Family heirlooms have a curious way of carrying stories within them. Across decades, they quietly become part of a family’s history, preserving memories that might otherwise have been forgotten and ensuring they live on for the next generation. This pristine HQ Premier is one such repository.

First published in the September 2026 issue of Street Machine

“My grandfather had it for about 40 years,” recalls Dusan ‘Duke’ Zec. “He bought this HQ off his nephew, who’d bought it when he was on his P-plates.”

Cruising around Canberra with a trailer semi-permanently attached, Duke’s granddad’s Prem was one of those workhorses that old blokes kept on the road through sheer force of will, unwilling to upgrade to something modern because their old steed was just too reliable to be put out to pasture.

“This was his day-to-day car, and he would do the rounds, you know? He’d go to his family’s houses, and he’d always have a trailer on the back with rubbish or trees in it,” Duke laughs. “But when I had my VH Commodore [see breakout, p. 82], my grandfather would always just say, ‘Let’s fix mine up’. He thought we could fix the HQ up just like this, but they were chalk and cheese really.”

Still, a seed had been planted, and once he was settled with a house and kids of his own, Duke’s thoughts circled back to his granddad’s old HQ. “I knew it was just sitting in his garage. I said, ‘Let me take it and let me fix it’,” he says. “I gave it a service, cleaned it up, put some rego on it, and took it around the block. Within five minutes, I realised I’d just signed up for a world of pain. Nothing worked properly.” 

That was a huge warning sign, but as Duke says, “If you’ve ever built a car, you’ll know that’s usually the moment you’re already hooked.”

Back in 1973, this HQ left the factory as a 25th-anniversary edition with a 202 and column-shift Trimatic. With just 135hp from the old 3.3-litre six, the Quey was no powerhouse, but it did have bucket seats, an electric clock, and an Air Chief push-button radio as standard. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you compare it to the bare-bones HQ Belmonts of the era, which didn’t even have armrests on the doors, the Premier was pure opulence. 

Knowing that he had exactly one chance at doing this right, Duke set to work on the car in his home shed. The plan wasn’t to do a high-intensity build that would instantly empty the bank account, but rather to take it slowly and get things done as time and money allowed. After stripping the car down to a bare shell and getting it sandblasted, Duke built a chassis dolly for transportation and shipped the car up to his good mate George Papadogiannis in Sydney to work on in his spare time. That must have felt like a ‘getting the band back together’ moment, because George had been responsible for the award-winning panelwork on Duke’s VH Commodore in the early 2000s.

“George chipped away at the car in his backyard for over three years between family life and his day job, bringing the body back from the dead,” Duke says.

Besides removing all the dents, scrapes and rust that the years of hard toil had inflicted on the Quey’s shell, George also removed the heater box to tidy up the firewall, and split the factory rear wheel tubs in preparation for some real rubber. 

Once George had finished working his magic fingers over the metal, the shell was shipped to Patrick Koenigkamp to lay some fresh silver paint over that 50-year-old metal, with the body and paint portion of the build finally wrapped up in 2023. 

“We brought the Prem back to Canberra, still sitting on the dolly,” Duke says. “It was the first time the car actually looked like it had a future again.”

With the car back in the ACT, Duke had Trims By Shaun reapply the factory-style vinyl roof, while he got Leo from BL Automotive in Wollongong to get a new powerplant underway.

A 202-cube red motor was no longer going to cut it – Duke needed more. “Originally, I was going to go big-block, but then I was like, you know what, it’s just going to be easier to put a small-block in it, even just to get rego on it,” he says.

It’s the conundrum that many of us face during our builds: big-blocks sound like fun until it comes time to squeeze them under the bonnet, change sparkplugs and deal with engineers’ certificates. Duke realised that he could do everything he needed with a small-block Chev – albeit with a few more cubes than they came with from the factory – and the best part was that it would bolt straight in with no rego hassles. Starting with a Dart block, the guys at BL Automotive decked the bottom end out with a stroker assembly that would yield 427 cubes, and then they gave it some ported Brodix heads and a Victor Jr intake. Add a custom roller cam and a 950cfm APD carb, and you’ve got a recipe for solid, reliable power. On the chassis dyno, the combo has cracked off a stout 434hp on pump 98 – a small-block punching out big-block numbers.

With the engine sorted, Duke says the real grind began: “Suspension, fuel system, chrome, bumpers, glass – every single part went back on by hand in the family garage,” he says.

A shortened nine-inch from The Rod Shop saw the HQ rolling on Weld V-Series wheels, and auto electrician Nick Dekantios rewired the whole car to hook the relocated battery, fuel system and everything else together in one cohesive unit. Then it was back to Trims by Shaun for the final interior work – which looks amazing – and after nine years of work, the Prem was looking like a real car again, and Duke finally set himself a deadline.

“The goal was to get to Summernats 37 in January 2025, and after nine years, we made it,” he says. As it turns out, it was worth the wait: the Premier earned a place in the Summernats Elite Top 60 hall. However, there was a tinge of sadness to go with the success.

“Unfortunately, my grandfather never got to see the finished car; he passed away in 2022, but he watched the build come together piece by piece, and he loved seeing it slowly coming back to life,” Duke says sadly.

“I am super happy with how it turned out and really glad I stuck with the factory theme with a little bit of pro street. The interior and the vinyl roof are probably my favourite parts; I didn’t expect them to turn out as good as they did. It was pretty hard to keep restraint on the build, to keep everything original, but I think the results speak for themselves.”

Indeed they do, mate.  

DUSAN ‘DUKE’ ZEC
1973 HQ PREMIER

THANKS
George Papadogiannis for bodywork; Patrick Koenigkamp for paint; Leo at BL Automotive for building the 427; Trims By Shaun for the interior and vinyl roof; Nick Dekantios for wiring; Castlemaine Rod Shop; Rare Spares; Zok at All States Towing; Nick at NSW Towing; Jason Sandner for paint touch-ups; Joe at Capital Liquor; Bev for use of his warehouse; the SMCA boys: Marko, Jovan, Mim, Chuck, Stojan and Micky; my brother Jov; most importantly, my wife Gemma and our kids Kora, Isla and Odie for putting up with nine years of garage time, parts deliveries and late nights

TOP STREET

Duke has prior form with building tough streeters. We featured his VH Vacationer in the April 2004 issue of Street Machine, but it didn’t look like any Vacationer we’d ever seen – it was a groundbreaking car for the time.

Smoothed, slammed and painted in BMW Phoenix Yellow, the VH sedan packed an injected Holden 304 V8 with a VL Group A intake that had been linished smooth and painted in body colour – something that would be unthinkable today given the cost of those manifolds now.

Duke’s Commodore really hit the mark with show judges, scoring the Top Judged Street award at Summernats 16, along with further Street-class gongs for Top Standard Paint, Top Sedan, and Top Engine Bay. So, what happened to the car since then?

“Long story short: I was getting on, and the car was just sitting there,” Duke says. “My brother wanted it, and I sold it to him for 15 grand around 2005. Which is nothing now, but then he sold it for like 22 grand!”