Unless you are a motorsport perv you won't know Garry Rogers and that's a pity not only because he's just built a new 2002 Holden Monaro that will cost you more than a Feezer, Lambo and McLaren combined but because he's been building cars in Australia for over 60 years that people have wanted to buy and race.

He was born in East Melbourne, schooled mostly in Melbourne, but spent a lot of his childhood in Sulphur Creek (pop: 650) in Tasmania and started his working life breaking horses. Then after his brother went off to university to do medicine his father told him to get a real job.

The real job was an apprentice mechanic doing up old autos for a backyard used car dealer. Apart from learning how to fix motors Garry learnt how to sell cars which turned out to be a far better skill as he then went on to own and run new car dealerships for Nissan, Subaru and Daewoo.

Back to the back yard. Garry's boss had an old racing car for sale. So he bought it and started racing in Appendix J Touring Cars which were the creme de la pavlova of racing from 1960 to 1964. His team was his girlfriend and roommates but despite that he had some success. Then he bought another car and another one until he was racing the ex-Leo Geoghan Holden Monaro and the ex-Bob Jane Holden Torana.

Fast forward to 1996 and Garry became one of the original Supercar team owners. Garry and his team actually build race cars that look like Holdens, Renaults or Mustangs. If you watch the Supercars it's hard to get your head around the fact that these cars are actually hand-built just like Feezers and Porkers used to be.

At the turn of the century (2000 not 1900) Holden asked Garry to build and race a Monaro 427 in the first ever Bathurst 24 against inferior makes like Lambos, Feezers, Porkers and Vipers. Garth Tander, Steven Richards, Cameron McConville and Nathan Pretty drove the yellow car to a win. Holden was pretty happy.

Then Covid hit and there wasn't much demand for race cars. Most of his staff have been with him a long time so he thought up something for them to do. Build the third Monaro. "We went out the back and looked at all our old containers where we had goods stored for many years and we found quite a bit of equipment we used to build the original cars. It was really satisfying to go back and get all the old bits and pieces we had stored away."

Garry has not only built and raced a lot of successful cars, he has started a lot of racing careers for people like Steven Richards, Jason Bargwanna, Garth Tander, Jamie Whincup, Lee Holdsworth and Scott McLaughlin, but most of all he has built careers for hundreds of apprentices, men and women.