THESE are some crazy times we’re living in, but despite it all, our scene keeps moving forward. While there’s no doubt many of us are doing it tough in a variety of ways, there are lots of folks out there in the hot-car scene pushing boundaries and getting things done.

First published in the September 2021 issue of Street Machine

Some are making world-beating products and exporting them to the world; others are just making sure the people in their community have a space – either online or IRL – to gather to support each other. And then there are the event promoters big and small. Car shows and race meets are right up there with the things many of us have missed badly during COVID-19 lockdowns, so our hats are off to anyone who has the testicular fortitude to organise an event in the midst of such uncertainty.

To pay tribute to these goers, we asked the Street Machine audience online to send us nominations of people they thought deserved a spot on our movers and shakers list. We got a great response and hereby present the results!

Reckon we missed someone? Email us at [email protected] and we’ll give them a shout-out on our socials.

Lance Warren

FOR an IT guy, Lance Warren is having a massive impact on Aussie drag racing. Okay, so he’s an IT guy who races a seven-second R35 GT-R, but what Lance has achieved as owner of Heathcote Park Raceway in just a few months is staggering.

Since taking over the central Victorian drag strip at the end of 2020, Lance and his crew have continually upgraded the track amenities, running events all the while. Heathcote’s calendar is booked out with cool grassroots shows, and it seems like it will only be a matter of time before the track will be able to host Group One racing for the first time in years.

Turbosmart

POWER is nothing without control, so said the Street Machine T-shirts of the 1990s, and Sydney’s Nic Cooper must have agreed. He designed the first Turbosmart blow-off valve in his suburban garage back in 1997, and the company has grown to boast a range of boost- and fuel-control products, with offices now in the UK and USA.

Turbosmart’s CO2-operated and even electronically controlled wastegates are changing the face of racing. The firm was rewarded with an incredible six awards at the 2018 SEMA Show for its GenV wastegate line, showing the incredible esteem in which Aussie-designed and engineered products are held.

Steve & Cherie Karagiannis

BRISBANE and cruise nights go hand in hand. A killer car scene and great weather have provided the raw ingredients for decades, but tensions with the constabulary has been a thorn in the side of meet organisers for just as long.

Keeping the right vibe is hard yakka, but it pays off in spades, as Steve and Cherie Karagiannis have proved with their monthly meets at Joe’s Diner in Eagle Farm. By working with the police and the car owners, their event sees more than 1000 cars each month.

Overtaking Lane

THE father-and-son team of Dave and Tyler Hamilton have been doing the car pervs of Queensland a fine service through their Overtaking Lane YouTube channel. The pair cover drags, track days and other events via livestreams and edited video, including last year’s Street Machine Drag Challenge Weekend. Their coverage has helped a lot of us in other states get by during the lockdowns! The boys have built up a very cool, supportive community around their content, too. Check out their Discord channel if you’re looking for a great place online to hang out and chat about cars.

Luke Nieuwhof

ALTHOUGH Perth-born Luke (right) now resides in Florida, USA, his influence and passion for the Aussie drag racing scene hasn’t dimmed one iota.

Luke has served as ANDRA media manager and as marketing and communications manager at the Perth Motorplex, but his biggest ongoing achievement is his work running Australia’s only dedicated drag racing magazine, Drag News Australia. Through the mag and the website, Luke and his partners provide a priceless service to racers, fans, tracks, sponsors and sanctioning bodies.

Northern Gal

KEEN to partake in local chrome-bumper cruises that encourage female enthusiasts, Paula Scarso created the Northern Gal cruises in 2013. Since then, Paula has built a great community that has ballooned into a fully-fledged car club that works with the local authorities to put on hassle-free weekly cars-and coffee-events, as well as huge monthly Saturday night meet-ups.

Scott Harker & Justin Simpson

SINCE 2012, Scott Harker and Justin Simpson have been championing the cause for professional radial drag racing in Australia. “We started the Kenda Tires 660 Drag Radial Series because we just wanted to do radial racing,” says Scott, who is also the co-organiser of Radial Riot. “We’d seen all the rules and politics drive people away from racing, and we wanted to bring them back. The first year we had 11 cars; now we’ve had as many as 165.” After building a strong base in Queensland, the Kenda series has expanded to running events at Sydney Dragway, and in doing so helped fill a vacuum left by the demise of the Australian Pro Street Association.

The key to the pair’s success has been in running regular events, hosting a range of attractive classes, and prioritising world-class track prep for high-end radial racing

Glenn Stankevicius

NOT only is Glenn Stankevicius one of the mainstays of the Street Machine Association of South Australia, but he was also instrumental in expanding SA’s conditional registration scheme.

Previously, the scheme was open only to street rods and bone-stock classics from 1979 or older. Thanks to Glenn and other dedicated enthusiasts, a rolling 30-year rule now applies, and the old ban on both modified cars and left-hand drive has been overturned.

As we’ve seen in other states, concessional rego not only gets more classics on the road, but is a boon for workshops, show promoters and anyone who wants to enjoy a cool old car!

Haltech

STEVE Mitchell could never have envisaged how far the company he started with his father Bill would go. From humble beginnings with its fuel-only F-series ECUs, Haltech has grown to be a global player in the engine management biz.

Based in Wetherill Park, NSW, but with offices in the UK, NZ, USA and more, Haltech’s range of Aussie-designed and made ECUs, wiring harnesses and full-colour dashes make impossible engine swaps possible.

Some of Australia’s quickest street and race cars achieve the results they do thanks to Haltech’s data-capturing abilities. The company’s new Nexus R5 combines a high-end ECU with power distribution output to revolutionise how cars are wired and run.

Andy Lopez

THE Street Machine Summernats co-owner has a passion for big events of all kinds, but since taking over Summernats, he’s discovered that petrol runs in his veins.

After his event company acquired MotorEx in 2017, Andy and his crew have built up a head of steam that now sees them run large car festivals for various levels of government around the country, most notably Red CentreNATS and now RockyNats. In addition to that, the crew now assists with the running and promotion of both Motorvation and the new Australian Top Fuel Championship. And you can bet there’s more to come.

Michelle Porobic

MANY will know Michelle for her work behind the camera at drag racing events across the country, as well as other events such as Summernats. What is less obvious is Michelle’s influence on the very social fabric of our sport, particularly in Victoria. Always the first to raise her hand to assist anyone in need, Michelle has helped countless racers raise their profiles and build connections within the sport. Who else but Michelle would drive across Victoria to help a fellow street machiner in his fight to get his personalised number plates back from VicRoads?

Jason Waye

LIVING and breathing your product is an important part of success, as Jason Waye of Tuff Mounts and Muscle Garage continually demonstrates. On the drag racing side, Jason has been a long-time supporter of Street Machine Drag Challenge as a sponsor, and has also developed three different cars to compete. And Jason’s passion for classic Sports Sedans as an owner, driver and restorer has helped spark renewed interest in what has to be our favourite category of circuit racing.

Geof Tartoosie

AFTER taking ownership of the Extreme Horsepower Show back in 2007, Geof Tartoosie has reinvigorated Adelaide’s only indoor car show. Now known as The Extreme Auto Expo, the show has been broadened to encompass a wider array of two- and four-wheeled rides, along with a prestigious Meguiar’s MotorEx Superstars round, a car auction and two massive cruise nights.

Geof valiantly attempted to get the November 2020 show happening, only to have a last-minute, COVID-forced cancellation. The rescheduled January event was a resounding success, and plans are afoot to return to the usual November date.

West Australian Street Machine Association

THE modified car community in WA is up against it at the moment, as a number of friction points have opened up with various parts of government bureaucracy. This includes dramas with stamp duty and the ongoing issue of the Department of Transport having seemingly unfettered power to reject a car’s engineering for rego, regardless of whether it meets the guidelines or not.

The WASMA advocates for the car scene on these and other issues. This is hard, taxing work that often goes unappreciated, so hats off to all those involved, including Mark ‘Happy’ Williams, Perry Ormsby, Steve Thomas, Chris Bitmead and Stan Khose.

Richie Howlett

WHILE Richie Howlett is best known as a long-time commentator at Street Machine Summernats and Motorvation, the West Aussie is also a keen drag and Jet Sprint boat racer, and does a load of work running his own grassroots events. The biggest of these is the annual Murray Auto Extravaganza at Pinjarra, which raises funds for local sporting groups and the Riding for the Disabled Association. Richie also runs the Shannons Southern Coffee Cruise, raising money for children’s cancer charities, and hosts the annual Ravenswood Raceway reunions. And, should COVID allow it, he has the inaugural Peel Rod Run ready to roll.

RRS

TRANSFORMING the handling of Blue Oval classics since 1999, Revelation Racing Supplies started off developing kits to make our local Fords handle and brake better than Henry ever intended. The RRS range has since expanded to include plenty of US Fords, and the engineers based on Sydney’s Northern Beaches have developed full kits to fit Ford’s massive overhead-cam Coyote and Mod motors into the narrow engine bays of some of Broadmeadows and Dearborn’s most beloved models.

RRS products are also well-regarded in overseas markets, particularly in the US for pro touring-style builds on Mustangs, Torinos and more.

Matt Mingay

AUSSIES love an underdog, or anyone who doesn’t give up in the face of adversity, which is why stuntman and Stadium Super Trucks racer Matt Mingay has a huge following.

The affable larrikin has bounced back after sustaining catastrophic injuries in a horror crash during a Stadium Super Trucks race in Detroit in June 2016. Incredibly, Mingay was back behind the wheel of his smoke-belching Hot Wheels stunt car at the Supercars Clipsal 500 just eight months later.

The hard-charging stunt legend is bridging the gap between drifting, burnouts and mainstream motorsport.

Harrop

AN AUSTRALIAN performance icon for over six decades, Harrop Engineering started as a family-run business building weaving machines, but now exports performance hardware to the UK, USA and Europe. A partner with Eaton in the development of its superchargers and limited-slip diffs, Harrop is continually developing product, including its new set-up for the mighty Ford Godzilla.

The Victorian firm has been a long-time supporter of the pro touring scene, first with the Harrop Ultimate Street Car Invitational and now as a supporter of the Australian arm of the Optima Ultimate Street Car event.

Graeme Cowin

The man behind Rocket Industries, drag racing legend Graeme Cowin has recently brought a big dose of nostalgic fun to drag strips around the country with the Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Car Series. With names emblazoned down the side of the pre-2002 bodies, the vintage-looking machines take older fans back to the glory days of Funny Car racing, while introducing younger generations to the appeal of fuel-burning floppers. The series runs at tracks all over the country, with big fields and clockwork-reliable performances.

Castlemaine Rod Shop

FOR over 35 years, Castlemaine Rod Shop has provided off-the-shelf parts to help Aussie street machiners jam crazy engines into all manner of cars. Led by Heath and Marc Waddington in more recent years, the company now stocks a dizzying array of more than 6000 items, with a flurry of project builds to showcase many of them.

A move into the burnout scene saw the creation of the ‘Warbird’ XP Falcon and ‘Real Deal’ LC Torana, which lifted the company’s profile to new heights. The Rod Shop’s partnership with Cleetus McFarland saw these cars, along with Steve Nogas’s KILLA-B Camaro, shipped to the USA, where the wild, blown methanol machines brought international attention to the Aussie burnout scene.

Melbourne Old School Cruisers

Melbourne Old School Cruisers is one of the largest and most active groups in the Victorian capital. We teamed up with them to put on our 100K Carnage show at Grays Online in 2019 and were impressed by how smoothly the club members worked to organise traffic control and other logistical issues.

MOSC regularly raises bulk cash for charitable causes and is also active in promoting old-school cars through participation in the Australian Grand Prix.

Simon Travaglini

SIMON ‘Gonzo’ Travaglini is one of the best-known names and faces in the West Aussie modified car scene. He’s had a successful racing career, starting off with hot street cars at Ravenswood Raceway and working his way up to Top Doorslammer – with an eight-second XY along the way. What’s more, he’s the man behind AllFast Torque Converters, using a wealth of knowledge gained through years of racing to build converters and transmissions for some of the quickest cars in the country.

Simon goes above and beyond when it comes to helping out drag racers and street machiners, especially if it’s for a good cause. He recently built the Dodge Hellcat-powered Mercedes CLK for Therapy on Wheels, a charity that takes cancer patients and their families on nine-second blasts down the quarter-mile! He also shares his healthy opinions on all things automotive as co-host of the Torque n Power podcast.