BIG engine, little car. It’s been a winning formula for racers and street machiners for decades. And it”s a formula that Castlemaine Rod Shop has grabbed by the throat for its business-card build LC Torana.

The car was on Castlemaine Rod Shop’s stand at Summernats 29 last year after being in-the-build for five or six years; the car was carrying a dummy-install GM LS V8 with twin belt-driven centrifugal superchargers but since then the baby Torana has copped a BNR Engines built 14/71 blown 560ci big-block.

It’s a big change of direction for the car that was conceived – and the build established – as a top-grade MotorEx contender, as CRS’s Mark Waddington explains: “We needed a burnout car in a hurry,” he says. “And most of the work was already done on this!”

The work performed over the past half-decade has been extensive, due to the intertwined reasons of a very rusty two-door shell (“We should have chucked it away and got another good one,” says Mark) and the initial level of build to Elite standards. The only remaining original panels of the car are the turret and one rear quarter panel – everything else has been replaced, re-jigged or re-engineered by being blown apart and stitched back together over an all-new chassis and floor using cuts from other dead Toranas, Muscle Car Parts repair panels and hand-formed metal.

The new CRS-built chassis holds a bespoke front end (based on the CRS customer-spec front end) with rack and pinion steering, plus a CRS nine-inch rear on a four-bar setup. It’s bagged both ends and the BNR-built blown big block is bolted to a MDT-built Powerglide.

After a quick dyno fiddle, the CRS Torana should hit the burnout pad at the Xtreme Powrfest in Shepparton in late January.