Star Of The Show

Luke Mitchell and his team built this LJ Torana in just four months for a tv show, and but it ended up in the summernats top 10

- Andrew Broadley

Ever watch those Seppo car shows on television and wonder how they manage to cobble a car together in record time to any sort of respectable standard? Just ask Luke Mitchell of Advanced Motorsports; the struggle is real.

This positively gorgeous LJ Torana was built from the ground up in just four months for Aussie TV show Rides Down Under: Workshop Wars, and there’s no questioning the standard to which it is finished – it landed in the Elite Top 10 and won a swag of tinware at Street Machine Summernats 33, which is a hell of an effort given the timeframe of the build.

“We were approached to do the show by the producer Rob, who was just a normal car guy,” says Luke. “We decided to go ahead with it and we were initially going to do a customer’s car, but I didn’t want any potential complications like money drying up midway through the build, so I decided to do my own car instead. I’ve always been a Torana guy, and I’ve had a few LJs but never actually found the time to finish any of them, so this is the car we decided to build.”

Luke already had an LJ shell that could have formed the basis for the project, but a mate of his had one that was in better shape, so he purchased it and brought it to the shop before he and his team ran at it flat-out. The project management side of the build was expertly handled, and it needed to be given the deadline and the scope of the modifications; there was simply no margin for error or delays.