SILVER LININGS

SOMETIMES WHEN IT ALL GOES WRONG, THINGS END UP OH-SO-RIGHT, AS SLAV TODIC'S NINE-SECOND TORANA PROVES

- DAMION SMY

HOW does a bloke from Melbourne shopping for a VK Commodore end up with an LH Torana – from Perth? It wasn’t part of the plan, but it certainly was a silver lining for Slav Todic, who had no intention of ending up with such a tough-looking Torana streeter.

“The VK that I wanted, I’d had my heart set on for a while,” Slav says. “Once I got all the money sorted and everything ready to go buy the VK, it was gone.”

Happily, Slav now does have a VK build in the works (see breakout, p.75), but before that, he needed something special to distract him for a while. “I was looking for a VK for ages. I saw a few blue ones with LS2s in them and some others, but I love silver; I pretty much only have silver or white cars,” he says. “Then I’ve seen this silver Torana – my mate Pazzo [Daniel Nunziante of PSIDUP Fabrications] sent me the link to it. I didn’t like the wheels, but the colour was spot-on and we thought the car had potential; we could make a good-looking, tough car out of it.”

Perhaps wary of missing yet another project car, Slav bought the Torana sight unseen and had it shipped across to Melbourne. It had a 355ci Holden in it, which he says was “nothing special”, and despite a clean body without any add-ons, it was also running an SL/R 5000 bonnet scoop. “We knew we were going to build an engine for it, so I pretty much bought it for the body and the interior.”