Greg Angus reckons he’s got a pretty bad case of OCD – Obsessive Car Disorder. “I’ve got a lot of cars. What can I say? I love ’em,” he says. “I’ve got an HK Prem in bare metal in my shed, which will get a blown Holden six. Over at my mate’s place, I’ve got a 427 ’66 Corvette convertible that’s just about finished, and I’ve got an HT wagon on the go as well.” There’s also a tubbed ’57 Chevy Bel Air with a blown big-block, and an HQ Monaro coupe with a blown 376ci small-block that he races in Supercharged Outlaws. Yeah, Greg’s got a problem, all right – one we’d all like to have!

First published in the February 2023 issue of Street Machine

You might think a bloke with that many cars just opens up his chequebook and goes shopping, but that’s not how Greg operates at all. He’s very hands-on in the build process, and the HT Monaro you see here was no exception.

The HT came into Greg’s life when he went to pick it up for mate. “It had been stored in a factory for years and years. I asked my mate, ‘What are you doing with this thing?’ He goes, ‘I promised it to a mate, and if he doesn’t want it, you can have a go at it,’” he explains. “It had the usual rust in the top of the rear quarters, the rollpan was nasty, and the window shelf was pretty bad. I ended up buying the car, and it was pretty complete; the trim was all there, it was pretty solid and had really good floors.”

Greg stripped it down to a bare shell and his mate Jason Hoctor welded in new panels to fix the rust. Then it was time for the bodywork, which Greg undertook in his home shed. “I had one of my mates, Shane Gluyas, help me finish it off at my shed before he took it to his place and painted it in Glasurit black.

I wanted a satin finish on the stripes, so I had them done in vinyl,” says Greg. The only changes to the body were the HK wheelarch moulds – because they tie in with the stripes and the red inserts on the badges – and, of course, the dirty stinking hole in the bonnet.

GTS restorers can put their keyboards down. Yes, this is a genuine GTS, but it was a six-cylinder car, so that makes it perfectly okay to stuff a motor into it that requires a little more breathing room.

It might be a tried-and-true combo, but what’s not to love about a 383ci Chevy small-block with a 6/71 blower and twin 600 double-pumpers? A steel crank, forged rods and pistons, Crane roller cam and a pair of RHS Pro Action heads equates to 550hp at the crank – more than enough for a car that sees a hell of a lot of street cruising.

The transmission is a really nice Turbo 350 that used to be in Greg’s ’57 Chevy. When he started putting motors in the ’57 that made upwards of 1000hp, he wanted to save the reliable trans and slotted it into the Monaro. The diff is, as you’d expect, a bulletproof nine-inch with 4.11 gears and a full spool.

While Greg didn’t have any qualms about cutting up the bonnet, the rest of the car is untouched, and the rear tubs have only been slightly massaged to fit the 15×8.5 Center Line Auto Drags with a 3.5-inch backspace and wearing 245/60R15 rubber. “I haven’t tubbed it and I haven’t cut the wheelarches,” Greg declares. “I was just pretty accurate with my measuring – 1360mm is the exact measurement you need to be with the diff width. You can have five people in the car and it doesn’t scrub at all.” Up front are some proper old-school cheese-cutters – 15×3 rims with 165 rubber – for that oh-so-right pro street stagger.

Greg lucked out with the interior, as the car had black trim from the factory; the rear seat still wears the original vinyl from over 50 years ago! There’s a B&M ratchet shifter slotted into the console and a couple of extra gauges to keep an eye on the water temp and oil pressure, but otherwise, it’s all as it left the factory, right down to the GTS steering wheel.

“The Monaro was always a passion of mine,” Greg states. “I had an HK Prem before, but I wanted a Monaro. Everyone said I was on drugs because I paid 35 grand for it. They’d say, ‘You’re a bloody idiot, mate; you’ve spent too much money on it, you’ve done this, you’ve done that.’ But I’ve been offered $230K for it.”

Who’s the idiot now?

Greg Angus
Holden HT Monaro GTS

THANKS
Alex and Cris at MotorOne; all my mates that gave me a chop-out – it was a lot of nights out in the shed and plenty of weekends, and a lot of beer!