Jewel IN THE ROUGH

VJ VALIANT

IT’S a brave man that takes on the restoration of a Valiant hardtop. They were rare when they were brand new, with only a few thousand built, and without the level of aftermarket support that Holdens and Fords enjoy, you either need to buy a pretty decent car to start with or have a sizeable network of contacts so you can track down parts. As it turned out, Mario Girbin had neither.

Relatively new to the Mopar scene, Mario hadn’t yet established those vital contacts when he picked up a VJ hardtop that initially seemed a lot more solid than it would prove to be. Mario had played with cars in his native New Zealand, but they were mainly K-series Corollas.