Holden Torana 2nd Gen

The engineering decision drove the design. To fit a six, Holden stretched the HB Torana ahead of the windscreen, which is why the four-cylinder cars measure 4120mm long and the sixes 4387mm on the same doors, roof and glass. The six-cylinder cars got new panels front and rear to cover the difference while the fours kept the old nose, so two versions of the same car sat side by side in the showroom. Once you know where the joint is you cannot unsee it. Leo Pruneau is the name attached to the second generation, with Peter Nankervis running the Torana studio and John Schinella as assistant design director, all under GM-H design director Joe Schemansky. Their work is restrained: a plain three-box shape, a slight kick to the rear quarter, almost no ornament. The XU-1 supplied the theatre instead. Blacked-out grille and tail panel, bold stripes and decals, Globe Sprintmaster wheels, a boot-lid spoiler on the LJ, a long-range tank behind the rear seat. Holden's first indigenous model name meant 'to fly', and by 1972 the badge had earned it.

The Holden Dealer Team existed because General Motors banned factory racing worldwide, so Holden funded a dealer-run operation instead and hired Harry Firth, the man who had run Ford's works team, to lead it. From 1970 the team's car was the Torana. Colin Bond won on the XU-1's competition debut at Warwick Farm in September 1970, beating a Monaro 350 and settling an internal argument about which car Holden should be racing. Don Holland took an LC XU-1 to third at Bathurst that year, a lap behind the works Falcons. The result that defined the car came on 1 October 1972, when Peter Brock won the Hardie-Ferodo 500 outright, alone, in the wet, a lap clear of John French's GT-HO Phase III. It was the last running over 500 miles and the last time a driver could go the distance without relief. In 1973 XU-1s finished second and third behind Moffat's Falcon. Brock then took the 1974 Australian Touring Car Championship, winning at Symmons Plains, Calder and Amaroo in the XU-1 before switching to the new V8 Torana. The XU-1 also won the Australian Rally Championship in 1971, 1972 and 1973, taking every round of the 1973 series.

In Australia the XU-1 is not really a car, it is a piece of the Holden versus Ford argument that families conducted at kitchen tables for thirty years. The 1972 Bathurst win came early in Peter Brock's career and made him; he left the mountain as the beginning of Peter Perfect, and the Torana went up on bedroom walls all over the country as the little car that had beaten the big Fords with half the engine. Nothing about that has faded. Both major Australian model makers still tool 1:18 versions of the 1972 winner in Holden Dealer Team colours, complete with anniversary liveries, which is a strange fate for a small four-seat sedan. Tribute XU-1s outnumber genuine ones at shows, built by people who wanted the poster car and could not have the poster car. The Torana never travelled. Almost nobody outside Australia and New Zealand has heard of it, and Holden itself has since disappeared from showrooms. Inside those two countries the badge still does more emotional work than most supercars manage.

Owning one is mostly about managing steel. These bodies rust in the floors, the firewall, the sills and the panel lips, and around both screens, and they do it whether the car is used or parked. Most survivors have had some of that repaired, and the quality of the work is what separates a good car from a project wearing good paint. The mechanical side is undemanding. The red six is a long-lived engine and the only genuinely expensive failure is a cracked or badly scored block, which is rare enough to be a talking point rather than a worry. Triple-carburettor XU-1s want their Strombergs balanced properly and their linkages free, and they run rough and drink hard when they are not, which is why so many ended up with a single carburettor and a story about where the originals went. Everything else is period-normal: drum brakes that want a firm foot, no power steering on most cars, a heater and not much else. Nothing about the car resists being driven, and Australian club registration schemes are built for exactly this kind of ownership.