BODY OF WORK

My wife is a fan of the SBS reality TV show Who Do You Think You Are? The show deftly traces the genealogy of various Aussie celebrities, from actors to musicians to sports stars, and inevitably throws up some skeletons in the familial closet. It occurs to me that a similar show on classic cars could have legs, since old cars as we know have usually been through multiple sets of hands on their journey through life, and often have their own ‘skeletons’.

All of this is especially the case when it comes to old race cars, as I discovered when I began chasing information on a specimen owned by Sydneysider Peter Farrelly-Rogers. I met the gregarious 70-something on a Maserati drive day at Phillip Island and assumed he was a well-heeled retiree with a garage full of Italian exotics. Peter quickly set me straight on that, as he’d been given the drive by his brother-in-law who’d won it in a charity auction. He did, however, have a unique piece of Aussie motoring history back home, in the shape of Holden LJ Torana GTR XU-1.