Mean Street

Kiwi Aaron Jenkins’s wild, super-tough Torana is just like an Aussie street machine,only different – and totally legal!

- Boris Viskovic

WE GET a lot of letters complaining how the cars we feature aren’t true street machines: That’s not legal; No way that will pass rego; It’s just a race car with number plates; It’s just a show car with number plates. 

Admittedly, some of the cars in Street Machine may not see the street too often at all. But before you get out your letter writing set or pull your smartphone out of your pocket, that’s definitely not the case with this tough-as-nails Torana hatch. It’s a Kiwi car, and on the far side of the ditch the powers that be are a little more reasonable when you tell them you want to register a fully scratch-built car with a twin-turbo 540ci big-block Chev and 14-inch rims out back. 

For a bloke that’s a house painter by trade, Aaron Jenkins has done a pretty amazing job of building the Torana from next to nothing. When he got the car it had already been cut up, tubbed and fitted with a rollcage, so it had the bones of what he needed to get started on the build. Well, sort of: “That’s all gone and been replaced,” he admits. “It was easier to make a new chassis and dump the body on it, but I didn’t want to chop one up. It had the important bits and I didn’t have to source too much.”