MARK PARSONS
RIPLEY, QUEENSLAND
AS THE new millennium approached, Mark Parsons was celebrating nearly a quarter of a century building hot cars – long enough to have seen certain styles and fads come and go. But what separated Mark from many of his peers was his general lack of brand allegiance – he just loves cars. And if he likes a certain car or can just plain see potential in a particular make or model, he’s always jumped in balls-deep and given each project his all.
01: Well-known hot rodder Len Moore was a good mate of Mark’s. “He had a very tough green T-bucket that ran a blown small-block Chev, which he would drag-race in a pair of overalls – no rollcage or anything,” Mark says. “He owned a Ford wrecking yard in Yennora and pieced together this XD ute in the late 1980s using a four-bolt 351 Clevo block with 4V heads, topped by a 6/71. A C6 and nine-inch finished it off and it was a popular Summernats car. Sadly, Len died in a car accident in the early 90s and a mate and I bought the ute off his family a few years later. We actually went halves in it – my mate bought the engine and trans and I had the roller. We took it to a few shows as a complete car, then later pulled the driveline. I replaced the supercharged engine with a carbied 351 and FMX, then fitted a plain XD bonnet and grille to replace the LTD combo. The Armorlites were swapped out for Convo Pros and it became my clean driver when we opened our speed shop, The Hot Rod Store. A guy saw it parked there in 1999 and just had to have it. I sold it for $11K and had to start again!”
02: MARK still had his old yellow Hilux ute for towing duties, but was keen to upgrade it to something more comfortable. This 1990 VG Holden ute became his new speed shop company vehicle in 1997. It was a beige, ex-council three-seater with V6 engine and column auto. Mark had been crewing on and towing Mal Gower’s ‘Swamp Rat’ A40 ute for a number of years, and, as a thank you, Mal offered to paint the ute for Mark. “I wanted it painted Black Black; that was the actual colour name and it’s what they use on hearses and the like,” says Mark. “It came up beautifully and looked the part with the VR Clubsport-style front bumper and grille. The wheels were custom-made for it by Center Line from their then-new billet range and really set it off; 16-inch rims were huge back then!” Interestingly, the Vn-based VG utes had no Commodore branding anywhere, and were simply marketed as a “Holden ute”.
03: THE Hot Rod Store started out of Mark’s detailing shed as a side hobby, but he soon realised it was easier and more fun selling parts than it was cleaning cars. “When enquiries for parts started to outweigh the cleaning work, we sold the detailing business and went into parts fulltime,” he says. “That was in 1997, and we had an amazing three years, importing parts from the States, being an Aussie rep for Deist and a NSW distributor for Super Plus. My mate Brett turned up one day in a one-owner Yellow Glow XY Falcon sedan he’d recently bought. It basically left the factory as a GT with no stripes, and had the lot – 351, four-speed, nine-inch, 36-gallon tank, six-leaf rear springs and a black GT interior. It was as if the original owner couldn’t afford the full GT so specced one up as close as he could. The build plate showed it was supposed to be Monza Green, and Brett returned with it a year later all resprayed in the correct colour. It looked mint. Our employee, another Brett, was looking for a cool car and scored the XY for $6500 in ’98. A year later, he had a baby on the way and was looking for something more family friendly. Coincidentally, my wife Sonja’s driver was a clean V8 ZK Fairlane with all the fruit, so we did a straight swap for the XY and loved it for the next few years. Sadly, we closed down The Hot Rod Store in April 2000 after a couple of bad turns of luck – the old Eastern Creek strip was shut after Mark Skaife had a bad crash on the Vht-clad racetrack portion, which basically destroyed our core drag racer market overnight,
plus we lost a heap of stock after a couple of ram-raids cleaned us out. We moved up to Tweed Heads for a fresh start and took the XY with us. We eventually sold it to a GT fanatic in Brisbane for $11,500, which, of course, was just before the ‘first’ big price boom for these.”
04: WITH money burning a hole in Mark’s pocket following the sale of the XY, he decided to get involved with the resurgence of nostalgia-style drag racing and build a fresh strip runner. Mark and drag racing legend Ken Lowe struck up a friendship, and in 2004 Mark bought one of Ken’s fibreglass 1938 Fiat Topolino bodies. “Ken let my son Ricky and I use his chassis jig, so we would head up to the Gold Coast on the weekends and get busy. Under Ken’s guidance, we sorted the RHS chassis and tube front axle, mounted the four-link and coil-overs, and dummied up the small-block Chev. That super-short diff was pretty famous, actually – it was out of Barry Birt’s ‘Cat Killer’ Hume Performance Monaro. I got right into it, hinging the body to lift up Funny Car-style, and eventually swapped out the Cragar S/S rims for 12-spoke spindle-mount fronts and genuine Halibrand rears. By 2009, it was still not finished as I kept making changes; then I sold it after receiving a very healthy offer.”
05: THE Topolino needed a cool tow rig, so Mark picked up this ’65 F100 for $6000 from Sydney in 2005. The seller had bought it in 1968, still in its dealership guise as a six-cylinder fitted with a trayback. He later fitted an ex-divvy van 1970 ute bed and switched to V8 power. “The bed just didn’t look right, as the width and pressings were a total mismatch, so I hunted down the proper 1965 box and painted it to match,” says Mark. “It’d had the 351 Windsor conversion in the mid-70s and was a real goer. The seller told me he bought the engine from a wreckers who had pulled it from John Laws’s smashed 1970 Mustang Mach I. Yep, the radio announcer had apparently written his off back in the day. Stock and wide cream-painted rims and whitewalls sorted its look, and I got approval to use the Moon signage from Mooneyes owner Shige Suganuma himself – we were set up next to him at Wintersun one year with the Fiat and became great friends. Ricky had started building his own ’65 as the full lowrider-style truck, but a ’55 Chev popped up for sale in 2009 that we needed to fund, and we sold the pair for $11K, minus the Moon livery, of course!
06: MARK’S eldest daughter Karisa fell in love with a baby-blue XP Falcon as a teenager during one of the family’s Wintersun trips. A few years later, in 2008, Mark and Sonja surprised her with one of her own for her 21st birthday! “We saw a similar one for sale so jumped on it, then hid it in the garage for the big unveil,” Mark says. “We managed to con her into helping lift the garage door under the premise it was broken, and she was left speechless after spotting her dream car staring back at her. She is 35 now and still has the XP – she just loves it and will never sell it. It has been pinstriped and we lowered it a little, and it hums along nicely thanks to a 221-cube six-cylinder and Cruise-o-matic trans. It’s a cool thing.”
07: ACCORDING to Mark, he can’t help myself: “I’d always buy cars to put away as rainy-day projects, and that’s exactly how this aqua LJ Torana two-door came about,” he says. Mark found it out near Laidley, west of Brisbane, in 2008, and $4500 bought him a tidy six-cylinder S model. He got it running, detailed it to within an inch of its life, painted the wheels black and that was it. It was nestled in the shed as a future build with plans for a respray and V8 conversion. “I realised I’d never get to it, so I popped it up on ebay a year later and sold it for $9K. It went to Victoria and I never heard of it again. This was a sign that prices were starting to go a little haywire, but no one could have predicted what cars like these were going to be worth today.”