DOUBLE ACTION

THINK BUILDING AN ELITE CAR IS TOUGH? TRY DOING A 1700RWHP HQ MONARO STREETER AT THE SAME TIME!

- IAIN KELLY

WHEN your 'other car' is a twin-turbo big-block HQ Monaro, life's pretty good. But good things don't come easily, and this monster Monaro build was hard slog for 'RIVAL' XE (p.24) builder and co-owner Eddie Khazi

"This HQ wasn't supposed to exist," he says. "My brother Younan and I were building our XE, and my cousin Sagz said he wanted to build an HQ. He said he had a vision of a 2000hp street car, so I said if he handled the drivetrain I'd do the rest. If it wasn't for Sagz, this car wouldn't have been built; it was a family project and he made it happen."

Eddie makes it sound so simple, as though we're all capable of knocking out a full-rotisserie build of a super-neat street car that packs all the engineering needed to run a six-second quarter-mile. When you consider he and Younan were giblets-deep in the five-year build of their elite-level, Barra-powered XE, you get a sense that the brothers work a little differently to most of us-not that we're complaining!

"It was hard," Eddie admits. "There were times when my brother was working two weeks straight on the Fairmont and I'd work two weeks on the HQ, and then we'd swap. We just kept rotating between the cars to keep things moving.

"Younan and I were working full-time jobs at the time, so after finishing there we'd come home to work on these cars 'til midnight, then grab some sleep as we'd start work at 5am. On weekends we would just do the cars, from early in the morning."

The brothers started with a genuine GTS, and not one ready for the scrapheap. Restorers beware you may get triggered at this point. "We bought the car as a running, registered, complete GTS," Eddie says. "We got it from Newcastle, and it went on a truck straight to Joe Signorelli at Gas Racing to be stripped for the fab work."