STAGE WRITE
B
RISBANE is an awesome place for
street machines, hot rods, muscle
cars and cool bikes. Not to mention
a great nightlife with a smorgasbord
of live bands to see. The only thing that sucks
in Brisbane is the traffic!
I rode out to Little Mick’s Koolsville Studios
shop, and his wife Tracey told me there was a
car and bike show on at the Hamilton Hotel –
the 4th Annual Rods & Rockabilly Festival. By
the time I arrived quite a few cars and bikes
had left the show, but I did happen to notice a
sleeper that I absolutely loved.
Robert Toy’s 1957 FE Holden ute is painted
in its original factory pale green and most
people would walk right past it without giving
it a second glance. However I noticed the
number plate had ‘308’ in it. Could it be a
Holden V8 under the bonnet?
I walked around the tidy green ute and
noticed the super-neat chrome-moly ’cage,which had a 2008 ANDRA inspection sticker
with bolt-in intrusion bars, and I knew straight
away this had been a 10-second street car.
I asked Rob’s wife Rachel if I could have
a look under the bonnet. There it was: a V8
Holden with a Harrop single-plane sitting in
the engine bay. This was no ordinary ute. In
this day and age of LS1s being shoehorned
into everything, it was so pleasing to see a V8
Holden powering this sneaky street animal.
After I took some photos of other cars,
caravans, hot rods, bikes and the band, I
came back to talk to Rob. The old ute has run
10.4s at 130mph naturally aspirated with a
383 stroker in it, but after Rob and Rachel’s
first son was born seven years ago, the FE
was retuned to make it a daily driver. The big
cammed 383 has been replaced with a 355,
but it’s still no slouch on the strip, running
11.2s at 120mph.
The 355 has a COME stroker crank and Scatrods with forged pistons. Compression is only
around 10.5:1 and the engine runs on BP
Ultimate straight out of the bowser. The sump
is a High Energy, while the oil pump is a stock
GM. Marty White took care of the cast-iron VN
heads; Marty’s dad John White is a legendary
drag racer from the 70s. The intake valves are
2.02 inches and exhaust valves are 1.6 inches,
operated on by a solid-roller Comp cam.
Rob built his own exhaust pipes and they’re
around 32 inches long. The 1.875-inch-
diameter primaries with a 3.5-inch collector
dump into a twin 3½-inch system with
Hurricane straight-through mufflers. The
pipes were a piece of cake for Rob, as he
owns and runs Toy’s Muffler & Mechanical
in Brisbane.
The bulletproof Bob Grant-built two-speed
Powerglide has an eight-inch 4500rpm stall
converter, sending the power back to 31-spline
nine-inch LSD with 3.55:1 gears. The tyres for