WHITE HEAT
David Steele’s HQ Monaro is utterly gorgeous, and has the grunt to match
THE HQ coupe is one of the greatest shapes ever to roll off Holden’s production line, with big, swooping lines and a presence on the road that is hard to top. Dave Steele has always been a Holden man, so when he got his hands on his HQ Monaro LS coupe in 2017 he always planned on giving it the five-star treatment. We doubt, however, that even he could've predicted the quality of finish that he would end up with twoand-a-half years later.
Luckily for Dave, he started out with a pretty solid base for the project. It’d been owned by a family friend of his since new, and aside from a blower sitting atop the factory-fitted 350ci Chev, the car was pretty much the way she rolled off the production line in the early 70s.
“It was a really solid car and hadn’t been messed with; that’s really what attracted me to this particular coupe,” Dave says.
Being a mechanic by trade, it didn’t take Dave long to start stripping the car back to its bare bones in preparation for a ground-up makeover, with both the body and chassis getting sent off to be blasted and powdercoated. Interestingly, Dave bought the Boyd Coddington wheels – measuring 18x7 up front and a meaty 18x10 in the rear with some serious dish – fairly early on in the build process.
“I bought the wheels before any of the major bodywork started so I could shape the body to fit the wheels,” he explains. “The rear has been tubbed up to the rails, with the rear guards pumped a little bit to give it that meaner stance.”
The metal fab goes a lot deeper than just wheel fitment, though, and it takes a keen eye to spot the hours of work that have gone into this build. The floor has been reshaped with a bigger tunnel, allowing the twin exhaust to be tucked up away from pesky speed bumps, while the ugly factory heater box on the firewall has been chucked in the bin and smoothed over. All the wiring, brake and fuel lines have been concealed from view wherever possible, making the underside of this coupe as impressive as the sleek exterior. “All the lines and wiring have been tucked and hidden, and all the Speedflow lines use aviationgrade fittings; there’s barely a hose clamp used in the car,” Dave says.
While the car came with a 350 when it rolled off the line 40 years ago, Dave knew that he’d need a more serious donk to match the build quality. After doing some reading he opted to go with the boys at BG Engines in Sydney, landing on a Chevy Dart block that was stretched to 427ci. Damian and the boys from BG threw all the good fruit in, including a Scat crank, Callies H-beam rods and a Melling billet-drive oil pump. There’s a custom-grind BG solid cam, and a pair of AFR heads that’ve had the full Cnc-porting treatment from BG in-house. Topping off the whole package is a Quick Fuel 850 carby, making the combo good for 650hp on 98 pump fuel. “Damo said it’s one of the few engines he’s ever actually wanted to keep; it’s a ripping motor,” Dave says.
Backing up the donk is a Turbo 400 with an SDE 3000rpm stall converter, with a transbrake for good measure. The rear end is a really impressive unit, with a Race Products sheet-metal nine-inch housing that uses all the factory pick-up points, with a 35-spline Strange centre sporting 4.11:1 gears. A complete Wilwood disc-brake kit helps Dave
IT LOOKS NICE, SOUNDS TOUGH AND GOES HARD, WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED IT TO DO
keep the big beast under control, while QA1 coil-overs all ’round give it the killer stance and grip he needs. While it’s a street car, Dave built it with the intention of hitting the drag strip. “The driveline is built to handle around 1200hp, and all the set-up we did is built around drag racing,” he says. “I’ll do the show car rounds a few more times and then hit the strip and see what it can do.”
The interior is a much simpler affair, with nothing out of the ordinary bar the B&M ratchet shifter and MOTEC C125 dash. It was a case of improving on the factory offering while keeping things simple; the leather on the seats was sourced from a Bentley catalogue, while the carpet is Mercedes stuff. It might not have a/c, but thanks to the floor-to-ceiling insulation Dave put in, heat management isn’t much of a problem. “We take it out in the summer all the time. We took it to a show in 38-degree heat with the missus and my kids and they loved it,” he says. “It gets plenty of air flow and the car’s cool so we can motor all day long in the heat.”
Dave gets the car out as much as he can, and reckons it’s a dream car to drive. “It looks nice, sounds tough and goes hard, which is exactly what I wanted it to do,” he says. The car’s already got a bunch of tinware to its credit, taking out the Best Show Car award at the Monaro Nationals in 2018, Best Holden at Harry’s Café De Wheels, plus a host of other awards to cram into the trophy cabinet. Dave’s hoping it’ll make an appearance at 2020’s Street Machine Summernats 33, but for now he plans on just driving his dream and enjoying it for what it is.
“I just can’t stop driving it; it’s my dream car and I just can’t thank everybody enough who helped me build it so quickly,” Dave says.