Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i Street Machine

EACH year at Street Machine Summernats, we award the Laurie Starling Memorial Scholarship to a young and upcoming automotive worker who’s shown real promise and innovation in the world of awesome car building. This year’s recipient was 19-year-old Luke Wehbe, a gun apprentice vehicle builder with the Ellard family at Image Vehicle Manufacturing. In addition to the Memorial Scholarship, there’s another Starling tribute award that honours Laurie’s unique style of car modification. The Laurie Starling Engineering Excellence Award is given out at Meguiar’s MotorEx each year to a car build that embodies out-of-the-box thinking and clever engineering. For 2025, that award went to Beau Boucher’s slammed, Godzilla V8-powered 1965 Ford F100, built entirely out of his Cut Weld Drive business in Geelong. Congratulations on the win, Beau. How does it…

LETTER OF THE MONTH WHEREFORE ART THOU? G’DAY all, after reading your article on all the previous Street Machine of the Year winners (SM Yearbook ’24), I realised that most readers and car enthusiasts – myself included – don’t know what became of many of these vehicles. With so many hours, dollars, dedication and hard work involved in each car, you immediately presume they would all still be around today, but are they? I have seen photos of the chassis from BLOBAK 2 (pictured, SM, Apr-May ’88) sitting all alone on a farm, which got me wondering, how many of these famous SMOTY winners have survived? Perhaps you could do a feature on them in the magazine? Graham Hawkins, email G’DAY Graham, that’s a great idea for a yarn. We…

SAM Italia has long been a fan of Ford Australia’s fourth-gen Falcons of the early 80s – particularly the XE. “I’ve always loved the shape and the front end – especially XE ESPs,” he says. “It goes all the way back to when I was a kid, when my grandfather owned an XD Fairmont Ghia. At car shows, I’d go straight to the XEs and just stare at them.” Now 30 years old, Sam’s no longer just gazing longingly at his favourite Falc model; he’s been the proud owner of this muscle-bound XE Fairmont Ghia since 2018, having won his dream car in an eBay auction. Back then, it was a neat, factory Monza Red car powered by an EFI six-cylinder. “It was a bit of a survivor, but it…

REMEMBER when XB Falcons were virtually worthless and used by young ’uns as paddock bashers? Glenn Rewell does, because that’s exactly what he did with this Falcon back in the day. “I got the car as a trade-in at the local Ford dealership in Castlemaine, Victoria around 1985. It was $300, and as an apprentice, I needed something to get around,” says Glenn. “They weren’t a sought-after car, so we bushbashed it, jumped it, did burnouts, and used the wheelwells in the boot to store beer and ice – which young me didn’t realise created the rust I had to fix years later!” Despite the abuse, the trusty Falcon never let Glenn down. Once he started his business in 1990, the XB was retired for a shop ute and sat…

ONE of the hardest and most frustrating aspects of any project car build is having to rectify the decades of sins committed by previous owners before you can enact your own vision. Fortunately for Paul Vavitis, he’s owned this beautiful VL Calais Turbo since it was brand new, at the tender age of 10! “My parents said that if I promised to finish my VCE, they’d buy me a car there and then,” he explains. “This was 1986, and the VL Calais Turbo commercial was playing on TV. It left such an impression, I knew I had to have one.” Once he was old enough to get behind the wheel, Paul somehow managed to avoid the usual P-plater tropes of distasteful mods or seriously injuring the car at the hands…

FEW Aussies can lay claim to having skidded Stateside at Cleetus McFarland’s Freedom Factory, but Caitlin Diwell is one of them, having piloted her hubby Brody’s monstrous WL Caprice there late last year. But Caitlin has a WL Statesman of her own, and when we spied her cutting sick in both the Stato and her FG Falcon XR6 at Gazzanats 2024, we knew we had to flag her down between events for a chat. What was it like skidding in the US? It was cool! There aren’t many chicks in the burnout scene over there, and I’m also only five-foot tall, so I blew their minds when I hopped out of the driver’s seat! We got married there, too – Brody skidded in the 2024 SEMA Horsepower Rodeo, and then…

To have your product featured here, call Kim Simonsen on 0439 422 285 or email kim.simonsen@streetmachine.com.au. 01 TABLE IS SET! THE new Metalmaster M16 Pro Series LIFT Welding Table from Hare & Forbes Machineryhouse could just be your ultimate mobile welding solution. It features a foot-operated lever for smooth height adjustment between 440mm and 960mm, so you can move it to just the right height without stressing your lower back; 150mm swivel casters for easy manoeuvrability around your workshop; and a 500kg load capacity rating so you’ll likely never be at its limit regardless of what you’re welding. The 800x1200mm tabletop is constructed from heavy plate steel, CNC-machined for precise flatness, with the mounting holes arranged in a 50x50mm grid pattern to offer plenty of clamping options. You can find out…

BLOWN V8s and burnout cars go together like hot days and cold beers, so it should be no surprise that this 8/71-blown monster is destined for duty in a skid and event car. Put together by Damian Baker at BG Engines, it’s a stout combo, but not one he’d describe as exotic. “This is a go-to combo for us for a burnout car, as it’s relatively easy to source parts for,” he says. “It made 1056hp on 16psi, and 925lbft, but it is not about making power; it’s about longevity.” Having built a vast array of tough engines for the likes of Adrian Cuthbertson’s SKIDMA Mitsubishi and Alon Vella’s Drag Challenge Radial Aspirated-dominating Capri, among many others, Damo understands how to make big-horsepower engines live. Starting with a Dart LS-Next…

AMONG all the amazing finished machines on display at Meguiar’s MotorEx each year, you’ll always find one or two gems still under construction that are just as worthy of your attention. In 2024, it was Rob Fekete’s 1970 Ford F100 pre-runner that sparked our interest, and at this year’s event, we were captivated by the SsCustom Mazda 800 ute in the Mobil 1 Performance World hall. Owned by SsCustom frontman Stacy Smyth, the little Mazda affectionately known as ‘Delilah’ is a fun side project to showcase what his business’s fabrication tools can do. “I found it on Marketplace, and being a Kiwi, I love Mazdas,” he says. “I started out by building the chassis for it, which is all completely new and different; the only things the same as the…

BLASTING THROUGH THE BONNET LIKE A SATURN V ROCKET IS A MOUNTAIN OF POLISHED BILLET HARDWARE GUARANTEED TO DRIVE HORSEPOWER JUNKIES INTO A FROTHING MESS THESE days, building an iconic Aussie muscle car into a truly stand-out street machine is no easy task – especially when the car in question is a firstgeneration Monaro. Coming up with a genuinely different spin on the HK-T-G coupe formula requires a ton of creative thinking, along with an extra-large set of stones! Clearly, Sydney’s Martin Pecotich possesses both attributes, as the HT Monaro he created with Paul Sant and the ProFlo Performance crew offers a fresh take on a contemporary pro street Monaro. From its one-off wheels, hand-made chassis and sumptuous, almost factory-looking trim to that epic 14/71-blown, 533ci billet Noonan H2O Hemi…

IF YOU’RE an Aussie Mopar nut, Chryslers on the Murray is better than Christmas. Held each year in the NSW/Victoria border towns of Albury-Wodonga, the three-day event has grown into the largest gathering of Pentastar cars in Australia thanks to the dedication of the Albury-Wodonga Chrysler Club – incredibly, one of the smallest car clubs in the country. The 2025 edition was one of the biggest yet, drawing a huge turnout of entrants and spectators from as far afield as WA, Tasmania, northern Queensland, and even Alice Springs! Festivities kicked off on the Friday with a track day at the Driver Education Centre of Australia (DECA) track in Barnawartha, 20km west of Wodonga, for anyone keen to put their Mopar through its paces. The tight circuit was perfectly suited for…

AHH, the 1970s in Australia: a time when radio was king and your favourite station might just give away something as cool as a custom van! Our story begins in 1976, when Coca-Cola commissioned a bunch of pre-release Valiant panel vans – each dubbed the Denimachine – to be porned out with mags, sidepipes and flames, along with a denim-stitched interior. In cahoots with radio stations around the country, these vans were given away as competition prizes, setting the airwaves buzzing while boosting Coke’s already whopping market share. The van scene was big back then – no, huge — so the competitions were a great success – hot enough for Coca-Cola Bottlers in Melbourne and its Victorian radio partner, 3XY, to give it another Victoria-only lash in 1977. The brief…

WHO says you need $200,000 worth of LandCruiser and caravan to tour our vast country? Central Victorian Paul Rockes certainly doesn’t think so. He threw a Barra into this old EK postie van, resurrected it in his own garage, and is already taking it on road trips all over the country. This isn’t Paul’s first wicked machine, having previously built an awesome blown V8-powered Mk2 Cortina (SM, Dec ’14), and the EK also shares shed space with his Appendix J-style FX Holden. So, how did the EK come about? “It’s a car I got from a mate of mine, who sadly fell to mental health problems,” Paul says. “I didn’t want to see the project unfinished, so I took it on and spent the next three or so years rebuilding…

HAVING previously completed a couple of threeday Drag Challenge Weekend events amongst plenty of local racing in his native Queensland, William Yarwood really stepped things up in 2024. Not only did he take on the full five-day Street Machine Drag Challenge torture test, but he also finished the event with a Speed Pro Six-Cylinder class win and in ninth place overall! William’s JZA80 Toyota Supra RZ does bulk kilometres with its turbo 3.0-litre 2JZ six spitting out more than 1300rwhp, which nets him regular eight-second ETs on the drag strip. However, all that racing takes its toll, and 2024 saw plenty of downtime for the swoopy coupe. “I broke the diff at the start of last year, and you can’t buy that crown wheel and pinion for the RZ models…

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. ANDREW MARANTOS HQ MONARO “I HAVE owned my 1974 HQ Monaro since 1999, and over the years it has had a few different looks, engines and paintjobs. In 2021, I finished a ground-up resto on it to turn it into a GTS tribute, running a 600hp LS3, Turbo 400 transmission and 9in diff. I started by stripping it down to a bare shell and respraying it in its original Sunburst Gold. I fitted a fuel-injected 5.0L from a VS Commodore, and it stayed that way until 2015, when I rebuilt the engine into a 355 stroker and…

HE sensory delight that is Nitro Funny Car and dragster racing will be familiar to many Street Machine readers, and Bill Kimberlin’s featurelength 1979 documentary American Nitro attempts to capture that experience on celluloid. Primarily filmed at the now long-defunct Fremont Dragstrip in California, the doco paints a vivid picture of the sheer intensity and passion that racers and fans alike had for the Funny Car class at this time, underscored by interviews with some of the biggest names and showpeople of the sport, right at the point where many of them were cementing their now-legendary status. Don ‘The Snake’ Prudhomme and Tom ‘The Mongoose’ McEwen feature heavily, both delving into not only the physically and financially demanding aspects of racing, but also the up-and-down emotional thrill and toll that…

SENSE OF ADVENTRA? AH, THE Holden Adventra – Australia’s Subaru Outback! Sadly, it didn’t quite hit the mark with buyers and was probably a bit before its time to entice the SUV-loving crowd that was to follow. Regardless, an AWD wagon with the option of a V8 and luxury interior sounds pretty good to us, and whenever one pops up for auction, like this 2004 LX8 recently up for grabs on Grays, Telfo tends to get a bit googlyeyed. We shared it on our Facebook page and asked if any of you have a similar soft spot for these things. Here’s what you had to say. Wes Goodwin – I’ve had one for 10 years. The main reason I bought it was it was half the price of a VY…

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EVEN for those strange types whose veins don’t course with petrol, everyone remembers their first car. It doesn’t matter if it’s a clapped-out old rust magnet that stops more often than it starts; that first ride symbolises so much – an initial taste of proper freedom, independence, and the start of adulthood. Michael Licciardi certainly has fond memories of his; having grown up in a family of gearheads, his first car was far cooler than most of ours. “I had a burgundy ’81 Caprice with a 308 and limo gears,” he says. “I had a soft spot for Statesmans back then, and I was looking for an HX, as my dad had one with a 454 in it when I was growing up. Even as a 13-year-old, Dad’s Statey was…

WHEN David Dewhurst caught up with childhood friend Trevor Pyatt, who had lived behind the Dewhurst family in the 60s, the last thing he was expecting was to fall in love with an old Valiant. “I hadn’t seen Trevor for 35 years or more and was pleasantly surprised when he called me one day out of the blue,” David recalls. “He’d ended up being a car wholesaler, and he contacted me because I’m an electrician.” Trevor needed some work done, so David visited his workshop at Panorama in southern Adelaide. “While I was doing the work there, I noticed this blue VF Valiant tucked away over in the corner. Strangely, it had the roof cut off, and I’d never seen one quite like that before. I said to Trev, ‘What’s…

WHILE the heyday of the modified panel van scene in Australia is now nearly 50 years’ past, there’s one build from that wildly creative time that even non-vanners know: Alley Cat. Street machiners will remember it as ‘the Sandman with a V12 Jag’, while for those more fluent with velvet trim and wild murals, Alley Cat is undoubtedly the most iconic panel van of all time. In 1975, a 19-year-old John Strachan (Snap Shots, SM, Jan ’15) plonked down his hardearned for an HJ Sandman painted GM-H Claret, and it was soon hotted up and making waves in the burgeoning van scene. The 308 scored a tunnel ram, while a set of Ansen hotwire mags and interior updates kept it competitive, with the body eventually treated to a fibreglass ‘Meteor’…

ALL-PAW THREE-DOOR KIAN HEAGNEY NISSAN PULSAR GTI-R “AS IF I didn’t already own enough unreliable Nissans, I’ve just added this 1990 Nissan Pulsar GTI-R to the stable. For those unaware, this little three-door version of the N14 Pulsar was built by Nissan as a homologation special to take on the World Rally Championship in the early 90s. As such, they’re turbo SR20-powered, manual, and use the same ATTESA AWD system as the GT-Rs of the time. This one had sat in a garage for 10 years before it came to me through some friends. It had a broken rear window, and the clutch hydraulic system needed an overhaul, but for the money, I couldn’t say no. We got it running the day after I picked it up. I’ve already had…

Email your favourite funnies to gday@streetmachine.com.au. GAG OF THE MONTH A DOG’S LIFE A MAN visits a psychiatrist, looking panicked and anxious. “Doc, I need help,” he says. “Every morning when I wake up, I think I’m a dog.” The psychiatrist leans forward and nods thoughtfully. “That’s unusual,” he says. “How long has this been going on?” “Oh, for years now,” the man replies. “Every morning, I wake up and I go straight to the back door, scratching at it like I have to go outside. Then, if someone rings the doorbell, I can’t help myself; I just go nuts barking at them!” “Hmmm, that is strange,” the psychiatrist says. “Have you tried anything to fix it?” “Oh yeah! I’ve tried everything. Meditation, hypnosis – nothing works!” the man says.…