As Australia’s most prestigious indoor car show, Meguiar’s MotorEx attracts the cream of the crop when it comes to no-holds-barred, mirrors-on-the-ground type showcars. Within that, the Superstars hall is where you’ll find the elite few cars which have qualified at feeder events throughout the preceding year. The MotorEx Grand Master is the car which judges best of all the Superstars qualifiers, so when we say that the Grand Master is the best of the best of the best, that’s exactly what we mean.

This year that car was Matt Ellard’s awe-inspiring 1974 Toyota Celica, built by Matt, his brother Michaeal, and the team at Image Vehicle Manufacturing.

“We’re pretty stoked; you can’t complain about winning!” said Matt. “We made a few little refinements after Summernats; just cleaning things up. We re-coated the exhaust, and made the new display.”

The Hot Wheels-inspired display did an awesome job of grabbing eyeballs and showcasing the car, winning some extra tinware in the form of the Impact and Display award. “We’ve been wanting to do it for a few years, but we couldn’t work out a way of building it to be light and transportable. We only got started on building it about a week-and-a-half ago!”

The car boasts a 3T-GTE Toyota four-pot, beautifully integrated Tesla interior, and absolutely impeccable paint, panel and fabrication, and the Grand Master accolade serves as a reward for all the hard yakka the Image crew have invested in the project.

“It’s a big relief because there’s hundreds of thousands of hours in it,” said Michael. “This is obviously not a customer project, but more of a team project. The team has worked on the car for free, so it’s nice to have this result because it’s a reward for them. It’s nice to have a good result.”