Coupe De HRILL

HSV’S GTO COUPE WAS ALWAYS A LOOKER, BUT WE WISH THEY WERE ALL BUILT LIKE ROBERT GULJAS’S AWESOME BLOWN EXAMPLE!

- IAIN KELLY

ONE of the most common lies we street machiners tell ourselves boils down to one simple sentence: “I’ll just give it a quick tidy-up.”

While it looks a million bucks now, Robert Guljas’s epic blown 2004 HSV GTO started off as a low-kay, but tatty, stocker. “The guy I bought it off used it every day, so it had a few scratches here and there,” Robert says. “It was just well-used, but it only had 120,000km, and I love these Monaros.”

Holden’s third-generation Monaro, coded CV8, was a hit from the time the top-secret VT Commodore Coupe concept broke cover at the 1998 Sydney Motor Show. The body kit-clad HSV GTO and GTS coupes ramped the horn-meter up and were pegged as future classics almost from the time they were new, though this didn’t stop Robert stripping his new toy.

“I pulled the car apart at home with my two sons to give it a coat of paint,” he says. “Once we pulled it apart, things got out of hand, so we decided to get it done in time for Summernats.”

Canberra’s annual Festival of Grunt is a common deadline for the builds of many cars, but what made Robert’s situation a little stickier was that he was starting his project in May. This left him only seven months to get the car finished, running and ready to be judged among Australia’s best-modified cars.

“I changed the motor to the blown one, which I had in the build already for an HG Premier I was building at the time, and then we decided we needed to mini-tub the rear end,” he sighs.