This page is about the red Monaro seen in Mad Max 2 “The Road Warrior”. As far as I know this is the first page containing information on this vehicle and I may be the first Mad Max fan to discover what the main factors of this car are.
A rear view of the Monaro (Car on the upper left)
After seing mad max many times i became very serious about tracking
down the makes and models of as many of the vehicles as possible. Most
of the vehicles were easerly reconised except for a few one of them being
the monaro. As my copy of Mad Max 2 was taped of TV, it was heavily edited
and poor quality. There for the only time you can see any off this car
is when it collides with the truck and the front is partially torn off.
This scene does not show any of the sides, roof or back, which made
it impossible to determine what the base vehicle was.
After a year and a half all the info that I had accumulated was that
someone thought it was a modified Monaro with Pontiac GTO grill.
About the same time I became good friends with Bart Mangrum in America,
we traded some American magazines for Australian ones, and in one
of the American mags I found a small pic of a “1940 Buick “Super” Coupe”.
I instantly recognized the grill as sharing many similarities with the
one on the Monaro and quick search on the net revealed that the grill used
is infact a from a 1940 Buick.
A 1940 Buick Special Coupe
Now that I new what the grill was from, I turned back to the base car to the base car. After looking at heaps of pictures of Monaros and comparing them to the few seconds of film I think it can be said that it is most probably a HQ Monaro produced between 1971 and 1974.
A HQ Monaro GTS. GTS was the hi-performance version of the standard
Monaro. Monaros were produced by GM-H more commonly refereed to as Holden.
Now I now what the car and the grill are, but as for the upraised bonnet and the headlights they are a mystery. Of course the bonnet could be a highly modified 1940 Buick item, but I cant say for sure. Note the lobes on both top and bottom of the head lights as this will be the easiest way of identifying them. If anyone has any more pics or knows anything about those two items or anything else, please e-mail me. Also if anyone can take screen capture of the movie and wouldn't mind trying to get some images of the car please let me know.
In the chase at the end of Mad Max 2, a faded red car with a white
T Top roof and rounded off front containing a rather large grill can be
seen for a few seconds at a time.
I would like to thank Cal and Peter Barton for allowing me to use there pics and Bart Mangrum for sending me the mags.
