Rare Holden Torana GTR stashed in Ford dealer for 35 years

Cast your mind to the mid-1980s, if you can… Pseudo Echo and INXS ruled the charts, interest rates were sky high and Kylie Minogue was dating Jason Donovan.

And in 1985, a red Holden Torana GTR was traded in at Aberline Ford in Wyalong, a tiny country town in the middle of NSW.

After the straight-six coupe was traded in on a new Ford Falcon, the Tangerine orange Torrie sat in the storage area for the next 35 years, unloved, uncovered and unsold. The odometer shows 86,000km.

Now, as part of a job lot of cars, signage, workshop tools and manuals that’s going up for auction, the LJ Torana GTR is expected to attract a lot of interest, not least because of its almost-unmolested condition.

Pics from auction house Burns & Co show that the GTR appears to be in tip-top shape, thanks in no small part to its distance from the coast. Didn’t your dad always tell you country cars were the best?

Its long-grain black vinyl interior presents well, and once the three decades of dust are blown away and some missing parts are replaced, the Torana should come up perfectly.

The four-speed manual GTR making 101kW wasn’t the fire-breathing XU-1 that Peter Brock thrashed to victory around Bathurst in early 1970s. In the mid-80s, cars like this GTR were not the highly-valued collectors items they are today - they were instead prime candidates for modification or used as the basis for XU-1 replicas builds.

In fact, its trade-in price probably would have been less than $1000.

Now? The tidy Torana – non-factory 12-slot mag wheels and all – will likely fetch a handsome sum.

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Will it attract telephone number-type bids? It’s hard to say, but we’d guess somewhere in the region of $80,000-$100,000 isn’t out of the realms of possibility.