Innehållsförteckning för June 2017 från Street Machine

WE MAY have only just fully recovered from the record-breaking horsepower party that was Summernats 30, but Summernats 31 will be upon us before we know it, and early indications are that it’s going to be a beauty! More then six months out from the event, the Summernats office has been a hive of activity, processing no less than 600 pre-entries! If you’re quick, you can still get yours in for only $150 before the 1 June price rise. When you consider that’s a mere 10 bucks more than a general admission season pass, you’d be mad not to. Meanwhile, the Burnout Masters field is starting to take shape, with almost half of the qualifying events having been run and won. From the Summernats 30 Burnout Masters, we have reigning…

IN THE mid-1980s, a group of Brisbane-based mates turned Australia’s street machining scene on its ear. The names Wayne Pagel, Rob Beauchamp and Greg Carlson will trigger memories for many old-schoolers, and their respective builds have long been entrenched as icons in our history books. Wayne’s famed black HT Monaro, which we featured way back in the June 1986 issue, was officially dubbed Midnight Maniac, but has since become universally known and remembered by what was on its number plates: GAS69. With a second generation of Pagel HTs featured in this issue – son Reece’s sedan on page 58 – we spoke to Wayne about those formative years of the pro street scene and how the modified car movement has evolved in the past three decades. What first got you…

DRIVER REVIVER I WOULD just like to let Simon Major know that there are others out there that feel his pain regarding helping drivers in trouble (Blowin’ Gaskets, SM, Mar ’17). But there are some of us that still stop and help, even of the new generation. I am 22 and I drive around in my modified Toyota 100-series Land Cruiser and do a lot of off-road camping and driving. While camping and in the outback, if I stop and help people, they have always been friendly to me. In the middle of nowhere we all need to have each other’s backs and look out for one another. Once you hit the suburbs and the cities, however, it’s a different ballgame. I still always stop and help, but a lot…

HUGE CUBES, 14/71 BLOWER, AND A COUPLE OF THOUSAND HORSEPOWER; WE WANTED TO BUILD SOMETHING NOTICEABLE! IN BUSINESS, it’s a good idea to get out there and show people what you do. And that, folks, is the fundamental reason this mountain-motored Torana exists. It’s a blown, big-blocked business card for chassis, suspension and brake hardware specialists Castlemaine Rod Shop, north-west of Melbourne. The Torana’s build has taken a few twists and turns since The Rod Shop’s Heath Waddington brought the car home a decade ago. Seeing a few ‘before’ snapshots of this little Torana, it’s easy to agree with his honest summary: “We should have chucked it away and got another good one.” You’ve probably heard a similar story – and read about it in Street Machine – dozens of…

HOW many people can lay claim to both of their parents having had cars featured in magazines? I can think of maybe two or three candidates tops, and Brisbane’s Reece Pagel is definitely one of them. “I had no choice but to be into cars,” Reece says. “I was around them from the start, especially HK, HT and HG Holdens. My dad, Wayne, built the GAS69 HT Monaro back in the 80s [SM, Jun ’86] and my mum Sandy still owns her QIK68 HK Premier [SM, Jul/Aug ’92].” With genes like that, it was virtually a given that Reece would follow suit, and it wasn’t long before an HK/T/G project started brewing. “I had an HK sedan as a daily driver that I was trying to do up but keep…

I COULD HAVE PUT A CRAZY CAM IN IT, BUT IT’ S B BEEN BUILT WHERE IT’ S G GOT A LOT OF GOOD TORQUE DOWN LLOW SO IT’S SSTREETABLE A LOT of the cars we feature in SMare comprehensive rebuilds where the owner has taken a worn-out old car, completely stripped it and then spent years turning it into their interpretation of the perfect street machine. But sometimes it’s easier to get something that’s already had a lot of the hard work done and then tweak it to your own personal tastes. Often it can lead to a bit of a stigma, where the car will always be referred to as “so-and-so’s old car”, but in the case of Melbourne-based Mark Psihountakis’s XW GT, that was never really an…

PETER Grmusa’s ATRISK XR Falcon is hands-down one of the most insane burnout cars in the scene. The specs are out of this world: 700ci big-block Chev, giant blower and 2000hp. It has enough grunt to take a tyre from brand new to a pile of dust in a matter of seconds; you’ve never seen a car so violent out on the burnout pad. ATRISK’s first incarnation won the Summernats Burnout Championship in 2006 and 2007 and was on the cover of the February 2008 issue of Street Machine. In 2013 Peter gave the car a break from competition so he could revamp it into its current form; in its place came the EVILXA Falcon ute, which won the Summernats 26 Burnout Masters. Overhaul complete, ATRISK was again an SM…

SHANE JONES 1971 LC GTR TORANA AT 19 years of age, Shane Jones turned his focus away from the surfing circuit and towards a well-worn Cyan 1971 LC GTR Torana that had sat in his parents’ driveway for far too long. After an extensive resto, he ended up with this sweet Sebring Orange road rocket, complete with the extra power of a fully legal V8. The bodywork was a collaboration between Bel Air Custom Paint & Panel and Ferrace Auto Body, and Bel Air also took care of the paint. Fifteen years after work was completed, the Torana still looks factory fresh. Keeping the Torry looking original was important to Shane, with the only departure inside being the addition of a monster tacho. Shane’s dad suggested slotting a suitably warmed-over…

IT IS ALWAYS exciting when a survivor from the 1980s golden age of street machining pops up in good nick, so we were pumped to see Owen Webb’s XW Falcon ute, Bruiser, for sale online. Owen is the chief judge for both Street Machine Summernats and Meguiar’s MotorEx, but he got his start with the XW in the late 1970s. It is an instantly recognisable car to those of us of a certain age, thanks to the blacked-out bar and distinctive rear spoiler. “I’d owned a few EJ Holdens and stuff beforehand, but it was the first car that really got me hooked on the whole car scene,” Owen says. “It was traded in on a new ute at the Bowral Ford Dealership where I was doing my panel beating…

26 MAY, BENALLA, VIC Benalla & District Classic Car & Motorbike Tour, Benalla Art Gallery. Call (03) 5762 1749. 27-28 MAY, BUSSELTON, WA South West Indoor Motor Show, Georgiana Molloy Anglican School. Visit southwestindoormotorshow.com.au. 28 MAY, GEELONG, VIC Geelong Charity Show ’n’ Shine, GTEC, 180 Boundary Road. Email horrorishannah@gmail.com. 28 MAY, ALBURY, NSW SSA Car & Bike Show, 570-582 Olive St. Call 0417 462 929. 28 MAY, KURWONGBAH, QLD Chrome Bar Bonanza, Lakeside Park Raceway. Visit qldraceways.com.au. 28 MAY, TAREE, NSW Weekend On Wheels, Jack Neal Oval. Visit tareerescuesquad.com. 02-05 JUN, MURWILLUMBAH, NSW Wintersun 2.0, Murwillumbah Showground. Visit wintersun2.com.au. 03-04 JUN, SOUTH BRISBANE, QLD Queensland Hot Rod Show, Brisbane Convention Centre. Visit qldhotrodshow.org. 04 JUN, ACACIA RIDGE, QLD Muscle Car Masters Holden Day Car Show, Elizabeth St Shopping Centre. Visit…

AS HEAD honcho of the Brisbane-based Asphalt Demons car club, it’s a given that Bill Taylor should have a history (and a shed) filled with tough cars. After many years spent tinkering away on all manner of cool rides with his late father Dennis, Bill continues the tradition, building and maintaining the family fleet with son Ashley. Whether it be Ford, Mopar, Chev or even Morris, Bill sets his sights on respecting a particular era and building cars to suit. 01: AT 17, Bill’s first daily driver was an HQ sedan with a hot red motor. “I lost my licence, so I figured I’d spend that time dropping in a worked 307 Chev; you know, the old: ‘I can’t drive for a year because of speeding so let’s make it…

I FIGURED I’D GET IN THERE AND GIVE IT A GO. AT THE END OF THE DAY IT’S ONLY A BIT OF STEEL; IF YOU STUFF IT UP YOU CAN ALWAYS CUT IT OUT AND GO AGAIN EVER met someone who embarked on a ‘quick tidy-up’ of a car and managed to keep a lid on it? Someone who managed to stay on brief, on schedule and on budget, and avoid having the entire build change scope almost of its own accord before their very eyes? Nah, we haven’t either. It’s something Sydney bloke Paul Xuereb certainly struggled with. In 2010, Paul finally managed to negotiate the purchase of this XM sedan after hassling the previous owner for yonks. He had the most modest of initial intentions, and even left…

I ONLY SAW ONE MOPAR ON THE DRIVE UP, BUT ONCE I HIT THE OUTSKIRTS OF WODONGA I KNEW THAT AWESOMENESS WAS BREWING BEING a third-generation Chrysler fan, it borders on bloody criminal that I’ve never made the pilgrimage to Albury-Wodonga for Chryslers On The Murray. So when Editor Telfo dangled the Pentastar carrot in front of me for this year, I jumped at the chance to immerse myself in the Southern Hemisphere’s premier Mopar event. Come early Friday morning I was on a Fokker bound for Melbourne and super-keen for the drive north to the border. My hire basher was upgraded from a Corolla to a VF Commodore, so I decided if anyone asked me what car I brought, I could legitimately say: “Just the VF,” and let them…

I WOULD MEASURE, CUT, WELD. THEN I WOULD DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN. THE PROCESS TOOK 20 OR 30 GOES BEFORE IT ALL CUT RIGHT, BUT I HAD THIS GUT FEELING THAT IT WAS GOING TO WORK THERE’S no doubt the VL is one of the more fondly remembered early Commodores. The V8 reached ‘peak bodykit’ under Tom Walkinshaw, while Holden’s smooth Powertech 6Ei, aka the Nissan RB30, more than ably powered the regular variants. But without proper set-up, they’d do single-peggers for miles just trying to boot it out of your mum’s driveway on a rainy day, while at the racetrack they were viciously marauded by Nissan’s mighty Godzilla – the R32 Skyline GT-R. Huss Ghamrawi grew up amongst all this; he knows the score. So when, as a…

WARREN Borg’s Chrysler 300 has been a flagship for the Mopar fraternity for some time now, with a gutsy blown Hemi under the hood. The 5.7-litre utilises a Manley rotating assembly with 9.8:1 forged pistons and customised factory heads with bigger valves. Factory headers have been ditched for a set of ceramic-coated TTI units from Modern Muscle, and the combination is swinging an F1A ProCharger with an eight-rib drive belt system. Warren has the blower cranked right up and is jamming 18psi of boost through the small-block, and on methanol the motor is pumping out over 800hp. Fuel supply is via a Fore fuel hat, with three in-tank Walbro pumps feeding eight 1500cc injectors. The motor is tuned from the USA using DiabloSport software, and the gearbox is a beefed-up…

“CREATIVE CARS COULD TRANSFORM YOUR HZ INTO A ROLLS, YOUR BEETLE INTO A PORSCHE OR EVEN YOURMUM’S TA22 CELICA INTO A SEMI-RESPECTABLE FERRARI” THE Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit is a handsome car, the epitome of the super-luxury land yachts of the 1980s. Sure, they ran the ageing 6.75-litre V8 and a basic GM auto, but introduced refinements such as active suspension, along with – <scratching record sound> What’s that? This ISN’T a Rolls-Royce? Oh yeah, now that you mention it, closer inspection reveals several issues. The grille’s a bit ‘off’ for a start, like when you meet someone whom you suspect has a papa that’s also their brother. Looking down the back, those tail-light lenses look a bit ‘Year 9 tech studies’, while the doors are – well, they’re Kingswood doors.…

IT NEEDS A LITTLE WORK IF IT IS GOING TO BE USED AS A RACE OR EVENT CAR. AS SOON AS I GO TO HAMMER IT, IT HITS BOOST-CUT! WHILE he sells new Volkswagens during the week, Brisbane’s Ben Horsfall has a very different turbo six-cylinder to take out on the weekends, with this 350rwhp Toyota 1JZ-powered HZ Kingswood in his shed. While everyone seems to be going nuts for LS1 and Barra swaps, punters shouldn’t forget Toyota’s venerable 1JZ and 2JZ turbo six-cylinder engines, with their ability to take boost and make horsepower like no other production motor of the 1990s. But Ben is the first to admit he’s no Toyota fanboy. “I didn’t do the build,” he says. “I found the HZ for sale in The Trading Post…

BREAKDOWN VEHICLES: 1946 Cadillac Series 62, 1951 Mercury Sport Coupe, 1962 Chevrolet Corvette C1, 1932 V8 Ford roadster, 1963 Dodge D200, 1981 Dodge Ram, Fiat 500 Topolino drag car, 1955 Chevrolet, 1973 Plymouth Satellite, 1972 Buttera Chassis Ford Mustang, 1965 Cadillac hearse, 1973 Dodge Dart STARS: Bonnie Bedelia, Beau Bridges, Leo Rossi, Hoyt Axton, Anthony Edwards, Michael Cavanaugh, Bill McKinney DIRECTOR: Jonathan Kaplan ACTION: Nicely filmed illegal street drags; racing action from the novice professional ranks; and the precision, high speed and risk of Top Fuel racing PLOT: The real-life story of drag racer Shirley ‘Cha-Cha’ Muldowney, as she graduates from street racing to the drag strip, fighting the old boys’ club in an attempt to become the first professional female drag racer AVAILABLE: YouTube THE biographical film Heart Like…

BADGE OF HONOUR? BACK in the day, putting a Chev badge on your Holden meant you had a tough rat or mouse motor under the bonnet, and was treated with respect. But as Simon Major relates in his Blowin’ Gaskets piece on streetmachine.com.au, the rash of Chev badges on late-model Commodores in more recent years has given younger folks who might not be up on their street machining history the wrong idea. For proof, here’s just a sample of the back-and-forth that took place on our Facebook page. Mark Seibold – Chev motors were not as prolific then as they are now. If you owned a Holden, 90 per cent of the time it had a Holden motor. If you were running a mouse or a rat, that small badge…

I TRY NOT TO LEAVE MY CHECKS TOO LATE, AS THE NEIGHBOURS DON’T ALWAYS APPRECIATE A BLOWN, INJECTED BIG-BLOCK RATTLING THEIR WINDOWS AT DINNER-TIME! THE Myers freight train rolled into Collie Motorplex for the long weekend in March, and the result was another epic fire and smoke show at the Fordhold Wreckers Gazzanats WA. With a couple of other major events happening on the same weekend, we didn’t have our usual suspects available to cover Gazzanats, so we chucked the notepad and pencil to deadset West Aussie burnout legend, Matt Purnell. It was Matt’s first show back after a lengthy break from competing, so he was pretty busy making sure his HJ Holden ute, BLACKOUT, was all good to go. It’s hard enough keeping track of everything when you’re just…

THE STANCE AND COLOUR, ALONG WITH THE WHEEL CHOICE AND FRESH CHROME, BEAUTIFULLY HIGHLIGHT THIS MODEL’S CURVACEOUS BODY STYLING I 'M AMAZED by the creativity still thriving in our scene. Some of the cornerstone models in street machining have been receiving the modifiers’ touch for damn near 70 years – you’d think everything that could be done has already been done – yet we are still blessed with the passion and individuality that sets some builds apart from the rest. Take Scott Moreland's S-Series Valiant, for example. When was the last time you saw a first-series Valiant with tubs, Convo Pros and big rubber? Or painted bright red for that matter? I don’t think I’ve seen these mods on many early-girl Vals and definitely not all on the same car.…

SUPPORT CARS, TRAILERS, WALLETS, EVEN MARRIAGES HAVE ALL BEEN FOUND WANTING ON THE BIG WHITE DYNO “IT WAS like glass!” enthused David Freiburger of Roadkill and Hot Rod magazine fame. He was grinning beside Jack Rogers’s 1968 Camaro, which he’d just piloted to a top speed of 249mph (400km/h), and he was talking about how flat the salt was this year at Lake Gairdner, South Australia, scene of the Dry Lakes Racers Australia (DLRA) Speed Week. He’d come as part of Rogers’s land-speed circus – three Camaros, a massive transporter and crew – all the way from the east coast of the USA. If you ever go to Speed Week, you’ll feel like you’ve travelled halfway ’round the world, too – it ain’t easy, brother. But once you’ve been there,…

EPISODE two of our new video show, Carnage, hit the web in late April, continuing the story of our Turbo Taxi build. Judging by the response, it seems like everyone is keen to see if we can make an old taxi go 10s on LPG. Last month we’d just finished doing an engine swap; we found a low-kilometre naturally aspirated donk on Facebook for $200. The price was right, but taking four days to slot in the uncooperative engine certainly took a shine off things. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and you can see our struggle first-hand by checking out the video on streetmachine.com.au. Since then we’ve been plenty busy. We drove the taxi around for a week or so before the radiator decided to drop its…

MY FIANCÉ MATT REBUILT THE STOCK V8, ADDING A BIGGER CAM; I JUST WANTED SOMETHING THAT SOUNDED FAT CHRISTY McGill is a Holden devotee from way back, having owned a raft of GM-H models before settling on this ’84 VK Berlina. Her chosen ride will be put to a particularly sweet use in a few months when she marries her fiancé Matt in true Holden style. Where’d the Holden love start? I grew up around cars, as my dad is a mechanic. He had so many cars – he was always buying them, doing them up and then selling them. During my early teens he had a white VK and my uncle had a copper one very similar to mine; that’s when I knew I wanted a Commodore. Tell us…

IF THE Transformers’ Optimus Prime chose to morph into a tough-arsed street engine, I reckon you’d be looking at it. Sure, ol’ Optimus needs the wholesome business end you’d expect from 572 cubes of Chrysler Hemi, but he’s a robot who also loves a splash of bling, and this gorgeous all-alloy, Six-Pack-equipped Mopar monster being built by Con Sagiaris at Pro Race Engines fits the bill perfectly. That droolworthy aluminium World-brand block features a raised cam tunnel and is filled with the best of the best, including a 4.5-inch-stroke Eagle steel crank, 7.1-inch Eagle H-beam rods and custom Ross 4.5-inch-bore pistons to create a dead-square reciprocating assembly. A Comp hydraulic-roller cam and Crower roller lifters team with Jet Engineering pushrods and dead-sexy Stage V rocker gear to activate the Manley…