My Muscle Car
Noel Denney
Car: HQ four-door GTS Hometown: Warnbro, WA What is it? It’s a 1974 HQ four-door GTS 308 four-speed. It’s an Adelaide-built car in Cognac metallic with Doeskin/Chestnut trim with B/W herringbone inserts. It’s got factory radio-cassette and speakers, factory air-conditioning, factory LSD. The colour in itself is rare on Monaros. As I am led to believe, there were only 12 ordered in this colour. I have only ever seen one other and that was a four-door 253 auto with Juniper green trim. I believe my combo with the options is probably a one-off as I have contacted Monaro clubs and Facebook pages and pretty much no one has seen the combo before and only a handful of people have actually seen the colour. When did you buy it? I purchased the car in 2016 even though I wasn’t really looking for a car as I’d owned a few over the last 15-odd years and had sold them off. Why did you buy it? A mate of mine, Frank, spotted this car for sale on Australian Muscle Car Sales and posted it on Facebook. I fell in love with it at rst sight, and being a 308 fourspeed had to have it. I gave them a ring and dropped a deposit on it, got it inspected, found it was all good, then transported it to WA from Queensland. What do you know about its life? After a couple of months I started to do some digging for its history and thanks to the receipt le that came with the car I was eventually able to track down and speak with the original owner, Phil. He purchased it new from Kyle Motors in Kalgoorlie in 1974, aged 24. Phil’s family were well-known pastoralists in the area. I asked him why he chose the unusual colour with the delete option stripes (as the car was originally delivered), as most young blokes would have ordered something like red with black interior and stripes. Phil explained to me that his girlfriend at the time (now his wife) had input into the combo! He actually ordered it stripe delete as he said the cops were onto GTSs and GTs at the time so he didn’t want to stand out. He said from a distance it just looked like a Kingswood! Anyway, Phil moved from Kalgoorlie to Gingin, which is closer to Perth, where it was parked up for around 15 years. In the early 2000s, a chap named Jesse was going out with Phil’s daughter and he kept bugging Phil to sell him either the GTS or an EH also parked in his shed. One day Phil said, “Which one do you want?!” Obviously Jesse picked the Monaro and he told me he spent a lot of dough painting it – brakes, suspension, exhaust, etc – as it was in shed- nd condition. Jesse also added the stripes. It was later sold to another guy here in WA, Grant, who later moved to NSW. Grant sold it to a bloke in Queensland (Peter) who owned it brie y before selling it to Rob, who had the interior trim redone. Then I purchased it through Australian Muscle Car Sales. Now she’s back in WA where she belongs! Anything you’d like to add? I will soon be reuniting Phil with his car with a visit to his Gingin property. She is a beautiful looking car – not perfect – but pics don’t do her justice. She is much nicer in real life. Finally, I actually bought the car without my lovely wife Susan knowing. I got a bit of a bollocking when I told her, but she absolutely loves the car and I’m now forgiven!