At first glance, you might think this is just another HQ Monaro with a flash set of wheels. But don’t let that flat bonnet fool you – there’s enough hardware hiding under there to make close to 3000hp! But it’s not just the stonk and the incredible finish that makes this Quey so special; it also serves as a rolling tribute to the late Nigel Warr.

First published in the July 2025 issue of Street Machine

Nigel had begun the project and worked on it for around three years, but following his tragic passing in a motorcycle accident in 2023, Craig Glassby and his crew at Shields Garage decided to finish it off in his honour and debut it Red CentreNATS 10 – Nigel’s favourite event.

From the outset, Nigel’s goal with the build was to recreate a much-loved car from his youth. “The story goes that Dad, back when he was late 20s or early 30s, had a yellow HQ with black stripes,” says his son Thomas. “We always wanted to do a big turbo, but Dad wanted to be able to drive it on the street, so it had to be under the bonnet and be relatively incognito, as far as a race car goes. But we still wanted to run a six-second pass in it.”

Ticking all those boxes with one car sounds like a pretty tall order, but when you have people like Pro Alcohol Funny Car pilot Craig Glassby on your team, such dreams can indeed come true. Craig describes the Monaro as “a Doorslammer-spec car for the street”, which makes sense once you learn that the driveline features the kind of gear you’d usually only see in full-on drag cars. That’s the only stuff that would stand up to the prodigious grunt coming from the water-jacketed, dry-sumped 427ci billet Noonan LS-Edge that now dominates the engine bay.

Of course, before all that could happen, Nigel needed to find a suitable car as a starting point, as his original yellow-and-black inspiration was long gone. He came across this Monaro for sale in Sydney, which had been a bit of a hottie back in the 90s. “It was a ‘street’ sort of drag car,” Thomas says. “It had a pretty tough 383 stroker small-block, Turbo 400 and nine-inch. It was quick, but it had no brakes when we first got it, which we learned the hard way when Dad tore it around the block!”

The chosen steed was pulled apart and sent off for sandblasting; unfortunately, what came back wasn’t too flash. “It looked like someone had tried to peen the dents out of it, but they’d just been putting holes in it,” Thomas says. “It was like someone had shot the doors with a shotgun – it was insane!”

It took a while to fix all the rust and those dodgy repairs, but once they’d got the body up to scratch, the rear was tubbed and set up for a four-link, wishbone track locator, anti-roll bar and a braced nine-inch. Up front, a Castlemaine Rod Shop tubular IFS was installed, with some modifications to the crossmember to allow the engine to sit nice and low. The front and rear suspensions were tied together with tubular chassis connectors designed and fabricated by Yul Jensen, who did all the fab work on the car.

The oval exhaust pipes are also Yul’s work; he took standard round pipes and shaped them in a press. “The five-inch dumps off the turbos are round, and then it goes down into the oval pipes,” Thomas says. “Yul spoke to a few people who reckoned that the oval actually flows better than the circle, which I don’t know too much about, but if Yul says it’s right, it’s probably right!”

The interior mixes factory styling with race car trappings. “We wanted it to look clean without looking like a race car,” Thomas says. Jason at World Custom Trimming decked out the door cards and Kirkey buckets in black with basket-weave inserts, with yellow stitching on the seats as highlights. “I was a little bit against the yellow, but now that we’ve done it, I think it looks really good. It would be a sea of black otherwise,” Thomas says.

Of course, a car with the potential to run sixes needed a pretty substantial rollcage, which would usually render the back seat useless, but the front passenger seat slides forward on rails and flips down to allow access. Sure, you’d probably still need to be built like an Olympic gymnast to get in there, but it’s the thought that counts.

The finished Monaro’s grand debut at Red CentreNATS 10 was an emotional affair, but the gongs it picked up for Top 10 Elite, Top Undercarriage/Engineered, Top Engine Bay and Top Paint speak to the incredible talent and determination of all involved. Nigel would surely have been rapt with it, but we reckon he’d have been even more chuffed that Thomas also took out Grand Champion at the event in Nigel’s old ’74 HQ ute!

While the Monaro has yet to be driven in anger due to some teething problems with the engine, that’s about to change now its show duties are over. “It’s time to run some fast passes in it, maybe win some trophies, and just enjoy it,” Thomas says. “We make these cars nice and we like to look after them, but we don’t baby them!”

With Red CentreNATS 11 coming up fast, you can bet the Shields Garage team will be going hammer and tongs to get the motor sorted. “We are going to change the rotating assembly to alloy rods so it’ll be making close to 3000hp,” Thomas says. With that much snot under the HQ’s bonnet, it’s not too hard to imagine the Warr family taking home another Grand Champion trophy!

WARR FAMILY
1972 HQ MONARO GTS

THANKS
Nigel Warr – the king; Donna Warr – the bank; Craig Glassby; Jeff Johnson at Power Management Solutions; Neil Moneypenny at Xclusivefx for paint; Dave Colcough at Shields Garage for panelwork; Yul Jensen at Yul’s Customs for the fab work; Johnny O’Dwyer at Ignite Auto Electrics; Pete Dastlik and Connor Begley at Shields Garage; Jason at World Custom Trimming; Mick at Freo Windscreens for glass and trim fitting; the whole Shields Garage team, family and supporters.