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Gallery 1
THERE’S a pocket of industry in south-eastern Melbourne with deeper significance to the Australian motoring story than it lets on.
Long before Holden Special Vehicles called it home, this site in the suburb of Clayton produced thousands of cars every year to get Aussies mobile.
Volkswagen built the walls and paved the way from 1954, Nissan and Datsun took over in the 1970s, before the baton was eventually handed to Volvo who let the site fall silent in 1988.
HSV picked up the torch in 1994 and more than two decades later began assembling the vehicle Australia will forever remember as the high water mark for locally made cars – the HSV GTS-R W1.
The race-derived super-sedan is the most extreme thing to leave the Clayton facility in its 63-year history, and while the last examples of HSV’s masterpiece were still rolling down the line, Wheels snuck behind the roller door to find out exactly what goes into building each one.
Today, the operation spans three buildings and an undercover car park with more than 400 cars on site. Transforming a VFII into a W1 takes 15 separate processes, a team of people and roughly six days to complete. Typically, about 80 production staff assemble 15 to 18 vehicles per day in this big, ageing shed. That number swells to 25 at times like this when demand is peaking. The workshop is a hive of productivity.
Donor vehicles ordered months in advance have been arriving en masse from Holden’s Elizabeth Vehicle Assembly Plant (VAP) in the weeks leading up to its closure. As always, they appear as complete ADR-compliant cars wearing raw black bumpers and temporary steel wheels painted bright orange or green. It’s a humble beginning. Only a small ‘W1’ written in paint marker on the windscreen indicates their destiny.
That’s the big W1 production challenge. Every other HSV has its one and only engine sitting up front before the enhancement process starts. The W1 doesn’t. “W1 is a big build. Engine, gearbox, front cross-member and front suspension all come out in one hit,” Purcell explains.
The station responsible sits in a corner of the workshop set up specifically for the W1 program where two cars can be worked on at one time. The front sub-frames of each, cradling the engines, gearboxes, and with control arms and braking components attached, are lowered onto rolling jigs engineered specifically for this purpose and wheeled away to a sub-assembly area.
“I moved over from Adelaide. As a Holden fan I saw it as a great opportunity to come and work for HSV. There are only 300 W1s being built, so to be one of six people that do it, it’s a great honour,” she tells me with obvious pride.
In the bay opposite the car she’s working on, the unneeded LSA engine and gearbox (destined to return to Holden to be sold as spare parts) are craned out of the sub-frame to make way for the W1’s ultimate cornerstone – the 474kW/815Nm 6.2-litre supercharged LS9 V8.
“Each of the engines is hand assembled in the US and has the assembler’s name on a plaque, similar to the LS7 program that we did for W427,” says Purcell, recalling what was the most expensive HSV in history until W1 came along.
Most of the LS9’s factory ancillaries are unsuitable for the W1 application. Exhaust headers, engine mounts and oil cooler are removed and replaced for packaging reasons. The dry-sump oil reservoir is altered to HSV’s design for chassis-rail clearance. Heater hoses are changed, coil packs are moved and a new wiring harness added before an engine number is stamped onto the block and the final ensemble lifted back into the sub-frame.
“Our ‘robots’ all have hearts,” jokes Purcell. “It’s about a six-hour turnaround from having a running LSA to a running LS9. The guys are quite good at it. Once you’ve worked in this area for a few weeks you know every nut and bolt of the job.”
Customers have the opportunity to come in and witness their car being built and it’s this part of the process the W1 buyers want to see most. Purcell is the man who makes it happen.
Visiting the workshop is a seminal experience. Tom’s Cafe (named after Mr Walkinshaw) is a shrine of signed memorabilia from years past. Old race-car parts are stacked on top of break-room lockers. Magnesium V8 Supercar wheels, stickered-up race-car doors and stylised illustrations drawn by HSV designers hang on the walls.
Each W1 returns to the regular production line ready to receive its wide-body front guards. They’re prepared by a bearded bloke named Cameron, who attaches the carbonfibre inserts to each side with practised finesse.
Cameron’s handiwork is followed by fascia fit-up, where the W1 gets its distinctive bumpers, model-specific spoiler with carbonfibre upper plane and a requisite ‘I just want one’ sticker on the rear windscreen.
“These bays are based on 25-minute turnaround times,” says Purcell. “Not so the guys are rushed, just so the cars move in sequence.”
A four-post hoist raises each car for access to the side skirts at a working height where all doors can still be opened. It’s one of 22 hoists in total. Here, the engine cover, tyre placard, key fob decal, petrol cap sticker, floor mats, bonnet badge, rear badges, sill and centre console badges are all added.
Exterior decals are attached using 3D-printed jigs for alignment. Warming drawers keep the adhesive backings primed. The nameplates of deceased HSV models are plastered to the outside of tool boxes all over this area. From here, it’s on to brakes, wheels and tyres.
These are finishing touches from a production point of view. Assembled W1s roll off the last hoist and down a bump track to reach the wheel-alignment bays, where they’re set up to a HSV spec that’s different to any Commodore.
“Nobody will be happy to chew out these tyres in 200km,” says station operator Dale. He’s a dab hand who has been at HSV for seven months and is already training others to use the apparatus. The accuracy needed is time consuming given the W1’s focused suspension and extreme tyre performance.
“We then get down to the final hoists,” says Purcell. “A full visual inspection and checks of safety-critical things, then a road test outside the complex to make sure the steering wheel is straight, brake pedal is good and there are no negative attributes.”
End of line validation includes up to 200 quality checks. A second set of eyes at the penultimate station inspects the inspectors and even assesses the bits HSV hasn’t touched.
Quality is an ongoing theme here. A huge sign on the wall near the entrance reads, ‘Quality is our legacy.’ I feel a pang of pride at the end of the line, as the W1 I’ve followed through the last steps receives its build plate and VIN decal: its badges of honour.
This is the end of an era for HSV, but what a way to go out. Seeing Australia’s superlative vehicle pieced together by hand is an eye-opening way to appreciate the level of engineering inside each W1. There will never be anything else like it.
He knows where I’m coming from. “We have an internal mantra here, and that’s ‘pushing boundaries’,” he says, with just a trace of melancholy. “It’s been bloody good fun.”
