UPDATE, 17 March 2026: We all took notice when Matty Smoors said he was targeting eventual sixes with his stonking twin turbo, VL HDT tribute. Well, he’s just gone and shown there’s real merit to that, running a best 7.65 on the car’s first test, with an early back off!

“We got four passes in. The first was a 15.3, then a 8.7. Next pass was 7.84 at 183mph! We found the converter was really loose, so I rolled off really early on the final pass, for a 7.65 at 173mph. On that last pass, we went 4.9 at 145mph to the eighth-mile, which was cool, on a 1.23 60ft.

The goal of the test at Dragway at the Bend last Saturday was just to get Matt comfortable, who prior to clocking those sevens on the weekend had run a all-time personal best of 8.90@155mph in his infamous VK.

“It drove really straight, it wasn’t unsettling and I felt very comfortable in the car,” says Matt. “We normally showed the car on wider tyres, but we ran the 275s here as we’ll do at Drag Challenge.”

The initial test was soft for car and driver, running pump E85. “We’ll try the methanol next time, and the engine builder was egging us on to add boost, so we may get as high as 46psi,” says Matt. “We’re working on sorting the loose converter now, then hopefully head to the Kenda 660 Series round at Tailem Bend in May to get some more running.”

The story to here:

25 June, 2025: Peter Brock famously tried to extract superior performance from the HDT VL SS Group A by mounting a box of crystals in the plenum, but for Matt Smoors, the solution to wicking one up was far more obvious: twin-turbo LS power! Still, just in case Peter Perfect was onto something, Matt made sure he fitted a Polariser to his Group A tribute build!

First published in the May 2025 issue of Street Machine

This VL isn’t Matt’s first dance with red first-gen Commodores. Rocking Magnuson-blown LS3 power, his wild FSTGMH VK appeared in Street Machine LSX Tuner #1 in 2014, and in 2017, we featured a video of the car soaring into the high eights at over 150mph.

“I was doing that in long sleeves and pants, with a half ’cage,” Matt recalls. “We could have kept refining that car and gone faster, but I felt that doing the safety upgrades would have made it less of a street car.” That meant Matt needed something else to go racing with, so he immediately began searching for another early Commodore.

“I was originally going to shove this driveline into a patina VB Commodore shell, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how cool twin turbos would look behind the brake ducts in a VL Group A front bar,” he says.

As it happened, a mate’s nephew had a relatively honest blank canvas sitting in a driveway, which he’d been threatening to restore for over five years. “I said, ‘If you were going to save it, you would have done it by now! Sell it to me and I’ll make something out of it!’” laughs Matt, who in no time at all had the entire car disassembled, with every part bubble-wrapped and catalogued.

Matt’s approach to the build was so methodical it verges on clinical. Every facet of the project was thoroughly planned and precisely executed, to the point where he handed his fabrication team at NextGen Race Cars a workbook full of hand-drawn renderings showing exactly how the finished product would look and work.

‘A VL HDT tribute wrapped around a six-second race car’ might be an accurate summation of the engineering lurking beneath FSTHDT’s skin, but that description does an immense injustice to the sheer quality of every other piece of the build. Remove the driveline and this would be an astonishingly exact HDT replica, but let it not go unsaid that we’re happy the 2500hp twin-turbo LS is there.

“The engine has been moved back in the engine bay, but not so far that we can’t use a set of slightly tweaked Tuff Mounts; this gave us better weight distribution but also the real estate for the intercooler and radiator,” says Matt. Repositioning the engine goes hand-in-hand with a tube front end in the interests of clearance and weight, and it’s fully Heim-jointed like the rest of the car.

As for the mill itself, it’s fair to say that ACE Racing Engines in California have screwed together one of the baddest hydraulic-roller-cam LS donks on the planet. “I’d been speaking with Stefan from ACE because he’s had extensive experience with hydraulic-roller set-ups,” Matt explains. “I was initially going to buy a camshaft from him, but when sourcing parts locally became too difficult, it just made sense for him to do the whole engine.”

The Dart LS Next2 block uses a Winberg billet crank, MGP alloy rods and custom Ross pistons to sit capacity at 388 cubes. “I was really adamant about staying with steel rods for a street car, but Stefan talked me into alloy rods. It doesn’t do anything to the driveability or reliability, and we just incorporate changing them into our maintenance schedule,” Matt explains.

LS7 heads and a hydraulic-roller cam round out what is a rather simple long motor, capped by a billet NxtGen Engineering intake manifold boasting no less than 16 FuelTech 2520cc injectors to provide enough go-juice for the car’s final goal of 2500hp, 50lb of boost and 8800rpm.

Amazingly, the combo is still wet-sumped, but that was a matter of packaging more than anything else, according to Matt. “By the time we moved the engine back and got the external oil pump mounted, we wouldn’t have had any room for a dry sump system,” he says. And that’s without the sheer mountain of plumbing that the team had already stuffed into the VL!

“When we did the chassis connectors, I insisted that I didn’t want them coming through the floorpan, so we ended up with symmetrical bars down the length of the car – two running along the trans tunnel and two that splay out towards the sills,” says Matt. The only problem was that those bars near the sills are where Commodore owners typically run their fuel lines and wiring. “That all now runs down the custom trans tunnel,” Matt says. That includes the fuel lines, coolant lines for the boot-mounted overflow, and the breathers for the engine, which have been cleverly integrated into the inner chassis connectors, like on a Funny Car.

Matt’s decision to run a Powerglide was partly due to the plumbing being shoved down the trans tunnel, which made the ’Glide a better fit than the larger Turbo 400, but packaging contraints aside, many of the country’s quickest LS cars run Powerglides.

The ’box has had every option ticked and is matched to a Circle D bolt-together converter and billet flexplate, while out the back, a custom chrome-moly nine-inch housing is filled with all the fruit, including gun-drilled, floating 40-spline axles.

Underneath the car, the longer you look, the more horsepower hardware you’ll notice, as well as some crafty custom tricks to make the whole shebang easier on the eyes. For example, only VL nerds would pick that Matt has deleted the factory catalytic converter hump out of the passenger-side floorplan to make it symmetrical – such is the degree of thought that has gone into this build.

The VL’s interior is just as tantalising, and behind every piece of grey trim is another nifty custom touch or a cleverly disguised piece of race-car paraphernalia. The amazingly intricate rollcage is slightly over-engineered for their goal, but Matt and the NextGen Race Cars team agreed that they’d rather go overboard with the safety gear. For something that’s painted bright red, it does an amazing job of sinking back into the HDT-inspired grey trim.

“Inside, VLs are like ‘50 shades of grey’!” laughs Matt, who went to great lengths to honour the original HDT herringbone trim, including custom-stitching Group A-style seat covers for the Kirkey seats up front. “The back is painted the factory 15i Grey, so we can clip the Group A covers on for shows and run standard grey ones at the track, meaning less maintenance,” Matt explains.

Other neat touches inside include the 3D-printed speaker grilles around the front legs of the rollcage; the clever adaptation of the HDT steering wheel to the quick-release mechanism atop a standard steering column; and the integration of the parachute lever into the factory high-rise centre console where the handbrake lever once lived. Despite the racing gear, Matt and the team went to great lengths to keep the interior looking and feeling like that of a street car – even the factory ignition barrel is still used to fire it up!

The painted shell arrived back in Matt’s lap mere months ahead of its debut at Street Machine Summernats 37. Fortunately, Matt’s obsessive control and strict management of the project meant that everything destined to go back in was sitting on the bench, already fabricated, coated and labelled, making reassembly a simple VL-sized jigsaw puzzle.

“The hardest part was that, even though we fabbed the entire car before sending it off to paint, the thickness of the paint changed the size of some of our mounting holes, and the coating process slightly shrank some of our hardlines,” he says. “Builds of this nature always challenge you, but we ran straight at every obstacle, because our deadline was non-negotiable!”

FSTHDT had a stellar ’Nats debut, picking up gongs for 3rd Top Engineered, 2nd Top Tuff Competition and Top 20 Elite, as well as invitations to both MotorEx and Red CentreNATS. “To have the car unveiled at Summernats and walk away with so many awards, and then be invited back to MotorEx and Red CentreNATS was unbelievable,” beams Matt, who’s nonetheless itching to see the end of the car’s show duties after MotorEx, when he’ll start laying down some numbers on the dyno before hitting the track.

“The goal of sixes at 200mph is our destination, but that won’t happen overnight,” he admits, but we suspect that the thrill of a challenge is what it’s all about for Matt.

MATT SMOORS
1988 HOLDEN VL COMMODORE

THANKS
My partner Loz; li’l George; Carey; Adam; Jase; Fatty; Chantelle; Brent; Greeno; Brad; Tom; Jeff; Ant; Tod; Cammaz; NextGen Race Cars; Pro-Matic Transmissions; ACE Racing Engines; Tremaniac Racing; Trikfab; Racewires; Speed Works; NXT Level Restorations; BBG Autobody; Wix Trimming; Circle D; Race Coatings; Speed Pro; GJ Drivelines; KustomKraft; Zahra Bodyworks; Unseen Repairs.

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