Red Monaro Image and Information Page

The Red Monaro

Story:

The Monaro is a red muscle car seen in the second half of the film. It is a minor 'character', having only a few moments of screen time. As such, it is rather difficult to get a good look at this car. It can be seen briefly in the attack after teh Mack is delivered, and in the final chase scene. The Monaro harries the Mack throughout the chase, but never really does anything significant. The last we see of the Monaro is when it lightly rams the Tanker. By this time, the Monaro's front left wheel has been damaged and it sits at angle. The tire would not last long like this, and I think that soon after the tire blew, the car was forced to stop, and its driver had to abandon the Monaro and go walking alone in the wasteland.



Specifications:

The car is 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.

FordGUY74 had this to say about the Monaro:

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 reconized 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. Therefore the only time you can see any of 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 is. 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. A quick search on the net revealed that the grill used is in fact a from a 1940 Buick.
1940 Buick grill

Now that I new what the grill was from, I turned back 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.

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 can't say for sure. Note the lobes on both top and bottom of the headlights as this will be the easiest way of identifying them.




A comparison of the Monaro and a 1940 Buick.

Modifications:

Other than the custom front grill and head lights, the Monaro has T-tops and its roof is painted white. The Monaro also has custom 'S' shaped exhaust pipes. The exhaust pipes actually end high up on the rear of the car, next to the tail lights. The left hand side of the Monaro sports flaming skull artwork, but unusually the right hand side has none.




Probably the only good look at the Monaro's side art.


Good look at the front


Close up of the stock grill


A look of the rear of the Monaro; its the car on the left.


A top view of the Monaro


Another rare look at the Monaro


A perfect shot of the Red Monaro's side art; thanks to Emil Minty for supplying this picture.