Summernats street machine festival car entries sold out seven months in advance

And to head off the controversy around the aggressive and dangerous behaviour which marred January's event, event organisers have examined Exhibition Park CCTV and online footage, identifying and excluding around 120 entrants.

Event co-owner Andy Lopez, whose Out There Productions company bought into the ACT car festival 12 years ago, said the massive demand for vehicle entries in the 2024 event - which will be capped at 2200 cars - had caught him by surprise.

"We opened entries on the Sunday of this year's [2023] event and had 1840 [entries] within 40 hours," he said.

"The speed at which those entries came in, quite frankly, caught us by surprise so we switched off sales, collated them and then went through a review process.

"That's when we identified around 120 entrants that we didn't want as part of our event because of what happened on that Saturday night [of the 2023 event].

"We then switched sales back on in March and had 250 entries in about 20 minutes.

"We opened up again this week and we are now sold out, seven months ahead of the event, which is pretty amazing."

The 2023 Summernats was also a spectator sell-out for three days and is estimated to have generated around $36.5 million for the ACT economy.

The national status of the Chic Henry-curated modified car festival has created its own Canberra cult heroes of the genre, of whom Peter Fitzpatrick stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Last weekend at Motorex, Melbourne's biggest street machine event, Mr Fitzpatrick's Canberra-built FC Holden was crowned "car of the decade" for the second time, making it the most awarded street machine in the country.

The extraordinary, immaculately engineered twin-turbo V8 Holden sedan, now into its third decade of build and rebuild, is known as Trilogy and is attracting another generation of admirers. Trilogy first won the Summernats Grand Champion prize back in 1991, when it was known as Tuff E Nuff. Five more titles have flowed since then.

It is a car which has defied the odds over decades. In a hectic three-week period in 2011, it won Summernats Grand Champion, was bundled into a container and sent across to Perth where it won WA's biggest modified car show Motorvation, then a week later became the first non-hotrod in 25 years to win car of the show at the Melbourne Hot Rod Show.

And all from a car which was bought back in 1974 for just $200.

"I've been showing it for more than 30 years but it's actually not my car, it's registered to [his wife] Michelle," Mr Fitzpatrick admitted.

"Michelle's dad bought it for her before we were married. I had a pretty nice EH Holden at the time and she had this nice FC. We joke that she only dated me for my car, but she had a pretty good taste in cars, too."

Few people - aside from the General Motors engineers and designers who shaped the Australian-built original some 70 years ago - would have as much imbedded knowledge, passion and fascination for the FC Holden as paint and signwriting specialist Peter Fitzpatrick.

That is evident in every tiny, fastidious detail of Trilogy, and in that he also owns a completely original FC sedan, with no heater or even a radio "because that's how they came", and with just 74,000 miles on the odometer, as a reference point. It's so original, he states proudly, it still has the factory plastic on the rear seats.

The next project taking shape is an FC wagon for the race track, a high performance "sleeper" which will even have the traditional white venetians across the back windows.

Mr Fitzpatrick sits at the top echelon of an estimated 9000 car builders around the country, all significant contributors to a national automotive aftermarket industry conservatively worth around $34 billion.

He is one of very few bold enough to take a custom build overseas.

In 2019, after a five-year ACT build of a 1935 Chevrolet coupe for a wealthy Queensland client, the car was sent across to the giant Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Show (SEMA) in Las Vegas, where it collected the General Motors designers' choice award.

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