Humble Brag

It might be humble by name, but Layton Crambrook’s award-winning blown HQ monaro gts sure isn’t humble by nature.

- Josh Bennis

WHEN it comes to getting the most out of an HQ Holden, Layton Crambrook knows a thing or two. He won the 2006 Australian HQ Holden Championship, after all.

In fact, Layton has been racing cars all his life, and was at one point the youngest-ever person to race a V8 Supercar. “I originally started racing sprintcars, but my circuit racing career started in an HQ when I was 14,” Layton says. “I went from racing an HQ to a V8 Supercar – not your typical motorsport transition!”

After finishing his time in Supercars, Layton built an HQ race car. “It was basically a show car underneath; it would have fitted in at Summernats it was that neat,” he says.

But ask any Holden fan what car they would build if they had the chance, and more times than most the answer would be: a blown two-door HQ Monaro GTS. And that’s exactly what Layton built next.

This award-winning Monaro GTS came about through Matt Cavenagh, a friend Layton grew up with in Darwin. “He saw the car for sale on Facebook, so I asked him to have a look at it for me,” he says. “The car was in good nick and had very minimal rust. It’s also a genuine two-door HQ Monaro GTS that originally came out with a 253. In the end it took about a week to get a deal together, and the car was mine.”

After taking possession of the Monaro, Layton had it sitting in the shed for a year while he figured out what exactly how he wanted to build it. He had an engine package put together by Steve Nicotra, but it was completed long before Layton had even started to prepare the shell. “There’s always the question of: Do we make it a nice road car, or do we take it down a different path? Believe it or not, the motor is part of the reason the car ended up the way it is; you can’t have a motor look that good and not have the rest match,” Layton says.