Induction

The Holden Commodore is dead. Holden announced its passing at the end of last year (along with the Astra model), as it rebrands itself as an importer of SUVs and utes. Into the future, there will be no Holden sedans. Events at Holden today are in rather stark contrast to what was happening half a century ago. Back then, 1969, Holden celebrated an enormous achievement: the successful development and production of a home-grown V8 engine.

The Holden 253 and 308 CID series V8 was not just any engine. This was a V8 drawn from a clean sheet of paper, designed speci cally for the cars Holden planned to build in the late 1960s and beyond. But it also had to stack up favourably against the V8 engine which parent company GM was already producing. And that engine wasn’t just any old engine, either. That engine was the nowlegendary small block Chev.

Holden’s V8 had to deliver the goods, because it was the chiefs at Detroit, not Fisherman’s Bend, who would decide whether or not the engine went into production.

It was no easy sell. Every other GM subsidiary around the world (all of the various North American GM brands, and Opel in Europe and in South Africa) managed to get by using the small-block 283 Chev V8 – why should the Australians be any different? The Holden V8, therefore, needed to be

good: not necessarily more powerful than the Chev, but smaller, lighter, no less reliable and no more expensive to produce.

The smaller 253 capacity was introduced with the HT range later that year. The rest, as they say, is history. The larger capacity 350 Chev was retained till the mid-‘70s as a counter to Ford’s 351 Cleveland, but the majority of V8-powered Holdens for the next 30 years were Holden V8-powered.

It didn’t take long for Holden’s V8 to hit the racetrack. Not actually in a Holden, initially, but rather in Formula 5000 open wheelers – where Repco’s specially developed fuel injected Holden V8 was pitted against the category’s benchmark 307 Chevs – which had been modi ed for F5000 racing by some of America’s best performance engine tuners. Success was for the Holden instant, with Frank Matich winning the 1970 Australian Grand Prix in his Repco Holden V8-powered McLaren.

Touring car success would have to wait until 1974, with Peter Brock’s rst ATCC win in the then-new LH Torana SL/R 5000 (check out our

Back in the Day section on page 72 for some stunning images from that Surfers Paradise race), but every Bathurst and championship win from then until the early ‘90s was powered by the 5.0-litre Holden V8 engine.

Interestingly, even when Holden ditched the Holden V8 in favour of the Chev when the V8 Supercars category kicked off in 1993, the Australian engine remained competitive on the track. Victory at Bathurst that year for the Larry Perkins team came using Holden power. Perkins won again in 1995 with a Holden – pretty much the only Holden engine still racing at Bathurst that year, with almost the entire Commodore V8 Supercars eet having made the switch to the Chev.

It’s been 20 years now since the Holden V8 was replaced as Holden’s road car V8 by the 5.7-litre Chev LS1. Yet even years later many Commodore buyers were still lamenting the death of the 308, because while the high-revving LS1 was lighter and more powerful, it couldn’t match the Aussie V8 for sheer grunt in the lower rev range (any early distaste for the LS1 was also due to the chronic oil consumption and related failures which dogged the American engine here in its early years – and which had been identi ed and recti ed by Holden’s engineers by the time the VY Commodore was released in 2003).

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Holden V8, this issue AMC delves into the remarkable history of the engine’s development – stretching right back to when the idea of an Aussie V8 was rst oated behind closed doors at Holden in 1962.

No doubt readers will have already noticed from our cover image this issue that it also happens to be the 50th anniversary of the classic Bolwell Nagari. The folk at Bolwell have chosen to celebrate this occasion themselves in the only way they know how – by producing an all-new Nagari, powered by a mid-mounted 6.2-litre LS3 Chev.

In 1969 the Nagari was an absolute sensation: an Australian sports coupe with supercar looks – and performance to go with it, thanks to lightweight construction and Ford 302 Windsor V8 power. And the Ford engine wasn’t even Bolwell’s preferred choice of powerplant – the original intention was to use the newly-released Holden V8.

While AMC would never wish to denigrate the classic 302 Windsor V8, just imagine what might have been: an iconic Aussie muscle coupe, designed and built in Melbourne, powered by a 5.0-litre V8 engine also developed and manufactured right here in Australia.