N/A ALL THE WAY

CHRIS VASSILIS'S EIGHT-SECOND LX TORANA STREET CRUISER IS A NATURAL-BORN KILLER

-  LIAM QUIRK

CHRIS Vassilis shares a unique relationship with his good friend and childhood neighbour, Bill Kaglatzis, owner of BK Race Engines. "If it wasn't for Bill, I'd probably have bought a few houses by now," he laughs. "Bill is definitely responsible for my love of cars. As a kid, I rode my bike around to his house one day and saw him piecing together an engine covered in Speedflow fittings and with two giant turbos hanging off it. That day the Lamborghini and Mick Doohan posters came down from my bedroom walls; I fell in love with tough V8s!"

Even so, it would take almost two decades for Chris to snag a muscle car of his own. Easily distracted throughout his teens and 20s by rotaries and motorbikes, he eventually outgrew these toys and found himself staring at an empty shed.

"My dad owned a Torana hatchback before he had kids and always spoke about it, so I pictured myself owning one, one day," the Sydneysider says. "My wife and I were driving to Port Stephens and saw a convoy of Toranas heading to Toranafest. To my surprise, it was my wife who suggested I buy one she probably thought I was just going to slap some whitewalls and venetians on a stocker and cruise it!"

Striking while the Minister for Finance had the war chest open, Chris immediately jumped online and found a prospective project several hundred kilometres away in Mudgee, NSW. There was no point making the eight-hour round trip without bringing the car home, but the gravity of the situation quickly dawned on Chris. "It was literally just a shell - no wiring, no glass, nothing in the doors," he says.