Shakey Nats 2025

South Western Sydney’s car culture is famous all over the country, with an over-representation of chrome-bumpered muscle cars hiding in garages throughout the Wollondilly Shire. Visit any pub in the region and you’re bound to find a carpark full of toughies, their rear screens littered with stickers of famous go-fast parts. You’ll inevitably bump into a bloke in a fading Street Machine shirt and overhear beer-fuelled yarns about cars being built in garages that may never see the light of day.

First published in the August 2025 issue of Street Machine

Pick the right pub on the right day and you might even see Tristan Ockers’s famous MINCER Capri cruising the Shire or pulling into a local watering hole. It was arguably Tristan and the Thirlmere Fryers Car Club that put the region on the map for Street Machine readers and gave exposure to this car-mad microcosm merely an hour from Sydney’s CBD.

So, when mates Josh and Shakey thought about staging an event to raise some funds for the Variety Bash charity run, they knew a humble Bunnings sausage sizzle wasn’t likely to rally the Shire’s troops. And thus, the Shakey Nats was born. “I thought that if we charged 10 guys $200 each to pop a set of tyres in the carport, we’d raise more than a barbecue,” Shakey explains.

Since that first event, the Shakey Nats has grown to become something of an institution in the Thirlmere community. “You’ll hear people talking about this event all year,” Josh says.

Don’t go thinking just anyone can throw their hat in the ring, though. The Shakey Nats is strictly invite-only, which helps the event police itself, keeping out the undesirables and maintaining what can only be described as an impeccably high calibre of cars.

For the 2025 Shakey Nats – the third running of the event – the boys decided to tweak the format a little. “Normally, we’ll have someone on the gate with a tin to collect the donations for entry, but the two local mines that employ the majority of our guests have both been quiet, so it didn’t feel right,” Josh explains. Instead, Shakey sought the help of several generous local businesses to fund this year’s Nats, giving the Thirlmere locals much more than a wild shed party.

You see, far from a testosterone-fuelled boys club, the Shakey Nats is a social gathering, teeming with the families of those behind the wheel. It’s a chance for like-minded enthusiasts to get together and revel in a little bit of chaos, and for those who might be struggling with their mental health to embrace the sense of community. “With that in mind, we’re shifting our focus to Beyond Blue,” adds Shakey, and while the crew didn’t ask for donations this year, the community still rallied and raised $5300 for the charity.

So, what is Shakey Nats actually like? It’s the kind of gathering every car nut around the country dreams of hosting. The safety standards certainly aren’t approved by any sanctioning body, and mechanical sympathy does tend to wane a little later in the day after some cold drinks loosen up the right ankle. At this year’s event, it seemed like any car with less than 600hp under the bonnet either never got the invite or never made it off the trailer, and as Daniel ‘DOGNUT’ D’aran reminded us, “There’s no shitboxes – they’re all tough cars!”

The afternoon moseyed along at a relaxed pace that seemed at odds with the high-revving anarchy of the carport. Cars would roll in, skid until they felt they were done and then leave to fit another set of wheels. More often than not, the smoke would stop for half an hour or more, and it carried on this way well into the night.

With the sun down behind the Great Dividing Range, the crisp Wollondilly air settled on a lawn littered with some of the state’s toughest street cars in various states of disrepair – some sitting on rims, some still steaming from an over-stretched cooling system, and some boasting much bigger wounds.

It’d be largely unfair to fixate on the carnage though; far more important is what like Shakey Nats do for the community. The day was one of boundless hospitality – of offering a stranger a beer from your Esky, or sidling up next to someone you didn’t know and extending a hand in greeting. While some cars left on trailers and others under their own steam, no one left sad, and the community got another 12 months’ worth of legendary yarns to retell until next year’s event.

Event organiser Shakey’s 427-cube Windsor-powered Falcon didn’t escape unscathed. He skidded a few times with his kids in the car before the big Ford V8 developed an unsettling noise.

MORE 598-cube big-block KILRHQ Holden HQ Kingswood

Nick Knight’s KILRHQ (SM, Jun ’21) and its thumping 598-cube big-block shook the shed rafters, knocking a set of tyres off with a full carload.

Charlie Hayes’s crossflow-powered XD longroof is a wicked P-plater rig.

After letting go of the transbrake and encouraging the front-runners to stand their ground, Jayden Mackey was ferociously unkind to his turbo LS-powered HQ ute’s giant rear meats.

Pete Robins found the limits of his Holden V8-powered LJ, leaving bits of block and rotating assembly on the shed floor.

These lunatics accidentally crushed the rear brake lines trying to clamp them off. They convinced a local hydraulics expert to come out and help them fix it, then put him in the passenger’s seat for a celebratory skid!