What made you wake up one Monday morning and say to the person lying next to you: "Guess what I'm going to do tonight? I'm going out to the old sandmining suburb of Heatherton, home of the mighty Tunners and buy a Strike Me Pink Torana for a lazy $183k."
Well whatever it was, there was plenty going around. Shannons had a 93 per cent clearance rate at their Melbourne autumn classic auction. The pink Torana, which almost doubled its estimate, was the first documented LJ-model XU-1 produced at GMH's Elizabeth plant and had been in storage for 20 years.
Earlier in the year, Shannons sold an as new Jasmine Yellow 1977 LX Torana A9X for $275k at auction. In 2017 Mossgreen sold the Peter Briggs-owned A9X driven by Bob Morris for $705k.
You can buy a very nice replica of Australia's own Porker killer for around $30k so why are two buyers in particular trying to corner the market on the real thing?
To my mind, the A9X is the greatest performance car we've ever produced (no emails please) and the rest of the hot V8 Toranas are pretty neat too. But there weren't many made, even fewer remain unmolested, even fewer have clean histories and there are two collectors vying to own every one.