Twelve years ago I stood by the side of Spring Mountain Raceway in Pahrump, Nevada, and watched Bret Voelkel overtake a race-tuned Lamborghini around the outside of a fast sweeper in a ’33 Ford Factory Five hot rod. This was my first time at the Optima Ultimate Street Car Invitational, and it opened my eyes to how the level of engineering and breadth of the American pro touring movement.

It isn’t just the Optima street car events that are full of fat-tyred Camaros,Torinos, carbon fibre hot rods, ‘Vettes, C10 or F100 trucks. Almost every weekend in the USA, from county fairgrounds to Goodguys national series events, there are punters entering motorkhanas and circuit sprints in everything from lightly modified classics to flat-out pro tourers. Pro touring got it roots in flat-out racing events like One Lap of America, and the Silver State Classic.

It was at the Silver State Classic in 1988 that RJ Gottlieb invented modern pro touring with his ’69 Camaro “Big Red”, as he aimed to take on the fastest supercars and late-model tuners with a vintage muscle car built with the best circuit racing smarts.

While we’re still growing the Optima Street Car Challenge in Australia, we’ve got a long, proud history of building corner-carving rides right back to the late 80sand early 90s. Craig Parker’s TUFFXY Falcon, Howard Bell’s LITRE8 Torana, Mark Sanders’s LH Torana, Nev Phillips’s LEGAL8 EH and Colin Townsend’s FJ were all pro tourers long before the term was coined.

Australians’ widespread love of touring car racing has seen many of us draw huge inspiration from those hard-braking, corner-carving machines, just as much as drag racing shaped much of the American street car scene. We many not have the raw numbers of pro touring cars, it is part of our street machining DNA.

The surge in interest for driving events like the Optima Street Car Challenge comes from people wanting to use their cars more, and in new and interesting ways. Drag racing is great but stringing together a whole lap of a track is a different kind of exhilarating. Not all cars that go to these sorts of events here or in the USA are aero-equipped, carbon fibre rockets; the key is people wanting to use their cars and drive them more. In the face of endless traffic, roadworthiness clampdowns, environmental distaste for “old cars”, and the sheer cost of buying and building a car, we all want to get our pound of flesh from our pride and joys.

What better way than to have some fun with them? It’s why I’m about to set off on a 2000km roadtrip in my overpowered waterbed of a car (my ’64 Pontiac Bonneville), heading for the Optima Street Car Challenge and Calder Park. With a bench seat, air suspension, the footprint of a family home and way too much horsepower, I am not going to be competitive, but that is almost beyond the point.

Since my car was featured in the April ’23 issue of SM I’ve been slowly clocking up miles in between family and work commitments. Any new build needs a thorough shake-down so I’ve had a good mate Kris Reberger set-up and refine the flex-fuel tune, Brintech Customs added custom seat belt mounts in the rear, I’ve been playing with different blower belt lengths to stop the belt slip at high-RPM that had limited horsepower on the dyno, and I upgraded my Haltech iC-7 dash to their new UC- 10 full colour display. I’m still chasing a bunch of finishing details before Optima, like re-gassing my air conditioning, calibrating my air suspension, and making a new power steering line so the crunch is well and truly on.