Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i Street Machine

EMAIL your missives to gday@streetmachine.com.au. Keep it short and sweet! LETTER OF THE MONTH GIVING IT SOME STICK HEY gang, Drag Challenge was great – thanks for putting on a killer event. I had an absolute blast in the Unrivaled Engineering Stick-shift class this year! I had planned to run my R32 GTS-4 in the Dial Your Own class with an auto, but I blew it up a week before I left, so I swapped in a manual and had a great time mixing it up with Zane [Heath], James [Miller] and Bruce [Howie]. I hope the Stickshift class happens again next year, as I’m planning to rebuild and keep the manual in the car now! Speaking of classes, are there any plans for a 10.5 class? There seems to…

WITH A PB OF 7.42@191MPH ON THE QUARTER-MILE AT DRAG CHALLENGE 2025, 1BADLC CERTAINLY LIVES UP TO ITS REGO TAGS BRANDON Zito’s 1BADLC may look relatively mild, but this clean, green Torana finished the 2025 Street Machine Drag Challenge on the top step of the podium after five days of racing and around 1500km of interstate driving. In addition to beating some of the quickest and fastest street cars in Australia, the lime-green two-door also won the Hare & Forbes Machineryhouse Radial Blown class, scored gongs for Quickest Chev-Powered and Quickest ET of the event, and took home a Four-Second Club hat. With a PB of 7.42@191mph on the quarter mile at DC 2025, 1BADLC certainly lives up to its rego tags, but it has gone through a near-complete rebuild…

THE combination of a few hard bevvies on a school night and trawling the internet for project cars rarely turns out well. With alcohol quelling our inhibitions, most of us turn into Richard Rawlings from Gas Monkey Garage and spend money we don’t have, lowballing innocent sellers. Fortunately for Ricky Toms, his ‘refreshed’ impulse buy turned out a lot better than most. I’D HAD A FEW BEERS AND WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING TO FIND OUT I WAS THE PROUD OWNER OF A VH SL/X! “I’d had a few beers and woke up the next morning to find out I was the proud owner of a VH SL/X. What’s more, I had to get myself to Shepparton in Victoria to pick it up,” chuckles the Canberra based revhead. Tough Holdens…

THOSE of you who can quote The Simpsons verbatim and remember when petrol was less than $1 per litre no doubt still find it a touch shocking that the 1990s apparently ended a quarter-century ago. These days, it seems like nobody hangs on to anything for longer than 20 minutes, but Mark Psaila’s managed to keep this 1966 HR Premier firmly in his possession for more than 25 years. “I bought the HR as a stock two-owner car in the late 90s,” Mark says. He kept it that way for a while, but once he’d swapped in a hot 208ci red six with triple carbs, it was game on. “Then it had a mild Chevy 350 small-block, and after that I fitted a big 434ci small-block from Trick & Mansweto,”…

BELIEVE it or not, 1997 was almost 30 years ago, and that’s how long we’ve been enjoying General Motors’ compact, lightweight pushrod V8 engine platform, the LS. It was GM’s first big, clean-sheet redesign of their small-block architecture since the 50s, and we still marvel at how easily the Gen III and Gen IV LS-based mills can be fettled to suit any project or budget. Troy Worsley of Warspeed Industries is one of Australia’s leading LS engine builders, renowned for pumping out everything from cam-only LS3s for the Superute race category to blown alcohol burnout combos and full-house 427ci screamers used in desert-racing trophy trucks. We asked Troy to give us his recommendations for making good power from an aspirated, street-based, pump-fuel LS, from entry-level through to max-effort combos. ENTRY…

ANDREW DOHERTY XT FALCON UTE “THIS old girl was a work ute on a vineyard not far from Melbourne, from 1968 all the way to 2019, which is when I bought it. It did have a canopy on it for most of that time, which saved the car from rust, so it was in overall good condition. She was a six-cylinder car with a three-on-the-tree, but I decided it might be time to give her a birthday. So, it got a bare-metal respray in Polar White, and Simon Hollingworth from SJH Race Engines hooked me up with a Cleveland-based 351, stroked out to 408 cubes. It uses CHI aluminium 3V heads, a CHI Dominator single-plane intake, custom solid-roller cam, and a 1000cfm APD billet Enforcer carby. It made 440rwhp on…

THE Great Meguiar’s Uncover is always a highlight of the Street Machine Summernats, and the 2026 edition is set to be massive, with 30 brandnew rides set to be revealed on the evening of Thursday 8 January. Summernats chief steward Owen Webb says the fact that so many high-end cars are being produced each year is a clear sign of the rude good health our sport. “We already have 21 unveils lined up for Meguiar’s MotorEx and another eight for Rockynats,” he says. We got a sneak peek at the list of cars to be unveiled at ’Nats 38, and the prevailing build trend among them seems to be Street Elite – rides built to a crazy standard but without a fully detailed undercarriage. “I reckon only five or six…

THE votes have been tallied for the 2025 Enthusiast Motor Insurance Street Machine of the Year award, and Martin Pecotich’s awe-inspiring, ProFlo Performance-built, billet Noonan Hemi-powered HTKO Monaro is your champion! In cahoots with the ProFlo crew, we managed to ambush Martin as he brought the car back from the detailer one sunny Sunday afternoon. As the shed door opened, we surprised him with a gathering of some of his nearest and dearest, the most sought-after trophy in Aussie street machining, and a giant cheque for a cool $20,000 from our good mates at Enthusiast Motor Insurance. It’s fair to say that he didn’t see it coming! Martin, congratulations on winning Street Machine of the Year for 2025! Thanks! To have my name on the Street Machine of the Year…

IF THE last Ringbrothers car we featured – the Aston Martin DBS V8 dubbed ‘Octavia’ (SM, Nov ’25) – was the James Bond hero car, then this ’69 Mach 1 Mustang is most definitely the villain. When the owner, Jake Hodess, brought the car to the award-winning Wisconsin-based workshop, he had a pretty simple brief: black paint, no chrome, and an interior that looks like a tuxedo. The rest of the details were left to Ringbrothers’ Mike and Jim Ring and their team, along with Ragle Design (which also worked on Octavia), and the result, known as ‘Kingpin’, is an even more pumped-up version of one of the bestlooking muscle cars to ever hit the road. WE ASKED OURSELVES: “WHAT WOULD THE FINAL BOSS IN A JOHN WICK FILM DRIVE?”…

ANTHONY’S MORE USED TO PILOTING A TUBE-CHASSIS, CARBON-BODIED MUSTANG IN TOP SPORTSMAN THAN AN ALL-STEEL XW UTE AS WE write this, the 10th edition of our full-fat, five-day Street Machine Drag Challenge event has been run and won, and while some racers this year are now well established in their classes or familiar names to long-term DC followers, there were plenty of newcomers keen to upset the applecart. Enter Anthony Spadavecchia, who came, saw and conquered the Speed Pro Six-Cylinder class on his first crack! Anthony’s no stranger to drag racing, though he’s more used to piloting a tube-chassis, carbonbodied Mustang to 7.90s in Top Sportsman, as opposed to the all-steel XW Falcon ute he used to run mid-eights at DC. He and a carload of mates got their first…

AARON DECIDED TO RETURN HIS VG VALIANT TO STREET-ONLY DUTIES AND TRANSFER ITS BIG-BLOCK CHRYSLER DRIVELINE TO THE SMALLER CENTURA LIKE all good drag racers, Aaron James is always looking to go quicker, and you can do that two ways: add more power or push less weight. For the past 10 years or so, Aaron’s been happy to go with option #1, which has taken his Drag Challenge-honed VG Valiant from a solid 11-second street car to a drag-and-drive weapon capable of mid-nines. But recently he decided to give the second option a go, and this ’77 Chrysler Centura is the result. “With the Centura, I don’t care if there’s a dent in it or a crack in the paint, but if I crashed the Val, I’d be gutted,” explains…

WHILE she’s a self-professed Ford fan, Kylee Kappe unconditionally cherishes her 1972 HQ Monaro GTS. Her love affair with this Munro goes back decades, and now the freshly rebuilt coupe has rekindled that initial spark. When did this HQ come into your life? In 1988. Dad was a mechanic at the Broken Hill Ford dealership and had built beautiful XWs and an XA coupe. I wanted something similar for my first car. When we drove to Adelaide to buy one, I was keen on a black XA coupe with a 351 and manual, but Dad said it was too powerful for me. Eventually, we came across this HQ GTS coupe with a 253, Aussie four-speed and 10-bolt diff. To my surprise, Dad let me look at it. Ironically, the man…

RE-ANIMATOR JACK LACY HZ ONE TONNER “I BOUGHT my 1979 HZ One Tonner in 2017 from an old farmer. It had been a farm ute all its life, and had been pulled apart and roughly repainted. I picked it up as a non-runner that was half-assembled, with a 202 red motor and Aussie four-speed manual. I pieced it all back together, cleaned up as much as I knew how to at the time – as I was only 13 years old – and got it running and driving. I had little knowledge about cars or how to do anything, but I decided to strip the car back down and start a restoration. Fortunately, there were a lot of YouTube videos I could watch to help me work things out. I…

THE National Drag Racing Championship (NDRC) has fired up its 2026 season with confirmation that Top Fuel will make a thunderous return to Mildura’s Atlantic Oils Sunset Strip in north-west Victoria for an 11,000hp, eighth-mile Twilight Nationals shoot-out, alongside the Aeroflow Sportsman Championship, 27-28 February. Sunraysia Drag Racing Association president Dave Thornton said the timing for the Twilight Nationals could not be better. “We were considering our plans for the 2026 Twilight Nationals when the NDRC approached us, and that is when everything fell into place. Now the Twilight Nationals will be bigger than ever with Top Fuel,” he said. Jim Read Racing crew chief Bruce Read said the team is itching to return to the Sunset Strip. “We had a blast last time we raced in Mildura, and the…

MIKE (Terry Serio) and his best mate Tony (Vangelis Mourikis) chase thrills racing Mike’s XY Falcon, hoping to break into the professional Sydney street racing scene. The Aces Club is at the centre of this world, with the club’s head-honcho, Fox (Richard Moir), the man to beat in his ‘FOX 1’ Dodge Challenger (SM, Jan ’19). Fox leads a motley bunch of smart-mouthed misfits, but Mike and Tony know they’ll have to beat them all if they want to be crowned number one. Circling the scene is Fox’s part-time love interest, Julie (Deborah Conway), a model, who takes a shine to Mike. So, when Mike challenges Fox to a race for the top spot, things are now personal. Unfortunately, Mike finishes a very slow second, and is now broke to…

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AS THE world’s premier automotive aftermarket industry event, the annual Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show in Las Vegas always delivers a plethora of wild builds, along with innovation in spades. But the 2025 event felt different. You could sense a real shift in how the industry is approaching design, technology, and craftsmanship – particularly in the higher-end builds. The tools, the talent, and the thinking behind today’s best custom creations are transforming what’s possible and redefining what ‘custom’ even means. Here’s what the 2025 SEMA Show signalled about the future of car design, innovation and the industry as a whole. GLOBAL ELITE SEMA 2025 proved that the best builders in the world are now operating at or even above OEM-level concept car standard. Ringbrothers’ latest build, a 1971 Aston…

IF YOU were an avid reader of Hot4s & Performance Cars or ZOOM magazines back in the day, then there’s a good chance that COPDAT is a recognisable little Datsun to you. Known for its unique Subaru EJ flat-four engine swap, COPDAT graced the cover of both of those magazines when it was in the hands of former owner Terry Boyle. “People still think it’s his car, and in fairness, he and I have stayed in touch and have a great relationship,” says current owner Emma Mullins. “Although we’ve kept the basic idea of what he’s built, there isn’t a nut or bolt on this car that hasn’t been changed.” Not long after Emma came into ownership of the Datto, a few spots of rust on the rear quarters prompted…

To have your product featured here, call Kim Simonsen on 0439 422 285 or email kim.simonsen@streetmachine.com.au. 01 STEALTH MODE TIRED of noisy external fuel pumps? Then Aeromotive has you sorted with its Phantom Stealth fuel pump range, an in-tank solution for cars that would normally run an external pump. Simply cut a hole in your tank, measure the depth, cut the Aeromotive pump hanger bracket to length and you’re done! It’s a great way to get a decent pump in-tank, whether you’re converting to EFI or need a heavy-duty pump for a high-horsepower carby set-up. The Phantom 200 system is capable of 600hp aspirated and 450hp force-fed in EFI applications, or up to 750hp aspirated and 600hp force-fed for carby set-ups. You can also go all the way up to…

ONE of Street Machine’s best-known project cars, the two-door EA Falcon known as the Sony Scorcher (SM, Mar ’98) will soon be back on the scene with a ferocious centrifugally blown Windsor combo. Built by Ed Johnson of EJR Performance in Morisset, NSW, this mill is a burger with the lot. “Brad, the owner of the car, wanted everything thrown at this one, and I was told to tick every box on the order sheet, as he wants to make real power,” says Ed, who kicked off the 1500hp-rated build with a fresh Dart Iron Eagle block running the shorter 8.2-inch deck height. Bored to 4.155in, the block was then filled with custom DSS pistons for 8.5:1 comp, a Callies Magnum steel crank, and Wiseco Boostline rods, with the capacity…