This year’s Meguiar’s MotorEx was a cracker. It was wall-to-wall candy and chrome throughout the Melbourne Showgrounds, but all people could talk about was Willy Armstrong’s 1969 VF Valiant ute. Even weeks afterwards, social media was awash with admiring comments for the late 60s farm ute; even Willy himself was surprised by the response.

First published in the September 2026 issue of Street Machine

“I was blown away,” Willy says. “It was never meant to be. I was going to just throw it back together, but everyone who touched it kept lifting the bar, like Mick at Flash Panel & Paint filling and smoothing the dash. It came back looking a million bucks, and then we blocked the shell at work, which we don’t normally do, and we went, ‘Shit, we got this all right’.”

Most would say it’s a little bit more than ‘all right’, but then, people do tend to get a little cavalier about cars they’ve owned for a long time, and this ute was Willy’s first car, bought back when he was just a teenager!

“My old man left me logged into his eBay and went to a footy function. He said to me, ‘Don’t go over $1000; that’s all you’ve got saved up.’ Then at the last minute I was watching [bids on the ute] climb, so I put the auto bid at $1100. I’m like, ‘Bugger it, he’ll get over it.’ So, I bought it for $1074. The best thing was I was only 16 at the time, so Dad had to drive four hours to St Arnaud to pick it up; he was pretty angry about it,” Willy laughs.

At first, Willy’s plan was just to put rego on it and slam it on the deck with some airbags, while retaining the original, P-plate-safe slant-six engine. But the ute had a little too much patina to keep the rego guy happy, so that prompted the first respray, and once it had rego plates on it, Willy went to town on the suspension.

“People said Valiants couldn’t be ’bagged, so I made sure I got it done to prove ’em wrong,” said Willy back when we first featured the ute as a Young Gun (SM, Apr ’15 – see sidebar, p. 65), when he was in his early 20s. Cranking the adjustable factory torsion bars all the way down and using a triangulated four-link rear airbag set-up he’d built himself, Willy managed to get the Valiant flat on the deck.

However, being fresh out of his fitter and turner apprenticeship, Willy was keen to see a bit of the world, so he sold the ute to help finance the trip. “I stayed in touch with the bloke I sold it to,” he recalls. “Over time, he stripped it, and he was going to put an LS in it and paint it Nardo Grey.”

Thankfully, that never happened, and after returning from his travels and starting a new business, Willy sandblasted the ute shell and epoxy-coated it for the guy, but then it got put in a corner until the owner could afford to take the next steps.

“Then one day he goes, ‘I paid you this much to do the work on it. Why don’t we meet in the middle and you buy the thing back off me?’” Willy recalls.

Saved from a life of being just another LS-swap, the ute was put aside while Willy concentrated on building up his business, Willy’s Drop Shop, and he spent some time on it when he could. At the same time, he also had a ’62 F100 unibody in the build; the idea was that the F-truck would be the show ride and the Valiant would be the shop hack. “Turns out I got carried away with the Val, and now it’s a little too flash for a shop hack,” Willy laughs.

Previously, the ute was a little unfinished, with an open tray and notched-out holes in the front inner guards for tyre clearance, but Willy decided to do all those things properly this time around. Those of you who aren’t Mopar-inclined probably didn’t notice the tubbed front inner guards, which are integrated so smoothly with the original sheet metal that they look factory. The rest of the engine bay has been smoothed as well, but without replacing the factory steel – Willy didn’t want the ute to lose any of its original character. To create a better driving experience, the rear bulkhead has been moved back two inches to allow the bench seat to be tilted back and give more underthigh support. And while we’re talking about the interior, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Lana from Traditional Trimming, who did an amazing job on the bench seat, door trims and parcel shelf.

We’ve all seen those show utes with smooth-as-glass trays; sure, they look amazing, but you just know they’re never carrying a load ever again. Willy went another way with his ute; the whole tub area has been replaced and the tray lifted at least eight inches, but he’s swaged the new metal so it looks almost factory, with the shallower depth the only giveaway. The factory tray is still under there, behind the rear axle, and it gives Willy a nice little hidey-hole if he wants to keep stuff dry. The whole tub area is coated in body-coloured Raptor liner, which makes it infinitely more practical than those show utes.

The colour is the original creamy Alabaster, which was again applied by Mick at Flash Panel & Paint, and despite its subtle off-white hue, it looks dreamy over the ute’s smooth flanks.

But pop the bonnet and that bright red slant-six just smacks you in the face. We know you’re wondering, and we asked as well: Why keep the slant-six? Given the cost of rebuilding the ‘leaning tower of power’, a V8 would probably be cheaper.

“When I first owned this car, I was 16 or 17, and back then because of the P-plate laws, that’s all you were allowed to have,” Willys says. “So basically I just built my 16-year-old dream car, and I kept it as a slanter.”

Now, Willy is the first to admit that he’s probably over-invested in the old slant, but there’s no denying the period engine looks a treat in the engine bay, especially with that long-ram Aussiespeed Hurricane intake. To get the best out of the 60s powerhouse, it was rebuilt with Molnar rods, Wiseco high-comp pistons and a solid cam that works with a heavily modified cast-iron head. There’s a Quick Fuel 450cfm four-barrel carb hiding under the air cleaner, and ICE ignition helps keep it firing.

“Guy at Boss Mechanical ran it up on the hub dyno to bed the rings in, and we thought we’d do a power run. We were blown away when the mighty slant made 203hp at the hubs,” Willy laughs. That’s not too bad at all, and when you run it back to the flywheel, the old girl is definitely making over 1hp per cube.

On the road, she definitely kicks along – not that slant-sixes ever had a problem in that department – and Willy has started racking up the kays already.

“I actually drove it home from MotorEx,” he says. “I wasn’t happy with a mate’s trailer I’d borrowed to get it there, so I put a permit on it and just drove it home. It was pretty funny, but I got all the bugs out of it and got it registered the following week.”

Since then, he’s taken it to the Sydney Hot Rod & Custom Auto Expo, where he scored a Top 20 spot. Let that sink in for a moment: a street-driven, slant-six Valiant up against a multitude of half-million-dollar show builds! He’s also cruised it all the way up from Melbourne to Queensland for Cooly Rocks On. How good is that?

A show-quality ride, slammed on the deck, with three-on-the-tree, the buzzing half-dozen up front, and one of Willy’s young blokes by his side. It really doesn’t get any better.  

WILLY ARMSTRONG
1969 VF VALIANT UTE

THANKS
My team at Willy’s Drop Shop; Mick at Flash Panel & Paint; Clint at Peninsula Cylinder Head Services; Lana at Traditional Trimming; Guy at Boss Mechanical & Performance; Stu at Burra Auto Electrical & Motorsport Wiring; Trav at Classic Car Installations; Shannon at Mornington Peninsula Windscreens; Rod at Race Radiators; Jamie at JD Custom Automotive; most importantly, my beautiful partner Tara and my boys London, Van and Nash

TOP GUN

If you’re thinking you’ve seen a slammed Valiant ute in the magazine previously that looked a little like this one, you’d be right. We featured Willy’s ute in Young Gun way back in the April 2015 issue, when he was just 22 – but it didn’t look quite as good as it does now. Sure, it was dropped all the way to the dirt and it was kind of beige in colour, but that’s about where the similarities end.

The front inner guards had open notches to clear the tyres, the rear wheel tubs were non-existent, and the rear suspension was open to the elements. If you put anything in the tray, chances were that it wouldn’t be there by the time you got home. But it was young Willy’s pride and joy, and we always love to encourage our younger street machiners to stretch their creative wings.

Who knows, maybe in another decade it’ll be back again even better – although we reckon it would be hard to improve on its current incarnation.