STRAIGHT SHOOTER

LLOYD TAYLOR'S SHOWSTOPPING, ARROW-STRAIGHT HT MONARO WAS BUILT 1000 MILES AWAY FROM THE NEAREST BIG CITY

- BORIS VISKOVIC

WHEN this HT Monaro showed up at the 2022 WA Hot Rod & Street Machine Spectacular, a lot of punters were trying to figure out which big-dollar custom shop had built it and, more importantly, who had done the arrow-straight panel and paint. Well, no big-dollar custom shop was involved, and the bloke who did the panel and paint was the same person who did 95 per cent of the other work: Lloyd Taylor.

Lloyd’s a pretty laid-back bloke, humble about his talents but more than happy to talk at length about what went into making one of the nicest HT Monaros you’ll ever lay your eyes on. Admittedly, it’s not exactly a ‘backyard build’, as Lloyd and his wife Caroline own Precision Collision in Karratha, a coastal town 1500km from Perth in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, famous for its iron ore, rust-red dirt and notso-flash roads.

That’s partly why you won’t see the Monaro cruising the streets of Karratha, but mainly it’s because the car earned a Superstars invite to this year’s Meguiar’s MotorEx in Melbourne, so Lloyd has been trying to keep it as pristine as possible but also tidying up a few things on the car he wasn’t quite happy with. If you’re still counting, it’s almost 4500km from Karratha to Melbourne.

So, how does a bloke, miles away from any other custom, high-performance or even parts shop, build a car to this level? Well, it does take time – around five years, to be precise, but even by city standards, that’s not too long. Keep in mind, too, that the build was done mainly on spare weekends in between Lloyd and Caroline running their business and bringing up two kids.