Found in a West Wyalong paddock on its belly and without wheels, Ryan O’Hara’s mutant Morris J2 ute ‘The Slug’ has been reinvented as a Summernats fun machine

YOU gotta wonder what our Pommy mates were thinking when they designed the Morris J2. The scurry-around-London delivery van’s lower flanks flare-out below the window line. The overall effect is like a big girl’s skirt covering the wheels. Kinda silly, but when you’ve slammed one to the level Ryan O’Hara from Uranquinty (in southern NSW) has with this hundred-dollar paddock-find, it’s more than kinda cool.

“It’s so low I have to run a 165/45 tyre on the front or I can’t turn it!” Ryan says with a laugh.

Ryan, who appears to be a perfectly normal bloke – he also owns a couple of Toranas – admits to having previously owned a similarly Pommy Commer van in the past. That, in a roundabout way, is the reason he owns this one now.

“I needed some spare parts and a mate, Mark Taylor, knew where this one was through some family connections,” says Ryan. “It was sitting in a paddock out at West Wyalong on its belly without any wheels. We needed a tractor with bale forks to pick it up. The farmer wanted it gone for scrap value – one hundred dollars.”

Already hacked from a van/bus into a ute to carry bales of hay, Ryan intended to make the Aussie-built Morris into a street-legal fun machine powered by a factory supercharged Commodore Ecotec 3.8-litre V6.

“But when I looked into all the rules and put it up on the hoist, I thought, ‘Naaahhh…’” he says. “There was a fair bit of work to be done.

“So now it’s just a cruiser and skid car. I have to trailer it but it’s 90 percent of the fun for a quarter of the cost.

“It doesn’t owe me much except lots of hours in the shed.”

Even though plans had changed, Ryan’s intended road-legal supercharged V6 remained. One part of the piddling little original four-cylinder remains, too: its cooling fan is now the centre of the steering wheel!

The driveline was installed after Ryan replaced the badly rusted middle section of the sills and boxed-in the original U-section chassis rails. With no rego rules to regard, he retained much of the less-serious surface rust and blended the necessary repairs into the paddocky patina.

The engine has been tweaked with a few bolt-ons such as higher-lift rockers, a fabricated exhaust (of course) and a cleanup of the intake with a ported blower end housing and removal of the Commodore’s U-shaped throttle-body mount. Power is around 220kW at the treads – not bad for one of these puffed V6s – and it’s backed by the standard four-speed self-shifter.

Those rear-wheel tubs are the Morris originals; Ryan has lifted them along with most of the load area floor to allow it to settle almost at ground level over its air-bag suspension.

The stock tin tubs are little more than half-filled, with tyres mounted on ex-Commodore rims. But as Ryan explains, changing them after he pops them is a challenge.

“I’ve got this mount under here,” he says, pointing to where a tow bar would be. “I jack it up with a 4WD high-lift jack, then put a stand under one end of the axle and let the jack down; that forces the other-side tyre down so I can just get it out from under the guard.

“It’s tight!”

The entertainment value of The Slug is beyond measure. Bang for bang and buck for buck, you’d have to go a long way to beat it.

Check out The Slug in action this weekend at the Deniliquin Cruising Nationals.