MORE than a decade after gracing the cover of our February 2010 issue, Sydney’s Brad Zammit brought his epic PROGAS LC Torana to Summernats Slam, along with this super-cool, V8-swapped LC GTR tribute. We caught up with him to find out where the Chrome Yellow toughie came from and see what the latest is with PROGAS.

First published in the March 2021 issue of Street Machine. Photos: Simon Davidson

What a cool rig! What’s the story with this Torry?

The yellow LC is a street car I bought about three years ago. I got it off Kris Velkovski, as I saw he had it for sale at Summernats. I just wanted a nice, tidy street car, because I had one back in 2000 with a small-block Chev, and I love that style of car. When the prices of early Toranas started going through the roof, I thought: “I better grab one before they go crazy.”

It sounds like you got a super-clean base.

It was good; I just tidied it up a bit, cleaned up some wiring and got rid of the Hornet scoop on it for the reverse cowl. I also added all the black-outs and GTR look. I have a set of 19×7 and 20×12 Simmons rims to go on it, too.

So she’s a full five-seater?

It had the chassis rails moved in the rear, and it runs coil-overs, but it still has a back seat; that was really important to me. I have a wife and two kids, so it needed to be family friendly. My daughter loves it; she is always telling me to go for a cruise.

What’s under the reverse cowl?

It is just a 350ci small-block, with iron aftermarket heads and a hydraulic-roller cam, plus a Powerglide and 4.11s in the diff. For a normal-stroke 350, it makes a little bit of power on the dyno at Westend, but I have the race car, so I didn’t want to have two race cars!

How did the Torana go at Slam?

I’d been told it had run in the 11s, so I thought I’d give it a hit and see how it went. It did 11.90 on the Sunday, which is plenty.

You’re not tempted to put it on the bottle?

I want the yellow LC to be a real streeter. I am tempted to put a shot of nitrous on it and gas it into the 10s, but one race car is enough at the moment.

Speaking of which, your other Torana, PROGAS, was last in SM as a 600hp meth-fed SBC. What’s news with it now?

It now has the old nitrous big-block Chev from Mark Hayes’s street Torana in it. It’s gone 7.5@186mph, but we have heaps more in it; we just need to get past a bunch of gremlins at the moment. We’re going to rewire the car when we fix some damage to the roof and rear quarter from a marquee blowing down on it.