B
UILDING a Summernats cruiser was a
pretty popular pastime in the early years
of the event, but it seems to have fallen
out of favour in recent times. The whole
idea is to create a high-impact, low-
buck cruiser that will turn heads and
ensure you and all your mates have a great time
at the ’Nats – and that’s exactly what Dave and
Robert Stephenson decided to do after visiting
Summernats 30 as spectators.
“We used to go every year,” Dave says, “but
we hadn’t been in a while because of young
kids and families. We’d never actually been
for a drive in a car at Summernats, always just
been there as spectators, but a mate of a mate
had an XD Falcon there and he took us for a
couple of laps. It was heaps better than walking
around, so we decided to bring a car for the
next year.”
One of the things that had held Dave back in
the past was thinking that a car had to be really
good to be worth entering and they didn’t have
anything that fit the bill. “The only way we could
make something good enough is to make a
Summernats cruiser, because then it doesn’t
have to be so good but it’s worthy of entering,”
he says. “Then it ended up good anyway.”
A big reason for that was due to the input
of a certain friendly neighbour, some bloke
you may have heard of before: Howard Astill.
“On our way home from Summernats we were
already on Gumtree [looking for the right car],”Dave says. We stopped at Macca’s on the
way home and had a bit of a planning session
with Howard. Within a couple of weeks we’d
bought the car and got stuck into the driveline.”
The end result is this glorious WH Statesman.
As you can see, in addition to an immaculate
paintjob and luxurious seating for seven, the
car’s had a pretty serious roof chop. In other
words, there’s none of it left.
Even though the car was always planned as
a cruiser, Dave and Robert also had another
stipulation: It had to be able to do skids. So
a few changes were made to ensure this
wouldn’t be a problem: “We got rid of the IRS
and put a live axle in it with 4.11 gears, put a
Turbo 400 in it, a high-stall converter, made
tailshafts and did all the suspension,” Dave
says. All of this work was done and tested
before the car got attacked with a grinder so
there wasn’t the usual mad rush at the end to
get the thing running just before the event. Of
course, nothing ever goes entirely to plan, and
there were a couple of speed bumps along the
way that created some challenges.
Keen to do the right thing, Dave and Robert
got in touch with Summernats staff indicating
their intentions, and were told they would have
to engineer every seating position and seatbelt
mount. All of a sudden this fun little project was
starting to sound too hard. Thankfully a bit of
common sense prevailed when Summernats
marketing manager Adrian Hodgson droppedaround to Howard’s place to pay a visit and
Dave asked him to come over and have a look.
Basically, they agreed that there were much
wilder cars cruising around Summernats
that would never have a hope of getting fully
engineered for road use, so Adrian went back
and had a chat to the powers that be and
got back to Dave and Robert with the good
news: “Build it and we’ll let the Summernats
scrutineers decide.” By now it was December.
“The seats had to be fitted correctly, seatbelts
had to be firmly mounted and all seating
positions had to have seatbelts, but lap belts
were sufficient,” Dave says. “The car got pulled
out of the corner, dusted off and we started the
job on 1 December! It turned out pretty good
for the rush it was done in. At that point, the
steel work wasn’t done, the welding wasn’t
finished yet, none of the bog work was done,
no interior was even thought of.”
Weld the doors up, chop off the roof, slap
some paint on and go cruising – it might sound
pretty straightforward, but it’s never that easy:
“Every modification we made created another
challenge,” Dave says. “Because we welded
the boot lid shut, we had to modify all the tail-
lights to make another way of fitting them to the
car, because normally you get to them through
the boot.” The rear bumper also presented
the same challenges, as did the side skirts
and door panels, as access to them was also
welded shut. All of these little things take time,The tops of the doors were
filled using exhaust pipe,
and the areas around the
mirrors and windscreen
were also smoothed off
ENGINE BAY: Under the
bonnet it’s all stock,
although Kon at Wollongong
Automotive Services threw
a bit of a tune at it. It’s also
got a twin 2.5in system to
make some extra noise