Holden Torana 1st Gen

The shape is a Chevrolet Camaro seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and that is not an accident. Leo Pruneau drew it in a GM studio in Detroit after Bill Mitchell asked for an alternative to Vauxhall's own proposals, produced it in a single sitting with the coke-bottle hip that was the American company language of the moment, and was then sent to Britain to see it built. Vauxhall's long-serving design director David Jones ran the department that finished it as the Viva HB. Holden's changes for Australia were small and deliberate: round headlights in place of the British rectangular units, its own grille and badging, with Joe Schemansky's studio, the company's first proper design department, handling the local work. It works because the proportions are right. Twelve-inch wheels ought to make a car look like a toy, and the long bonnet and kicked-up rear quarter stop it. The Brabham treatment is the period detail worth knowing: black paint-outs, wider wheels and gold Brabham badges, restraint by 1967 standards. The Series II added an HK-style steering wheel and a collapsible column.

Just one HB Torana appears in a Bathurst entry list. Car number 5, Chris Cronan and Steve Parkes, ran the 1967 Gallaher 500 four months after the model went on sale and finished 41st, 103 laps in, at the tail of Class A. That class was for cars retailing under $1,800, which is exactly where a $1,795 Torana sat, and it belonged to the Datsun 1000s and the Morris Cooper Ss. No Torana appears in the 1968 or 1969 entry lists at all. There is a reason, and it is not that Holden had gone cold on racing. The competition money in those years went to the other new car, the Monaro, which won Bathurst outright in 1968 with Bruce McPhee and again in 1969 with the newly formed Holden Dealer Team. An 1159cc four had nothing to offer a race organiser working to price classes. The Torana became a racing car the moment the LC put a six in the same body for 1970, and everything the name means at Mount Panorama starts there rather than here.

The HB's cultural work was done by its name and its badges. Torana was the first Holden model name drawn from an Aboriginal language, and it stuck hard enough that within a decade it meant something quite different from a 56bhp four-door: Bathurst, Brock, the A9X. The HB is where that word entered Australian English, which is why an unremarkable little sedan still gets a second look at a show. The Brabham badge did similar work in the other direction. Jack Brabham had nothing to do with the car beyond a commercial deal, and Vauxhall had already sold a Brabham-tuned Viva in Britain, but a world champion's name on a $2,000 shopping car in a Holden showroom is a very 1967 thing to find. Australians have been rude about it ever since, mostly through the old backronym that has Torana standing for Tons Of Rust And No Acceleration. Its real second life is in the street-machine scene, where a light, cheap HB shell has been carrying blown V8s to Summernats and turbocharged combinations down Drag Challenge for decades.

Rust is the running story, and it is the same story as every Australian car of the period: floors, sills, lower front guards, rear quarters, and the mounting points you cannot see from the driveway. None of it is beyond a competent panel shop, but it sets the price of the car. The mechanical side is refreshingly undramatic. The 1159cc four is a simple pushrod engine with a small appetite and a long record of being worked hard, and it will keep doing that provided the cooling system is honest and the oil is fresh. Expect it to feel busy at highway speed, because it is. The Borg-Warner 35 automatic was optional and it takes a real bite out of 56bhp, so the four-speed is the one to have if you plan to keep up with traffic. Twelve-inch tyres are the one running annoyance, since the choice is narrow and you will be ordering rather than dropping in somewhere. Drums want setting up properly and then behave. Everything on the car is reachable, which is the compensation for all of it.