QUICK TEMPER

MORE THAN 30 YEARS AFTER BUYING IT, DAVE BARNARD HAS FINALLY PIECED TOGETHER THE QUICK-AND-ANGRY MONARO HE ALWAYS WANTED

- TAS MCMILLAN

MOST people don’t get to hang on to their first car. Fewer still manage to transform it into a trophy-hauler beyond their teenage dreams. Dave Barnard is one of those few to have done exactly that with his Monaro, but this build is far more than a new set of rings and a quick blow-over in the factory colour. No, my friend, this HQ is all about the details.

His uncle is the one who first kindled Dave’s fire for Munros. “My uncle had a purple HQ GTS,” he says. “One day he dropped me off at school in it, and that’s when I started really liking Monaros.”

When Dave was a second-year apprentice, he managed to scrape together enough folding stuff to purchase a Monaro of his own – this one. “I bought it in 1988, drove it around for a couple of years and then pulled it apart. I thought I’d do it all up, but it just didn’t happen, so it sat in pieces.”

While the Monaro hibernated in various garages over the next three decades, Dave built himself a neat HQ more door with which to menace the streets. The sedan wasn’t an ugly slug, either, making its way into a few magazines and running a 9.9@132mph with a long-suffering, nitroushuffing 350 Chev. Just when Dave was ruminating on plans to revive the Monaro, someone offered him the right money for the sedan. A deal was done, the four-door was moved on, and Dave got busy.

“Originally it was a 308/Trimatic car, but it dropped a valve and destroyed the engine the second week I owned it!” Dave says. “I’d put a 350 Chev, TH350 and drum brake nine-inch in it, but all that running gear went into the four-door.”