We can only begin to imagine Mic House’s excitement when he was crowned third in the Tuff Mounts 235 Blown class at last year’s Street Machine Drag Challenge. After all, just 48 hours prior to the start of the event, the L77 engine in his HD Holden had decided to eat half its bearings!

First published in the July 2025 issue of Street Machine

“We had a failure with the oil pick-up on the dyno, so at 8000rpm it wiped out the bearings, and we only had two days to fix it,” Mic recalls. “I ripped the sump off with the engine still in the car, replaced the bearings I could get to and just sent it – there wasn’t time for anything else!”

The rest of the HD was also a fresh build, and due to the engine dramas, Mic had virtually no time to test anything before towing it down to Melbourne’s Calder Park from Wodonga for the DC 2024 check-in day.

After the first day’s racing at Calder was cancelled due to an unsafe track, the HD’s first real test was the drive to Mildura. “We’d just put an all-new IFS front end in it, and it’d done maybe 20 metres before we hit the road out of Calder for the Day One road leg,” says Mic. “So, I was on my own, had no idea how it’d drive, and just had to wing it. Luckily, the car drove beautifully all week – like a dream!”

Mic builds the occasional customer car out of his House of Auto Fab workshop at home, so he is well-versed in making quick, bad-arse machines. When his experience crewing for Matt Carpenter’s ‘Problem Child’ XP Falcon at DC Weekend 2022 gave him the appetite for more, Mic decided to overhaul the family HD cruiser, which he’d owned since 2012, for his first proper DC campaign.

The HD’s 202 made way for the budget, 500,000km-old L77 from a Caprice, which was given a backyard rebuild by Mic and good mate Corey Edwards. “I did want a small-block originally, but we already had the LS, so it was the cheapest and easiest option,” he says. “We gave it a hone and rebuilt it with a VCM camshaft and the Blackwell Race Engines heads.”

A key part of what Mic wanted for this combo was nitrous. “I’ve built a tonne of turbo LS stuff before, so it was partly to be different, and also because I just love the outlaw aspect of nitrous,” he says. “The whole idea of this build was to take the old-school street machining style I grew up idolising but modernise it to work best and be fast today.”

Depending on the size of shot, Mic reckons the nitrous and engine combo is good for upwards of 650hp. “At Drag Challenge, we only had a 50-shot because it was so fresh, but it’s a 300hp kit, so we run around 150hp minimum at the track these days,” he says. “For this year, we’re planning the full 300 if we can!”

The L77 typically runs premium 98, with a Haltech Rebel LS controlling the show.

Drag Challenge was one hell of a test ground for the new combo. After Day One’s racing was canned, Mic had to wait until he drove the length of the state to Mildura for the HD’s first real test hit. He pulled a best of 7.04@102mph at Mildura’s eighth-mile, and the next stop at The Bend in South Australia saw the HD’s first quarter-mile passes yield a 10.61@130mph best. “Getting into the 10s after everything was amazing,” says Mic.

He wasn’t done, either, with further passes during the final two days at Heathcote Park Raceway knocking his PB down to 10.47@130mph. Unbeknownst to him, that pass on the penultimate day was enough to seal third in class.

“I had no idea where I was placed; I didn’t even know we could see the results online during the week!” Mic laughs. “To get third on the last day was incredible. I only went to the trophy presentation to celebrate the guys I thought had won – not me!”

Since DC ’24, Mic has regularly been taking the HD out for no-prep eighth-mile action at Wilby Motorsport Park, and has big plans for his assault on DC 2025 later this year. “We’re debating whether we put a stroker kit in the engine,” he says. “I want more nitrous, and we want to do a converter, some diff gears and maybe flex-fuel. If we get time, I might ’cage it so we can chase nines without any trouble, because that’s the goal now,” he says.

You’ll be able to see the wagon once again mixing it with the best in Tuff Mounts 235 Blown at Drag Challenge 2025, 28 October to 2 November 2025.

MIC HOUSE
1965 HOLDEN HD WAGON

Class:

Tuff Mounts 235 Blown

THANKS
My wife Monica House; Craig House at EBA Hire; Tom Doyle; Zakk Gabriel at Zakk’s Paint & Panel; Corey Edwards at TMD Auto Co.; Brett Simmonds at Twin City Dyno Tuning; Rapid Performance Wodonga; Ashleigh Righetti at Engine Master Australia Albury; Braedon Caton at Budgie’s Auto Sparx; Hayden Ridley at Asylum Speed & Fab; Darren Leitch; James Harris Automotive.