LJ Torana V8 prototype

Strike me pink! There’s a 308ci engine back under the bonnet of the LJ Torana V8 prototype. Two years ago in AMC’s Great Escapes issue, #84, we brought you the story of how Tasmanian Torana enthusiast Allan Mills spent 30 years tracking down this car, before finally taking ownership in 2012. Mills’ car was still fitted with a six-cylinder engine when that story was published in late 2015, as Allan pieced together as much information of the stillborn GM-H product program ‘XW7’ as possible. This survivor now stands as a symbol of Holden’s long-lost plan to race a V8-powered LJ Torana at Bathurst in 1972. The Supercar Scare of mid 1972 killed off those ambitions and, according to Holden’s official line, the prototypes were said to have been destroyed. Yet the Strike Me Pink prototype you see here was obviously spared from the Lang Lang proving grounds’ crusher. So too the Lone O’Ranger-coloured V8 prototype (pictured left). The latter was registered by GM-H on September 6, 1972 as LGN-307 in Melbourne with the 308 V8 engine under the hood and became Holden executive Joe Felice’s company ‘hack’ for two years, before it was returned to factory as-built GTR condition with a new sixcylinder 202ci engine fitted and sold off through Holden’s normal ex-company car tender process.

The pink sister car was ultimately saved from the clutches of death from the long arm of the law. It was initially secretly kept at Lang Lang, until one of the potential client groups for the intended LJ V8 production cars, the New South Wales Police Service, communicated their need to Holden for a super high-performance vehicle in order to chase and catch cars as exotic as Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

Thus, the pink LJ V8 prototype headed north to join the NSW police force as an unmarked undercover car, stationed on the harbour city’s North Shore. A number of these V8 Toranas were in the fleet. They were kept under wraps and not common knowledge in the force – let alone in the wider community.

When the time came for NSW police to offload this very special Torana, the secretive nature of how the car was provided to police by GM-H meant it could not be sold as received. In order to include the car in the usual auction process, a strange condition had to be met: the engine and transmission had to be removed from the vehicle. After all, there was no such thing officially as a LJ GTR Torana V8 model. As a result, the Strike Me Pink car was included as a lot in the Sydney Motor Auctions in an unregistered state and with

The surviving pink LJ GTR Torana V8 prototype is again powered by a 308ci engine – for the first time since the early 1970s.