Street Machine

IF CAR events were used to measure the strength of the economy, Australia would be on top of the OECD right now. Almost anywhere with a decent-sized population is well-serviced with shows, cruises, motorsport, burnout events, cars & coffee meets and

AN EXAMPLE of one of Holden’s most iconic modern muscle cars – the CV8 Monaro – is about to undergo a comprehensive restoration and rethink at the hands of its original creators. Holden has teamed up with Craig Lowndes and a select number of key buil

THE Queensland Hot Rod Show is one of the longest-running indoor shows in the country, and notched up its 48th event in early July. The event went into hiatus last year – after shows at the Brisbane Convention Centre in 2015-2017 – but was back this

WE LOVE a street party, and it is obvious plenty of you guys do too, thanks to the success of Red CentreNATS in Alice Springs. The good news is Central Queensland will get its own automotive street party soon, with the first Rockynats kicking off in

20TH EDITION AT LAST! Street Machine Hot Rod #20 is out on newsstands now! As always, the mag is a labour of love for our writers, photographers and artists, and in many ways,Hot Rodis the pride of the SM fleet. It is not only the place where we ca

BASED on the early life of former moonshine runner and NASCAR legend Junior Johnson, The Last American Hero follows a southern-backwater knockabout who becomes a national sporting icon. Jeff Bridges stars as the youthful but sure-footed Elroy ‘Junior

FAST cars are in Kris Edwards’s blood. Hailing from the NSW Central Coast town of Wyong, he is the third generation in a line-up of street and track racers. Kris’s grandfather Arthur was a street racer of the bike kind through the late 1940s, before

SPEED cameras are annoying enough as it is, but imagine if those cameras were not only booking us for creeping over the limit, but for our rides being too loud? Well in the UK that might be a real possibility, with trials beginning for speed cameras

IT WAS pretty obvious to everyone watching Lego Masters earlier this year that the bloke with the cracking beard was clearly a car guy with an intimate knowledge of all things automotive, a lot of mechanical ingenuity and a really awesome T-shirt col

A BIT over 10 years ago, Angelo Furfaro bought himself a 273ci, V8-powered ’67 Valiant as an occasional cruiser. It was a real survivor, as Angelo says: “It was mint – very little rust, and all the hard stuff like glass and moulds were all pretty goo

HAVING a killer ride to cruise your beaches, pubs and cafes is one of the foundations of the street machining hobby. But the path from boring stocker to something that rattles the windows at the local RSL is often fraught with setbacks and project sc

DAVID Frake, Leo Khouri and Mark Lamb are quick to reassure us that they aren’t madmen. Although, as we stand between two irreplaceable, iconic Aussie muscle cars covered in dirt and bug guts, it would be easy to query that. Leo explains that their s

WHILE there were plenty of awesome cars designed in the 1970s, Holden’s HQ Monaro coupe has to be one of the top shapes to come out of the era of disco, fondue and bellbottoms. Mitch Godfrey’s Top 60 Elite-qualified Monaro didn’t start off as a stunn

JAI and Corrina Schluter have been drag racing together for the better part of 30 years, but their XC hardtop (SM Fords #8) was way too mental to do double duty as a street car. “We got to the point where we were sick of having a race car that sat in

WHEN our mates at Unique Cars reasoned they’d attended enough car events that it was high time they hosted one of their own, we thought we’d better tag along and suss it out. They’d seen how much fun we’d been having running events like Street Machin

SOMETIMES dreams really do come true. Just ask 35-year-old Jarrad Rogers; his 1974 G-Pak LH Torana has helped him fulfil more than one dream over the past several months. After a single rust bubble spawned a five-year ground-up rebuild, Jarrad traile

ANY traditional hot rodder worth their salt has heard of The Race Of Gentleman beach races in America, or TROG as it’s commonly known. So when the large and highly dedicated Drag-Ens Hot Rod Club decided to hold a similar event for pre-’41 period-sty

BY MY reckoning, this incredible ’63 Lincoln Continental is the ninth car of Mark Sullivan’s that we’ve featured since 2005: “Not bad going for an individual,” says Mark, who then admits: “I’ve slowed down a bit actually.” Yep, it’s been about 18 mon

WHAT blows me away about Anthony Villani’s XP coupe is that it was built 23 years ago. Yep, that impeccable blue paint is over two decades old, yet it bears hardly a blemish. “The paint, interior and wheels are exactly as I built the XP in the late 9

BEAUTIFUL Alice Springs is gearing up for the fifth running of the acclaimed Red CentreNATS circus, and it’s promising to be the biggest and baddest rendition we’ve yet seen. Run by the Summernats team together with the Northern Territory Government,

THIS month we will be repairing a rusting door corner. Whether due to lack of maintenance and/or poor design, areas such as door bottoms are prone to clogging up with all sorts of foreign material. Add in water or condensation and things tend to get

THE past couple of years have seen a flood of kick-arse go-fast bits for the venerable Holden V8 hit the market. While the iron lion will never enjoy the same level of aftermarket support that small-block Chevs and LS engines have, it is something of

THERE seems to be two main ways that modifiers put strength into vehicles. There’s the ‘railway iron’ method, where the design relies on heavy structural members that resist the applied stress from bigger engines in a simple fashion to get a strong s

COREY Columbro still has his first car, this mild-looking EH Holden, which was originally owned by his grandfather. But while it still looks as it did when Nonno had the keys, it now sports a healthy turbocharged Holden six under the bonnet. “I wante

USUALLY when Queensland’s Phil Halpin and his two sons hit the drag strip in anger they’re straddling motorbikes, but when Drag Challenge Weekend came to town a few months ago, the boys opted to trade in their crotch-rockets for a weekend in Phil’s W

AS OF 1 July 2019, leaded racing fuels are banned in Australia. They’ve been banned in most forms of motorsport in Europe for many years, and as a result the European fuel manufacturers’ main focus has been on developing unleaded racing fuels. The Fr

TIRED of building Schwarzenegger arm muscles by hauling on that small sports steering wheel of your street machine? Now there is a relatively simple answer to all that, which can overcome the steering loading effects of fat sticky tyres on those extr

I WANT to begin this month by taking a close look at the way the 2019 Gulf Western Oil Winternationals played out. The most important event on the calendar needs the weather to be good if it’s to be successful. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case thi

LONG-roofed Yank tanks really are the cat’s meow. And Manda Groves’ 1962 Chev Bel Air wagon is the perfect example, with its hectares of sheet metal punctuated by long, sleek brightwork. The huge wheelarches easily swallow the massive Intro rims as t

THE team at Australian Rod & Custom Components have you sorted for all your rear end needs with their new fabricated nine-inch housing kit. Hardware consists of a 0.119in-thick chrome-moly steel body and a 5/16in-thick chrome-moly steel third member

THERE are plenty of fabrication shops around Australia that can turn out a killer race car. But when the guys at Profab Motorsport Fabrications, the Wollongong chassis and suspension shop responsible for the most cutting-edge radial cars of the past

“I BOUGHT my Mk1 Escort three years ago. It needed a diff upgrade, along with minor items to be engineered. Soon after, the standard motor made way for a worked two-litre Pinto with a big cam, head work, forged pistons, twin 48mm Webers and a Sierra

A MAGICIAN was working on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The audience would be different each week, so the magician allowed himself to do the same tricks over and over again. There was only one problem: the captain’s parrot saw the shows every week

IT’S NOT unusual for gearheads to become obsessed by a model of car, or even a particular part. This longing could be for an HT Monaro or maybe a Trans Am front to fit to your panel van, but in Andrew ‘Macka’ McDonald’s case, it was for a pair of, er