First published in the September 1995 issue of Street Machine

No matter how hard a bloke tries to come up with something a little different, there will always be some clown out there who reckons he’s seen it all before. Peter Hill’s Calais-dressed VL Commodore is a beaut example. He’s just invested 18 months of blood, sweat and tears, coaxing the hidden bits of the all-conquering Nissan Skyline GT-R into the spaces vacated by the stock drivetrain, and all we hear from some tyre-kicking turkey is that GM “built only 10 of them”. Yeah, right.

Laughs all round of course, but also a sigh of despair from Peter. He’d spent altogether too many nights tossing and turning over whether it would all fit right before coming up with a classic shoehorning job that would require zero modifications to the VL’s original chassis.

With a high-tech 2.6-litre twin-turboed straight six to provide prodigious mumbo, and that sporting twin cams and 24 valves, the R32 Nissan GT-R Skyline is your basic, everyday Japanese missile. Nissan’s talented engineers made sure all the power would get to the ground, too, even in racing form. They came up with a computer-monitored four-wheel-drive system that can read what is happening at each corner and then alter the drive accordingly. If a wheel starts losing traction it can be powered down, while a wheel that has loads of grip can be fed more mumbo. There’s also an overall traction control and four-wheel steering system that gives the GT-R its top-of-the-class handling.

So why not just buy a GT-R? Well, Peter owned an Audi Quattro and was impressed with its AWD at around the same time Richards and Skaife were blitzing Group A with their Winfield GT-Rs. He didn’t want a two-door either – but then the penny dropped. Out the back of his Auto LPG tuning business in Kyabram, Victoria, sat a VL that had been used as a T-car by the mighty HDT. So Peter grabbed his tape measure, strolled outside and came back stunned – and then feverishly developing a plan.

That plan was to start by adapting the front-wheel-drive half of the GT-R to the Nissan motor by using a GT-R trans and a full nine-inch Harrop rear end. “It just kind of snowballed from there,” Peter explained to us. “I ended up buying a full GT-R racing engine with bigger turbos, a stroker crank, Autronic engine-management system, bigger injectors and trick front brakes.”

What we saw was the ultimate Q-ship. This car could be driven around by Peter’s mum. He even hatched a plan to have her drive into a nearby Holden dealer and ask them to check the oil.

The stroker crank came about after he got some advice about fitting bigger turbos to the 2.6-litre six. Sure it’d work, but the hassles would apparently outweigh the benefits. Peter is very grateful to Gibson Motor Sport: “After talking to them I split the motor in two, made an adaptation panel and used the 3.1-litre bottom end. I bored the block to 89mm and fitted Cosworth pistons with gapless rings.”

Up front is where Peter had the most problems with the build. It looks neat now, but it took four goes before the difficulties were solved. The engine and the front diff of a GT-R is a single unit, so you can’t move the engine in relation to the front suspension. Locating the crossmember itself wasn’t a problem – incredibly, the holes lined up with those in the VL Commodore chassis! The problems started when he tried to fit the Nissan wishbone to the Commodore strut. He overcame that little headache by machining the Nissan hub so it would fit a Bilstein strut. And Peter the Smart now has a front end that can accept any camber/trail combination you can think of.

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty – the grunt: “With the boost set at 1.3 bar we should get around 570hp. I’ve got variable boost control up to 2.0 bar, which should give us about 750hp, but that will shorten the life of just about everything.”

You’d have to go a long way to find anything tricker than the 14-inch Copenhagen composite racing disc brakes on this hybrid rocket ship – they’re straight off an IndyCar! Top-notch Harrop Group A calipers clamp onto the trick rotors.

With more than 1300 hand-built parts inside that ex-HDT race chassis, and running power steering, air-conditioning and a sunroof, Peter has one trick car – not to mention the fearsome potential to make a mighty 188hp per road wheel.

Me? I’ll check the weekend papers’ used-car columns for one of the other nine. Oh yes, and thanks to Robert and Craig at Viperdrive for the use of their GT-R in our photos.

Peter Hill
1988 VL Commodore/Nissan GT-R

Where is it now?

Last we have seen of the VL was on this Facebook post last year: