Mellow Yellow

Benny’s VN came in white and left in HSV Devil Yellow. Not a show car and not pretending to be one — a straight, tidy street car with the right things done properly.

Plenty of what comes through here is a frame-up restoration measured in years. This one wasn’t, and it’s worth showing for exactly that reason. A car doesn’t need a hundred-thousand-dollar budget to be worth doing well; it needs the paint done properly, the mechanical sorted, and somebody to resist the urge to add things it doesn’t need.

Back to a bare shell

The car was stripped — glass out, interior out, engine out — and the shell prepared for colour rather than scuffed and shot over. That’s the difference between paint that looks right in the first year and paint that still looks right in the tenth.

It went into the booth in HSV Devil Yellow, and the parts most people never see went with it. The engine bay, the door apertures and the underside were all painted out in body colour, so there’s no seam where the good work stops.

The driveline

Under the bonnet is a cammed Holden 304 running Holley Sniper EFI — carburettor simplicity to look at, fuel injection to live with. Behind it is a T5 manual, and VT front brakes went on to give it stopping power the standard car never had.

The engine bay was detailed to match the paint rather than dropped back in as it came out. It’s an easy corner to cut and it’s the first thing anyone looks at when the bonnet goes up.

Inside

A custom interior, trimmed here in our own shop. The VN’s own lines were kept — the point wasn’t to turn it into something else, just to make the cabin as tidy as the outside.

The result

A good mix of original VN styling and subtle upgrades throughout. It looks like a VN Commodore, because it is one — just a considerably better sorted one than it was when it arrived.