GROUP EFFORT

MATT SMOORS'S VL HDT GROUP A TRIBUTE IS A GENRE-DEFYING, 2500HP SHOW CAR WITH ITS SIGHTS SET ON SIXES

- STORY LIAM QUIRK

PETER Brock famously tried to extract superior performance from the HDT VL SS Group A by mounting a box of crystals in the plenum, but for Matt Smoors, the solution to wicking one up was far more obvious: twin-turbo LS power! Still, just in case Peter Perfect was onto something, Matt made sure he fitted a Polariser to his Group A tribute build!

This VL isn't Matt's first dance with red firstgen Commodores. Rocking Magnuson-blown LS3 power, his wild FSTGMH VK appeared in Street Machine LSX Tuner #1 in 2014, and in 2017, we featured video on our website of the car soaring into the high eights at over 150mph.

"I was doing that in long sleeves and pants, with a half 'cage," Matt recalls. "We could have kept refining that car and gone faster, but I felt that doing the safety upgrades would have made it less of a street car." That meant Matt needed something else to go racing with, so he immediately began searching for another early Commodore.

"I was originally going to shove this driveline into a patina VB Commodore shell, but I couldn't stop thinking about how cool twin turbos would look behind the brake ducts in a VL Group A front bar," he says.

As it happened, a mate's nephew had a relatively honest blank canvas sitting in a driveway, which he'd been threatening to restore for over five years. "I said, 'If you were going to save it, you would have done it by now! Sell it to me and I'll make something out of it!"" laughs Matt, who in no time at all had the entire car disassembled, with every part bubble-wrapped and catalogued.