Thanks, Holden, for all the opportunities you gave to Australians.

Buying a Ford from a Holden Dealer was just wrong! I gritted my teeth, lowered my pride and bought it.

One of our neighbours used to work for Holden in Dandenong and he would basically drive home with a new car every day. We used to sit outside and wait for him to drive past.

Sometimes my sister and I were allowed to go for a passenger ride with Dad in the Charger out on the track. It was the highlight of our weekend feeling that brutal acceleration and the sound of the screaming engine.

I got out of the car and caught a glimpse of the rear corner. I couldn’t see anything else, but I had already fallen in love with it.

I was just so excited with the White Knight that nothing else mattered. The rest is history and I still have the car.

I said ‘listen, you can’t do that, as I’ve got to sell this!’

I jacked up the ‘mule’, removed the wheel, and a section of brake disc rotor fell on the ground. I will never forget the look on the brake engineer’s face!

I then noticed a hubcap bouncing down the road and into a paddock. Dad was very annoyed that his Charger had ‘let him down’ and angrily stopped to hunt for the errant hubcap.

It’s an immediate hit. “Hey Charger” isn’t just a catchline on television screens, it’s a popular cultural symbol in streets around the nation. The first Chargers are rolling off the assembly line in Adelaide.

When I arrived home, I would see the dinner right in front of me moving across like an assembly line. It was a very weird feeling until you got used to it.

It has no problems at all keeping up with modern traffic, though it does get a bit noisy and rattly at 100 kilometres per hour.

Nearing the second anniversary of Holden pulling the pin on car manufacturing in Australia, there seemed no better time to make the trip east to visit the Trafalgar Holden Museum. Well, it turns out there was, but we’ll tell you more about that later.

Autoliv helped a lot of young families achieve what they dreamed of, like owning a house and supporting your children.

They laughed at me 20 years ago, but now, plenty of people are starting to chase them. It’s dragging the cars back on top where they should have been from the start.

They just said, ‘sit at this desk. Here is the General Motors Engine Test Book which has got the different engine tests we do. You need to understand all that, because everything we do is based around this manual.’

For years, Chasing History was that dusty seventies coupe with a blown motor in the shed. It received some attention every now and then, but those self-imposed deadlines to get it going never really helped.

We’ve started a brand-new Facebook group to support the people who worked in the Australian car industry.

Their tales should be relished for generations to come, so we’re on a mission to meet the owners of Australian cars and share their stories.

Chasing History is about the men and women who designed and assembled our cars and their components around Australia.