Table of contents for July 2024 in Street Machine

IT’S back! Street Machine Drag Challenge 2024 is all set for October/November, and it’s going to be a big one! This year, the event will start and finish at Calder Park Raceway, calling in along the way at Mildura’s Sunset Strip, Dragway at the Bend in Adelaide and Heathcote Park Raceway. It is the ultimate test for your street car and the most fun you can have on four wheels! To give our spectators a stack of extra entertainment, we’ll be hosting a Summernats Pro Burnouts qualifying round at The Bend after racing finishes on Friday afternoon, along with another massive Pro Burnouts qualifier that will run side-by-side with the racing under lights at Heathcote Park on Saturday night. And once racing is over on Sunday, our new VIP Grudge…

EMAIL your missives to gday@streetmachine.com.au. Keep it short and sweet! > LETTER OF THE MONTH WHEREFORE ART THOU, OTRON? HI GUYS, your magazine did an article on my black Holden Gemini, OTRON (pictured right), back in the Oct-Nov 1991 edition. I am trying to track the car down, as it was so unique with the electronics and computers I installed. I donated the car to the Cancer Foundation of Western Australia in April 1997 so they could auction it off for a donation. They informed me that Youngs Holden in Perth purchased the car. I contacted Youngs, but it has been taken over by Youngs WA, and no one there could tell me where the car went after that. I have also tried Facebook, Google and the like, to no…

IF YOU’VE ever been to the Bright Rod Run (and you damn well should’ve), odds are you’ve seen Joel Beatson lapping in an early Falcon. He’s a native of the gorgeous Victorian town, and his business, JRB Automotive & Offroad, sponsors the iconic weekend every year. “I’ve always had a car to cruise around in: a couple of other old XPs and XLs,” Joel says. It was one of those cars that set him on the path to the Kurrajong Green XP sedan delivery you see here – though it’s well beyond anything he’s done previously. “In 2014 or 2015, I had an XP Fairmont I’d bought from a mate that had hit a deer,” Joel says. “I needed some panels, and a guy had them at a swap meet.…

DON’T let this ’69 Dodge Coronet R/T’s sleek, factory-appearing exterior fool you – there’s a 2000hp, twin-turbo 572ci Nelson Racing Engines Hemi lurking under its snorkelled hood. Owned by Chris Retzos and built by Shane Rowe and the team at Southern Rod & Custom, the Dodge was crafted from the outset around that head-kicking engine, but there’s much more to this car than its character-defining mill. The Coronet has been in the works for 15 years. It was all but finished 10 years ago, not long after we featured it in bare-metal form in the February 2013 edition of Street Machine. When Southern Rod & Custom relocated from Deniliquin to Shepparton, the car went into storage with only the partially finished trim left to be finalised. SRC then got very…

WHEN Andy and Donna Minas kicked off the Sydney Hot Rod & Custom Auto Expo in 2014, it seemed like an ambitious undertaking. The Rosehill Racecourse venue had already proven its worth as a good location for an auto event in the days of Russ Avis’s Sydney Car Festival, but starting a brand-new indoor car show – without the drawing power of driving events – must have been a daunting prospect. Nevertheless, the Auto Expo was well supported from the outset, and the addition of the Nostalgia Lane hall in 2018 made the event a drawcard for lovers of traditional rods and customs from all over the country. That innovation was led by Andy Colalillo and the Outkasts Car Club, and they’ve curated an incredible line-up of cars each year…

SCAN TO HEAR THE RED MOTOR SING ON THE DYNO! DEAN Trounson spent his teenage years submitting art for our Expression Session pages, which goes some way to explaining why his first-car tastes were a bit different to the average P-plater back in 2010. “I really wanted an FB station wagon – which I still want to get – but they were just out of our price range,” he says. “I then spotted an HR on eBay that seemed pretty honest looking. My dad and brother went to have a look, and the deal was done.” The bogged-up, two-tone green body wasn’t to Dean’s taste, so he soon bought an HJ sedan as an interim daily driver and pulled the HR apart. “I always lusted after the white with red…

IT’S SUCH AN ADRENALINE RUSH! HAVING A LEVEL OF CONTROL IN AN UNPREDICTABLE SITUATION IS A GREAT FEELING BOBBIE-Maree scored more than just a trophy when she debuted her turbo Barra-powered Datsun 120Y on the Northern Nats burnout pad – she also left with a ring on her finger! We caught up with the newcomer to talk about her first time on the pad. How was your Northern Nats experience? Better than expected! It was my first burnout in the car, so there was lots of pressure and nerves, but we did three skids over the event and won second place in the Six-Cylinder class. It was a surprise, because I thought I was being judged in the ladies’ class; I didn’t realise I was being judged along with the…

YOUR eyes aren’t deceiving you – this 60 Series LandCruiser isn’t some tow rig that got lost on its way to drop off a trailer in the pits at Drag Challenge. It was actually 20-year-old Josh Abela’s weapon of choice for DC 2023, and it rocks a stock-bottom-end 6.0-litre LS and a juicy shot of nitrous! Josh is the son of Adrian Abela, who himself has taken on Drag Challenge several times in their now-sold Barra turbo XH panel van. With that moved on and his old man’s next machine still under construction when DC ’23 rolled around, Josh turned to the Cruiser to take on our five-day drag-and-drive marathon in October last year. Josh picked up the neat 60 Series just a few months before the event, purchasing it…

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. SHAWN MCCANN 1963 CHEVROLET C10 “AFTER many years of owning tough Holdens, in 2017 I started yearning for an old project that would be more of a cruiser, so I scored this Chev C10 off a mate who needed funds for a larger project. She was a bit of a plain Jane, but she did come airbagged and with a small-block V8 in the engine bay, so she was the perfect starting point for my plans. I’d spent a few house deposits on shiny paintjobs for my past projects, but this time the plan was to keep…

WE ALL pine for the lost 70s Aussie classics, lamenting the ones that got away and the missed opportunity to spec and order one brand new. But Andrew South reckons all is not lost: he plans to build brand-new cars with iconic 1970s looks but with modern running gear, under the name Drive South. Andrew says the idea came to him when he was en route to pick up some beaten-up car parts. “As I was driving there, I was thinking, what am I doing? I’m buying all these parts; it’s costing me a fortune and I gotta restore them,” he says. “Why don’t I build a new car? Is that such a crazy idea? What would that look like?” As he already owns an original LX Torana built for…

I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TIME I’D RUN UNTIL I SAW MY DAUGHTER RUNNING ALONG THE FENCE LINE, SCREAMING OUT, “DAD, YOU DID IT. YOU RAN AN EIGHT-SECOND PASS!” WHEN Michael Gonzalez isn’t busy making eight-second passes in CHOCTOP, his street-driven, LSA-fed VC Commodore, or cruising one of the many other cars in his collection, he can be found managing Springmount Raceway, home to Far North Queensland’s biggest horsepower hoedown, Northern Nats (see p. 48 for full feature). We caught up with Michael at this year’s event for a quick chinwag. Tell us about your cars. I’ve got three Fords and three Holdens in my shed. I have a genuine 1971 GT Falcon, a 1974 XB, and a 1979 XD 351 ute – all V8s and period-correct. Then I’ve got a…

THE SAGA CONTINUES NINE years after Mad Max: Fury Road reinvigorated the action genre (and with it the Mad Max franchise itself), the follow-up flick, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, has arrived, once again directed by George Miller. Our intrepid scribe Jack Houlihan was quick to get himself to a screening, and you can check out what he thought of the new fillum on page 16 of this issue. But we were keen to learn our readers’ opinions; here are a selection of your thoughts from our Facebook page. Dave Robbo – Just took my 86-year-old dad and my four kids. Good flick, mad cars, solid story and epic scenery. We all walked out happy. Winged Sixx – If the Interceptor ain’t in it for long or at all, it’s…

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THE PRO BURNOUT CATEGORY OFFERED A $15,000 FIRST PRIZE AND TWO SPOTS IN THE NEW PRO BURNOUT SERIES AT SUMMERNATS 37 SPRINGMOUNT Raceway’s three-day Northern Nats event is famous for offering its entrants myriad ways to smash tyres and burn copious fossil fuels. Drags, burnouts, roll racing, go-to-whoa and Skid Row are all on the table, making the most of the venue’s A-grade quarter-mile and spacious burnout pad. Located an hour’s drive south-west of Cairns, Springmount is nestled in the foothills of the 907m-high Walsh Bluff, making it one of the most picturesque strips in Australia. This year, Northern Nats partnered with the crew behind Street Machine Summernats to help officiate the burnout comps, supercharge the show car side of things and generally promote the hell out of the event.…

WITH a production run of about 6000 units, the ’57 Chevy Nomad is the rarest ’57 Chev of them all (see sidebar below). So, when it came time to give their treasured longroof a full rebuild, Donna and John McCoy-Lancaster didn’t want to start hacking it up. Instead, they took the restomod route, maintaining their Nomad’s timeless styling while making it stop, steer, ride and accelerate infinitely better than it did when new. With three more ’57s in their shed, along with a host of other classic and collectible machinery, the duo know what they’re on about. Luckily, they had plenty of time to plan the rebuild, as the procurement process of the car they now call COOL took some 20 years. “After landing in Australia in ’78, it had…

SURE, things were great 30 years ago when you could pick up a cool piece of Aussie muscle for a few grand, throw some performance parts at it and have some fun on the street or strip. But most of those cars really weren’t that quick by today’s standards, and the very few properly swift machines at the pointy end of the sport were crafted by legends achieving goals the rest of us could only dream about. Fast-forward to today and we’ve got genuine street cars making 2000hp and beyond – and if you’re not making at least 1000hp at the tyres, are you even trying? Even average folk like you and me can build a quick car these days, and that’s largely thanks to the advances in engine management…

CHRIS Kurumolla’s VL Commodore is one bad-arse machine. Powered by a single-cam RB30 six-cylinder, it has run 6.64@209mph over the quarter-mile, and there’s more to come! Yet while its accomplishments on a 275 radial are extraordinary, the car retains real street composure despite its polycarbonate windows, parachutes and race wheels. Chris, who owns Melbourne workshop CK Automotive, is clearly a capable racer and mechanic, and his VL has been built to an impeccable standard. From the very beginning of the project, he had seven-second quarters in mind. “We started with a dead-stock VL with the intention of running a seven-second pass,” he explains. “We were focused on single-cam RB30 performance only, but we really wanted to keep the car as street as possible – something my mum could drive.” Chris’s…

TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK JESSE HELDENS EH HOLDEN WAGON “WE BOUGHT this 1964 EH in June last year as an abandoned project that desperately needed life. With a deadline of Cooly Rocks On 2024, my 24-year-old fiancée (an automotive detailer) and I (a 28-year-old automotive spray painter) have a lot of work ahead of us, as the car is being built with minimal tools in a carport. Mods include a small-block V8, three-quarter chassis, a custom diff, four-link, wheel tubs and an all ’round airbag set-up. The floor as been raised and a trans tunnel made to fit the Turbo 350 and one-piece tailshaft, and the front and back seats have been modified to accommodate the tunnel. The doors have been modernised by squaring the corners rather than keeping…

NINE years after Fury Road cemented itself as an all-time action great, its follow-up, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, is finally here. The new film makes no apologies for being a direct extension of Fury Road’s insane universe. A young version of our buzz-cut heroine (Anya Taylor-Joy) is yoinked from her family’s “place of abundance” within the first few minutes, kicking off a protracted cat-and-mouse game involving Furiosa’s mother and the crew of the warlord Dementus (including Two Hands’s Acko, David Field). We meet Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) atop an Aussie-designed, radial-powered JRL Lucky 7 chopper, cementing him as the biker bad guy we’ve been missing from the Mad Max franchise since 1981. With his crew including Mr Norton, Mr Harley and more, he’s a proper successor to the Toecutter with…

THE RESPRAY AND BIG WHEELS ARE BARELY DIGGING A NAIL INTO THE FLOW-COATED SURFACE, BECAUSE PROGM8 HAS BEEN TOTALLY REBORN UNDERNEATH WITH shitloads of detail and a stove-hot 355 from Flowcraft Race Engines, Frank Darmanin’s first incarnation of PROGM8 was more car than most of us will ever have in our sheds. Debuting in 2007, the VH SL/E became a staple of the show car circuit. “I drove it a bit, but I didn’t get to race on a slick with the old engine,” Frank recounts. “Then I had a little mishap, so I tore it down and started again!” It takes proper ’nads to pull apart such an epic car to essentially start from scratch, but the result is one of the most beautifully finished Commodores we’ve ever seen.…

WHEN Peter Marriott was a young bloke in the 80s, he built a Jade Green windowless HT panel van that was a pretty neat thing in its day. “My panel van had killer paint on it – as good as anybody had back then,” he recalls. “My brother and I painted it and did all the panelwork ourselves.” But while Pete’s HT looked great and had excellent trim, under the bonnet was a humble 202 six-cylinder, with gears shifted via a three-on-the-tree. As an apprentice electrician at the time, Peter didn’t have the funds to go any wilder, and he ended up selling the van in 1986, instead focusing his attention on drag racing. If you’ve had even a passing interest in West Aussie drag racing, you’ll no doubt recognise…

WE’VE all got stories about meeting our heroes, and they often end badly. But Rob Gorgievski picked the right kind of hero in Frank Marchese, coming away with an enduring friendship and a big-power, show-quality XW Falcon to boot. In fact, this juicy GT replica began as Frank’s personal project. “I bought the shell during COVID as a project from the back of a shed,” he explains. “The car had been used as a donor over the past 20 years.” Despite its pillaged status, what remained was straight and dry, offering a perfect blank canvas. Meanwhile, Rob was on the hunt for a Candy Apple Red XW. “I actually found a completed car in Melbourne a few years back, but the owner wasn’t interested in selling it,” he says. “I…

I LOVE JZ ENGINES, AND GOING FROM THE 265 HEMI TO A TOYOTA MILL SEEMED LIKE A NICE FIT AS WELL AS FAMILY heirlooms go, Benny Royal’s 1973 Toyota Corona Mk2 is a hell of a lot cooler than an old piece of jewellery. “It’s been in the family for 35 years; I was two years old when my parents bought it,” Benny recalls. “My dad hotted it up in the 90s with a 265 Hemi, and it did a best of 14.3, which was pretty quick for its time.” As the 90s came to a close, the Corona got parked up, until an 18-year-old Benny decided he wanted to give it another lease on life. “It needed some love, so I started chipping away at it with a mate,”…

To have your product featured here, call Kim Simonsen on 0439 422 285 or email kim.simonsen@streetmachine.com.au. 01 GATED COMMUNITY PULSAR Turbo Systems’ new external wastegate kits for BA and BF Ford Falcons are now available! The kits include a cast elbow housing and screamer pipe, and while they’re perfectly suited to Pulsar’s own Next GEN 45mm wastegates (pictured left), they can also work with Turbosmart 45mm and GFB 44mm ’gates for those who already have a wastegate. Either way, the result will be improved mid-range torque for your BA/BF engine. Visit pulsarturbo.com.au for more information or scan the QR code below. 02 THE DAILY GRIND THE new Metalmaster HG-200 bench grinder from Hare & Forbes Machineryhouse boasts sturdy construction for consistent performance you can rely on. It’s equipped with a powerful 1hp…

Email your favourite funnies to gday@streetmachine.com.au. > GAG OF THE MONTH FALL GUYS THREE men are at a pub, discussing their experiences with skydiving. The first man says, “Well, I jumped from the plane at 1500m and was supposed to pull my parachute at 800m, but when I did, nothing happened. I tried again and again: at 600m, nothing; then 450m and still nothing! Finally, at 300m, my parachute opened and I landed safely, only slightly injuring my ankle.” The second man responds, “Pffft! That’s nothing! When I went skydiving, I jumped from 2000m and was supposed to pull my parachute at 1000m. But as 1000m approached, I pulled the ripcord and nothing happened; 800m, still nothing. Then 600m, then 450, and still nothing. I got down to 300m, and…

THE humble Holden V8 has long been considered by many to be the poor cousin in the GM small-block family, especially when compared to the more widely favoured small-block Chev and LS platforms. But with the number of plastic fantastics that have landed on our Mill of the Month page of late, you could be excused for thinking they’re the hot new thing in performance engines! This one is an absolute belter – a 400ci, twin-turbo Torque-Power Little Paw, buttoned up by the gurus at ProFlo Performance. “I can’t wait for this one,” grins ProFlo’s Paul Sant. “It’s going into the SIKJIM LH Torana drag car, which has always had a Holden in it. It used to have a factory block and two older-style turbos, and it made plenty of…