Mario Turcarelli reflects on his lengthy career in the car industry

It’s a brisk August morning in Melbourne’s north-east. Nearing the top of the hill in Heidelberg West, the Melbourne skyline occasionally reveals itself behind the single storey houses on Dougherty Road.

The man we’re meeting leads Dolphin Products, an Australian business that supplied plastic products to Holden until the end of local manufacturing. The foyer still displays automotive memorabilia, but Dolphin has diversified into plastics for the gaming, resources, medical, military and retail industries with millions of dollars of machinery running in the adjacent warehouse.

Mario greets us with a firm handshake. He insists on a coffee and a chocolate biscuit.

“We use Australian coffee beans,” he explains as the coffee machine huffs and hisses. “I love Italian coffee, but the beans all lose their taste by the time they get here.”

We make our way into Mario’s office, finding everything from a scale model of a front-wheel-drive Statesman luxury car concept for the Chinese market to his award-winning entry into Holden’s Camera Club competition in 1988.

He gives us a hand setting up the tripod and takes a seat. While we’re fiddling with the settings, Mario shares his first thoughts on the demise of the car industry.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

With the red light on and the microphone running, we get started.

Leaving the Aeolian Islands

“I was born in Italy,” Mario beams as he points to a map on the wall.

“My family is from a little group of islands off the coast of Sicily called the Aeolian Islands. The biggest island in that group is Lipari. They were in the news recently when the volcano Stromboli erupted and it’s one of those seven islands.  

“We came out to Australia in 1960 when I was about two years old. My parents came here to start a new life for my sister and I. They wanted to create some opportunities for us and make sure we had a good education and upbringing.”

The spark

We asked Mario about the origins of his automotive passion.

“My interest in cars came from motor racing. I was a big Peter Brock fan and loved to watch he and Allan Moffat battle it out at Bathurst each year.”

Metal and machines were in his blood, too.

“When I was growing up, my dad worked as a metal worker for an English company called Locker Group in Moorabbin. During my school holidays, I would go there and work with him on metal perforation machines, folders and benders and I even used to make filter elements for big industrial air compressors.

“Having seen how hard he worked, I made sure I finished my degree in mechanical engineering. My father, Isidoro, is still very proud, because that’s what he always wanted. He was the one who pushed me to go on and study to be a mechanical engineer instead of a motor mechanic, which is what I originally wanted to be. And I’m still grateful for that.”

Four on the floor

When Mario was ready to get behind the wheel, his eyes were set on something with a Holden badge and three pedals.

“While working with my dad at Locker Group, I managed to save up enough money for my first car. The car I wanted to buy was a HG Monaro. I saw one at a dealership on St Kilda Road for two and a half thousand dollars. It was metallic blue with a cream interior, but there was only one problem; it was a T-Bar automatic and I wanted a manual!

“Later on, I found a manual Rally Red, LC Torana 2600cc six-cylinder that had only done about 65,000 miles with a three on the tree manual transmission. It was on sale at Garry and Warren Smith, on the corner of Ferntree Gully Road and Dandenong Road. It was dead straight standard and I liked the colour of it, plus it had the GTR wheels which made it look a bit better. I went home and mentioned to my dad that I had seen this car for $2150.

“I took him to see it and he said ‘oh, look, it’s too old. You should buy something newer, keep saving’. I only needed $150 to buy the car, and my dad wouldn’t lend me the money for it, so my sister loaned me the money I needed. And then I was mobile! I did a lot of work to the exhaust, suspension and engine and the car and it went hard and sounded hot!

I sold it when Holden started allocating me reliability test cars, and got $2150 back for it six years later. I still miss that car today.”

Plastic fasteners or motor cars?

Nearing the end of his degree in 1979, Mario fielded multiple offers to commence his career in engineering.

“A lot of companies would come to the Caulfield Institute of Technology campus where I studied Mechanical Engineering and Holden was one of those companies. As it so happens, I was offered three jobs the year I graduated.

“One of the offers was from Sidney Cooke, a fastener company. Another one was ITW, which was also a plastic fastener company. The third was Holden.

“It didn’t take much thought to decide which way I wanted to go.”

Welcome to Holden

Mario’s journey began at Holden’s Fishermans Bend plant a couple of kilometres south-west of Melbourne city.

“I started at Holden in November 1979, just after I graduated. On my first day, I didn’t have a table or a chair. It was just a big desk I shared with a couple of other graduate engineers. But immedicably I felt the warmth of the people who were friendly and caring, and I quickly fitted into the Holden culture.

“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.’ It took a while before we got a desk and a proper chair!

“I started as an engine test engineer in the dynamometer section. There, we had to run all the power, torque and durability tests for engines, then tear them down and make sure they performed. My first lot of testing was with the blue XT5 3.3L and 2.85L six-cylinder engines. Holden had just moved from the red XT4 to the blue XT5 engines which had more power and better economy. I ran a whole series of tests comparing them and showing the improved performance and durability which were the features of the new VC 1980 model Commodore.

“From memory, Holden had around 23,000 people at the time. It was a period when they were consolidating and shutting down factories. They were in the process of shutting down Pagewood in Sydney, Acacia Ridge in Queensland and later the Dandenong assembly plants, taking the number of employees to about 6500 by 1990.”

The back of Bourke

Mario soon moved into reliability to be made campaign manager for a recall campaign to find and replace faulty Garington steering arms on Bedford buses supplied by Holden based in the Holden Service Department in Albert Road, Albert Park. After ticking off every Bedford bus in Australia in two months with a map and some pins on a pinboard, he moved back into warranty investigation and reliability testing for all Holden passenger cars.

“I became the reliability engineer for powertrain, chassis and suspension. I did warranty investigations for customer problems that the dealers couldn’t fix and would write service alerts for how to fix all sorts of problems.

“We also built advanced models. We had our own garage which was in Plant 1. In there, we built some VK test vehicles with the first fuel-injected engines. We then drove those around the country and left them with some of the service dealers to put kilometres on.

“We spent a lot of time driving up to Rockhampton, I’ve been to the back of Bourke and all the way to Broome and Alice Springs. The test trips were fantastic. Everyone wanted to go on one. Having said that, there were some people who couldn’t drive on test trips and we often had cars lose control in some pretty major incidents! I can’t remember anyone getting seriously hurt though.

“There was also a lot of dirt driving. Some people didn’t know how to drive on dirt. Before I left, they made it a requirement to have a proving ground licence for test trips so you had a little more advanced skills than the average around town driver.”

Trim and ornamentation

As Holden prepared to introduce the bigger, broader VN Commodore in the late 1980s, a surprise conversation changed the course of Mario’s life.

“John McInerny, my manager in the Reliability group, had been promoted into trim manager, and he wanted me to go with him. He came down to see me and said ‘look, I have spoken to Brian Ducase (who was the director of the trim and body area) and we’re going to bring you upstairs as a design engineer.’

“Up until then, I had been doing the mechanical side of things – engines, transmissions, brakes, suspension – so I’d had nothing to do with trim. He said, ‘well, we’ll give you a promotion to specialist engineer.’ I repeated that I didn’t know anything and before I finished, he said ‘perfect man for the job! You’re going to learn properly.’

“I took that job and became a trim engineer. They called it ‘Trim and Ornamentation’. I managed the door trims, parcel shelves, the belt mouldings, spoilers, side skirts and badges. It was an interesting job with lots of parts. By the time I left Holden, there were about 20 engineers managing the bits I handled all on my own in 1990.

“In those days, we were transitioning from drawing on big tables to CAD (Computer Aided Design) and the engineer’s job was to work with the designers and drafters to turn the styling project into an engineered part.

“I worked with Peter Nankervis in styling, Mike Simcoe, Richard Ferlazzo and a few others. I built up a good relationship with the styling people and back in those days, I held a white security pass which granted me open access to the styling studios. In the later days, they didn’t issue those very easily! I enjoyed going in there and seeing the interaction between the clay models and the styled components. You saw the product come to life.”

New challenges with Nylex

While the VN Commodore succeeded in snaring market share from Ford in the passenger car market, the Trim and Ornamentation group were under the pump.

“The door trims were a problem on the VN. Holden had subcontracted them to a company called Bostik Emhart Group in Thomastown. They had never made door trims before and were struggling to meet the 400 cars per day requirement. The quality of the trims wasn’t good; the vinyl would pull off and bridge through the armrest, so we were instructed to redesign the process to a Nylex Woodstock process used by Ford.

“We were given instructions to do an urgent redesign on the door trim over Christmas. Mike Simoce and I worked with a company called Future Transport to redesign the trim to suit the Nylex process. We tooled it up in Italy and switched from one supplier to another quickly in 1990. There was no Christmas holiday for us that year.

“I got so involved in the new door trim project, that I left Holden to go and work for Nylex as a development engineer. I was there between 1990 and 1995 and learned a lot about manufacturing and dealing with other car companies like Mitsubishi, Nissan and Ford who we supplied trim to. It’s a very key part of my past, but it became part of my future. Without that expertise, I would not be here running a plastics company.”

Back at Fishermans Bend

Mario’s time away from Holden proved excellent for his professional development, but he was soon back as a level eight trim engineer.

“It went full circle, because I followed a speaker grille project alongside interior project that Nylex was doing which included the speaker grilles that went into the VT Commodore. There was one of these per door and it was very complicated with technology that had been acquired from SKT in Austria. I was involved with that for about a year and a half.”

Under a clear direction not to steal any engineers from the internal Commodore team, one of Mario’s previous bosses brought him back to Holden in an all-new Opel products group for small cars in the Asia-Pacific region.

“They signed me up as a trim engineer, pretty much at the same level as where I had left. I was involved in building an Astra at a greenfield site in Thailand. I started off with trim, soon moved into the chassis side and then became the chief engineer for the Astra car line. It was a successful project and they now build the Holden Colorado Ute at that site at GM Thailand in Rayong.

“I also had projects in India, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia and even China. That went on for quite a while with lots of travelling. It was a great development opportunity.”

Super Mario

Having been intricately involved in the development of the Commodore during his first stint at Holden, Mario returned to the team producing Australia’s top-selling passenger sedan in 2002. However, all wasn’t well with the ‘Billion Dollar Baby’ due in the second half of the noughties.

“When they got me back into the Commodore team, I was engineering manager for induction, exhaust and transmission in the Powertrain group. I was involved in some of the early meetings for the VE Commodore. It was the first time Holden had ever built a car from the ground up. People don’t realise that. Every other car was derived from a Chevrolet or Opel vehicle.

“At the time, I was quite comfortable in the Powertrain group looking after exhaust, induction, transmission and some of the engine add-on stuff.”

Mario continued.

“One day, Tony Hyde called me into his office and said ‘look, we have a whole lot of issues with the suspension.’ They weren’t solving all the problems they had and that’s because the suspension was new. They had what they call PTRS issues – Problem Resolution Tracking Sheet – and when I took over the VE, there were 279 of these. They all had to be solved before the start of production and there were only two years to go. That was a very short time to solve all those problems, some of which were very serious.

“We had cross-functional teams from around the world working on it and a truck engineer from the US came over and recommended some very minor changes to the design. We made all those changes, revalidated and tested and everything was passed and approved. Denny Mooney was in charge of the company at the time and when we got the okay to start production with all the suspension issues resolved, he called me ‘Super Mario’! He couldn’t believe we had solved so many problems in such a short time.

“It was stressful, it was hectic and I had to be very tough with some of the suppliers. I think I lost my cool a few times in the process, but the job got done and the suspension was one of the reasons the VE Commodore won Wheels Car of the Year.”

End of an era

As financial markets collapsed and General Motors scrambled to stay afloat, Mario’s journey at Holden came to an amicable close.

“In 2009, I was offered a package to leave. I went home to my wife and said ‘I think I’m going to take the money and create my own luck’, which I did. I was interviewed for the job at Dolphin that I have now. I maintain it was my automotive and plastics background that got me this job.

“At the time, Dolphin Products was still dealing with automotive components, tools and processes. I stayed in touch with Holden because we were making their parts and we still had meetings right up until they stopped making cars in 2017. We won the GM Supplier Quality Award for the last three years of production, and I’m very proud of the support we gave to Holden.”

The last one

Half a decade after leaving Holden, an offer to own one more Australian-built sport sedan from the Elizabeth assembly line arrived in Mario’s inbox.

“I received an email from Holden asking whether I would like to order a brand-new Motorsport Edition VF Commodore, sight unseen.

“I spoke to my wife and she said, ‘you’ve already got an SS-V. Why do you need another one?’

“I pleaded, ‘well this one is special!’

“She said, ‘I don’t think you need another car. The one you’ve got is just fine.’

“I had to put a $2000 deposit on before the end of the year. They hadn’t described what the car was other than that it was based off an SS-V Commodore. I put the deposit in and it was accepted. Then I had to tell my wife and boy, that didn’t go down well!

“I was invited to a VIP unveiling of the car at Fishermans Bend and was very proud to be there. They told us we would get a scale model and there was a computerised screen with Rob Tribuani, who used to work for me in chassis group, driving one around Phillip Island.

“I also got a car cover with my name and the build number on it. I managed to grab #0127. I wanted Peter Brock’s number #0005, but I think everybody else thought the same thing. I have three boys, so it’s going to be hard deciding who gets that car, but the other SS-V we traded in was bought by my son, Mark. We’ve both got the 6.2-litre V8.

“I can proudly say I have driven every Holden Commodore, all the way from the VB through to the VF. Four-cylinder Commodores, six-cylinder Commodores, V8 Commodores. The VF Series II was the best Commodore ever built. I put my money where my mouth is and I intend to keep it for a long time.”

The wake

Mario had a rare opportunity to visit Holden’s Elizabeth plant in its final operational days.

“I was luckier than most of my Holden colleagues because as Managing Director of Dolphin Products, my wife and I were invited to a final supplier thank you and an opportunity to walk down the Elizabeth assembly line for the last time. I also got to take photos of some of the Motorsport Edition VF Commodores that were being built, the same as mine in red.

“It was really good to be a part of that, but I said to my wife, ‘I feel like I have gone to a funeral’. Then we had supper. It was like going to the wake for your best friend.”

Looking back

Approaching the two-year anniversary of the last automotive domino to fall down under, Mario shared his thoughts on local car manufacturing.

“We never really had an Australian car industry. People don’t get that bit. What we had was an industry that was run by overseas businesses that were making vehicles in this country while the economics made sense under a protected tariff regime. If you took the tariffs away, the economics didn’t make sense, The question is, why build cars in Australia when there are plants in lower cost countries that you can bring cars from?

“It wasn’t the government’s fault. The tariff reduction had started under the Button Plan in the early 1980s and everyone knew about that. It wasn’t the current government’s fault either. What happened was the Australian dollar had risen to around parity which made it very hard to export. On top of that, we were building the wrong cars. There was a transition from the customer base to products that weren’t made in Australia. That’s what caused the demise of the car industry.

“The question is, could the other car companies have reacted to that? Well, it costs a lot of money to design a new car and set up an assembly line. There was a fragmentation of the top 20 vehicles sold, whereas in the 1980s, Holden, Toyota, Ford and Mitsubishi were selling hundreds of thousands of cars each. If you look at the top 20 models now, you would be lucky to sell 40,000 cars and about 50,000 of them are utes. It’s very hard to make a business case to make 20,000 or even 50,000 cars annually. 

“Electric cars are different. They don’t need engines or transmissions. Will there be a future in Australia for vehicles? Yes, and that will be electric. There are Chinese companies already looking at setting up electric car companies in Australia. Once you make a body and trim that out, it’s more about energy storage and efficient electric motors.

“I think we will see a change, and the good thing out of that is that maybe, we might be able to start up our own Australian-owned and controlled car company.”

A big thanks to Mario for his time, insights and the coffee. If you’re keen to see what he and the team at Dolphin Products are up to, you can check out their website and Facebook page.

One more thing! Make sure you stop by our assembly lines on Facebook and Instagram to meet more of the people who helped to make our motor cars.