16 Young Builders Compete for Street Machine of the Year Glory

Sixteen young builders have made the cut for Street Machine's Young Street Machine of the Year competition, and the diversity of what they've assembled in sheds, garages, and driveways across the country is striking. There are 1970s Holdens sitting alongside Japanese imports, a Volkswagen Squareback, a Mazda rotary, and a pair of Toyotas that have been transformed into something their original designers never imagined. The judges received enough entries this year to make the selection genuinely difficult, but what emerged is a list that captures something real about how young Australians are learning to build cars right now: mostly at home, mostly with their fathers or mates, mostly by refusing to cut corners.

Riley Clatworthy bought his 1979 Holden Commodore VB as a bare shell in 2023 and spent the next three years turning it into a 308-powered cruiser that got out of hand in the best way. He was 21 when he finished it, having saved every penny from his apprenticeship and done nearly everything himself in a home shed with his dad—the only work outsourced was paint and panel. Anthony Crouch compressed an entire build into nineteen weeks, working full-time while he and his partner fabricated, welded, and assembled a 1965 Ford Falcon XP ute with a 347 Windsor engine. He ran it at Willowbank and clocked 11.4 seconds at 118 miles per hour. Abby Bruce bought a rough Holden Commodore VK off Facebook Marketplace for fifteen hundred dollars when she was seventeen, drove it fifteen hours home to NSW, and spent the next year building it into a Group A replica that echoed a car her father had owned when she was twelve. For her eighteenth birthday, her dad found the original custom plates and bought them back.

The builds span wildly different philosophies. Lachie Roberts imported a Nissan Silvia S15 and modified it with lip kits, coilovers, and suspension work to match a vision he'd carried since childhood. Jonny Murgana took a non-running Skyline R33 and, with help from his father Frank and cousin Frank Marchese, built an RB25 engine capable of 1000 horsepower, currently running safely at 600, wrapped in Midnight Purple and set up for drag racing. Jake Matheson spent three and a half years on a Mazda RX-4 with a billet 13B turbo engine, doing 95 percent of the fabrication himself. Koby Wade bought back the BMW E30 his father had given him to learn on when he was twelve—the car had sat in a mate's workshop for eight years—and rebuilt it by combining two E30s into one, stroking the motor to 2.9 liters and restoring the interior in black and white leather.

Some builds carry particular weight because of what they represent beyond the metal and horsepower. Charley May Goldsmith's Ford Falcon BA ute, called MISBAVN, was built with her father Jeremy after watching him finish his own burnout car. She notes that her dad never limited her to typical activities just because she's a girl. Lacey Sines designed and built a 1976 Holden HJ ute with her father, learning to weld, cut rust, and handle panel and paint—skills she wanted to master because it's her car and she needs to know how to fix it. Jack Agnell bought a bare shell 1981 Toyota Corolla for a thousand dollars and spent nearly a year in his parents' two-car garage building it into a turbocharged drift car, working every night after his job and every weekend. He fitted a 4AGE from an MR2, modified a Tarago differential, and sourced parts from across the Toyota lineup, all tied together by a Haltech ECU.

The older cars in the field carry their own stories. Jordan Fawell spent two years restoring a 1980 Holden Gemini wagon that was full of rust and dodgy repairs, completing the bodywork and paint himself with his father. Jack Francis built a 1979 Holden HZ ute Sandman mock-up with a 400-cubic-inch Chevy small-block and an 8/71 blower. James Gazeas is converting a 1976 Toyota Celica from carby nitrous to a twin-turbo Cleveland V8 setup, planning to have it ready for Summernats in three months. Luka Brix was fifteen when he bought a 1969 Volkswagen Type 3 Squareback as a rolling shell and spent nearly three years on it, doing eighty percent of the work himself on a budget tight enough that he bead-rolled aluminium for interior door cards and cut up spotlight rugs for carpet.

Declan Harcombe took a rough 1988 Holden Commodore VN wagon with an existing LS conversion and reimagined it as the VN SS wagon Holden never built, creating a one-of-a-kind rear bar by modifying a genuine SS lip and welding it into place. Jake Tsaikos left a note on a Cressida he saw in a car park when he was sixteen, bought it six months later for five hundred dollars, and has spent years building it into a machine that's run 9.9 seconds at 151 miles per hour on ten-year-old radials. He's made his own engine mounts, fuel lines, and parachute, and is now beginning the roll cage.

Public voting is now open at ysmoty.com. Voters enter a draw to win three thousand dollars cash and the chance to help determine which of these sixteen builds takes the title. What's clear from the list is that the young builders competing aren't chasing shortcuts or outsourcing the learning. They're building in sheds and garages, learning from their fathers and mates, and creating machines that carry the weight of their own hands and time.