Brandon Zito’s 1BADLC may look relatively mild, but this clean, green Torana finished the 2025 Street Machine Drag Challenge on the top step of the podium after five days of racing and around 1500km of interstate driving. In addition to beating some of the quickest and fastest street cars in Australia, the lime-green two-door also won the Hare & Forbes Machineryhouse Radial Blown class, scored gongs for Quickest Chev-Powered and Quickest ET of the event, and took home a Four-Second Club hat.

First published in the January 2026 issue of Street Machine

With a PB of 7.42@191mph on the quarter-mile at DC 2025, 1BADLC certainly lives up to its rego tags, but it has gone through a near-complete rebuild from when it ran its first seven-second pass at DC back in 2019.

This is one well-travelled Torana, originally built by another DC winner way back in the day. “Mark Drew built the car many, many moons ago, and Drewy then sold it to John Groten in Perth,” Brandon explains. “My dad’s neighbour, Noel Abela, bought it, and I was able to buy it from Noel in 2015 at the age of 22, because my dad has an LJ he’s raced for many years and I wanted my own to join in.

“Back then, the car had an aspirated 434ci Shafiroff small-block race engine in it, and it was a pretty wild thing with heaps of comp and running on race fuel. But it was still registered, so we drove it on the street a couple of times and my dad Dom did a couple of race meetings in it before we pulled it apart.”

Brandon resolved to tone 1BADLC down so he could still enjoy it on the street. After dropping the comp in the SBC, he netted a 9.20 ET in naturally aspirated trim, and then decided it was turbo time. “I wanted to go faster, so I built a completely new small-block, adding twin Garrett GTX3582 turbos,” he says. “I ran a best of 7.71, and that engine served me well, staying in the car for eight years.”

At the beginning of 2025, Brendan decided the Torana still wasn’t swift enough for his liking, so it was time to step things up once more.

He began by dropping the LC off to JR Modifications to fit a Mood Motorsports anti-roll bar. “The car was so good, but I wanted a proper anti-roll bar,” he says. “Whenever I used to take off, the car would twist because it was still set up for slick tyres, as that’s what it was on back in the day.”

That small change soon rolled into a rather large snowball. “I ended up rolling out of there with a Mood Motorsports fabricated nine-inch diff, AFCO shocks all ’round, a McDonald Brothers tube front end, stretched rear quarters and new tubs to fit an X275 tyre, a fabricated boot floor, and new intercooler piping to suit the new Pulsar G42 turbos,” Brandon laughs.

Jake Di Medio from Dandy Engines then put together a fresh 394ci small-block for the car, based around a Dart Little M block and 23-degree Racer Pro heads. The bottom end is replete with a Callies Stealth crank, Oliver steel rods and custom 10.3:1 Gibtec pistons, while a custom tool-steel Comp solid-roller cam and Isky solid-roller lifters round out the short combo.

Up top, REV Inconel valves, PAC springs, T&D steel rockers and JET Engineering pushrods turn boosted air and E85 into glorious horsepower. A billet Lock Industries intake plenum cops 30psi from a pair of huge G42 Garrett snails mounted on custom turbo manifolds, with a FuelTech FT600 ECU controlling everything via Turbosmart electric wastegates. Running aspirated on Dandy’s engine dyno to bed everything in, the SBC made 638hp, before stomping out over 1400hp at the hubs on Tunnel Vision’s hub dyno.

“It’s way laggier with the bigger turbos,” Brandon says. “The old 3582 turbos spooled instantly on the street, but at the track it feels way faster now because I’ve never left the line with that much boost. I knew we went fast on that last pass at DC ’25.”

Amazingly, despite all the work done to take the Torana to the next level, Brandon rolled into DC with the car completely untested – the drag-and-drive equivalent of turning up to climb Mount Everest having previously walked up some fairly large staircases.

“The car was ready maybe a month before, and I’d wanted to make sure everything was good [before DC] because of all the changes,” Brandon explains. “It had new suspension and a new engine, we went from a 26in-tall tyre to a 28in-tall tyre, and I wanted to test the combo in case we needed to change the converter or diff gears.” In the end, Brandon wasn’t able to get things sorted, so our test day on the eve of the event proper was his first chance to see how the car fared.

“A couple of nights before we left, I had Shane Marshall come around and set up the car as a base, and I didn’t change any settings the whole week – he hit the nail on the head! We did two eighth-mile passes on the test day, and these gave Nathaniel Ardern from FuelTech a base to work off for the tune, and he made the little LC go A-to-B every pass.

“We were one and done every day, which is a massive effort. To run one pass every day and win Drag Challenge was just unbelievable. We still managed to roll into bed every night past midnight, but I think that’s normal at DC.”

The taste of a hard-fought victory may be sweet, but now Brandon’s keen to take things at a far more relaxed pace for a bit.

“My kids ask every day to get picked up from school in the Torana,” he says. “Now the car is back together, I can’t wait for them to come racing. I’ll have to find some Toranas for them, too, as I’d love to build cars alongside them like I did with my dad.”

BRANDON ZITO
1970 HOLDEN LC TORANA S

THANKS
My dad and my best mate Dom Zito; my little cousin Jayce Mostacci; my brother-in-law Steven Giurgius; Anthony Fortunato; Jake Di Medio at Dandy Engines; Jon at JR Modifications; Simon Gauci at JATS Automotive Repairs; John at Campbellfield Concrete; Heavy Duty Automatics; Nathaniel Ardern at FuelTech Australia; Frank Marchese; Shane Marshall; Peter Kollitiris at SDE Torque Converters; Ben Sioklis at Custom Body & Automotive; Peter Maz at Unique Auto Interiors; Razza Wise; The Race Shop; Speed Pro; Tuners Edge; my lovely wife Michelle and boys Orlando, Valentino and Renato; the rest of my family and friends for all their help and support.