MARK PARSONS
RIPLEY, QUEENSLAND
THE street machine scene stepped up a serious notch by the late 1980s, with the first Summernats laying an annual foundation for the explosion in build styles coming in hot for the 1990s. Mark Parsons was still deep in car projects at the time, elevating his game with a view to future show and drag-strip success. “I’ve never gambled and I’ve never smoked,” he says. “Money was always precious to me so I could funnel it into cars.” We take up the third part of Mark’s car journey during this period, showcasing some builds that would still draw plenty of admiration today.
01: SIX-HUNDRED bucks bought Mark this grubby blue XB GS as a parts donor for his Fairmont family car. “It was fully optioned with air and steer, and was a factory 302 Clevo with a C4 and Borgwarner rear,” he says. “I was mainly going to rob it for the sports grille, sports dash and nostril bonnet, but with a boot spoiler and Speedy chromies, it looked okay, and I started to realise that underneath all the mess it was actually in really good nick. The white vinyl interior looked disgusting, but my wife Sonja and I scrubbed it to within an inch of its life and it was just in perfect condition. We decided it was too good to wreck, so we sold it a few weeks later for $1200.”
02: WITH Mark’s Austin A40 hot rod project blown apart, he got busy with a Model A roadster build. The new fibreglass A-body was grafted to his A40 chassis, while the Torana front end and EH rear were finished up properly for engineering. The 327 Chev from his old Model A bucket was put back into service, and virtually everything that could be unbolted was sent off to be chromed. “My mate, Mark Merrin, owned Nepean Chrome, and always looked after me on my builds,” Mark says. The roadster was coming together, but with a new business venture on the horizon, Mark was getting itchy for another panel van project, so the hot rod was sold as roller in ’89 for $5800 and the small-block Chev went into a ’34 roadster hiboy. I love the stars-and-stripes tailshaft Mark had lined up for this: “I saw the idea in a Yank magazine and loved it; at least if you ran someone over they’d remember you!”
03: BY THE late 1980s, the popularity of panel vans was waning, but Mark could see the appeal of building one with a street machine flavour. He found this primer-patched EX-NRMA HQ in Unique Cars magazine for $1900 and set to work. “It was owned by a house painter, who I swear must have driven it around with no lids on any of the tins – the cargo area and tailgates were just covered in thick, multicoloured layers of paint; it made colour fleck look plain!” Mark laughs. “I could see the potential in it though, and he accepted my offer of $1500. It had a Statesman front nose and had been converted to 253 at some stage, and looked to have been a show-type build originally that had been put back to work. My mate Brett resprayed it in Cyan Blue, I dropped the front end to give it the right amount of rake
and added Speedy Kalifornia rims. We started our mobile business, Auto Buff Car Detailing, around that time, and I used it as a work van for years before trading it on a newer WB Holden van. Car detailing was a great business, and we eventually shifted into a designated factory unit; we had Telstra and police contracts, and often had to clean vomit and poo out of police sedans after busy nights. I remember being in a fully marked VP Commodore and pulling up at a set of lights next to a mate of mine, and he did the full clichéd double-take. A couple of weeks later, I ran into him and he said, ‘Man, I swear I saw you driving a cop car.’ ‘No, no, wasn’t me,’ I told him!”
04: MARK’S wife Sonja wanted a nice car, so he found her a beautiful one-owner HQ 350 Statesman in rare Taormina Aqua Metallic with a black vinyl roof. “It was fully optioned with a Turbo 400 and LSD rear and worth every cent of the $6000 asking price,” Mark recalls. “I stripped it back to bare metal and resprayed it, hotted up the 350 with a carb, intake and headers, and poked the air cleaner through a spare bonnet. I finished it off with another set of Kalifornias to make it and the HQ van a bit of a pigeon pair, and fitted a B&M shifter in lieu of the original console. We cruised the Summernats in it and had a heap of fun, but I always knew the value in this car, so I kept all of the original parts to make it easy to change back to stock. That was lucky, as the guy who bought it in 1992 wanted it put back to standard, so I pocketed a tidy $11,000 from an $8000 investment and got to keep all of the good stuff.” Sonja still ended up with a nice car, by the way: an Hsvenhanced, Atlas Grey VN SS Commodore.
05: MARK was always buying and selling cars among his own personal projects, and was at a wrecking yard buying parts for a TD Gemini flipper when he spotted this HQ Premier. “I asked what they were doing with the HQ and they said it was going to be crushed, as ‘no one wants them anymore’ – it was the early 1990s,
remember. The Prem was still in its original cream with a brown interior, and ran a 253 with column-shift Trimatic and Elstar wheels. I offered them $600, and it became our family cruiser for the next six months. I was woken early one morning by the sound of someone revving the shit out a V8. I walked out to the front of the house and looked up and down the street and saw nothing, then wandered into the backyard to find my then five-year-old son Ricky hanging off the steering wheel and mashing his foot up and down on the accelerator!” It was a sign of things to come – almost 30 years on and Ricky has his own big-block HQ that’s run a street-trim 9.80@139mph.
06: AFTER selling his green V8 TD Cortina a few years earlier, Mark got keen for another street sleeper build, so he picked up a tidy eraspec white-with-brown-interior TE Corty. The original six-cylinder and auto were replaced with a 302 Cleveland and C4, while Ghia wheels were added to keep it looking plain. The plan was to keep it stock but lightweight, so he removed as much extra weight as possible and geared up to start racing again, this time at the newly opened Eastern Creek Raceway. “I loved the look of the TF Cortina Pro Stocker that Dave Missingham used to race – it was supertough – so I was inspired by that,” he says “I eventually realised that the 302 wasn’t a tough engine anyway and felt like I was wasting my time, so I sold it on. I did do a heap of burnouts in the backstreets with it though.”
07: MARK’S main project throughout this period was this 1936 Ford coupe with ’35 front sheet metal. Originally built by Alan Lang in the 1960s, Mark picked it up in 1989 from Greystanes for $12K. The five-window body featured a five-inch roof chop and through the ensuing decades had been outfitted with a tunnel-rammed 302 Windsor, Top Loader and Jag front and rear ends – all chromed, of course.
Mark did the show scene and rod runs for the next five years, initially painting it flat black and adding a set of Dragways, before a rebuild that included Mazda Mach Green paint. “I rushed the paintjob to make it to the ‘muddy’ 1991 Hot Rod Nationals in Penrith, and it came back to bite me with a few areas that soon blistered,” Mark recalls. “I was so frustrated with myself because I just sanded it back and sealed it, but didn’t bare-metal it like I knew I should have. After the Nats, I had it sandblasted and the roof chop was a bogged-up mess – it was that bad that I actually planned to do a Mercedes cloth-type Carson top instead. I got as far as tubbing it and fitting bigger rear wheels, but sold it unfinished because one of my dream cars came up for sale. Man, that roof chop was pretty severe; I went through a Macca’s drive-through once and ended up with my arm stuck through the window holding the drinks tray; the cups were too tall to pull back through!”