The Tail Spin Holden FB Was Frankensteined From Five Cars, Including An R33 Skyline

See this car? It’s a Holden FB. Only it’s not. It’s actually two, underpinned by an R33 Nissan Skyline. It took five cars to chop up in order to build this one, and the result is rather unique.

The FB was a family of vehicles that Holden, GM’s Australian subsidiary, made in the early 1960s. It was offered AS a sedan, wagon, ute and panel van, with a 2.3-liter six-cylinder engine good for all of 75 horsepower (56 kW). All told, Holden made nearly 150,000 of them in less than two years before it was replaced by the EK series halfway through 1961. But this has to be the most unique.

Called the Tail Spin, this custom job was completed by a husband-wife team in Canberra, with help from Astill Design just up the Tasman Sea coast in Wollong, New South Wales. And it looks like it was a rather complicated build. In fact it took years to complete.

Now if the finished product doesn’t look quite right to you, that could be because it’s a front-to-back design. The team took the back ends from two Holdens and put their body shells together, giving its front end the same shape as the back, right down to the tail fins.

Underneath that tail-turned nose is a 5.0-liter GM V8 taken from a wrecked VN Calais and packing considerably more muscle than the original FB. It’s mated to a T700 gearbox, with a Borg-Warner limited-slip differential, disc brakes from a VS Commodore, 18-inch Schott Velocity wheels, a fully custom stainless steel exhaust, and a hodgepodge of parts from other cars.

The unique bodywork is painted in a greenish gold custom mixed by PPG, and the candy-apple red interior features seats lifted from a Lexus and with a modified take on the original dashboard, right down to the gauges.

The completed vehicle may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s certainly unique. And it’s won awards, including the coveted MotorEx Grand Master trophy. You can get the full story in the eight-minute video clip below from Inside Garage.