AUSSIE COP CARS
The heat. The fuzz. The five-0. We don’t always see eye-to-eye with ’em, but they’ve had some cool rides
FOR a fast-car nut, there are few things that grab the attention quicker than a mirror-full of red and blue lights: cherries and berries; whirligigs. You’re being lit up, wheeled, pulled over. For decades, whenever your gaze darted from the road ahead to this scene in your rearview mirror, those fast-approaching police lights have more than likely belonged to the familiar, locally made Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore. But soon they will be no more.
With the last Aussie Ford Falcons made in 2016 and the final batch of Holden Commodores rolling off the line the following year, the ranks of our mighty home-grown police cars are thinning out. Retirement beckons the last of these Aussie-made lords of the bitumen.
Usually Ford or Holden and usually V8 (but with a few other brands and some fast fours and sizzling sixes sprinkled into the mix, too), these special-build police cars – known colloquially as chasers, interceptors or pursuit specials – have become part of the collective Australian psyche: respected and reviled, loathed and loved, thumbs-upped and middle-fingered in roughly equal measure.
The shit-stare needs little in the way of explanation: Few of us like to be pulled over and sternly told we’ve done the wrong thing before having our wallets lightened by the equivalent of a week’s wages or more. Nope, having the smile wiped from your face with a ‘tinny’ (Traffic Infringement Notice) is never much fun. But on the flipside, for decades, premium-performance ex-highway patrol vehicles have given thousands of us a leg-up into a late-model hot six or V8 for a bargain price.
In fact, the Aussie Ford and Holden police chasers have sometimes shared DNA with the manufacturers’ high-performance showroom cars. Despite the aura of our batch-built, ‘one of 500’-type Aussie race specials, the need to survive the rigours of police use rather than the desire for motorsport success was often the motivation behind the development of some of the higher-performance components under our Commodores and Falcons. Those ‘turn-and-burns’ that prowling highway
THESE SPECIAL-BUILD POLICE CARS HAVE BECOME PART OF THE COLLECTIVE AUSTRALIAN PSYCHE
AUSTRALIAN FORD AND HOLDEN POLICE CHASERS HAVE SOMETIMES SHARED DNA WITH THE MANUFACTURERS’ HIGH-PERFORMANCE SHOWROOM CARS
patrol cars perform – pinging cars travelling in the opposite direction, braking heavily from the speed limit, performing a U-turn, chasing at high speed, braking to a stop and then idling for several minutes while someone gets written a ticket – are tough on cars. That’s why, over the years, hardware such as baffled sumps, upgraded brakes, lowered and stiffened suspensions and extra engine and transmission cooling capacity have all been integrated into many factory Holden and Ford cars built for police use.
Although Commodore and Falcon both have staunch histories of high-performance police-use vehicles, other Aussie-made cars have served our cops, too. Since the 1960s, cars as diverse as Minis, Toranas, Valiants and even Nissan Skylines have been used for various state police departments’ Special Traffic Patrol, Traffic Branch or Highway Patrol duties on Aussie roads.
From the first Aussie Falcon, the XK, in the early 1960s, Ford Australia seemed to work harder than Holden at building cars to make the coppers happy. Legend has it that the 1967 XR Falcon GT was a spin-off from Ford’s continuing efforts to service police fleets by providing Falcons (first with sixes and later V8s) with a bit more pep than standard.
Two- and four-door cop-spec Falcon V8s were available for the following 15 years, until 1982, when the international fuel crisis saw Ford kill its Aussie-made V8s, ending an era of legal police brutality on our streets: the 5.8-litre V8 Falcon cop car. With today’s 200kw mummy-mobiles, the on-paper 149kw from the last of these Falcs – the sleeper-spec XE Falcon GL – may seem a little weak now, but these cop-spec cars were an effective, and hence respected, tool of trade.
Holden quickly filled the gap left by Ford with its Commodore Police Pursuit Vehicle (yes, it really was named that), which arrived during the VH production run. Built in both six-cylinder and V8 guises, the pinnacle of performance for these police-spec cars was the highoutput manual V8: Holden announced it had ‘Brock’ heads and manifold, a lightened flywheel and a swathe of other suspension, braking and interior tweaks for safer, sharper police use.