A MADDER MAX

car movie The looke d may have Roger mad, but Whyte ’s Diane and ly is! actual tribute

Special effects — you either love them or hate them. Either way, though, they’ve blurred the lines between reality and make-believe. When watching a movie, or normal TV for that matter, it’s now impossible to know what’s real and what’s been created by a clever bastard on a computer. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Back before computers took over the world, you could believe what you saw on the screen — well, almost. When Mad Max came out in 1979, its petrol-crazed theme was a hit with petrolheads around the globe. In Australia, America, and here in New Zealand, every bloke who watched it wanted his very own V8 Interceptor — ‘the last of the V8 Interceptors’, to be more exact. However, as much as the wildly kitted Fairmont hero car had car guys drooling, there was one thing not quite right with the movie, and it was something that bugged even the staunchest Ford lovers — the switchable supercharger. Moviegoers were led to believe that, with the press of a button, the supercharger atop the Interceptor’s engine could be disengaged — something that escaped most viewers yet riled those with any form of mechanical inclination. While Invercargill’s Roger and Diane Whyte were among those more mechanically minded viewers, that didn’t put them off the movie or the car — not in the slightest. Fast forward to 2015, and, by now, the pair had worked themselves into a position where they owned an enviable collection of cars — all Fords, of course. It was while they were rebuilding an XC panel van that the idea to build an Interceptor clone took hold. Of course, coming up with the idea would prove the easy part. The pair looked at no fewer than six XB Fairmonts before finding just the right one. Yep, just like the quest to find petrol in the wastelands, this wasn’t going to be easy. That point was highlighted further when the partially restored coupe they’d purchased was stripped down to bare metal. Dents here, rust there, bent chassis rail — you name it, the car had it all. Still, that wasn’t ever going to stop the project from being completed. While John and Brett at Melrose Panel Beating sorted the chassis, rust, and dents, Roger got into the mechanical side of things, kicking off with the nine-inch diff. Being a former mechanical engineer, it wasn’t long before he’d ground the old mounts off and adapted EB Falcon discs and calipers to suit. He then had former drag-racing guru Grant Findley turn his attention to the C4 transmission, which was stripped and rebuilt with a few upgraded parts along the way.

THE MAIN REASON WAS TO FIX THE FLAW WITH THE ORIGINAL MOVIE CAR — THAT FAKE SUPERCHARGER

The main reason for those upgrades was to fix the flaw with the original movie car — that fake supercharger. A true-blue petrolhead, there was no way Roger was ever going to bolt a blower to the car and not bother making it work! Just as Toecutter and his gang in the movie hunted for fuel at all costs, Roger hunted down the correct parts for the blown combo — the bones being the 351 Clevo block dragged out from the back of his shed. To make sure the combo could run some boost without things ending in a crisis, a Scat stroker kit was sourced, along with low-compression pistons, which were all assembled and balanced by Automotive Engine Reconditioners (AER) in Invercargill. When things got a bit more unusual was when it came time to spec the camshaft. Roger explains, “I like the sound of a 253/308 [Holden motor] — they’ve just got a nice rumble to them — so we had a camshaft made to change the engine to the same firing order, which, ironically, is also the firing order of a Ford Y-block.” There was a bit of an eerie coincidence when it came time to sort out the supercharger set-up. While the 6-71 blower itself and twin 650cfm carbs were a simple Trade Me purchase, things became more interesting when Roger was in conversation with the seller: “While I was talking to Bob Fisher about an intake manifold, he asked what motor it was for. I told him I was building a Mad Max Interceptor, and he told me [that] he was involved in the set-up of the original Mad Max movie cars. It made for an interesting conversation, which led to Bob also making a low-profile distributor to fit.” That new relationship didn’t just provide a vital piece of the ignition system; it also allowed Roger to ask any other questions that he might have about the genuine vehicles. After all, with the aim being to build the car as movie-accurate as possible, plenty of research was already being done. The bodykit that the car now wears is like the real deal, even if it did mean Roger had to learn the art of fibreglassing. “The kit just didn’t fit at all,” Roger says. “I watched some YouTube tutorials and stood back just looking at it for a week before getting the grinder out and cutting it up to put the pieces where they should be. I made moulds of the body shape to help with