There was an ad on TV in NSW which shows a crestfallen bloke staring into the engine bay of his broken-down yellow HK Holden Monaro GTS. A big red lottery ball rolls past (it’s an ad for Lotto) and voila! the old HK is transformed into a brand new yellow Monaro.

First published in the December 2004 issue of Street Machine

Well, if I was that bloke I’d be right pissed off. Fancy having your classic HK morphed into a new Monaro! Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be swinging the keys to one of Holden’s new two-doors but give me the choice and I’d take the classic every time.

Joe Cauchi lusted after a classic Monaro too. Like most of us, he can’t remember the last time a big red lottery ball rolled past his house. But long-held dreams of owning a car capable of standing tall on the strip and being appreciated on the street gives many of us the fire inside to eventually acquire what we want, without having to wait for the lucky numbers.

Heck, when this Monaro came up for sale, it was almost as good as winning the lottery anyway. Yep, Joe bought the car running and not too far from how you see it here. He’d been running a nine-second Camaro at the new Western Sydney International Dragstrip but had long been playing with the idea of building a Monaro.

The plan had progressed as far as buying a donor shell but a session at the sandblasters mapped out the next stage of the build: abort. There was more rust than metal. You win some, you lose some. Joe looked for another car to begin building again but instead found this ready-made monster Monaro being sold by Ric Graziotto.

Ric’s history with the car stretches back to 1985, when he bought what was then a damaged Monaro. Originally a silver six-cylinder, it was black and Chev 327-powered by the time it was back on the road three years later. That lasted three weeks — almost as soon as it was finished, Ric had the car off the road again.

“I took it to the old Terry’s Diffs & Chassis [now closed] and had it built to race,” recalls Ric. The result was a nine-inch rear, a set of coil-overs mounted behind the axle and a three-quarter chassis running from just behind the front subframe mounts, past the front eyes of the four-link.”

Of course, the boot floor was severely abbreviated too, removing the stock HK in-floor juice container. A few other tweaks — removed fuel filler, Premier four-light front and stretched rear guards — give the car a bit more menace, as does the paint, Dulux Jet Black.

In that form it was campaigned on Sydney’s strips — Oran Park and Eastern Creek — with a 454 big-cuber running Hilborn trumpet-style injection, backed up by a Powerglide two-speed ’box. By all accounts, Ric had a good time with his 10-second Monaro on the street. As well as being a solid performer, it was built to a high enough standard to earn a place in the Top 80 Elite at Summernats 2000.

“I wanted a big-block street car,” Ric says. “It just got out of hand and ended up with a cage and all sorts of stuff. It put a smile on my face and it broke my heart sell it. I had it a real long time. But with business, houses, family, other projects and all that, my wife said: ‘If you’re not going to use it, sell it!’”

Ric knows his Monaro went to a good home. Although Joe bought it as a well-built and well-sorted street/strip car, there have been some big refinements since he acquired it. The injected 454ci engine that Ric ran a decade ago was removed and replaced by another big-block. Joe imported the basics from the US before he and Top Doorslammer racer Joe Schembri built it. Rather than retain the old engine’s injection, the new engine has another, more assertive form of induction — an 8/71 supercharger under an Enderle injection system.

“Joe wanted a supercharged engine!” Schembri says. “He’d bought the engine components even before I met him. I think this engine was originally intended for his Camaro.” The components were shipped in from Performance Automotive Warehouse in California.

“Basically, it was bought from a catalogue,” explains Schembri. “All the components are brand new, from the blower to the sump, except the block. It was all machined, balanced and ready to assemble. Everything went together like a big model kit. It wasn’t a real lot of work on my part. I simply double-checked everything while we were assembling it. Everything was fine. It was easy, really.”

The heads are cast-iron Merlins, designed by US Pro-Stocker ‘Grumpy’ Jenkins.

“These ones are straight out of the box,” Schembri says. “They’re okay for a good street engine, but being cast iron they’re too heavy for a pure race car.”

The whole roller hydraulic valvetrain is Crane. Pistons are off-the-shelf TRW forged items on Eagle H-beam rods and a steel crank.

Behind the 900hp engine is a two-speed Powerglide with a 4000rpm stall converter.

“It only had 11-inch tyres or something under it and we were concerned that they wouldn’t be wide enough,” Schembri says. The fix? Bigger wheels and bigger tubs.

Ian Carpenter at Kreative installed larger tubs to take a set of 29.5×13.5 Mickey Ts, converted the nine-inch rear to a full-floater, set up some wheelie bars and did some mods to the tailshaft. The brakes are Romac rears and HQ vented fronts. The front suspension is surprisingly standard although seriously lowered.

The blower on the new engine is wider than the earlier Hilborn injection trumpets, requiring the hole in the bonnet to be reshaped to provide clearance. Carpenter took care of that.

“It’s a good all-rounder, with close to 900hp, I would think,” says Schembri, who had a big hand in the rebuild of the car. Enough to do nines from the line?

“It may go a little bit quicker but it’s low on compression and it’s heavy. The torque of the engine … some of the body gaps are starting to close up. I don’t think he wants to do too much more racing with it! After all, it is his baby.”

In the family

Joe Cauchi’s been drag racing on and off since the early 1980s, when he ran a triple SU-fed, 202ci six-powered EH Holden wagon at Sydney’s now-defunct Castlereagh Dragway. In his own words: “I settled down to family life and the car sat in the garage until this year, when we removed the engine and put it in the EH ute that I bought for my son, Luke, about three years ago.

“When the new track (Western Sydney International Dragway) was ready, so was I. I bought a Camaro and started dragging again. My wife Louise is very enthusiastic about drag racing. Louise and Luke are booking into a drag school this summer in Queensland, so it’s going to be a family affair!”

Engine in detail:

• Enderle injection hats for petrol, methanol and nitro come in different sizes. This one’s a birdcatcher.
• A backfire on a blown engine can knock the supercharger clean off. Blower straps keep it on — or near — the engine.
• Fuel tank’s in the engine bay because it’s hard to pump fuel foward when you’re accelerating.
• The 8/71 blower is slightly overdriven and delivers 15psi boost. At about 900hp, this engine is quite mild.
• Joe imported the engine and blower as a package. It cost about $30,000 plus assembly, plumbing and fitting in the car!

Joe Cauchi
1968 HK Holden Monaro GTS