AN ORDERLY Q

MATT MCINTOSH'S FIVE-YEAR HQ STATESMAN BUILD WAS NEVER MEANT TO BECOME AN ELITE-LEVEL CAR, BUT THE NUMEROUS TOP GONGS IT SCORED AT SUMMERNATS 35 SUGGEST OTHERWISE

- BORIS VISKOVIC

MATT McIntosh’s HQ Statesman set tongues wagging at Street Machine Summernats 35, and it wasn’t just the punters’ attention it caught following its debut as part of the Great Meguiar’s Uncover. The judges must’ve taken a liking to the 70s luxobarge too, because it took home trophies for Top Engineered, Top Bodywork, Top Undercarriage/

Driveline, Top Engine Bay, Top Pro Custom, and the big one: Top Judged Elite. Luckily, Statesmans have a big boot!

The build took Matt around five years, which might seem like a long time, but once you see how much work went into it, you’ll probably wonder how he got it done so quickly!

Of course, it helps if you have your own automotive business, which in Matt’s case is the Echuca Service Centre. They were able to do most of the work in-house, including bodywork, paint and dyno tuning, but on the flipside, they still had to get their customers’ cars out the door, too.

“I bought the car off an old guy in Finley,” Matt says. “It was a good, clean car, but weirdly, it was a 308 with a four-speed. It was unregistered; he was just doing track days in it. What I wanted was a four-door Australian car so we could all get in it and go for a drive. I wanted big tubs and a 1500hp engine that was nice and neat and had plenty of grunt. But along the way, we sort of got carried away and kept going, and going, and going.”

The Quey’s underpinnings are now all top-notch, with a Castlemaine Rod Shop front end that features tubular A-arms, rack-and-pinion steering and coil-over shocks, but those aren’t the only benefits. “I’d used the Rod Shop chassis before, and it lowers the engine heaps, which was really important, because I wanted to get everything under the bonnet,” Matt says.