The Story of Behemoth
I have owned my VF Valiant (Behemoth) since 1997 (more than half my life). I am the third owner, and the glovebox contains the original sales documents from its sale through Commonwealth Motors in Braddon ACT. The car still has its original Canberra Y-series number plates, which have been on it all its life.
I fell in love with VF Coupes in the 1990s, and spent a great deal of time scouring the Canberra Times for good examples. I drove a few and when the blue with white roof 225 car came up for sale in Yarralumla in 1997, I just had to have it. The asking price of $5400 seemed too much, but the owner wouldn’t budge, and logic didn’t matter because I was in love.
I drove the car for the next 10 years as my prized daily driver. I drove it as far north as Newcastle, as far south as Melbourne, and as far west as Adelaide. I drove it to work as a high school teacher in Queanbeyan in the late 1990s, and enjoyed my students admiring my “wog chariot”. One day on the way home from work, I was racing a Falcon XR6 from the lights and revving the slant pretty hard. A conrod bent and the engine needed major work. I decide this was time to put a 440 in my precious Valiant.
Although I did huge amounts of careful research, I had no practical experience with modified cars, and I didn’t know what I was embarking on. Several jobs (replacing and upgrading the brakes for example) had to be done twice because I hired the wrong workshops, and I got discouraged by the amount of money that was being drained, and the lack of progress. The Val moved between workshops around Canberra and Queanbeyan for several years, and then when I got discouraged it sat for about 7 years at the back of my garage, whilst I focussed on my young family and demanding career.
In 2013 I started my own business, which became quite successful for a while, and money was less of an issue. I also met a gentleman by the name of Shane Feltam, who had worked on another VF Coupe, and who has an extensive resume of SummerNats-winning restorations of Holdens and Fords. His work was amazing, and he could take on the Val as a “complete project” so that I could just hand the whole thing over to him. Shane came over to my place whilst visiting Canberra for SummerNats, and he seemed excited about taking on the project.
The car was very straight, had no rust, and lots of the difficult work had been done. Moreover it was full to the brim with high quality parts, and an appealing original colour combination. Shane liked, and embraced, my philosophy, which was to keep the car looking original other than the wheels, and of course under the bonnet. The Val was taken out of the back of my garage, put on a tilt tray, and taken to Shane’s workshop in Gundagai.
Over the next 4 years Shane completely stripped the car and restored everything from the ground up. The brand new motor, a very tough build by Muscle Motors from the US, was sent to Shane’s friend Bill from BK Race Engines. Bill made a tough motor into something amazing with a complete rebuild.
Shane outsourced the interior restoration to his friend David from Wagga, and the car spent a few months in David’s garage, where I visited a number of times to sort through details of the interior.
The interior is something special, as David retrimmed the already excellent interior in leather, carefully following the original design. For example, David took the vinyl door-cards, that had heat-pressed fake stitching, and made real stitching over the leather that is an exact match to the pattern of the original vinyl.
Next behemoth went to Ray Spence, in Canberra, for full engineering approval. Ray’s friend Mick from M&A Engineering completed $13,000 of work to address things like rear seat belt installation, suspension clearance, and miscellaneous minor items to comply with full registration requirements.
The next step was to take the car to Chryslers on the Murray in March 2023, where the car was one of nearly 1000 entrants. The highest possible prize for the car was “Best of Show” which goes to just one car. In 2023 this went to a beautiful 1946 Dodge. The next highest award goes to 5 cars chosen by the judges as “Top 5 of Show”, which is where the Val was recognised.
Sadly, following divorce and the melt-down of my business, my financial position has changed again, and I can’t afford to keep the Val. It has been a great part of my life story, and it is very satisfying to end the project, so that I can pass it on to the next custodian in good shape.
I hope that whoever owns the car next, will enjoy it. The bodywork is amazing, but this is a car that, in my view, should be driven and enjoyed. It total I estimate that I have spent more than $250,000 on the Val, and I never approached it as an investment, because that is not how these things work, especially as an amateur enthusiast. I hope the next owner will get a lot of pleasure out of driving an 800hp tough-as-nails fully-street-legal Valiant. Behemoth loves doing massive burnouts.
