Bold statement: iconic Australian V8 magic is coming back to life, with three legendary Holdens set to relaunch their glory days in a carefully curated restoration run. And this is where it gets controversial: does reviving vintage race cars dilute history or celebrate it? Let’s unpack the plan and what it means for collectors, fans, and the sport.
Ben Eggleston has announced ambitious intentions to resurrect a trio of Holden Commodores that once defined era-defining battles on the Supercars circuit. Eggleston Motorsport, a prominent Super2 squad, holds a remarkable archive of famous V8 Supercars, including several machines built and raced by the factory HRT team. The three cars under restoration are currently being worked on by ex-HRT fabricator George Smith.
Eggleston explained to Speedcafe that the timeline centers on milestone anniversaries: “It’s 30 years since Craig Lowndes won Sandown and Bathurst in the 1996 HRT VR, so that one will come out around Bathurst. So will the [Peter] Brock ’97 car, which was on pole with Mark Skaife, and Craig’s 1998 championship-winning machine will be out as well. We’ve got three big ones coming up at the end of this year. It’s going to be really busy getting them bang-on, but I’m looking forward to getting them out so people can see them.”
The 1996 Commodore, driven by Lowndes, instantly earned a place among Australia’s most famous V8 touring cars, celebrated for both its performance and distinctive design. Notably, it features a diagonally running roll-cage bar to the passenger footwell, added for chassis stiffness. That bar was later banned in subsequent cars due to concerns about driver extraction in accidents.
Unraced since a crash at the Gold Coast in 1999, the car was acquired by Eggleston a decade ago. Eggleston has previously expressed a hope to see Lowndes back behind the wheel of this restored machine.
The Brock ’97 and Lowndes VS ’98 Commodores also met unfortunate ends. Brock’s car sustained extensive damage after Todd Kelly’s tyre-failure crash at Eastern Creek in 1999, while the Lowndes VS suffered near-total destruction at Oran Park in 2000 under Paul Morris’s driving. In recent years, Eggleston persuaded Morris to part with the wreckage of the Big Kev car to help restore its Lowndes HRT heritage.
At the Adelaide Motorsport Festival, Eggleston’s long-running pursuit of HRT history continued with a public showing of another HRT era machine: a HRT VT that Lowndes briefly raced in 2000, which had been unseen for 22 years since its last race with Paul Romano.
Eggleston elaborated, “I’ve basically got one model of every Craig Lowndes car at HRT—that was one I needed and wanted. I wore down Bap Romano over several years, and he’s a terrific bloke who agreed to part with it along with a few other components. We’ve got it in the 2000 livery Craig ran for a couple of rounds. I reckon it looks awesome; the red is striking, it’s a ripper.”
The festival also featured Lowndes’s 1995 Bathurst pole-winning VR, another Eggleston-owned V8 Supercar. The spotlight was on Eggleston’s 2010 Triple Eight Bathurst 1-2 Commodores, freshly restored to their TeamVodafone colors.
Other HRT-era Commodores in Eggleston’s collection include Lowndes’s 1999 Calder rollover car and the Bathurst 1000-winning machines from 1990 and 2005.
Thoughts to consider: restorations like these spark lively debates about preserving history versus modifying cars for modern display or performance. Do these projects honor the past by keeping the cars as they raced, or do they risk masking fragile histories behind polished exteriors? What’s your take: should such restorations prioritize period-correct authenticity, or should they embrace modern preservation practices to keep the machines operational for future generations? Share your views in the comments.
