As an avid street machiner and owner of Queensland-based fabrication shop Motor Fab, Luke Kestle has always had a bunch going on. A recent highlight was getting to grudge-race his awesome ‘Junkyard’ 1969 HT Monaro against the famous ‘Farmtruck’ Chevy long-bed during the Street Outlaws: No-Prep Kings Australian tour in 2023.

First published in the July 2025 issue of Street Machine

But over the past year, Luke’s spent a bunch of time in the United States, where he now has the HT as well as his more recent build, a stunning, twin-turbo small-block Chev-powered Torana, which he’s been developing for small-tyre racing.

The Junkyard Monaro has come a long way since Luke bought it in Townsville many years ago. “I’d been regretting selling my previous Monaro, and I really wanted another one,” he recalls. “An HT was on a list of cars I’d been trying to collect, and as it happened, I bought the Torana and the Monaro in the same week and stuck the Monaro in a shed for a rainy day.

“Back then, we decided to start an event called Aussie Rivals for pre-1971 cars. The first event was great, and for the second, we thought we’d do something cool like drive out west, find a car, get it going and spray it with nitrous until the conrods came out of it.”

However, when no such car had been found 90 days out from the event, Luke decided to yank the Monaro out of storage, leave the ratty body as-is, bolt a bunch of Motor Fab goodies to it and get it going. As luck would have it, a bloke walked into the shop wanting to sell a stock MkIV 454 big-block Chev for cheap, so Luke snapped it up as a suitable powerplant.

Unfortunately, that’s about when COVID hit, so the second Aussie Rivals never eventuated, but the lockdowns did give Luke the time to finish the HT, which at that stage included a TH400 transmission, BorgWarner rear end, stock front end, and a rollcage.

Once he’d got the car going, Luke’s next step was to add nitrous. “To be honest, I’d never messed with the stuff, and we had lots of problems getting it working,” he recalls. “We did a bunch of test-and-tune meetings at Willowbank to get it ironed out, and even the three-day drag-and-drive event they ran in Queensland a few years back.

“We started spraying it with a 200-shot on a plate, and incredibly, the engine lived and the car got quicker. But it had a bodgy axle on one side, and I kept worrying it would break and put me into the wall when it wheelied, so I replaced the rear end with a nine-inch.”

Luke then got the car registered with the 454, which was still going strong. The 200-shot was replaced with a 250, but it started eating the back plugs, so Luke switched back to the 200 and eventually stopped retarding the timing on the bottle, running it with a massive 36 degrees of ignition timing. “It loved it,” he laughs.

“We replaced the old peanut heads with a set of repaired heads off another racer’s car; they were big CNC AFR heads with a small chamber, which worked well with the low compression.”

When the Street Outlaws crew announced they’d be embarking on an Aussie tour in early 2023, Luke had his sights set on taking on the Farmtruck. The word was that the Chev truck could run a 5.8 to 6.0 on any track, and Luke was nowhere near that. He had to find more power, and that meant even more nitrous!

“I was at 9.40 over the quarter, so the easiest way to get it going quicker was with a fogger kit,” Luke says. “But I was sure the first hit was going to be the last for that motor!”

Finally, the big day came and Luke’s Junkyard HT got to face off against the Farmtruck on home soil. The battle was steeped in TV-show drama and controversy, with great conjecture over who came out on top, but either way, it was a cool experience for Luke.

“They were just blown away that the car hooked up so well on a 255,” he says. “I was probably more surprised that the stock motor took two kits of nitrous – a 200-plate shot, and then as the power wheelie would start to come down at the top of first gear, I hit it with the fogger as well, which was another 350hp!”

With a 10.8-second best over the quarter naturally aspirated, the HT is now probably a 9.0-second car with all the nitrous engaged.

But while Luke’s taken the car with him to the States and has been getting involved in some local events, he’s primarily been concentrating on the development of his new Torana.

“There are no real plans for the Monaro right now; we just keep changing as we go,” he says. “I do have a full Haltech system for the car and the old turbos off the Torana race car that will probably end up on it. We robbed a lot of good parts off the race car build to get it going, and I really think we can run a seven on the stock bottom end; I think it’s doable.” Now that’s something we’d like to see!

While the Torana has been Luke’s focus, he’s still been doing bulk miles in the Monaro in the US, having recently covered 1000km in the Redwood Rally in California, beating hard on the HT while he was at it.

“We bought a Comp Cams Xtreme hydraulic-roller camshaft off Marketplace for $180, and it came with a bucket of lifters. I just washed it all up, cleaned up some of the scuff marks and banged the lifters in any hole,” he laughs.

“We’re now turning the motor to around 7800rpm. When I first started racing it, I wouldn’t rev it past 6300, but we just keep throwing more and more at it, and it won’t blow up! It still has the factory tin timing cover, and when we rev it hard, the cam walks forward, the cam button pushes the timing cover forward, and it sprays oil in a beautiful pattern around the engine bay! I’m out to prove a point that the 454 is stronger than the LS!”

What’s not to love about that?