Take it from us: running numbers at the track and then hitting the road with your mates to enjoy a good slice of our wide brown land is a seriously excellent way to spend your time. It’s why so many have signed up for drag-and-drive events like our own Street Machine Drag Challenge over the past decade or so. Nathan Marshall is one such fella, and he has built this clinically clean but wickedly powerful ’57 two-door post to both cruise highways with ease and turn serious times on track.

First published in the April 2025 issue of Street Machine

It took Nathan a while to get around to it, though. Having honed his skills working for guys like Craig ‘Shonky’ Brewer (SM, Sep ’15) and George Cooper (SM, Aug ’11), he stepped away from the car game for over a decade. “After owning a few street cars in the early 2000s and spending most of my time getting defect notices cleared, I sold my 355ci Torana and put the cars on the back-burner to move away to Western Australia for work,” he says.

Twelve years later, Nathan returned to Victoria to take a job in Ballarat, where he found himself surrounded by workmates with cars. “I was introduced to Bayden Roberts, who had been importing cars with his dad for many years. Bayden had a blue-over-blue ’57 two-door post that was his daily driver, with two baby seats in the back and floors covered in kids’ toys,” he says. “I’d always said if I was to build another car it would be a tri-five Chevy or a big-cube hot rod, so over a couple of Jack Daniel’s cans, the deal was done.”

Nathan set about making his new acquisition more to his liking. He removed the whole floorpan from the front seats to the tail-lights, added a C-notch to the chassis rails to bring the ride height down, and got John Lang at Pro9 to build a four-link and stout nine-inch to sort the rear end. The diff features all the good fruit like a chrome-moly sheet-metal housing, Strange Engineering centre, full-floater axles, and Wilwood disc brakes.

While that was happening, Nathan raised the tunnel and rear floor for clearance and made a new boot floor to get the Chev back on the road and driving, and for the following 18 months or so, he did just that, enjoying the car to the hilt.

Eventually, though, an ever-increasing itch for more power reached a point where Nathan just had to scratch it. Keen to add drag-and-drive events to the ’57’s list of capabilities, he took it off the road to prepare it for a serious escalation in horsepower.

“I purchased an engine from long-time friend Dwayne Gerdes that was brand new and just needed pistons and to be assembled,” Nathan explains. “It had a blower and hat for his build, so all the components he already had suited my application.”

Nathan’s plan was to fit a couple of turbos to the ex-Gerdes big-block, so the mill was dummy-fitted to the car and twin 82mm Turbonetics hairdryers were mounted under the front guards. The car was then sent to Lucas at Carline Automotive & Exhaust in Ballarat to start work on the exhaust, headers, rollcage, parachute and tow-bar mounts that would now be needed.

Meanwhile, Glenn Wells was tasked with putting the big-block jigsaw puzzle together. He added a Callies crank and rods and custom CP pistons to the Dart Big M block for a boost-friendly 9:1 comp and healthy 540ci capacity. A custom Comp mechanical roller cam pushes Crower lifters up into the AFR 315 alloy heads, which wear Crane rockers with stud girdles.

Without the turbos, the big-inch rat made a healthy 730hp on the MCE engine dyno, and that ramped up to well over 1000hp on pump 98 once the party-starters were plumbed. “It was always built to drive on the street and do drag-and-drive events, so pump 98 was always the plan, and I didn’t want to go too radical on the engine,” Nathan says.

While the engine was being built, Nathan got on with serious surgery to the car itself, which included recessing the firewall to allow the 540 to sit back in the frame. He also fitted a Rod-Tech rack front end, which required converting the car to right-hand-drive and redoing the American-spec dash. The engine was then reinstalled so B&B Off Road could knock out the intercooler, custom radiator, and all the aluminium fab work in the bay.

Sean Parsons from Resurrected Panel & Paint then finished off the remaining fabrication jobs and smoothed the body down, ready for Barry at Armstrong & Sons Body Repairers to do the final rub-down and apply the Porsche GT Silver paint. Once all that was done, Chris Bywater at Race Wires went over the car’s full loom, wired in a FuelTech ECU, and put in a base map so Nathan could drive it onto the trailer.

The full set-up and road-ready tune was handled by Nathaniel ‘Nads’ Ardern, who spent bulk time setting the super-low Chevy up on the Tunnel Vision hub dyno. “It became quite time-consuming trying to lift the car and get the rear guards away from the rollers on the hub dyno,” Nathan laughs.

One of the most eye-catching elements to the Chev is the super-clean cabin. Aaron Develyn at Rolls & Pleats Motor Trimming in Ballarat covered most of the interior in Italian Nappa leather, with Mercedes carpet hiding the flat floors. “Aaron had a massive job in front of him with the custom floor, making the carpet, the door trims, a custom back seat and more,” Nathan says. “I also have a factory bench seat that has been trimmed to match.”

Nathan is also quick to credit Dwayne Gerdes as a major driving force in getting the Chev to this level. “Dwayne has helped me so much with advice with all my projects,” he says. “He’s been like a mentor to me, listening to my ideas or problems and offering advice, so I have to give him a massive shout-out.”

While Nathan has rebuilt his Chev to tackle the strip as well as the street, he didn’t go to all that trouble just to run an untested build in the burnout box, so for now, he’s just enjoying driving the revitalised ’57 ahead of Meguiar’s MotorEx in May, which will likely be its last ‘big’ show. “We’ve done the Australia Day cruise, the Colac Motorfest, and I took it up to Bright, but once MotorEx is done, I’m just going to be driving it as much as possible,” he says. “I’ve already gone through three sets of Mickey Thompson rear tyres – it’s too good!”

NATHAN MARSHALL
1957 CHEVROLET 150

THANKS
Aaron Develyn at Rolls & Pleats; Bayden Roberts; Sean at Resurrected Panel & Paint; Glenny Wells; Jason Gerdes at Shotgun Performance; Chris Bywater at Race Wires; Barry Cartlidge at Armstrong & Sons Body Repairers; Dwayne Gerdes; my parents for always supporting the cars; my wife Hayley and the kids for their ongoing support, and Kale for all his help in the shed.