DREAM THEATRE

FANTASIES SOMETIMES COME TRUE, AS THIS NEAR-1000HP LC TORANA PROVES

- IAIN KELLY

FINDING your dream car as a cherry example locked away in dry storage for nearly 35 years is a fantasy every street machiner has had. But for Nick Ursino, who'd wanted a two-door Torana since he was a kid, it was how this epic 980rwhp monster came to be. "I used to have a four-door LH Torana," he says of the beauty that we featured in Street Machine LSX Tuner in 2015. "But one day my mate was over and I told him I was after a two-door LC. Amazingly, he said, 'I know someone with one in a shed."

Fortuitously, the LC was just five minutes from Nick's house and had been sitting in that garage since 1985. "I made a deal with him that day and picked it up that weekend," he says.

You don't need 20:20 vision to see that the time-capsule two-door Torana didn't stay stock. 

"It's basically a three-quarter chassis car," laughs Nick. "The whole idea was to make it look like a standard GTR Torana dropped on a fat set of wheels and slammed really low. It now has a full chassis, the floor has been raised 100mm to tuck everything up high, all new floors, the firewall has been stepped and smoothed, the rails are beefed up, it's got a full 'cage, and it has a rear clip."