Australian Muscle Car 2020-02

6
The Holden Commodore is dead. Holden
announced its passing at the end of last year
(along with the Astra model), as it rebrands
itself as an importer of SUVs and utes. Into
the future, there will be no Holden sedans.
Events at Holden today are in rather stark
contrast to what was happening half a century ago.
Back then, 1969, Holden celebrated an enormous
achievement: the successful development and
production of a home-grown V8 engine.
The Holden 253 and 308 CID series V8 was
not just any engine. This was a V8 drawn from
a clean sheet of paper, designed specifically for
the cars Holden planned to build in the late 1960s
and beyond. But it also had to stack up favourably
against the V8 engine which parent company GM
was already producing. And that engine wasn’t just
any old engine, either. That engine was the nowlegendary
small block Chev.
Holden’s V8 had to deliver the goods, because
it was the chiefs at Detroit, not Fisherman’s Bend,
who would decide whether or not the engine went
into production.
It was no easy sell. Every other GM subsidiary
around the world (all of the various North American
GM brands, and Opel in Europe and in South
Africa) managed to get by using the small-block
283 Chev V8 – why should the Australians be any
different? The Holden V8, therefore, needed to be
good: not necessarily more powerful than the Chev,
but smaller, lighter, no less reliable and no more
expensive to produce.
The smaller 253 capacity was introduced with
the HT range later that year. The rest, as they
say, is history. The larger capacity 350 Chev was
retained till the mid-‘70s as a counter to Ford’s 351
Cleveland, but the majority of V8-powered Holdens
for the next 30 years were Holden V8-powered.
It didn’t take long for Holden’s V8 to hit the
racetrack. Not actually in a Holden, initially, but
rather in Formula 5000 open wheelers – where
Repco’s specially developed fuel injected Holden V8
was pitted against the category’s benchmark 307
Chevs – which had been modified for F5000 racing
by some of America’s best performance engine
tuners. Success was for the Holden instant, with
Frank Matich winning the 1970 Australian Grand
Prix in his Repco Holden V8-powered McLaren.
Touring car success would have to wait until
1974, with Peter Brock’s fi rst ATCC win in the
then-new LH Torana SL/R 5000 (check out our
Back in the Day section on page 72 for some
or’s Induction
eve
rmoyle
stunning images from that Surfers Paradise
race), but every Bathurst and championship win
from then until the early ‘90s was powered by the
5.0-litre Holden V8 engine.
Interestingly, even when Holden ditched
the Holden V8 in favour of the Chev when the
V8 Supercars category kicked off in 1993, the
Australian engine remained competitive on the
track. Victory at Bathurst that year for the Larry
Perkins team came using Holden power. Perkins
won again in 1995 with a Holden – pretty much the
only Holden engine still racing at Bathurst that year,
with almost the entire Commodore V8 Supercars
fleet having made the switch to the Chev.
It’s been 20 years now since the Holden V8 was
replaced as Holden’s road car V8 by the 5.7-litre
Chev LS1. Yet even years later many Commodore
buyers were still lamenting the death of the 308,
because while the high-revving LS1 was lighter
and more powerful, it couldn’t match the Aussie V8
for sheer grunt in the lower rev range (any early
distaste for the LS1 was also due to the chronic
oil consumption and related failures which dogged
the American engine here in its early years – and
which had been identified and rectified by Holden’s
engineers by the time the VY Commodore was
released in 2003).
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Holden
V8, this issue AMC delves into the remarkable
history of the engine’s development – stretching
right back to when the idea of an Aussie V8 was
first floated behind closed doors at Holden in 1962.
No doubt readers will have already noticed from
our cover image this issue that it also happens
to be the 50th anniversary of the classic Bolwell
Nagari. The folk at Bolwell have chosen to celebrate
this occasion themselves in the only way they know
how – by producing an all-new Nagari, powered by
a mid-mounted 6.2-litre LS3 Chev.
In 1969 the Nagari was an absolute sensation:
an Australian sports coupe with supercar looks –
and performance to go with it, thanks to lightweight
construction and Ford 302 Windsor V8 pow er. And
the Ford engine wasn’t even Bolwell’s preferred
choice of powerplant – the original intention was to
use the newly-released Holden V8.
While AMC would never wish to denigrate
the classic 302 Windsor V8, just imagine what
might have been: an iconic Aussie muscle coupe,
designed and built in Melbourne, powered
by a 5.0-litre V8 engine also developed and
manufactured right here in Australia.
Greg Taylor
Issue 114 – 2020
EDITOR
Steve Normoyle
Email: amceditorial@chevron.com.au
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