Opinion: Australians moving onto new performance car heroes

Six months after Holden’s Port Elizabeth plant in Adelaide closed, it’s been interesting to see how people have responded to this momentous loss in their own different ways.

For the most part, and curiously, it seems to be by just not talking about it. Anybody who makes too much of a fuss or sends barbs flying over which is better, Falcon or Commodore, is quickly told to “move on” as we have “no choice but to”. That’s been our experience on social media, at least.

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But it also seems that for many, you can’t just switch your interest off. It’s had to redirect into other things, like water flowing in whatever direction gravity pulls it.

Within our ranks there seems to have been a refusal to ‘buy an SUV and be done with it’. I was at a service station the other week and got chatting to a bloke in a Kia Stinger GT. He also owned an FG FPV F6 and Gen-F HSV GTS and said he loved everything about the Stinger – except the badge on the front of it.

At MOTOR, we’ve seen a renewed interest in hot hatches. Once a category written off for being too small, too laggy, too toy-ish and perhaps not masculine enough, we met a tradie in his 50s at Winton Motor Raceway in country Victoria one afternoon a few weeks ago who proudly told us he had bought an A45 AMG.

Everybody mocks it off for being a little toy, and then he takes them for a ride in it, which quickly shuts them up, he told us through a wry smile.

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Part of the new ‘direction’ for MOTOR is to celebrate modern classic cars more often. Vehicles like the BMW E46 M3, VT HSV GTSs, or the C5 Audi RS6 are featured in our latest June 2018 issue, to mention a random few. There is a whole universe of cars in this space and you’ve all told us you’re quite happy for us to go there, so we are.

It’s been interesting to notice the curiosity in the upcoming updated Ford Mustang, too. Is this car the ‘new XR8’?

There’s certainly more Mustang news more often, as it’s a global car and Ford just has more money to spend on it. As such, there’s so much to talk about the new one that we’ve grilled the chief engineer and produced an exclusive under the skin tech feature, as you’ll read from our June 2018 issue.

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The new performance car business continues to be a fascinating and surprising one, whether it’s the brilliant, thrummy three-cylinder Ford Fiesta ST, a Lamborghini SUV, a rear-drive Audi R8 departing from quattro, which was previously sacrosanct, or the McLaren Senna, a car that takes track performance of a road car to a brand new level.

And it seems Aussie manufacturing – which we thought we had just seen the last of – has entered its next chapter, a cottage industry, with the shock advent of the Brabham supercar, which you’ll also read about in the June 2018 issue.

With so much money flowing into the performance-car market and manufacturers pursuing your business, you can count on it keeping your interest. It’s keeping mine.