O
NE of the things I find most amusing
about the whole muscle car scene is
how some owners always find a way
to make their car ‘one of one’. You
know how it goes – this colour paint
with that colour trim; those wheels;
painted on a Wednesday by a left-handed
genius with an upside-down spray gun. Well,
Scott Kelly has gone one better and built
himself a ‘one of zero’ Aussie muscle car
classic. Huh?Yep, for some reason, Chrysler Australia
Limited (CAL) never built a hot version of
the two-door hardtop Valiants in the VH-VJ
model series. Most likely it’s because they
didn’t want to take the focus – and perhaps
sales – away from the locally developed R/T
Chargers. Instead, they put the 265 Hemi
and go-fast stripes on the four-door Pacers.
But what if CAL took a leaf out of the US
designers’ handbook and built a properly hot
two-door version of a Pacer? They almost
got there with the E55 Charger, but that got
watered down into more of a luxo-cruiser than
an all-out race machine.
Well, wonder no more. Scott has been a
Mopar tragic since 1979, when his dad
rocked up with a ’72 Charger for his mum to
drive, and by the time he was old enough toget behind the wheel, there was a VJ Regal in
the driveway.
“I hated that thing,” Scott remembers. “It
was Sherwood Green – the worst colour
in my opinion. But there was a guy getting
around the northern beach suburbs of Perth
who had this beautiful metallic blue hardtop
with an all-white interior and five-spoke
Dragways. About three or four years ago I met
the guy that built it, James Long. He does a
bit of restoration work on dash fascia panels,and the one in my car came from him. I was
describing the car that got me into hardtop
Valiants and he said: ‘Yeah, that was mine!’”
Yep, being in Perth, it’s more like two degrees
of separation and everyone knows everyone!
It’s common knowledge that the Ford and
GM-H muscle cars were always more highly
valued than the Chrysler offerings, but the
latter were still just out of reach for a young
bloke on a sales rep’s wages, so while Scott
has always lusted after one of the Sports
package cars, there was never one in the
garage. “When I had two grand, an R/T might
have been four; when I had four or five grand
they were eight or 10,” he explains.
“My first car was a VG hardtop: one
owner, 245 two-barrel Hemi, BorgWarner
35 column-shift auto, pale green, black vinylroof and brown interior. Before too long I had
removed all the badges and the vinyl roof
and given it a respray. Chrome five-slotters
and dome centres from Kmart with 235/60
Bridgestones. I picked up an old VE VIP
wreck and rebuilt the 273 with a four-barrel
and a 904 Torqueflite. I swapped out the 245
and BW and drove the wheels off that old
hardtop for about eight or nine years until I
sold it to finance a marriage and a mortgage- the usual story.”
For a long time Scott admits he was a bit of
a ‘gunna’; it got so bad that his wife actually
told him to do something about it. “I was just
a spectator for a long time, didn’t have a car
I could race at the drags or anything, so I
spent all my time watching flash cars going
around,” he says. “I had these bodies lying
around my place but never did anything with
them. Then my wife said: ‘You’re never going
to get around to doing anything with them,
just go out and buy one!’ So I did.
“I got the car out of Mudgee in NSW
because there was bugger-all floating around
here at the time. There was a VH hardtop in
SA I went and had a look at and made an offer
on, but he wouldn’t be in it, so I hopped on a
plane to Sydney, took a hire car out to Mudgee
and went and had a look at this one. It wasSCOTT KELLY HAS GONE ONE BETTER AND BUILT HIMSELF A
‘ONE OF ZERO’ AUSSIE MUSCLE CAR CLASSIC