BUDGET BLASTER
> CRAIG ‘GUSBOY’ INGOLD INVESTED JUST $6000 IN THIS ’37 CHEV, BUT THAT WAS ENOUGH TO MAKE AN IMPACT IN THE BIG-BUCK SPORT OF BURNOUTS
BURNOUTS are a bloody tough gig these days. Twenty years ago, before social media, you only had to jam a blower on a half-decent car to get the crowd on their feet at the handful of burnout competitions around the country. Today you can throw $200,000 at a skid car and people will just walk straight past it. But for less than $10,000, Craig ‘Gusboy’ Ingold has bucked that trend and built one of the coolest burnout beasts of the modern era.
Built on a Hilux chassis, Craig’s 1937
Chev truck is well designed, bulletproof and does one hell of a skid – and he absolutely drives the wheels off the thing. While the uneducated may just see a rusty old chariot that would be a certain target for the next Tracy Grimshaw hoon hunt, a closer look reveals a very cleverly built rig.
“I guess the main build started seven years ago,” Craig recalls. “I had a Hilux at the time and was looking to build something cool. I knew what I wanted – a Hilux chassis with a 1937 Chev cab, styled as a rat rod.
“I started poking around and a mate found a cab in Young, NSW. It was an old army deal, so I decided to follow on with that theme. Back then, we still had the Trading Post, and through that I bought a stock VY 5.7-litre LS and 4L60E trans with all the bolts. That combination now has over 180 burnouts under its belt!”
Craig started by shortening the 2WD 1991 Hilux chassis and the diff, welding up the latter’s centre. Mounting the LS and trans was fairly straightforward, according to Craig: “We simply sat the
WHEN CRAIG GETS ON THE NOISE, THE MACHINE GUNS SPIN, AND FLAMES SHOOT OUT OF THEM WHEN HE BACKS OFF THE THROTTLE
cab on the chassis and started trimming bits off it as we needed to.”
Craig remade the whole floor in 3mm plate, took a grinder to the roof for a radical chop and then simply bolted the cab on the chassis.
“It looks tight in the cab, and it used to be even tighter before I lost the 70kg I’ve now dropped,” Craig says. “It was a squeeze; I had to make the door trims out of hessian so I could jam my knees in there somewhere.”
Initially Craig got the car up and running with the stock LS, which made 300rwhp after a flash-tune by BNZ Automotive in Fairy Meadow. But over the years it got low on compression, so the most commonsense fix was to add a set of upside-down block-huggers and two Chinese junker turbos. With a couple of pounds of boost up the pipe and still on pump gas, the combo’s back where it used to be at 305rwhp.
With the exception of the turbos, the powertrain is all stock – motor, transmission, converter and ECU. Brakes and steering are all still Hilux. A 20-litre fuel cell in the rear is fitted with a single Bosch 044 pump to feed the motor.
“I worked out that the car cost me around $6000 to build, and it turns more heads than a $100K burnout car,” Craig says. “Probably the highlight of owning the car was taking it to Tassienats; that was an awesome trip and people just loved it.”
There are a few really trick features on the truck. In keeping with the cab’s army origins, there’s a cool bomb-casing intake manifold and awesome machine gunbarrel exhaust tips. When Craig gets on the noise, the machine guns spin, and flames shoot out of them when he backs off the throttle!
“To be honest, I can’t take all the credit for the machine guns,” Craig says. “They are in fact Harley slip-on exhaust tips, and it just happened that when it gets hot we get nice flames on the back-off.”
On the pad, this thing is a beast! At the recent Brashernats in Sydney, Craig pulled off a four-and-a-half-minute burnout that seemed to cover 5km of driving and didn’t see the temperature get above 220 degrees, thanks to a great radiator by his buddies at South Coast Radiators.
If you have not seen this ’37 Chev in action, you are really missing out. It certainly makes a welcome change from the seemingly endless parade of blown and injected combos on the pad.
PASSIONATE people have been building and racing street machines for a very long time. There was a guy who I never met and have forgotten his name, but I reckon I might tag him as Allen Larsen. Allen used to race at a time when war surplus sidevalve Ford V8s were cheap. Allen got one of these engines and somehow stuffed it into the bay of a small Vauxhall sedan. God knows how this combination went around slow corners, but it would have been a real weapon in a straight line.
Later, he got onto an EX-WWII sidevalve Cadillac V8, and these were real good engines. Unlike Ford’s cast-iron wonder, where three exhaust ports each side ran through the water jackets to exit each side of the block and made the coolant boil, Cadillac’s inlet and exhaust ports were all in a line out of the top of the block, between the heads and the valve gear valley. They had large-diameter hydraulic lifters on a fat-lobe cam, a strong bottom end, and 5.7 litres of good breathing capacity.
Allen must have been some smart thinker, for he needed a good-handling chassis to cope with this big-grunt engine, so he ordered a new English-built Riley chassis and bolted the Caddy in, then reworked the inlet manifold to take two downdraught carbies. He designed and fabricated a De Dion rear axle assembly, where a centre-diff assembly feeds an independent axle each side and then a fat steel tube runs around the back of that to firmly connect the rear wheels. He then mounted an open, two-seat, steel sports car body on top and went racing.
I don’t know if Allen won many races, but years later an ex-speedway racer known as ‘Terrible Tim’ Hocking tracked this Caddyriley to its owner. Tim bought it and stored it in the yard out back of his old Queensland high-built house. He didn’t like Allen’s widetrack De Dion rear, so he took to that with a gas axe and arc welder to cut and shut this ingenious unit until it was narrower than the front-wheel track. Apparently he wanted the car to have what he called a “crab track”. God knows why, but he left this now-modified car out in the tropical rain until the bottom half of the steel body rotted away.
Tim was like that. He was good at tracking stuff down. One day he came home with a rolling display chassis of a 1950s English Jowett Javelin, a two-seat sports car powered by a flat-four engine. He also found two overhead-cam cylinder heads made by some fanatical English engineer to fit the Jowett. He bolted these onto his engine, lowered the result onto the Javelin’s large-diameter twinchassis tubes and discovered the twin-cam heads fouled the tubes.
This didn’t stop Tim. He got out the gas axe and cut a large scoop out of each tube, didn’t plate the result, and left it out in the rain. He also had a 1950s AJS 7R ‘Boy Racer’ bike that lived in his lounge room, but he got to that with gold and silver paint until it looked like the face of a carnival clown.
Snow Sefton was another racing guy. He built a road-racing weapon using a WWII short-wheelbase Jeep chassis, dropped in one of Henry’s V8s, and created a body. Very light, the combination was real quick and he called it ‘The Strathpine Special’. But it had a bit of a problem. Down the long straight at Lowood, the Special had a habit of suddenly jumping a metre sideways at top knots, as the short tailshaft wound up the rear springs.
Snow then went and bought a Holden Special designed and built by engineer Wally Anderson. It was a two-seat open sports car designed as a competitor against the outdated MGS. Then Colin Chapman introduced the cheap and fast Lotus 7 and that was the end of Wally’s plans to mass-produce his car.
Snow didn’t like the Holden FX’S wheels and brakes, but he had a magnificent 1930s Alfa Romeo 8C sports car. It had a supercharged, eight-cylinder, 2.3-litre engine that developed real horsepower, but the girder chassis and suspension was basic and outdated. Snow decided to transfer the magnificent alloy brake drums and wire wheels onto the Holden, made a mess of the result, and never completed the job. He sold the Alfa engine to one bloke, the supercharger to another, but he needed steel reinforcing for the concrete floor of his new garage at Lawnton. So he cut up the 8C chassis rails and poured concrete over them!
When Historic racing got going in Australia, a mate of mine wanted a suitable car with a history to race. He heard about Snow Sefton and his bastardised Holden Special, and bought this off Snow. Wanting to take it back to what it had originally been, he stripped off the Alfa bits and advertised them for sale. A Melbourne man replied with cash, traced the 8C engine and blower, and bought them too. He then tried to convince Snow to dig up his garage floor. Snow wouldn’t be in that, so the Melbourne man went away to find somebody who could fabricate a replica chassis!
SNOW SEFTON BUILT A ROAD-RACING WEAPON USING A WWII SHORTWHEELBASE JEEP CHASSIS, DROPPED IN ONE OF HENRY’S V8S, AND CREATED A BODY. THE COMBINATION WAS REAL QUICK AND HE CALLED IT ‘THE STRATHPINE SPECIAL’