We follow a HSV GTSR W1 down the production line

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.

Our chaperone was Andrew Purcell, an HSV man of 21 years and the brand’s Technical Liaison Officer. The original VS-based GTS-R was mid-production when he started; the 13,000sqm workshop a sea of ‘Yella’ paintwork. Back then the company’s entire inventory could fit under the one roof and just three workstations – mechanical, electrical and bodywork; each with a single operator – could turn a Commodore into a HSV.

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.

Each body arrives with its final paint colour applied, and most of the HSV-specific interior trim already installed on the Holden production line. In fact, Purcell estimates that production efficiencies saw up to 50 percent of HSV componentry handled at the Holden VAP, including installation of the 6.2-litre LSA V8 engine that starts life in all W1s before its extraction at Clayton.

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.

The operators here don’t rotate through different stations like others do. A young, brown-haired girl named Savanna is one of the elite few selected to work the procedure, and for her it’s a dream come true.

“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.