GAS747: Twenty Plus Years With a Holden VL Calais Turbo

I bought my Holden VL Calais Turbo in January 2004. I'd be lying if I said I knew back then it would still be in my garage 22 years later, but here we are. The plates are GAS747, and if you've been around the Australian VL scene for any length of time, you might have heard of it.

For those who haven't, the VL Turbo is a bit of a unicorn. Holden took their VL Commodore in the late 80s and shoved Nissan's RB30ET turbo engine under the bonnet. Three litres, factory turbocharged, rear-wheel drive, 150kW and 296Nm straight off the showroom floor. That doesn't sound like much today, but in 1986 it was properly quick. Australian highway patrol units used them. People still talk about them.

What pulled me in wasn't just the factory spec though. It was what the platform could do.

The LPG years

For a long stretch, GAS747 ran on LPG. That probably sounds odd to anyone outside Australia. LPG was cheap, plentiful, and most people associated it with taxis and delivery vans, not nine-second drag cars. But the chemistry works. LPG handles boost well, runs cool, and if you know what you're doing, you can make serious power on it.

We did exactly that. The car was built around an RB30ET-based setup with a big single turbo, a built transmission, a strengthened diff, and drag-oriented suspension. On LPG, it ran nine-second quarter miles. That got noticed. The car ended up across Australian car media, YouTube clips, Facebook videos, and a few drag racing pages. People still send me links to footage I'd forgotten existed. What still surprises me is that no other VL Turbo has gone quicker since. All these years on, the time still stands.

I never set out to build something famous. I just wanted it to be fast, reliable, and a bit different. The LPG angle was the difference.

Moving to E85

After the LPG era, I switched the tune over to E85. Ethanol gives you a similar cooling effect to LPG but with more headroom for power. Most of the serious drag cars in Australia run it now. The tuning is more refined, the parts support is better, and the consistency is excellent.

The trade-off is I haven't raced it competitively since the LPG days. Life gets in the way. Work, family, projects, the usual story. The car is still here though, still tuned, still capable. I write about it and the rest of what I do over at paulsera.com when I get the time.

Why the VL still matters

There's a generation of Australians who lost their licences in VL Turbos. There's another generation who never drove one but grew up hearing about them. The platform sits in a weird sweet spot between classic and modern. The RB30ET responds to mods the way the later RB26 does. The chassis is light. Parts are still around if you know where to look.

Factory figures for a VL Turbo Calais manual were roughly:

• 0 to 100 km/h in 7.6 to 7.8 seconds
• Quarter mile around 15.5 seconds
• Top speed claimed over 220 km/h

Those numbers seem quaint when you're staring at a modern AMG, but the VL was a proper performance car for its time. And it scales. From stock to nine-second drag car is the same chassis, the same basic engine architecture, the same bones.

Twenty years later

I still open the garage and look at it sometimes. It's not pretty in the way a restored Monaro is pretty. It's a working car. It's been thrashed, rebuilt, retuned, raced, parked, started up, parked again. The plate has stayed the same the whole time.

GAS747 isn't really about being the fastest or the cleanest VL out there. It's about owning something for long enough that it becomes part of the furniture. 22 years in, that's the part I didn't see coming.

If you've got a VL story of your own, I'd love to hear it.