History
This was my first car, purchased from Bayford Motors after it was traded in on a Fairlane when I worked there in the Spare Parts dept in 1979. Originally dark brown with white roof and interior, 308 column shift auto, Trimatic, bench seat, it underwent a few (!) changes over the 13 years I owned it, only selling it as it could not be registered in SA when I moved in 1990. It was fully street legal and registered in Victoria and I drove it everywhere including the 1988 Summernats, where it took out Top Wagon.
Never trailered, it was great fun to drive and never ran a bonnet either apart from long trips. I removed every single nut and bolt on that car, knew it inside out (and the Pontiacs I have today are much the same mechanicals which makes life much easier for old buggars like me). With over 600hp, altho 5mpg and only on Avgas or Avgas blend meant plenty of trips with drums in the back of my Gemini to Essendon Airport to keep the beast cruising. I think my mum hated to see it gone more than I did when I sold it around 1994 as she cried for days (but it could have been that she knew then that I wasn't moving back to Victoria).
Still miss it, I always intended to be 70 and cruising in it which would have happened if I didn't leave Victoria. Funnily enough, I collect pub stuff here in SA and a guy come all the way over from Melbourne to buy some signs from me and he saw a picture of the car on the wall in my gamesroom. It turned out he had a pretty impressive XR or XT (cant remember sorry mate) and he knew the guy who bought it from me. He had just fitted a new big block and tranny into it after many years (i sold it as a roller) and sent me some pictures of it on the back of a tray truck on the way back to his house. What a small world!
Modifications
Too many to mention. 3/4 chassis and tubs with ladder bars, narrowed 9" with 4.56 LSD by John Taverna (who I worked with at Ford before he started his own business from his backyard, RIP John) and 14"x15" centrelines filled out the tubs.
The pic shows the tunnel-rammed 454 over 60thou (468?) with plenty of good gear inside, but like all revheads, it wasnt enough. I had already gone from 308, to wild 308 that ran 12.9 in this before tubs), to 350, to 396, to 427 and then this engine pictured with a Turbo400 full manual with 2500 stall. I had built a real killer engine with staggered ram mechanical fuel injection, big dollar alloy heads, full roller etc, that was to go in it, but when selling the engine pictured, a guy saw the new engine on the stand along with killer new Turbo400 and made me a cash offer I couldn't refuse and this was never fitted. This engine made 740hp and 650 ft lbs at 6500rpm with single 850 carb where it ran out of flow, it would have been great fun to putt around if it had gone in.
It was treated to a full bare metal 2 pack paint job by my best mate John Wus (who went on to paint plenty of top award winning show cars like Ron Barclays Coral Blue HQ ute) as his first real project car over plenty of beer in my mums shed. All trimmed out by the lord of the trim Carlo Laudani at Reservoir Motor Trimmers (who I went to school with) and killer exhaust by another good mate, Mark Land at Settlement Rd Exhausts. I also had a full custom rewire done with circuit breakers rather than fuses fitted in the glovebox. It was also fully engineered by Laurie Sparks and fully approved by RTA.
I was very lucky to be in an area where so many friends were talented rev heads (like Johnny Lang of Street'n'Strip engineering, who put in the cage in his backyard before he started out by himself) and at the right age where 2 jobs meant plenty of cash and the right time where pro-street was just getting popular in the USA. I was also lucky that John Taverna was on my side when I said I wanted to build a wagon (as everyone else said not to be mad and build a monaro etc) and let me do plenty of trading and work to make the pro-street conversion pretty inexpensive dollar-wise and build something that nobody had seen before.
