Family Values

Mark Thomson Built His Fat Hg Premier As A Cool Cruiser, But It Didn’T Get His Family’S Tick Of Approval Until It Had A Turbo Six-Litre Ls V8

- Iain Kelly

MANY of us love to involve our friends and family in our hobby, to show them why we spend all those nights with skinned knuckles working on a car we curse ’til the early hours of the morning. Fortunately for Geelong’s Mark Thomson, his wife Jodie and sons Archie and Cohen love his tough turbocharged and injected HG Premier. “It means a lot to have my wife and two sons support my hobby,” Mark says.

In fact, the reason he purchased this HG was to have a car the whole family could enjoy. “I bought it back in 2010 after completing a full resto on an HT Monaro,” he says. “I was after another project, but with kids on the scene now I wanted a four-door. I saw an 80-year-old man drive the Premier into a caryard in Footscray; I followed him in and watched him trade it in on a Holden Astra, so I bought it off the caryard.”

While it had obviously been a loved car, that didn’t mean it wasn’t in need of a fair bit of fixing, which is where Mark’s mates stepped in. Together they built a fairly traditional Geelong cruiser, complete with mini-tubs and a gruff 400ci Chev smallblock. “The original plan was to leave it a six-cylinder for a while and just cruise around, but as the old story goes, next minute it was all pulled apart, panels sand-blasted and body paint stripped,” Mark laughs. “Rod Drew hand-fabricated all the rust repair sections; he is an incredible self-taught metal fabricator and some of the sections he made looked like they were genuine Holden parts. After the rust was sorted my good mate Mark Drew performed his magic massaging the body back into shape and also got those 295/50 tyres squeezed under the rear.”