Have you ever looked at a Chevy El Camino and thought, “That is still too car-like?” No? Of course not…the selection of trucks available in America pretty much ruled that out, especially with the onslaught of smaller trucks that became available in the 1970s and 1980s. But the Australians love their utes, so when the regular ute doesn’t have enough capability, enter the flatbed ute, or as Holden referred to them as, a “one tonner”. Effectively it was a chassis cab version of the Kingswood: you got everything from the B-pillar forward car-wise, and the remainder of it was yours to adjust. If you wanted to run a stake bed, a flatbed or simply wanted to leave the framerails bare, that was your call.
This Holden, known as “HOG400”, ticks our boxes. It has a nose clip conversion (Aussie guys, help me here. I know it’s been swapped, but with what?) and has enough grunt to hunt around the low 10-second range all day long, and if things go nicely and the weather cooperates, it will clip into the nines. It doesn’t have the issues that you would expect a car with nearly no weight, it just hooks and books with no drama.
Okay it’s got a Prem nose and GTS guards, does that help!
We drop the “One” and call them a “tonner”. They only ever came with a single 7″ headlight so the twin 5″ headlights are from a higher model Holden.
They we’re always a very basic trademan’s car, bench seat, basic interior but they did come with heavy duty axles, tailsharft and a gearbox with a low first gear.
A good tonner always get a lot of respect.
Agreed, Prem being Aussie shorthand for a Holden Premier, the upmarket model between a Kingy (Kingswood) and a Stato ( Statesman) – all the front sheetmetal interchanges. I think these have huge potential – one of the very few Aussies to get a full chassis. When I worked at GM there were piles of chassis and bodies for these laying about near our maintenance section, and I used to daydream about what you could throw onto one of those chassis…there was one of these around back in the day, only saw a picture of it once that had the original front cab but from the B pillars back he’d made it into a replica Formula 1 car complete with huge rear tyres – to my 16 year old mind it was friggin awesome…