Inside the Holden Hurricane

In 1968 in the USA, the Summer of Love was in full swing in hippie-filled San Francisco. The Woodstock Music & Arts Fair was a year away, Richard Nixon became president and NASA was preparing to send men to the moon. Down Under, John Gorton was prime minister and our first major pop festival, Sunbury, was still four years away. Television was in black and white and the most space-age car on Australian roads was Holden’s new HK Monaro.

The Monaro was a sensational first for a company more known for building utilitarian three-box specials. But at its Fishermen’s Bend Technical Centre, Holden’s designers and engineers were concurrently working on a concept that would prove that an automotive backwater like Australia could create world-class cars with ground-breaking technology.

It would be the car that set Holden on the road to becoming one of only three studios within General Motors that can design and build concept cars.

In early 1969, the jaw-dropping RD 001 (Research & Development 001) was shown at the Melbourne Motor Show and Australia took a giant leap forward in the car world. Dubbed the Hurricane, the knee-high mid-engined sportscar looked like it had come straight from the grid at the Le Mans 24 Hours -- or The Thunderbirds science fiction series! It was the kind of car young boys scrawled on the backs of their school books.

Consider this… In 1968, even Ferrari, which didn’t build three-box specials, had only just released its first mid-engined two-seater, the Dino 206 GT. Holden therefore was right up there with Europe -- the only problem was, unlike The Dino, the Hurricane was never designed for production.

There's was another raison d'etre for Hurricane. Under the Holden's dazzling metallic orange fibreglass body was the first Australian-designed V8 – a 193kW experimental version of the 4.2-litre ‘253’, soon to be widely used in the Holden range. But the Hurricane also boasted technological firsts like a rear-view camera (it had no back window), the pre-Sat Nav Pathfinder route guidance system, inertia-reel seatbelts, automatic air-conditioning; digital instruments, oil-cooled disc brakes, hydraulic one-piece canopy, tilt steering column and adjustable pedals.

Still, a concept car is only exciting until the next one comes along and in Holden’s case, that was the Torana XU-1 predictor, the GTR-X coupe in 1970. Thus the Hurricane became yesterday’s news until it was resurrected in 2006 and painstakingly restored from shabby chassis to bronzed glory by a dedicated team of new-millenium engineers and designers.

It was officially unveiled by Chairman ad Ceo, Mike Devereux, at Holden’s Port Melbourne headquarters in October. The next stop was Melbourne’s Motorclassica auto show and concours.

Mixed Parentage

So who designed Hurricane and why? Was it an American or an Australian? Who signed off on it? Can we rightly claim it as an all-Aussie invention?

Opinion is divided among veteran Holden stylists and engineers. Legendary American designer Leo Pruneau, who joined Holden in time to design the GTR-X and the HQ, has his view.

“We’re still hung up on where the design came from but I wish I could say that I did the car,” Pruneau laughed.

“Joe Schemansky was the design director when I got here and he told me years ago that Bill Mitchell, who was the VP [Vice President Designes] in the States, sent a model to put in Schemansky’s design exhibition in the lobby at Holden, and I think all the canopy came off some show cars in America.”

Peter Nankervis was a junior designer in 1969 and after a six month stint in GM’s Detroit design studios he came back to Australia to work on the HK Holden wagon and ute. He has a different version of events.

“We made a lot of scale models at the time,” Nankervis told motoring.com.au.

“Ted Schroeder, who did the modeling of the original HK Monaro, did a number of quarter-scale models and I believe but I’m not absolutely sure, that the Hurricane is based on one of those. But all the rest of the design was done here, absolutely.

"The little group of R&D engineers who developed the mechanicals of the car was in a closed-off area in the auditorium with Don Daharsh [from the US]. Not even in design.”

“I’d like to think Peter’s story is more accurate than mine, frankly,” Pruneau said.

“They were always doing these kinds of cars in Detroit but how this one actually got here, we’re just not absolutely bloody sure. What I can’t find out is who authorised the car. If Peter’s story is right and the scale models were done ahead of time, somebody at Holden had to make the decision to make a runner. It was done for the [new] engine.”

Current head of Holden design, Tony Stolfo, first saw designs of the car as a 19-year-old uni student and it intrigued him then. He was responsible for giving the restoration of the Hurricane a green light in 2007. He’s in the dark about its original designer too.

“We don’t know who actually penned the design,” Stolfo shrugged.

“Don Daharsh was in charge at the time and says it wasn’t him but he couldn’t name who it was, so we really don’t know.”

For Stolfo and his dedicated and talented team, restoring the Hurricane was a “labour of love”. There was no budget allocated, the budget was passion, he said.

“There was no dollar figure. If there’d been a dollar figure, it probably wouldn’t have happened and that’s why it’s taken so long.

"It was done in down-time at the studio, people worked after hours and we pulled in favours from suppliers. Everything is done at a budget but this project was our number one concept car, the only one in our concept stable that we hadn’t restored.”

Beacon Re-lit

The car that could have been Australia’s Ferrari never had a production future, alas. Holden probably couldn’t have afforded to build the Hurricane anyway, even without some of its more futuristic technology, Nankervis commented.

“There was never an intention to build it,” he stressed.

“[But] We did do a study to build a sportscar and in design we had Aston Martins, E-Types, Corvettes and Ferraris – with front, mid, and rear-engine seating layouts – for a big show for management to demonstrate what we could do. But they said no, we can’t afford it.”

For designers like Stolfo, Nankervis and Pruneau, funding for “fun projects”, as Pruneau calls them, is impossible to secure. But concepts, like the Hurricane, done more for the love of an idea than for profit are still the lifeblood of car companies.

“The fun projects are done in the back room,” Pruneau said.

“Nobody sees them and you work on them and work on them until you’ve got it right then you show them. If you ask anybody [in management] if you can do it [beforehand] they’ll tell you, “Hell no, we haven’t got the money or the time or the people. It’s all bullshit!”

Forty two years after it debuted to acclaim, the Hurricane remains a sophisticated styling beacon that shone brightly in a less-sophisticated time but was allowed to burn out. Until now.