New Heights

Dean Rickard’s ht monaro is no small feat of custom building excellence

- Iain Kelly

Taking an iconic Aussie classic car and enhancing it while simultaneously retaining the essence of its style is a Herculean task. It requires a balanced eye, plenty of grey matter, huge amounts of talent and drive, and a big pair of stones.

Melbourne’s Dean Rickard knew this when he started the genre-shifting build of his HT Monaro back in 2016. It’s a car so finely detailed and thoroughly re-engineered that it threatens to redefine what we consider a street car. The beautiful finish means it can slay at shows, but it is built to be driven long distances like a pro tourer, and yet it looks like a mildly modified classic.

“I had an HT Premier that I had done up, but it wasn’t quite as good as what I wanted,” Dean says. “I started looking through Street Machine for who was building the best cars and saw Down Town Kustoms’ FC ute and figured that was along the lines of what I wanted, which was to have an HT Monaro but to update it. I wanted to take the original style but modernise it.”

After deciding the cherry six-banger, three-on-the-tree HT Monaro was too clean to cut up, Dean found a tatty 307ci GTS in Albury that would make a perfect base for the build, and dragged it up to Taree for DTK to take a look at.

“The focus of the build was to make it 100 per cent HT Monaro but modernised and updated, without losing the flavour and style the HT Monaro has,” says Down Town boss Graeme Brewer. “Every single piece, no matter where or what it was, was removed and studied so we could modernise it, and that led to a huge amount of work.