Indholdsfortegnelse for Year Book 2020 i Street Machine

CAN’T get enough of that street car life? Then check out our special Street Machine Outlaws magazine. Harking back to the days of Performance Street Car, Outlaws is 100-percent pure grunt; there isn’t a single car featured that doesn’t make at least 1000hp at the hubs – and many make much more than that. On the cover is Andy Coles’s ballistic VL Calais. The twin-turbo LS-powered ride is right up there with the quickest streeters in the land – we’re talking 7.2@193mph – and still does the school run. For Ford fans, we look at one of the most formidable SBF-powered street combos on earth – namely the Clevor that resides in Alon Vella’s Capri. The Vella crew are undefeated in their class in seven out of seven Drag Challenge…

Write to: Your Stuff, Street Machine, Locked Bag 12, Oakleigh, Vic 3166 or email streetmachine@aremedia.com.au. Make sure you include your address (not necessarily for publication). Keep it short and sweet! > LETTER OF THE MONTH GREETINGS FROM BRAZIL HELLO, I’m sending you some photos of my art, painted free-hand on steel sheet. It all started when a friend challenged me after seeing a portrait I made of a dragster with two blown V8 engines – I always like challenges! I live in a city called Curitiba, which is in the state of Paraná in the south of Brazil. We also have the hot rod culture here in our country, but it is not as strong as in Australia and the United States; our economy doesn’t help much in terms of…

UNLESS you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years or so, you would have heard of the Moits Racing team and their stable of good-looking and very quick race cars. Their history on the race track goes further back than that, though – all the way to the early 80s – and it all started with this very car, the legendary ‘WOG-007’ TD Cortina of Michael Moit. “I bought the car in 1981 and had Bob Purnell fit the V8 almost immediately,” Michael says. If you do a search on the internet, you can find videos of the Cortina popping wheelstands at the Oran Park drags thanks to a combination of very soft front suspension, traction compound and a tough engine. THE CAR WAS ORIGINALLY FITTED WITH…

MENDO Mitrevski has turned his hand to a number of street car projects in the past, including several SS Commodores and an XY GT Falcon. But in 2015, the train guard from Shellharbour set about fulfilling a vision he’d nurtured since his first Summernats at age 15: putting together a pro street-style Torana worthy of a ’Nats Top 60 finish. This time there would be no shortcuts. I NEEDED A CAR THAT I COULD MAKE MY OWN – NO MORE HALF-DONE PROJECT CARS THAT I THEN FINISHED OFF “I needed a car that I could make my own – no more half-done project cars that I then finished off,” Mendo recounts. “The LX Torana was a car I’d always wanted to build, but it was just a matter of finding…

WHEN it comes to project cars, some of us are flat-out getting one done, while others, like Scott Barter, don’t mind juggling multiple builds at once. The bossman at Oxytech Powder Coatings had this supercharged, airbagged ’56 Chev pick-up built while he was also putting together a pro touring LSA-powered HJ Sandman, not to mention swapping an LS1 and T56 into his dad Richard’s HJ One Tonner. “When I got it, the truck was just a body on a chassis,” Scotty says. “Ryan Carter from United Speed Shop in Newcastle is a good mate of mine, and he’d bought this bargain ’56 Chevy cab out of South Australia, put it on an HQ chassis and was going to sell it off. Even though I wasn’t looking for a project, we…

IT’S a surprise this wasn’t a character in the movie Cars. The black-painted front wheelarches are the shoulders framing a teddy-bear face with its grille-shaped nose and those sparkling eyes posing as headlights. It was this happy personality that first attracted Gippsland couple Amanda and Johnno Goodge to the humble Morris J-type van. “I bought a big-block Corvette about 10 years ago,” begins Johnno, “and Amanda was hanging it on me: ‘Well, what am I going to have?’ I said: ‘You choose a car and tell me what it is and we’ll get it for you.’ One day we were having coffee in Melbourne somewhere and a Morris J-type van pulls up out the front. That was it. Sold! She wanted one of those!” The search for a J-van began,…

CALL me biased, but the XW/XY Falcon has to be one of the toughestlooking body shapes to ever roll off the Broadmeadows production line. Owen Webb’s WILD THING XY took those muscular lines and turned them up to 11! Debuting at Summernats 1 in 1988, WILD THING was one of the new breed of showquality pro streeters. To prove the point, it scored a spot in the Top 10, as well as Top Undercarriage & Driveline. While its wild graphics and lurid rear end were plastered across the cover of the March 1988 issue of Street Machine as part of the huge Summernats coverage, readers had to wait until the following issue, April/May ’88, to get the full rundown on this legendary machine. The car was already pretty wild when…

FOR Robyn Bradbury, it was the build process of her husband Terry’s immaculate XM Futura (SM, Sep ’18) that slowly lured her into the car scene. Through choosing paint colours and assisting with the creation of a bespoke ride, she was hooked! And while backing up a Top 60 Elite build like Terry’s XM isn’t easy, he and Robyn have knocked it out of the park with Robyn’s custom US Falcon, a 1960 two-door sedan. The Aussie XK and XL Falcons closely resemble these first-gen Yankee Falcs. How are they different? In America it’s known as a 1960 two-door sedan. There are a lot of little differences; the tail-lights are larger and the grille is different to the Aussie versions. I wanted to keep it American, so it’s stayed left-hand…

HERE is some massive news for the West Aussie car scene: the crack team that has brought you Street Machine Summernats for the past 10 years and, more recently, MotorEx, has come on board to help bring Motorvation back to its former glory. This is no hostile takeover – more like a match made in heaven. “We’d been asked a bunch of times about doing a show in WA, so after Summernats this year, I reached out to the Perth Motorplex about working together, because I knew about Motorvation’s long history and great heritage,” Andy Lopez from Summernats says. “Summernats and Motorvation always had a certain synergy. In the glory days, a truck would leave Summernats and head west with some of the best burnout and elite cars. When we…

AN EMOTIONAL win for Shane Van Gisbergen and Garth Tander at Mount Panorama in October marked the end of Holden’s factory involvement in the Supercars series. With just one racing season left before the Lion departs circuits forever, you took to Facebook to reflect on the Aussie icon’s past, present and future. Peter Julian – The cars driven at Bathurst are so irrelevant now to cars you can buy; it’s pretty pointless putting any brand’s badge on them at all. Brendan Smith – The Mustang race car is based on the road-going version that you can go out and buy right now! Ya can’t go out and buy a new Commodore, can you? Peter Julian – I have a Mustang; it’s 100 per cent identical to the track car –…

IT HAD A 355 HOLDEN STROKER THAT WAS COMPLETELY ROOTED – THE CAM WAS SNAPPED IN THREE AND THE BLOCK WAS SPLIT ANDREW Canicais is a pretty young bloke, still in his late 20s, but has had a pretty impressive list of cars already, including a couple of VN SS Commodores, a VZ Maloo and a VY GTS dubbed PRO GTS that was airbagged and ran 10-second quarters. But he was keen to get into something with a steel bumper, which is where this VH SS Commodore comes in. “It’s pretty much how I bought it, but it had a 355 Holden stroker that was completely rooted – the cam was snapped in three, the block was split and all sorts of shit,” Andrew says. “I’ve always had LS engines,…

MAT ‘Gudge’ Budaj remembers how it all started: “When I was 15, I pitted for Manuel Galea, who raced an RX-4 with a 400ci small-block. His brother had a plain yellow XY.” That teenage XY vision made such an impression on Gudge that he ended up building his own yellow sedan with a GT interior, Center Lines and an avgas-slurping 351 Clevo with closed-chamber 4Vs and 12.5:1 comp. In the early 2000s, Gudge parted out the car and sold it off, but the itch to build another never left. When a friend mentioned an XY ute he’d seen rusting quietly out the back of a panel beater’s in Werribee, Gudge thought he’d have another crack at it. “It was a Ford parts delivery car, and it was pretty rough!” he…

FOR a fast-car nut, there are few things that grab the attention quicker than a mirror-full of red and blue lights: cherries and berries; whirligigs. You’re being lit up, wheeled, pulled over. For decades, whenever your gaze darted from the road ahead to this scene in your rearview mirror, those fast-approaching police lights have more than likely belonged to the familiar, locally made Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore. But soon they will be no more. With the last Aussie Ford Falcons made in 2016 and the final batch of Holden Commodores rolling off the line the following year, the ranks of our mighty home-grown police cars are thinning out. Retirement beckons the last of these Aussie-made lords of the bitumen. Usually Ford or Holden and usually V8 (but with a…

THERE are not a great many positives to have come about from this whole COVID-19 malarkey, but in a strange way it was well-timed for Sydney Dragway. Plans were already well advanced for an extensive refurbishment of the facility this year thanks to an $11 million grant from the NSW State Government. So no matter which way you slice it, the place was going to be closed to the public anyway as it became more of a construction site than a drag strip. As it happened, most of the refurbishment was able to take place while the coronavirus had our country by the short and curlies, so now we have a killer new surface within a magnificently upgraded facility, and have not had to forgo much actual drag racing for…

RESPECTED racer John Kerr has successfully finished every five-day Street Machine Drag Challenge event so far in his tough, home-built, 364ci-powered ’64 Mercury Comet Caliente. The Comet’s straightforward aspirated set-up is proof that you can score several Drag Challenge Dial Your Own Top 10 finishes and an ANDRA gold Christmas tree while sticking to a tight budget. And it’s quick. Last year John easily ripped a 10.6-second pass on Day One of DC – a surprise for the drag racing veteran. “On my first run at Calder, a crosswind hit me before the finish line, so I backed off and then got back on it. I was a bit upset at myself, thinking that I stuffed up the run,” John says. “I got the timeslip and had run a 10.61@126mph…

HZ HOLDEN PANEL VAN RYAN OLD MAN “I’VE owned a bunch of panel vans throughout my life, but about a decade ago I lost my pride and joy, a genuine HJ Sandman van, due to financial issues. This HZ pano is the replacement, which I bought around five years ago. It was built in July ’79 – and so was I! I’ve had the body taken back to bare metal and resprayed in VF Commodore Red Hot. I reckon the custom black-and-silver Sandman decals I had made look wicked against the red. The pano will run an L98 six-litre with a mild cam and single-plane manifold. Behind is a 4L60E, which I’m getting built up now with a 2200rpm stall behind it. Up the back is a shortened nine-inch with…

WHILE many know of the Chrysler Hemi’s ferocious reputation in American muscle car lore, Ford had its own ‘semi-hemi’ race-ready big-block. The Boss 429 was fitted to Ford’s angriest Mustang as a way of homologating the 7.0-litre brute for use in NASCAR, even though Ford campaigned the mid-sized Torino in that series. The aero-slicked Boss 429 Torino Talladega won far more races and championships than Mopar’s more famous Charger Daytona and Plymouth Superbird ‘wing cars’ before they were all banned by ‘Big Bill’ France in the early 70s. Today you can still buy a Hemi-stomping bigblock Boss Nine, but you’ll need to call up Kaase Race Engines, not Ford. “I believe my customer actually bought this engine off the Kaase Engines stand at SEMA,” says Howard Astill, who has been…

AS RAIN fell over Archer Falls Airfield in the picturesque Sunshine Coast hinterland, a sense of serenity pervaded – that is, until the calm was shattered by the screams of a well-worked 186 grappling for traction. Welcome to the ninth Salubrious Dirt Drags. The weekend of 23-25 October saw more than 550 cars descended upon the airfield for a one-day blast of dirt racing, pin-ups, music and good times. And with the rain turning both the dirt drag strip and the makeshift skidpan – known as the Pit of Terror – to mud, this year’s Salubrious Dirt Drags became a festival of fishtailing, filth-flinging madness. The party started on Friday night, with entrants setting up camp for the weekend to be front and centre for the following day’s main event.…

PURCHASED by Steve Sterjovski in the year of the Sydney Olympics, ITSWAR started its journey as a fairly typical Sydney-spec VL Calais Turbo. Riding on a set of 17-inch Simmons FRs and powered by a singlecam RB30 sporting a Microtech ECU, big intercooler and T04 turbo, it hit all the right notes for the then-19-year-old Steve. “It had all the bits that were cool in the 2000s and was lots of fun on the street, but I destroyed the bottom end being young and dumb within 12 months of owning it,” the Wollongong local laughs. “It sat around for a while, as I was devvo that I had just killed my car, and I started parting out the drivetrain. One thing I was certain of was that I wanted to…

FORD XK FALCON ‘PURSUIT’ FORD Australia launched its US-designed, locally made Falcon in September 1960. Within a year or two, Ford was producing special versions for Victorian Police, replacing the Falcon’s standard 144ci six with a souped-up version of the optional 170ci mill. Named Pursuit by Ford, the cop version featured a different carby that liberated an extra 15hp (from 101 to 116hp). Was this Australia’s first proper pursuit special? FORD XB FALCON 500 THIS mint XB (left) belongs to the Australian Federal Police Museum. Known as the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, these police XBs packed a 351/fourspeed driveline, with upgraded suspension and brakes. In the glovebox was a second speedo, calibrated to 220km/h. HOLDEN VH COMMODORE HOLDEN’S Police Pursuit Vehicle pack was available with a higher-output V8, with some…

IT’S no secret that Aussie cars didn’t have great brakes back in the 60s and 70s. But as we keep jamming horsepower into cars of this era – which we drive on crowded roads full of dingbat drivers – the need for heavy-duty braking artillery has never been more important. Victoria’s Hoppers Stoppers has been providing street machiners with the whoa needed to match their go for decades, and the company has just launched schmick new four- and six-piston caliper offerings for LC-UC Toranas. Designed around a fat 330x32mm ventilated rotor and with a modern slide-on hub carrier, the new Hoppers kits require a 17-inch (or larger) wheel for clearance. The kits are ADR-compliant and still use Aussie-designed components that are of original manufacturer specs. This benefits the end user…

SEND photos of your car and a few details of what went into the build to Readers’ Rockets, Street Machine, Locked Bag 12, Oakleigh, Vic 3166 or email readerscars@aremedia.com.au. Please note: Send us copies of prints as we are unable to return your photos. DIANE ABED 2011 VE COMMODORE “THIS is my VE II SS-V wagon, BWITCH. It runs a Harrop OTR cold-air intake; Harrop FDFI 2300 supercharger; ZL1 fuel pump; hydraulic-roller cam; tie-bar lifters; ceramic-coated Hurricane headers (17/8-inch primaries); twin three-inch mild-steel exhaust; Hurricane mufflers and cats; Harrop Ultimate brake kit (381mm front, 365mm rear); Harrop braided lines and Harrop by KW Street Comfort coil-overs. Wheels are 20-inch Koya SF12s with Nitto Invo tyres. The custom House of Kolor candy paint was laid on by Innov8ive Customs, who went…

Send your favourite funnies to: LOL, Street Machine, Locked Bag 12, Oakleigh, Vic 3166 or email them to: streetmachine@aremedia.com.au. > GAG OF THE MONTH TIE/DIE A MAN is wandering the desert, having lost his way, when he comes across a friendly-looking salesman with a suitcase. “Good day to you, good sir,” the salesman says. “Water, please!” is all the man manages to say through his parched throat. “Oh, I’m afraid I don’t have any water on me,” the salesman replies. “But I can offer you one of these stylish ties.” With that, he opens his suitcase and presents a collection of coloured ties. “I don’t want a stupid tie! I need water!” the man rasps. So he keeps wandering, and after a while he sees a building in the distance.…