Innehållsförteckning för Yearbook 2022 från Street Machine

Write to: Your Stuff, Street Machine, Locked Bag 12, Oakleigh, Vic 3166 or email streetmachine@wheelsmedia.com.au. Make sure you include your address (not necessarily for publication). Keep it short and sweet! LETTER OF THE MONTH A LIFE LESS ORDINARY LOVED seeing the Porsche (bottom right) in the December issue, even though it’s something fairly different for SM. Say what you will about a Euro sports car appearing in this mag; it was a refreshing change to see something that handles better than your average dumpster on 24-inch Simmons rims and still has more than enough power to be a bloody good time. Maybe somebody should do a Porsche 928 V8 next and really stick it up the haters! The TSS EA Falcon (top right) was an interesting piece of kit too,…

KAINE Fiorenza might be just into his 30s, but he’s had a passion for early Valiant hardtops for over half his life. In fact, he owns three of them! “I dropped out of school at 14 to buy my first one,” Kaine says. “The idea was to strip it and paint it, but I broke the [rear] window trying to remove it.” In his defence, Kaine was pretty young at the time and didn’t know that you shouldn’t try and lever a toughened screen out with a screwdriver! The rear window on Val hardtops is a pretty odd shape, and back then Kaine couldn’t find one for sale anywhere. Instead, he bought a whole car – the VF you see on these pages – which came with heaps of spare…

HOLDEN’S Torana hatch wasn’t hugely popular. In fact, only around 8000 of them were made, so the ones that remain on roads today are a bit special. And with NASCAR power and a Summernats Top 60 berth to its credit, Blake Evans’s example is even more precious. This Canary Yellow LX is not the first of Blake’s builds to have achieved ’Nats success. “I had a lime-green LC Torana GTR that we took to Summernats 30,” he says. “It was a street-type car – stone chips included – but my aim was to get it into the Top 60. I gave it a bit of a tidy-up and fixed up a few things that I knew weren’t to the right standard.” The result? “Yep, Top 60! I was pretty happy…

THE IDEA WAS TO FIT A KILLER ENGINE CONVERSION INTO A GRANDDAD-LOOKING HK MONARO – A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING YOU might be wondering what a relatively stock-looking HK Monaro GTS is doing in the pages of Street Machine, but there’s a bit more going on with this car than first meets the eye. Father-and-son team John and Travis Oberg have worked together to build this stunning ride. Inspiration came from the elder Oberg; as a young bloke growing up in a small farming town just north of Esperance, WA, John saw a brand-new HK Monaro, and it has been stuck in his mind ever since. Many years later, that cherished memory has been channelled into the car you see before you. According to Travis, the build philosophy was pretty…

IF YOU look back at peak 80s Holden muscle, HDT’s VK SS Group A – popularly known as the Blue Meanie – is bloody hard to top. Mark Spiteri certainly agrees, which is why his own VK weapon offers a blend of HDT originality, huge levels of howling Holden grunt, and a dash of modern luxury. “Growing up in the 80s and 90s when VK and VL Commodores ruled the streets and race tracks was a big influence for me,” Mark says. “I knew if I was ever to build a car it’d have to be a VK Commodore.” I HAD A VISION TO MAKE THIS DIFFERENT. I DIDN’T JUST WANT TO BUILD A REPLICA BUT ONE OF THE GREATEST TRIBUTES GOING AROUND When the time finally did come for…

YOU’LL struggle to find a happier face than George Hatzi’s in the Drag Challenge pits on any given day. He’s a top bloke who has contested our gruelling marathon a number of times in his super-slick XF Fairmont Ghia. In those earlier attempts, the XF was actually rocking a force-fed SOHC Intech six, a combo that’d had a long history with this car. “When I got it around seven years ago, it was actually a turbo single-cam on LPG,” George says. “I ran a best of 11.70 with the gas, and then we switched to E85 and it ran a PB of 10.20.” As cool as the SOHC deal was, George knew it’d only get him so far. “It had its limitations, so we’d been planning a Barra swap for…

CHRISTINE Cini may be a late-comer to the Aussie muscle car party, but she’s making up for it in style, having recently invested in a matching numbers LJ Torana GTR XU-1. Initially she just wanted to give it a quick respray, but things soon ramped up significantly, culminating in a show worthy nut-and-bolt resto. How’d you come to own an XU-1? When I was younger, there was an XU-1 a few streets away that would catch my eye whenever I saw it. While my family weren’t into cars, we still had the fun Ford-versus-Holden arguments, and I’ve always been a Holden girl. So, in 2016 when my husband Alan asked me, “If you were to have any car, what would it be?”, I responded with, “A 1973 GTR XU-1 Torana,…

Send your photos of fun with cars to: Sunday Too Far Away, Street Machine, Locked Bag 12, Oakleigh, Vic 3166, or email high-resolution images (1mb+) to: sundaytoofaraway@wheelsmedia.com.au. Please send copies of prints as we are unable to return your photos.…

AN ICON of the early 2000s show scene is being brought back to its former glory, as the ex-Jamie Kochaniewicz VS ute known as PSYCO undergoes restoration ahead of its return to Summernats. The VS was dominant in the early 2000s, claiming a King of Auto Salon gong, and a Top 60 spot plus Top Murals and Top Car Display at Summernats 15, not to mention haunting our March 2002 cover. The ute went to auction last year after changing hands a few times, soon making its way to a Perth car collector. The Vortech blower was refitted to the injected Holden V8 and retuned, before the car was sent back east for Darryl Harrington of Automotive Installation Services to handle the rest. “I’ve been doing car stereos for probably…

CAR ownership can be a funny old thing. Some people are all about crazy variety, punting an RX-3 coupe one week and some sort of 50s Yankee wagon the next. Then there are those with devout and outspoken brand allegiance who will never stray from their chosen manufacturer and have all the apparel to match. But there’s another group of car fans who mostly love that one particular model that’s seemingly entrenched in their DNA. Sydney’s Marcus Thomas falls into this latter category. A firm love of Holden’s HJ-HZ range has seen a number of them pass through his hands over the past quarter-century, with only the occasional ring-in along the way. 01: MARCUS bought this HZ sedan as his first car back in 1997, and soon hit the streets…

IMPURE THOUGHTS NOTHING gets purists upset like cross-pollination between rival brands, so naturally the Barraswapped LC Torana built by Al McClure never fails to get a reaction on our socials. We recently re-shared our original feature story on the car from the August 2020 mag on our Facebook page, along with the news that Mark Whitla and Darby Hamilton now own the beast and plan to bring it to our next Drag Challenge. Here’s what you had to say about the Ford-shoved Torry. Brad Robinson – Oh no, is that a two-door Cortina? Marcus Stingray – It was common to see Ford nine-inch diffs and Top Loaders in GM cars back in the day, but not this. James Domenico – This is how smart Holden guys do it! Shane Galvin…

MARK HAS DONE PLENTY OF SUSPENSION WORK TO HIS PREVIOUS PROJECTS, BUT HYDRAULICS PROVED TO BE A BRAVE NEW WORLD MARK Sullivan might have had more cars in Street Machine than Hawkey had frothies, but he’d never been in a car club – until he built this 1967 Buick Riviera. Taking a hard left turn away from his usual build style of ’bagged, angry streeters on big wheels, Mark chose to transform this Riv into a traditional lowrider after falling in with the right crowd. “I started cruising with the guys from Fresh Stylz Lowrider Club, and then going out to dinner with them, and one thing led to another,” Mark laughs. “The more I cruised and went to shows with them, I realised I really liked how-chilled-out the lowrider…

WITH its gorgeous custom widebody, 700rwhp turbo six and manual gearbox, this epic Mk1 Cortina practically screams ‘race car’. But don’t be fooled; it’s a proper street beast. Darwin bloke Mark stumbled across this Corty about 15 years ago. “I’d always wanted a Mk1 Cortina because I like the shape of them, but the only things I could find back then were Mk1 and Mk2 Escorts,” Mark says. “I was doing a job for a customer and saw there was something under a cover, and I asked, ‘Is that a Mk1 Cortina?’ He couldn’t believe I knew what the silhouette was, and it just went from there.” That base-model ‘jailbar’ 220 car came home with Mark, becoming his second serious project after his widebody Mk1 Esky. “I got some rough…

DITCH Jones’s HR ute (SM, Apr ’07) was one of those cars that you could call ‘polarising’. The two-tone paint, wild teal-coloured interior and welded-up tailgate definitely had tongues wagging when it debuted at Summernats 20, with people either loving or hating the styling. One thing that couldn’t be argued though was the level of detailing and build quality that went into the car, which Ditch had owned and showed since the late 80s. He took the HR off the road in the late 90s, as he recalled in our 2007 feature on the ute: “I wanted to take the car to the next level, as I kept coming up against better machinery.” By the look of the end result, Ditch skipped ‘next level’ and went straight to ‘boss level!’…

JAMIE HAGE VOLKSWAGEN BUS “MEET The Hooligan Drag Bus. This is a custom build that I began by building a chassis jig and then the rest of the body from there. The engine is a stock LS1, the only goodie being the PAC valve springs. Bolted to it is a second-hand Chinese GT42 turbo using a water-to-air intercooler. The gearbox is a Turbo 400 with a billet valvebody, reverse-pattern shift and a transbrake with a high-stall converter. There’s a nine-inch out back with a full spool, 35-spline moly axles with floating hubs and 3.89:1 gearing. The 35-inch tyres and steel rims are for transport and dyno only; the actual wheels it’ll have are 15x14 Weld Draglites with 32.5x14.5 Goodyear slicks for racing. I recently had the LS1 ECU flash-tuned, and…

JOEL CHOYCE LX TORANA “HERE is my 1977 LX Torana hatch. The car had a stout Haddad-built Holden 355 stroker when I purchased it four years ago, but after many late nights in the garage at home over six weeks, and help from one of my good mates, Andrew Murray, it now runs a 430ci LSX paired with a Harrop TVS2650 blower. It’s shifting through a Shotgun Performance Powerglide and Ford nine-inch diff. The current tune is running 13.8psi of boost, making 910rwhp. I’ve now upgraded the injectors and added more boost, with the goal of making closer to 1100rwhp. The hatch gets driven everywhere as a daily or at the track. It’s taken a long time to get the car where I want it, but I’m stoked with the…

GET excited! After two postponements, we’re delighted to announce that our five-day Drag Challenge marathon will now take place between 30 January and 4 February next year! The unrelenting rain in Victoria forced us to postpone the 2022 edition of the drag-and-drive event, which was meant to take place 25-29 October, as neither the tracks, pits nor public roads could have coped with 300 cars and crew after the mass flooding events and threats of further precipitation That followed the rescheduling of the 2021 event due to spicy cough restrictions. That followed the rescheduling of the 2021 event due to spicy cough restrictions. Happily, the move to the new dates allows us to bring Portland’s awesome eighth-mile track back into the schedule. It all kicks off on Monday 30 January…

WILL happily admit that ‘Ozploitation’ films are a guilty pleasure of mine, and 1976’s Deathcheaters is up there with the best of them. Steve (John Hargreaves) and Rod (Grant Page) become best mates during a military tour of Vietnam. Upon returning to civilian life, they settle back into domesticity with their respective loves – Steve with his spunky blonde partner, Julia (Margaret Gerard, director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s real-life spouse), and Rod with his beloved pooch, Bismark (Ziggy). The two friends quickly become a sought-after stunt duo dubbed The Cunning Stunts, working in television and movies. This career helps the pair scratch their ‘action’ itches, but their experiences during the war have left them craving more thrills. Their eagerness to assist with some local police operations brings Rod and Steve to the…

IT TAKES a special kind of person to build the same model of car several times, especially when you’ve already taken one to the dizzying heights of Summernats Grand Champion. Grant Connor is that person, and he’s back on the scene with another killer XR Falcon. “I’m obsessed with them,” the Orange, NSW bloke laughs. “It stems from when I was a little kid. My mate’s brother had one out in a paddock, and the round tail-lights had me mesmerised. As I got older, I progressed through the Auto Salon stuff and then I got into V8s, but I always remembered the XR tail-lights.” This is the fourth XR Grant’s owned, following a stocker in his younger years, a 1000hp drag car, and of course the stunning ‘Bad Apple’ sedan…

IT HAS been a couple of years since the Street Machine team has had a warm body on the ground at the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show in Las Vegas. COVID caused the cancellation of the event in 2020, and with international travel still sketchy in 2021, editor Broads wisely opted to use a local journo to cover the event. This year, I got the guernsey, and not before time – I haven’t attended the world’s biggest aftermarket auto exhibition since 2005! And I sure made the most of it, packing in as much of the good stuff in and around the event as possible. While both exhibitor and attendee numbers at last year’s event were reportedly down on previous years, things had certainly rebounded in 2022, making this…

MOTHER Nature has wreaked havoc on the car events calendar lately, so we were relieved to spot blue October skies peeking through the clouds at the annual Harrigan’s Rod & Custom Show. Around 500 cars cruised out to the water’s edge at Harrigan’s Drift Inn in Calypso Bay, midway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, to enjoy South-East Queensland’s largest one-day automotive show, now in its 14th year. More than 4000 spectators came through the gates, greeted on arrival by rows of bumper-scraping pick-ups, lowriders and big block-powered tanks overflowing from the first carpark. Sat amongst the impressive variety of custom rods was an astounding display of high-horsepower toughies and elite-level show cars, and the quality of many was worthy of the Summernats and MotorEx unveil halls. Last year’s show…

Aged around 21 or younger and have a neat ride? Send some pics and info to: Young Guns, Street Machine, Locked Bag 12, Oakleigh, Vic 3166 or email us at: readerscars@wheelsmedia.com.au. TRAE BOUCHERE > 15, DARWIN, NT E MIGHT be only 15, but Trae Bouchere is already establishing himself as a serious up-and-comer in the NT burnout scene behind the wheel of his neat, force-fed VP Commodore. We bumped into the Darwin lad at Gazzanats NT, and debriefed after his trip to Red CentreNATS. How did you wind up doing competitive burnouts? My stepfather started drag racing back in 1980 when Hidden Valley first opened, so it’s just kind of run down the family line since then. My brother’s got a blown VF ute called RAMPAGE, and my other brother…

GAG OF THE MONTH MR RIGHT MY GIRLFRIEND just dumped me. “I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “You’re so pedantic; everything has to be just so, and everything I do is wrong. I loved you so much, but it’ll never be enough for you. I’m leaving you. I’ve found someone else. Gary and me are driving north tonight and you’ll never hear from me again.” She was just about to leave when I yelled, “No, wait!” She turned back, tears in her eyes, a glimmer of hope still remaining. That was when I uttered those three magic words: “‘Gary and I’.” Gram Mernartsi, email WELLNESS CHECK A SWEET old lady telephoned the hospital. “Is it possible to speak to someone who can tell me how a patient is doing?”…

WHEN we last caught up with Carolyn Hayes (People Like Us, SM, Oct ’17), she was just getting started on her LH Torana Drag Challenge build with her then-partner (and now-husband), Aussie pro street legend Mark Hayes. The car is now nearing completion, and this 900hp small-block is what will power it. Carolyn was one of our OG Drag Challenge combatants back in 2014 in her previous Torana, which ran a staunch, naturally aspirated small-block. But with Mark being a devout nitrous man, it should come as no surprise to learn that Carolyn’s new combo will be helped along by a healthy shot of the good stuff. The 415-cuber was assembled at home by Mark and Carolyn, with machining performed by Westend Performance. Starting with a Dart block, the rotating…