In the ensuing years, ROCK 4 changed hands a number of times. The Fairlane won Best Street Machine Overall at Summernats and a stack of tinware after that, and then it was won by SM reader and Ford freak Patrick Smithers.
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The engine was an HO-spec, injected 5.0-litre from an EB Falcon with its matching four-speed auto. The chosen vehicle was a 1963 Compact Fairlane, which Howard named ROCK 4, and the final configuration included a custom-fabricated chassis incorporating a double A-arm front end and four-bar rear. Howard would then get to show it for a year before it would be given away to an SM reader. It was recently treated to a banging respray by Drago Ostric.Įditor Tim Britten and builder Howard Astill negotiated a deal: Howard’s team was given nine months to build a car before debuting it at Summernats 5 in 1992. The Scorcher survives, although the driveline has been significantly changed since it was given away.
To me, that was the most exciting and most dynamic time in the Australian car industry‘s history.”
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Even Scorcher’s colour – a fizzy orange inspired by my preference for Fanta rather than Coke with a Big Mac – was on point, with bright, breezy colours (such as Holden’s Tiger Mica and Ford’s Toxic) filling showrooms in the early noughties. At the exact same time, Holden was secretly building the two-door VT Coupe that stunned us all at the 1998 Sydney Motor Show, and Ford Australia launched its Tickford T-Series V8 sedans. “I reckon we were thinking along the right lines with the Aussie muscle car theme. “As Paul Bennett sliced into the car’s B-pillars for the two-door conversion, I thought, ‘There’s no going back now!’ And so began the busiest 18 months of my life.
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“A good-condition EA GL manual with the 3.9 single-point motor was bought for $5500,” recalls GT. ‘The Sony Scorcher’ was the two-door EA Falcon muscle car that Ford never built: a 1990s hardtop with a high-performance, street-legal V8 under its snout. PROBABLY the most ambitious project car in Street Machine history was dreamed up by the team of journo Glenn Torrens, editor Mark Oastler and Expression Session guru Jeff Haggarty. The do-it-or-die knowledge of EFI I gained then has helped me immensely with many cars since.”
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With his encouragement – and his Holden workshop manuals – I sorted through the chopped-up loom wire by wire. “Luckily for me, I’d met ‘Fast Eddy’ Vieusseux while doing a Crow Cams tech story, who knew a bit about EFI. “I was on a steep learning curve, dealing with a mess of hacked-up EFI wiring and an engine that could never run properly with the standard tune in the brain-box.
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“I can’t remember if it took me six weeks or a year to get that bitch running right, but crikey, was it a task,” GT says. By the time Mark Oastler became editor, a mild 304 had been built up, at which point Glenn Torrens was tasked with getting the long-standing project finally running. Then came another pause before Owen Webb got involved to apply the graphics, as seen in the September 1996 issue, while Dragway provided a set of custom rims. We covered the rust repair, stopped for a while, then had Granville TAFE students paint it. Bought during the reign of editor Ewen Page, the ute first popped up in the mag as a rusty shitter. OUR ‘Wild Child’ WB Holden wasn’t a giveaway car – it was actually our shop truck.