Bent-eight brilliance
THE ONLY PERSON I can see is wrestling with a reel of fencing wire, the wind attempting to tear his clothes from his back. The mercury’s hovering just somewhere north of zero and the wind’s ripping in off the Bass Strait. Grey sheets of rain queue up offshore, ready to begin their strafing runs. I look over to the farmer and he’s grinning from ear to ear. I crack the window of the Camaro ZL1 down a few centimetres. “Go on,” he yells, dropping the reel and rolling his fist in the universally acknowledged language of petrolheads everywhere, “punch it!”
Australia loves a good V8 and it’s easy to understand why. A bent-eight speaks of qualities many of us identify with; a rugged toughness, dependability, heritage, performance over parsimony and an irrepressibly larrikin ability to paint a smile on your face. We’ve gathered six of the very best of the current crop of V8s for a celebration of the engine, and we could easily have brought more, but we had to draw a line somewhere.
Chevrolet’s 477kW Camaro ZL1 by HSV ($162,100) is the catalyst for the great Gippsland gruntfest, but it isn’t even the most powerful vehicle here. That honour goes to the 522kW Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk. Taking a radically divergent approach to the generation of its power-to-weight number is McLaren’s fierce and focused 600LT Spider. Pitch in a couple of 5.0-litre atmo heroes of very different persuasions – the Ford Mustang GT and the Lexus RC F – and then round out the gathering with the Mercedes-AMG C63 S.
The Camaro disappears up the road in a cacophony of 6.2-litre supercharged small-block and tortured treadblocks. I’m laughing, the farmer’s standing in the road behind, also cackling with pure joy. The ZL1 is that sort of car, up to a
