Rat- Tastic!

Steve Metcalfe took a garden-ornament fe holden and turned it into a 900rwhp demon in just four months

- Kian Heagney

Sometimes keeping things simple and going back to basics can yield the best results, and few builds demonstrate that as plainly as Steve Metcalfe’s cheap-as-chips FE Holden project.

Steve is no stranger to classic Holdens, with a collection of big-horsepower, show-quality rigs in his stable. But for this build, he decided to take a different approach. “I wanted to build something to show that you can do it all yourself, and you don’t need big bucks either,” he says.

The other big trigger for the project was spending a few weeks in the US with the Team Enemies Everywhere crew for the Horsepower Wars $10K Drag Shootout, a challenge forcing teams to build stupidly quick cars in a small timeframe on very strict budgets (see sidebar). “The $10K Shootout and talking to Harry Haig a lot opened my eyes to this whole budget thing, so I decided to do one myself,” Steve says.

Steve stumbled across this FE and a much nicer FC for $1500 on Facebook Marketplace around 12 months ago. The FE was in a pretty sorry state: “It had been sitting in a paddock for at least 30 years, I reckon,” he says. “All the chassis was completely gone, and only one floorpan was semi-okay at best. It had no diff and no interior – it was a rust bucket – so I had no problem with cutting it up.”

Being a gun fabricator for Enemies Everywhere, Steve set about building the FE into a crusty monster. It copped a whole new chassis – very similar to the one Steve made for the Camaro the team used to win the $10K Shootout. Steve also renovated the FE’s floor, trans tunnel and tubs, along with fabricating a chromemoly rollcage.