Australian Muscle Car

A Holden Dealer Team Monaro race car that never raced at Bathurst has sold for the unprecedented sum of $750,000. While the figure falls short of Lloyds’ own pre-auction prediction of more than a million dollars, the sale has set a new record for the

The Supercars season swung back into action at Sydney Motorsport Park in June, bringing to an end a Covid19 pandemic-induced hiatus of some four months. Like all professional sports getting back under way amid the pandemic, the Supercars raced at the

As Peter Brock’s public relations manager during Brock’s spell with the Holden Racing Team in the 1990s, Paul ‘Wally’ Weissel got to know the Great Man better than most. In this series, Wally recalls some of the fun from his time living with and mana

I loved the story about the Super Chicken HQ van, it looks incredible. l just can’t get enough of stories about our local car industries quirky one-off production models and the prototypes that didn’t make it. The WB Kingswood and Premier sedans and

Motor racing is a complex sport, especially at the professional level. The reasons manufacturers spend so much money risking their reputations on the track are many and varied. For some, just being involved in competition is itself enough: a chance t

In the beginning at the Holden Dealer Team, Colin Bond was the undisputed lead driver. Bond’s versatility meant he could be employed in racing as well as in rallying, and that was how things operated for the first six months of the HDT. His success r

Bob Morris was a young star on the rise at the end of the ‘60s. As part of the factory Toyota team he’d won his class in Corollas at Bathurst in 1968 and ’69. Those performances would have been in the back of Harry Firth’s mind when Morris and his fa

Looking back, Ian Tate concedes that an upgraded GTS 350 might have been a better option at Bathurst in 1970 than the XU-1. But that doesn’t mean he thinks that the HDT could have won with the Monaro. The Monaro was not without its shortcomings; acco

“We wanted to stay in racing, and the Torana was the only way we could do it,” Felice says. While from the outside it looked like Holden was out there all guns blazing in rally competition and on the track in racing, within the company the situation

Harry Firth is commonly regarded as the father of the Torana XU-1. In reality, the Holden Dealer Team boss was probably more like a kind of XU-1 midwife, or even foster parent. It was Firth who made sure that the XU-1 package Holden delivered was the

David Sheldon featured in the previous issue of AMC as the co-creator of the Holden six-powered Mini Sports Sedan, the ‘Molden’. After the Molden experiment Sheldon opted for a more conventional avenue of racing: a HT Monaro GTS 350 in Series Product

Holden didn’t want to race it, and therefore it missed its chance at Bathurst, but a HG Monaro GTS 350 did find its way into Series Production racing. Towards the end of 1972 Keith Hanson raced this bronze HG GTS 350 in Series Production races at the

It may have been the ‘Command Performer’, according to Holden’s advertising campaign, but it’s the car that never got to perform. Not only was it never put to the test against the GT-HO Phase II at Bathurst, but the true nature of its performance pot

In one sense, the Chevrolet SS assembled in the Republic of South Africa between 1971 and 1973 was General Motors’ version of Ford’s Fairmont GT, aka the Rhino GT. In another, the HG-based Chev SS was Holden’s forerunner to Ford’s XC Falcon Cobra – a

Reflecting on the motor racing career of Digby Cooke, it is easy to believe it took him 20 years to become an overnight sensation in qualifying his Holden HT Monaro GTS 350 on the front row of the 1969 Bathurst 500. However, that would be selling his

Drama at Amaroo Park’s Dunlop Loop shortly after the start of the opening round of the ’74 Sun-7 Chesterfield Series. This seven-car melee was triggered when John French unsuccessfully tried to go down the inside of Bo Seton’s Escort (car 53) on the

A circuit like Hume Weir could never happen today. And even if it did, it would never be deemed worth of hosting top-level racing, such as Supercars, TCR, S5000 or even the second-tier likes of Touring Car Masters and Porsche Cup. But back in the day

Back in 2017 when we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1967 XR Falcon GT (AMC #96) we pondered the fate of those XRs that raced in that year’s Bathurst 500. The white GT of Ian and Leo Geoghegan that finished second survives and a replica of the

For this issue, Slot Addiction sat down to talk with Dominic Grimes, president of the Australian Scalextric Racing and Collecting Club. Dominic also describes himself as a slot car ‘custodian, so his views on slot car collecting are informative and e

Taswegian reader Ian Stewart got in contact with AMC after our Craven Wild cover story in issue # 116. Ian was at Symmons Plains when the Morris/Grice Commodore made its race debut in early 1980, and fortunately for us he’d brought along his Kodak te

King Street, Newtown, is renowned as Sydney’s uber-cool high street, the height of inner-west Sydney chic. But back in the early 1970s Newtown had none of the cafes, restaurants or designer fashion retail stores for which it’s famous today, and gener

The best race ‘performance’ for the six-cylinder D&P Traders Torana XU-1 Sports Sedan came at Oran Park, when it was only narrowly beaten by Pete Geoghegan’s Super Falcon Improved Production machine, as Gillard explains: “There was a huge crash at BP

Perhaps buoyed by Gillard’s strong results in the six-cylinder XU-1, in 1972 Darcy Peck decided to upgrade to a V8 version. However, the D&P Traders V8 XU-1 would be a classic case of bigger not in fact being better… It was, Gillard says, a ‘horrible

Idon’t think I’ve been so happy to be wrong for ages. Remember not long ago I said there would never be a model of the Group C Nissan Bluebird? Well, Authentic Collectibles just had to go and make me wrong! And well done them. Plans are afoot for a 1

Some people like to spend lots of time and effort modifying their model cars. If you’d really like a hotted-up die-cast Monaro but lack the time (and amazing skills) to do it, this might be your next-best thing. As with Biante’s earlier HK and HT Mon

Some muscle cars are bought by loving owners who pamper them like members of the family. Other muscle cars, though, aren’t so lucky. Some get stolen, smashed or thrashed. Some get parked and lost under a layer of dust in an old shed, others get left

Win on Sunday, sell on Monday. It’s a hoary old cliché of motor racing, but back in the Series Production era of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s it really did hold cache for both manufacturers and their dealers. Take Fair Deal Car Sales, one of two Hold