Innehållsförteckning för May 2025 från Street Machine

DON’T be fooled into thinking Ford’s new Super Duty Ranger is just a Wildtrak jazzed up with a new badge and a snorkel – this thing is actually a first for Australia’s booming dual-cab sector. Built to incorporate feedback from the forestry, fire management and mining sectors, the Super Duty combines a massive 4500kg (braked) towing capacity, 4500kg gross vehicle mass (GVM), 8000kg gross combination mass (GCM) and proper offroad capability into one ute. So, while the current-model F-150 has the same towing capacity, the Super Duty outdoes it on GVM and GCM, and we’d bet it’d towel it up on the beaten tracks as well. It took a lot of re-engineering of the existing platform for Ford to hit all these impressive numbers. The chassis itself is redesigned and…

LETTER OF THE MONTH GONZO JOURNALISM HEY guys, your coverage of Gonzlab’s open day in the March edition was fantastic! Such a wholesome local event, with cars, good food, and an epic engineering project to celebrate. I only loosely know of Gonz, but what an absolute gem of a character he was in Jack Houlihan’s interview! I was crying reading those quotes, and I desperately wish I could turn back time to be there myself to check out ‘The Liberator’ in the metal. Big FOMO over here! Heath van der Waerden, email I SEE RED I REFER to Tristan Camm’s letter a year or so ago (Your Stuff, SM, Nov ’23) seeking info about VZ Cross 6 One Tonners. In the reply, Dave Carey reckoned that most of the ones…

PETER Brock famously tried to extract superior performance from the HDT VL SS Group A by mounting a box of crystals in the plenum, but for Matt Smoors, the solution to wicking one up was far more obvious: twin-turbo LS power! Still, just in case Peter Perfect was onto something, Matt made sure he fitted a Polariser to his Group A tribute build! This VL isn’t Matt’s first dance with red firstgen Commodores. Rocking Magnuson-blown LS3 power, his wild FSTGMH VK appeared in Street Machine LSX Tuner #1 in 2014, and in 2017, we featured video on our website of the car soaring into the high eights at over 150mph. “I was doing that in long sleeves and pants, with a half ’cage,” Matt recalls. “We could have kept refining…

DAY ONE, FRIDAY 4 APRIL THINGS weren’t looking too crash-hot on the weather front leading into Rare Spares Rockynats 5. Torrential had rain lashed the entire town of Rockhampton for a week, leaving us all wondering whether some parts of the event would still be able to go ahead. Happily, the rain clouds had largely departed by Friday morning for Day One of Rockynats. While the humidity was through the roof – even according to the locals – and there was still plenty of mud underfoot, it didn’t stop 1100 entrants cramming the roads around the Rockhampton Showgrounds for the annual Street Parade cruise to the Rocky CBD near the Fitzroy River, which unofficially kicks the event off each year. Walking among the throng of killer cars lining up for…

AS ENTRANTS and spectators filtered through the gates of the Ballarat Airport in regional Victoria for the 2025 Western Highway Shootout, it felt like it had been a bloody long time coming. But boy, was it worth the wait! Since the Shootout’s successful first run back in 2022, COVID-19 lockdowns, fires and other forces got in the way of attempts at bringing back this one-day drag-and-drive event. Happily, the day finally came on 8 February this year. The Western Highway Shootout is organised by brothers and Ballarat locals Luke and Kade Preston, in conjunction with Street Machine Drag Challenge veteran Kai McPhee. WE HAD PEOPLE WHO’D COME TO SPECTATE ASKING IF THEY COULD COME BACK WITH THEIR RACE CARS THIS MORNING TO RACE “We were nervous coming into today; we…

MY FRIENDS IN LOS ANGELES WENT TO CHECK IT OUT FOR ME. IT WAS IN A BIT OF A ROUGH NEIGHBOURHOOD, SO THEY ACTUALLY TOOK A GUN! HAVING built plenty of wild, blown, big-cube, tyre-burning muscle cars with more horsepower than a carpark full of Camrys, Mark Sullivan is now on a different path of automotive excellence. The 2007 SMOTY champ is embracing the low life, where no cat’s eye is safe and comfortable cruising is way more important than whether he has the quickest 309ci Windsor-headed ’58 Zephyr in downtown Watanobbi on a Tuesday night. Along with nearly a dozen other cars Mark has built over the past 20 years, we’ve previously featured his ’63 Lincoln sedan (SM, Aug ’19) and, most recently, his ’67 Buick Riviera lowrider (SM,…

A SECOND-generation Iron Maiden is in the making thanks to Serena Channing and her hot-pink XD Fairmont Ghia. Serena’s seven-year-old daughter Laura is a go-karting champ, and the colour of Serena’s XD was decided upon by way of a mother-daughter agreement. In fact, the entire project has been a family affair for these dyed-in-the-wool Ford fanatics. Sounds like your whole family are keen revheads, Serena! Yeah, we have quite a few cars – all Fords and all V8s or turbocharged. Even my daily is a BF Typhoon. My daughter has now claimed the XD as hers, along with a couple of our other cars. And while I was pregnant last year with my son, he would move around in my belly when I’d go to the go-karts or be around…

IF PETER Tsekenis’s ANMLXY isn’t the quickest all-motor, street-driven Falcon in Australia, it’s certainly up there. Having lapped the quarter in 8.44 seconds without any form of artificial aspiration, it’s a certified rocket. This 462ci Clevor is the engine that powers the car, and it makes a monumental 1060hp – insane territory for a street-driven small-block. “Is it a street engine?” poses BK Race Engines frontman Bill Kaglatzis. “Not really, but we’re trying!” After two years of racing, and with Street Machine Drag Challenge on Peter’s radar, the call was made to put the engine through its paces on the street to see how it would fare, then yank it out for a freshen-up. “The customer insisted on doing some street driving – you’ll never find out if it can…

SINCE its inception in 2016, the Holden Drag Nationals has evolved into one of the best-loved events on the Aussie drag racing calendar. If you want proof, the 190 entrants packing Central Victoria’s Heathcote Park Raceway for the 2025 instalment of the Lion-hearted lovefest should be ample. This year saw the event return to HPR after a move to Mildura’s Atlantic Oils Sunset Strip eighth-mile in 2024. “We changed it up, but Heathcote just feels like the home for this event,” says head organiser Todd Foley. “The feeling around the track is just right, so it was great to be back.” Following an unofficial test day on the Friday night, Saturday’s race day didn’t quite go to plan. “The track started off great in the morning, but we just kept…

THIS CAR WAS NOT ONLY ONE OF THE BEST-PRESENTED AT MOTORVATION, BUT IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST-SOUNDING AS WELL MONG a sea of tough cars at Motorvation 39, Bailey Djuric’s XY Falcon ute was a standout. Basking in the late afternoon sun in the staging lanes on Saturday, the paint looked like an oil slick and the gold GT stripes were popping. It looked way too nice to throw around in a skid competition. But once that high-steppin’ NASCAR motor fired up, the sound of 800-plus naturally aspirated horses was all that mattered. This car was not only one of the best-presented at Motorvation, but it was one of the best-sounding as well. Designed to live at 9000rpm all day long, the dry-sumped, high-compression, bulletproof NASCAR engine is the…

LEGENDARY playwright Oscar Wilde famously wrote: “Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess.” While he penned that line in 1893, he could have been talking about the cars turned out by ProFlo Performance, which has redefined how angry and wild a pro street build can be in the 21st Century. This 1969 Holden HT ute is the perfect example. It has show-stopping Kashmir White paint, beautifully smoothed panelwork, and custom bodywork touches, like many clean streeters. But it also sits on a heavily revised chassis that allows it to roll on a set of customised 20x5.5 front and 24x15 rear wheels. The engine bay doesn’t feature a small- or big-block Chev, Iron Lion, or LS; instead, there are 768 cubic inches of Sonny Leonard mountain motor in there.…

HELEN Wynants and Stephen Barrie are a couple of full-blown petrolheads, with a couple of hotted-up Toranas to prove it. With its fastidiously polished alloy and imposing eight-stack EFI Holden V8, Steve’s black SS hatchback was a standout of Street Machine’s January 2018 issue. Now Helen gets her turn in the spotlight with this retina-searing SL/R 5000 named ‘Ruby’. “This sedan shell had been sitting around a while,” Helen says. “Steve had the hatchback, so I told him the sedan was going to be mine.” MANY HOURS WERE SPENT CUTTING AND RE-GLASSING EACH PIECE TO ACHIEVE A FIT WORTHY OF AN ELITE-LEVEL CAR Knowing that the secret to a happy life is a happy Helen, Steve got stuck in. The build ended up taking six years to complete, four of…

LONG before young ’uns had swapped out overpriced S13s for AU Falcons to throw sideways at drift days, a small team from Ford Performance Vehicles unintentionally foreshadowed the trend with the DRIF6, an after-hours deal thrown together by the FPV engineers in 2006 in the name of fun. The car that would become the DRIF6 wasn’t picked fresh off the FPV assembly line to be built as a pristine, high-end machine. Beginning life as a 2002 BA Falcon, it had been used for a stack of hot-weather testing in rural Australia before being shoved in a corner after a ‘kangaroo crash test’ mangled a good portion of the front passenger side. Looking to build something cool for Ford’s annual family open day, the FPV boffins dug the car out in…

IF YOU’RE a big fan of the Iron Lion and got excited when you saw what’s under the bonnet of Kelvin Mann’s 1997 VS Commodore ute, we’ve got some sad news for you. What you’re actually looking at is a carefully disguised 6.0-litre L76 LS. And to make matters worse, there’s a Pulsar G42 1450 turbo hidden in the tub where the fuel tank used to be! “I always had that vision in my head of keeping it sleeper like that; I like to keep people guessing!” Kelvin says. “It has caused a fair few arguments online with confused people – I just let them fight it out amongst themselves.” Kelvin’s sleeper ute idea first started to come together when he got an LS, a Paul Rogers-built Powerglide and a…

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. JOHN PHILIPPOU VB COMMODORE “I’VE had this 1979 VB SL/E for around 18 to 20 years. I bought it to put all my good parts in after I crashed my first early Commodore at Calder Park doing burnouts. It sat around for a little bit, then I spent seven to eight years building it, all of which I did in my shed. I tubbed it myself, which included notched rails to fit the 28x12 tyres on the 10in-wide wheels. The diff is a 9in from Geelong Differentials, and the tub kit and arms are from McDonald Brothers…

FORMER getaway driver Yul Perkins (Dax Shepard) is a goofy but harmless bloke living the quiet life under witness protection in rural California. It seems that ‘Charlie Bronson’, as he is now known, had turned on his mates following a Los Angeles bank heist that went haywire. A few years on, and with his new identity established, Charlie is shacked up with the love of his life, Annie (Shepard’s real-life wife Kristen Bell), and all is looking rosy for the couple. A dream job offer for Annie throws their life into a spin when she reveals the new posting will be in LA – the last place Charlie wants to show his face. It soon becomes apparent that some important half-truths told to Annie about Charlie’s past are going to…

WE CAME across Nikki and Adam’s crusty-but-wicked, 13B turbo rotary-swapped VK Commodore at this year’s Rockynats, built to combine Nikki’s love of Commodores with Adam’s penchant for rotaries. You can find out more about the car in our full Rockynats coverage from page 40 of this issue, but here’s what you had to say about this unusual creation when we shared it online during the event. Jay Duca – Such a cool build! Fun fact: a VK Commodore is the same weight as an FC RX-7 that this engine came from, so it’s basically a VK sports car. Brock Malone – Cue all the “Why would ya waste a VK Commodore like that?” or “Why bother with a gutless rotary engine?” comments. Personally, I think it looks and sounds cool…

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THE untimely passing of Harry Haig last year had a profound effect on many people in the drag-and-drive community, not least of all his friends and family. Paul Douglas, who’d known Harry for years and joined him on two of his Street Machine Drag Challenge escapades, realised that it was no good having a half-finished race car cluttering up his shed, and got stuck back into it. The result is this beastly Cortina that should carry Paul well into the seven-second zone. The little TD has been in Paul’s possession since 2010, when he chucked a cheeky $400 bid on an eBay auction and woke up later to find he’d won. “It was a shit box four-cylinder car from Melbourne,” says the New South Welshman. “I did all the panelwork…

ONLY the bold would modify the genuine version of any factory muscle car nowadays, so there’s much to be said for going a different route and building something from a donor car that isn’t burdened with an inherent dollar value. Sydneysider Chris Symeou fell somewhere in the middle with the build of his VG Valiant Hardtop. “I wanted to build a replica E35 Pacer, but my Hardtop left the factory as a Regal 770 with some rare and unusual options,” Chris says. “I decided to make this build a happy compromise between both, which created something completely one-off.” Modifying cars is about expressing one’s individuality and personality, and Chris has followed that mantra to a T. But, like many projects, it all started from very humble beginnings. “The car was…

FACEBOOK Marketplace is full of treasures, but it is also a hive of scum and villainy. Attempting to purchase a used engine from another country through Marketplace adds an extra level of complexity – organising it all via Messenger, paying via PayPal in a foreign currency – so it’s definitely a roll of the dice. Still, I figured the chance to own one of the most exhilarating and refined small-block engines of all time – the legendary Dodge R5P7 NASCAR V8 – would be worth the risk. These 355 to 358ci mighty-mouse engines have a fearsome reputation, having dominated NASCAR racing from 2001 to 2012. It was the golden age of corporate motorsport sponsorship – a win-at-all-costs, unlimited budget era never to be seen again – so the Dodge R5P7…

GIANT RAT DANIEL ERCEG 1938 CHEVY PICK-UP “THIS is my 1938 Chev pick-up, which runs a cammed LS, airbagsall ’round, and a custom boxed chassis to get it nice and low. The plan was to keep it ratty as you see it now. I found the cab under a tree in Western Australia, while the front guards, grille and all that I already had lying around. I’ve built the whole truck myself, except the motor, which I had a mate go through. I’m hoping to have it finished off this year in amongst other projects.” PUTTING THE ‘F’ IN FUN JAMES & AMELIA PARK 1978 FORD F100 “OUR 1978 F100 is a work in progress. Amelia has always dreamed of having an F-truck, which I can appreciate too, because who…

Email your favourite funnies to gday@streetmachine.com.au. GAG OF THE MONTH AHEAD OF HIS TIME JAMES Bond walks into a bar, dressed to the nines in an impeccably tailored suit. He perches himself on a bar stool next to an extraordinarily beautiful woman and orders a martini (shaken, not stirred) from the bartender. He then proceeds to play with his wristwatch, not even paying the slightest bit of attention to the ravishing woman sitting beside him. The woman, however, has definitely noticed James! Intrigued by his seeming disinterest, she asks him, “Is your lady friend running late?” “No”, replies Bond. “I’m just testing my new technologically advanced watch.” The beautiful woman cocks an eyebrow at him. “Oh? What’s so special about it?” “Well, this watch can forensically scan my surroundings and…