CURSES, FOILED AGAIN! WELL, FOR NOW ANYWAY

It was just after Christmas when I saw the advert on an online auction site. Plenty of you lot saw it too, because I was flooded with emails giving me the heads-up. The heads-up on what? A factory red-motored EJ Holden, that’s what. Or so the ad claimed. I collared the phone and rang the seller who told me that he’d not long ago acquired the EJ and that a couple of his mates reckoned it was a genuine red-motored example and that he was sitting on a fortune.

But the bloke was honest about what he knew and admitted that he wasn’t sure exactly what he had (he’s a Ford man, after all) and that his mates could well be wrong. And yes, I was welcome to lob around to his place and check it out. Didn’t need to be asked twice, I can tell you. So I grabbed a torch, my copy of an old Rare Spares book that helps decode VINs and chassis numbers and whatnot and headed off.

As the bloke opened the tilt-a-door, there was an Atherton Ivory over Loddon Green EJ wagon with, I reckon, just about every Nasco accessory ever offered in a catalogue. Whoever bought this baby brand-new must have just found a gold nugget or won the Opera House Lottery, because they’d ticked pretty much every box. I’m talking sun-visor, metal venetians, bonnet spears and even those too-cool-for-school scuff plates under each door handle. The only thing this particular EJ didn’t have was a taxi-bar (you know, the towel-rail looking thing that used to attach to the back of the front seat in early Holden cabs).

And lurking under the bonnet was, indeed, a red motor. But what made Old Mate think it had been there forever? Apparently, one of his advisors had looked at the chassis number stamped into the inner guard on the right-hand-side of the engine bay and saw that it ended in `173’. And whaddaya know? The engine was a 173. The owner was looking all excited as he showed me this. My heart was sinking. This was a red herring of the highest order. I can see how it might have given the crew hope, but I reckon it was just one of those monumental coincidences that the last three chassis-number digits happened to be 1, 7 and 3.

So I scratched deeper and came up with a whole load of nothing. Here’s how I know the car is not a factory red-motored job: For starters, the car still had the plates welded on to the cross-member that accept the rear-engine/gearbox mounts on a grey-motored car. Now, that’s not conclusive, because they could have been left in place at the factory even if the car was a red-motor job.

But less debatable was the fact that the welds on the red-motor engine mounts had clearly been welded on by somebody who wasn’t working at the Holden factory that day. Oh, they were good, strong welds, but they weren’t factory ones. Also, the build plate showed it to be a late-1962 version. And from what I can gather, any red-motored examples would have been built at the very end of EJ production, say, August 1963. Another strike. The other clue was that the motor in this car was sporting a 173, and they weren’t being built until the HQ rolled around in 1971. Okay, so it was a replacement motor, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t replace a grey.

But the final nail in the coffin of this argument was the original owner handbook which came with the car. And in it was listed the chassis number – which matched that on the build-plate – and an engine number – which was a six-digit number staring with a`J’. I rang the Early Holden Club of Victoria and checked. Yep, that made it a grey-engine number. This car had been born with a grey under the lid. Bummer.

None of this is to suggest that this wasn’t a car to restore and be proud of, but it wasn’t the unicorn I’ve been looking for. Funnily enough, though, it’s given me even more hope than ever, if only because it’s one less EJ to be forensically examined and either ruled out or, hopefully one day, in.