THE LAST DETAIL
This radical, wide-body HQ Monaro build took eight years of exacting work by Down Town Kustoms
WRITING feature articles on cars built by Down Town Kustoms is normally quite a task, as the Taree workshop led by Graeme Brewer has built a solid reputation for constructing genre-busting machines overloaded with cool features. It’s never easy to squeeze all of these little details into a concise story, but I found it particularly daunting in the case of Peter Sharp’s SHQRP Monaro, thanks to the sheer scale of the work involved in making this radical, wide-body HQ.
Still, my own professional struggle doesn’t compare to the strain Graeme Brewer has felt over the past eight years. “It feels like a weight has been lifted now it’s coming to the end of its build process,” he sighs. “This car has been a massive mental load, because every modification creates 10 other things you need to find solutions to, and there’s thousands of mods, so it extrapolates out.”
Coming up with ideas for mad mods is one thing, but working out how to integrate them cohesively into a whole car is a tougher ask.
Building something in a style that hasn’t really been done before is an even spicier burrito to unwrap.
“With a car of this level, there’s no textbook to solve these issues for you, so you just have to think and think and think about it,” Graeme explains. “It just consumes you; I would take it home and it would creep into my brain. It could get stressful, because I don’t always have the answers right there and then.
“These days we know the problems that we will likely face in a build of this stature, and we can fix them before they pop up. But back when we were building this car, we had so much more trial-and-error in the process. Funnily enough, we didn’t have many redos, apart from part of
COMING UP WITH IDEAS FOR MAD MODS IS ONE THING, BUT WORKING OUT HOW TO INTEGRATE THEM COHESIVELY IS A TOUGHER ASK
the floor to accommodate the twin three-inch exhaust after the engine stepped up from the naturally aspirated LS1 to the supercharged LSX.”
While it stands as a unique, coachbuilt vehicle today, Peter Sharp’s HQ build actually started off the same way as many others do: Bloke buys car with an idea of a quick tidy-up and repower;
SHIFTING SANDS
ANY car that takes years to build will have some features that will lock it into a certain era, and Graeme is refreshingly honest about this when discussing not only the finished car, but his and DTK’S own evolution during SHQRP’S build.
“I’d say this is the car that got us noticed as Down Town Kustoms to start with,” he smiles. “I think it is good to look back at the process of building it, even knowing that, if we built this car now, we’d build it totally differently.
“What I mean by that is our processes have evolved, so we can do it with computer design to speed up the process and increase the precision, plus we’re far more experienced with cars of this level now. That’s also on top of the parts availability improving so much in recent years – even things like the HID headlights the HQ has, as they were done before LED headlights were so common.
“There are parts on this car that were so far outside our experience of car building and fabrication when we started, like the rear quarters that Jamie made, but we’ve learned and evolved as a shop. At the time we were building it, all the processes were incredibly advanced. For instance, we made the grille in timber and James Foden had to 3D-scan that, which was almost science fiction at that time, and then it was billet-machined.
“Today, the technology we can build a car with makes these processes far simpler and quicker, so there is no guesswork or trial-and-error. But this car is a good reminder of how we used to work, and how far we’ve all come as professional car builders.”