Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 100 i Australian Muscle Car

Nought to 100 in a whisker over 16 years! We’re mightily proud of those performance figures. Welcome to the milestone 100th issue of Australian Muscle Car magazine. Cracking the ton is cause for much celebration. It gives us an excuse to reflect on the very first issue, which was a runaway success, and laid the platform for all the great yarns that followed. We couldn’t properly tell the story of issue #1 without tapping into the recollections of the bloke who pulled it all together, Mark Oastler. From page 42 ‘MarkO’ takes us back to late 2001 and talks us through his thinking, especially piecing together the all-important cover. He writes: “That first AMC cover had to do more than just grab attention. It also had to make a mission…

The Holden Monaro needs no introduction, but gets one anyway. Born in 1968 and named after the Monaro region in NSW, the pillarless hardtop coupe collected Bathurst victories – including the Lion’s first in 1968 – tin-top titles and a Wheels Car of the Year award all in its first generation, to cement its legend status in Australian Muscle Car lore. When Holden hinted at a new Monaro in 1998, via a knockout Sydney Motor Show concept, few expected ever to see the road-going reality. The coupe’s attractive form flowed from the pen of Holden design boss Mike Simcoe, who developed the proportions as a tape rendering on the living room wall of his home in Melbourne. Yet the VT Commodore-derived two-door prompted a hugely positive response, and in 2001…

The hot six-pack is an Australian muscle cornerstone, but by the noughties, with no modern-day Chrysler Val’ to fly the flag and the Commodore SV6 a far cry from the triple-carb LJ Torana that took Brock to his first Bathurst in ’72, it was the Blue Oval left holding the torch. The modern hot-six Falcon story started in 1991, when the EBII S-XR6 managed to overshadow the reborn Falcon V8 – the 4.0 straight six was cheaper, quicker and handled better than the new 5.0-litre Windsor S-XR8. When the BA series arrived in 2002, the Falcon was set to upset the natural order again. The 240kW XR6 Turbo was a startlingly quick machine that again asked the question: do you really need a bent-eight? Though the performance and appeal of…

Holden Commodore VTII SS The VTII SS Commodore holds – with the VSIII Commodore ute – the distinction of being the last Lion powered by the legendary overhead-valve Holden V8 engine. From origins in 1969 in the HT series, the donk was offered in 4.2-litre (253ci) and 5.0-litre forms as well as high-performance stroker 5.6 (HDT) and 5.7-litre (HSV) forms before being superseded by the imported Chevrolet Gen III V8. Its best-known form was as a 5044cc mill (the 308, mate), however from 1985 it was reduced to 304ci (4987cc) to drop Group A Commodores under a capacity cut-off that allowed a lighter racing weight and bigger wheels and tyres, and that’s how the Aussie 5.0-litre continued until bowing out in 2000. FPV BA GT Meet the model that heralded…

It’s a double celebration this issue for the Out of Action section. The first, now you’ve reached page 102, should be obvious. But OoA also celebrates 10 years of propping up the back-end of the mag. It was issue #36 in early 2008 (with KB’s Nine Sports Camaro on the cover) when we bit the bullet and gave some weathered classics their own space in these pages. Sixty-four issues on we’re still receiving pics of cars requiring TLC... or a miracle. So this issue we present ‘the best of’ OoA. Maybe that should be the ‘worst of’. Dunno. The blurbs are from their first airing in AMC, so don’t take the information as gospel. OoA will live on, so get out your cameras and start snapping some old muscle cars…

When Australian Muscle Car magazine first hit newsstands over 16 years ago it was amid a resurgence of interest in Aussie-built performance cars. Issue #1 was published a matter of months after Holden released the reborn Monaro, as Ford and its new partner Prodrive prepared to revive the famous GT badge. Both manufacturers were embracing nostalgia power to help market their new products. So while the new feature-based magazine’s bread and butter was examining the past, the early pages of each issue were given over to reporting on these highly anticipated new models. There was plenty to report, too. Our first issue led with news of the latest generation Monaro’s planned return to the racetrack in 2002 via the Nation’s Cup category and the Bathurst 24 Hour race. This story…

It was a tough call choosing between the FPV BA GT and the BFII GT Cobra for inclusion in our top six most sought-after and significant modern muscle cars list. The former represents the birth of Ford Performance Vehicles and the return of the GT badge, and made a massive impact when it arrived in 2002. The latter stands as the last and, arguably, most desirable of the FPV models based on the sixth-generation Ford Falcon. That desirability stems from its link to the XC Falcon Cobras of 1978. We had to have one of them, because the BA-BFII series represented a return to form for Ford via FPV. Its huge popularity saw the BA GT eclipse the iconic XW GT and GT-HO with a sales tally of more than…

When AMC embarks on a road car-themed story our first port of call is to the relevant club (or clubs) for assistance in contacting owners of the machines we seek. Rarely does clubland let us down, invariably embracing our request with enthusiasm and professionalism. When the project is to the size and scale of this 18-page whopper, we needed a sustained-level of help. Sure enough, both clubs that assisted us here went above and beyond the call of duty given the significant time investment on a weekday with club members re-organising work and family commitments. Both organisations were truly superb. The HSV guys are covered overleaf, but here we give some ‘love’ back to the FPV Tickford Club of NSW for so heartily ‘buying into’ the mission. The club describes…

Arrow AU Falcon T he inaugural AMC cover featured an unfinished custom two-door Falcon AU. It was Ford’s answer to Holden’s shock Monaro rebirth of a few years earlier, except for the fact that Ford Australia had absolutely nothing to do with it. Rather, the Arrow Falcon coupe was the brainchild of brothers Troy and Clayton Hillier, renowned builders of hearses and stretch limos at their family-owned business in Tenterfield in northern NSW. It was Troy Hillier, a self-confessed Ford nut, who came up with the idea of expanding the business to build and sell his custom two-door Falcon. And what a machine it promised to be… if something of a left-field choice for second top billing on a start-up magazine’s all-important first cover. The mag’s founding editor Mark Oastler…

“Oh, Al’s out on his boat,” came the disembodied female American voice some 15,000km away on the other end of the phone line. “You can call him on his cell phone.” Picturing a neat little half-cabin moored alongside a jetty somewhere – it was about 9pm Florida time – I dialled the number, only to find that ‘Al’ wasn’t sitting comfortably at a wharf pottering around with some minor matter, but instead was aboard his 44ft, twin-diesel Powercat catamaran that was sitting awkwardly on a large lump of coral. This, clearly, was not a man who sat around taking life as it came; he went out and grabbed hold of it in big chunks. Al Turner would later ask us not to mention too much about the boat: “I had…

The Unfair Advantage So, you and your mate have bought yourself some slot cars to have some fun with over a few beers. He’s a Ford man and you like the idea of racing his Brut 33 Falcon with your HDT Torana, and kicking his butt like it’s 1974 again. But wait. That Scalextric Torana is no match for the Falcon. Why can’t you keep up? When your Torana hits a curve, it trips and rolls over like a Las Vegas hooker. Unlike the heyday of the real L34, the Scalextric Falcon is a better racer, and the reasons for it are plain and simple. The dynamics that help your Scalextric hang in the slot mean that the wider and longer chassis of the Falcon is more predictable in a…

The cover story of the very first issue of Australian Muscle Car in 2001 named the six ‘Conrod Classics’ you could own for less than $20K. The machinery this modest budget bought you back then now brings a tear to the eye. How about an HK Monaro GTS 327, Falcon XB GT Hardtop, Torana SL/R 5000 L34 or VC Brock HDT Commodore for what was – and still is – new small-car money? We wish we’d taken our own advice, given the Muscle Car boom that’s happened over the ensuing five years, and the continuing value growth these Australian performance icons have enjoyed. We’ll have more on the values of these cars today elsewhere in this milestone 100th issue, but here it’s our job to heed the lessons learned and…

Wheels magazine called it ‘Australia’s First Supercar’ when it tested the HSV W427 in its August 2008 issue. Launched at the height of the muscle-car boom, this was the most serious Australian high-performance sedan in decades. The W427 was conceived around 2004 by then-Holden managing director Denny Mooney and then-HSV boss, the late Tom Walkinshaw, after a chat about how to mark HSV’s 20th anniversary. The VE hadn’t even hit showrooms, yet it was clear the next-gen Commodore, which would also spawn HSV’s E-Series, was the machine. And the 7.0-litre LS7 from the Corvette Z06 and C6.R was in the frame as the donk. The W427 was the trail-blazer, setting the template at HSV for an all-out engineering exercise a decade before the GTSR W1. The hand-built, 7008cc (427ci) V8…

BUILDING a race car for the road has been the genesis of many an Australian muscle car great, but it wasn’t motorsport homologation that gave rise to the most potent Aussie sedan ever built. Rather, the GTSR W1 is the product of Holden Special Vehicles throwing everything at a VFII Commodore-bodied high-performer to give the model – and both brands – the send-off they deserve. Every aspect of the specification of this special sedan – codenamed ‘P860HP’ during development – screams track car rather than the tourer the Australian four-door sedan has most often served as across the generations. At the heart of the $169,990 super sedan – that was the new price; the W1 is long sold out and you’ll pay much more for a used one – is…

“As far as HSV and their dealerships are concerned they see us as a major benefit – we are the best marketing tool they have” - Joe Garzaniti Club President The HSV Owners Club of NSW (incorporating HDT) currently has 280 members on its books, predominantly owners of later model cars. The club is open to owners of the Australian-built high performance vehicles bearing the HSV and HDT SV badges. “We started as the NSW branch of the HDT Owners Club in the mid 1980s and have evolved over the years,” explains club president Joe Garzaniti. “When I joined in mid 1990s it was the HDT-HSV Owners Club of NSW and, in the 2000s, we went through another name change which is the HSV Owners Club of NSW incorporating…

Brian Stratton There’s just so much going on in Brian’s amazing photo from March 25, 1973. His image, sent in by his brother, Neil, has magnificently captured the chaos at Oran Park that day. “Fred Gibson blew his engine coming over The Dogleg with Morris behind him,” Neil writes. “Both slid all the way down the hill followed by Bond who made it through, while Grice clipped the outside fence. Then, as Fred Gibson was getting ready to get out, Don Holland joined the party.” As Fred (back to camera) marches off, a fire marshal hits the deck after jumping out of the ute. Brian’s other shots show action from Warwick Farm and Amaroo. “Steve Snuggs Thought I’d share some pics I took at Adelaide International Raceway in the mid…