I laid on with a paint roller. Around 2016, we turned it into…