It's 1964, and a rangy young bloke by the name of John Crennan is driving an Aston Martin DB5 from its owner's men's wear shop in Balwyn to Holden's styling studio at Fishermans Bend.

Unknown to the 20-year-old, he is playing a small role in the creation of a legend.

In his position as a cadet in Holden's sales analysis department, a megalopolis that in those days covered everything from product planning to market research, the eager young Mr Crennan has been given the job of collecting five or six different coupe offerings for a highpowered directors' review to be conducted by then styling chief Joe Schemansky.

The DB5, complete with James Bond 007 Goldfinger-style ashtray, was the only privately owned car to be used for these deliberations, and Mr Crennan enterprisingly gained its use by offering the owner an EH Holden Premier for a week."

It was very much the thrill of my life," recalls Mr Crennan. "I remember it was the only one of the cars I sourced that I was able to drive. All the others came from manufacturers and were trucked to Holden."

Little did I realise that I played a paltry role in the meeting from which some sort of inspiration or decision relating to Monaro came."

John Crennan is now one of the senior figures in the Australian automotive industry. A successful sales and marketing career at Holden ended in the late 1980s when he accepted an offer from Tom Walkinshaw to set up Holden Special Vehicles.

After 16 years managing an increasingly successful hot Holden shop and racing effort, Mr Crennan has stepped back just a tad to become HSV's chairman.

His career is unique, but having his life touched by what's colloquially known as the "Munro" is not. Many people seem to have a connection to Holden's iconic two-door sports coupe.

Certainly the level of veneration the Monaro receives and the importance it is accorded in Holden's history is entirely out of proportion with a sales rate that at best ran at just a few thousand a year. Four years on from Mr Crennan's early sleuthing work, Holden launched the HK Monaro, its first attempt at a locally built coupe. The star of the range was the GTS 327, a vehicle built with the express aim of getting Holden its first win in the Bathurst 500. It was an ambition in which it succeeded, filling the top four places in 1968.

Then came the HT and HG versions, followed by the completely new HQ and finally the HJ, HX and HZ facelifts of the mid-1970s before the Monaro went out of production in 1979 for the first time.

It came back as the Commodore Coupe in 1998, a secret concept that stunned that year's Sydney motor show. Two subsequent years of speculation and campaigning ended in confirmation of production and the return of the Monaro name.

The revived Monaro went on sale late in 2001 with a forecast life of three to four years and about 4500 sales. In July, Holden created more headlines when it announced production was ending. Supply will probably run out here early in 2006 but exports will continue longer to overseas markets including the US.

The final sales figure should end up around 50,000.

Even before it departs this time, Holden is promising Monaro will eventually come again. Just how and when still seems fluid, but the determination to engineer a return indicates the car's value."

There is a whole raft of less tangible stuff that it delivers to the brand in spades," says Holden marketing director John Elsworth."

The appeal of Holden across a whole bunch of age groups has grown since Monaro was put into the market, particularly (among) young Australians. And it has brought a whole new bunch of buyers from other brands we would never ever see, and we know that from the trade-ins."

It's a car that just makes you smile, whether you are buying one or not," he says. "It's big, it's loud and it's uniquely Australian. It's a name that has aged well."

Mr Elsworth is too young to remember the impact of the original Monaro. He was born in 1968, the year the car first appeared. But as a fresh inductee into Holden's product planning department in 1998, he lived through the rugged internal debate between the revheads and the rationalists over whether the coupe should go into production.

A key figure in winning the debate was Peter Hanenberger, the German who took over as chairman and managing director from American Jim Wiemels in 1999. A big man with a big vision and an empathy for Holden after a stint in the 1970s as a chassis engineer, Mr Hanenberger simply decided Monaro had to be built. It was a symbolic achievement. He wanted Holden shaken out of its comfortable state. More products more quickly. More exports more quickly. More success more quickly.

There are strong parallels here with the advent of the original Monaro. Then the youthful Max Wilson was in charge of Holden and determined to expand it to a full-line producer as rapidly as possible. From the traditional sedan and wagon, Holden launched the four-cylinder Torana in 1967, the Monaro and the odd, long-booted Brougham in 1968 and the long-nosed six-cylinder Torana in late 1969. Mr Wilson also brought the concept of factory options to Holden. It was said the HK offered more than 2 million variations.

In those prosperous and optimistic days, Holden's position seemed unassailably dominant in term of both sales and psychology.

The ability to build the Monaro was testament to that. When it was launched, Mr Wilson called it the "biggest step" for the company since the first Holden in 1948.

Reflecting that, it went on to win Wheels Car of the Year."

I think internally at Holden the launch of Monaro to my mind was more important first time around than second time around," says Mr Crennan, who bought a six-cylinder 186 S model. "It was groundbreaking in those days, there was nothing else in the range except a sedan and a wagon."

In those days it was like Holden having an MG or Triumph TR4. To have that in the range of products gave Holden permission to be a sporty company."

It went racing, it went rallying, its expression shone out much, much more amid a much narrower band of alternatives both within the Holden family and within the total car market. It just had a presence that dominated, mainly because things weren't nearly as competitive as they are now."

But while plenty of kudos and another Bathurst win for the HT GTS 350 in 1969 (the only one for the legendary Colin Bond, driving with Tony Roberts) were collected, it did not result in sustainable sales success. Even the first two years yielded an average of just 3000 sales, and even before the last coupe was built in 1976, Holden had resorted to a four-door version to bolster interest.

According to Mr Crennan, that reflected Holden's buying audience of the time. "I remember seeing some research in the early 1970s that indicated the Holden coupe buyer seldom came back as a repeat buyer, meaning that the excitement of a two-door car in that size sometimes got balanced out by its impracticality for the family man."

The greatest factor for Holden in those days was repeat business, it was massive. If someone bought a Kingswood, then next year - if they had a good year - they bought a Premier. You held your owner base, plus you built on it a bit from time to time."

Monaro's 1979 demise came as Holden entered a period of struggle. Kingswood was replaced by the smaller Euro-based Commodore, there was near- financial extinction in the mid- 1980s and it entered and left a joint venture with Toyota.

After that, Holden began the climb back in the 1990s, a move that accelerated in September 1997 when the handsome VT Commodore arrived. Its direct VZ descendant is still Australia's bestselling car.

Much of the VT's success was attributed to a new-found sense of style, which delivered more credibility to Holden's designers than ever before. Department boss Michael Simcoe was determined to exploit the opportunity to the full, leading a small group in 1998 that produced a two-door hardtop version of the VT as a concept for internal study. When the public affairs boss at the time, John Morrison, saw it, he ordered the whole project shrouded in secrecy and scheduled it for a public unveiling at the Sydney show in October.

The response from media and public alike was spectacular from the moment the cover came off the sleek coupe at 11.30am on Thursday, October 15, 1998."

We had an understanding it would shock people," recalls Mr Simcoe. "But that it would carry on and sustain that and get front-page news in the newspapers around the country and all that sort of stuff?

No, we had no idea."

We had no inkling that it would be big enough that Holden would not know how to say no.

Because that's what happened in the end. The negative of saying no was bigger than the positive of saying yes."

The coupe appeared in a different environment to the original Monaro. Holden was no longer the dominant figure in the Australian motoring scene; indeed, Ford had led the way for much of the 1990s with the Falcon, and Toyota had established a local manufacturing operation for the Camry. Mitsubishi had long since taken over from Chrysler at Tonsley Park in Adelaide, where Magnas rolled along a line that had once built Regals and Chargers.

Nissan was the most recent in a long list of local manufacturing casualties and Holden and Ford had drastically rationalised back to a single assembly plant each. The market was growing, but the share of the domestic giants was shrinking as the economic playing field flattened and imports grew.

Like Australia itself, the motoring industry was becoming more cosmopolitan and challenging.

In this turbulent arena, says Mr Simcoe, the coupe was Holden's ace. Its shock unveiling and then its production three years later as Monaro returned it to hero status while also pushing it headlong into a more complex, international future."

It turned Holden from one of the three or four companies designing, engineering and manufacturing vehicles into the leader, whether numerically we were or not," says Mr Simcoe."

Overnight Holden went - if not in fact - back to the glory days of 50 to 60 per cent of the market. It had that much pull with the media and the public we suddenly had cachet again; the brand got this huge dose of adrenaline."

And Holden under Mr Hanenberger's ambitious reach exploited it. The breakthrough was a visit to Melbourne in February 2002 by General Motors' recently hired septuagenarian global product boss Bob Lutz. He drove a CV8 Monaro and became convinced it should form the basis for a 21st-century Pontiac GTO, a muscle-car superstar in the US in the 1960s that was affectionately known as the "Goat".

By June, Holden had signed a letter of intent with its parent to build the GTO. The first examples were shown at the LA and Detroit shows in January 2003 and it went on sale in November that year.

Initially the reviews and sales were muted but the car has gained momentum ever since.

Not as quickly as Holden in the GM world, though. Its design and engineering divisions have been increasingly integrated into the global scene, and Mr Simcoe now works in Detroit, overseeing the development of North American passenger-car design.

Along with him, the underpinnings or "architecture" for the next-generation VE Commodore, called Zeta, have been exported to the US to support a future generation of US rear-wheeldrive cars. It's all part of Mr Lutz's championing of the way Australians do business cost effectively.

The Monaro is a prime example. It took just 22 months to develop from product freeze to production using breakthrough maths-based development techniques, and cost just $70 million in the process."

Monaro made people look, and the people who watched saw it happen were impressed," says Mr Simcoe. "These days, there are lots of nay-sayers about the design over here, that it's old and tired. But the reality is that there is no one over here at GM who has had a success at that level."

Overnight Holden became relevant in the GM world, initially at a design level and then beyond that on an engineering and production level. It just forced people to notice Holden for what it is good at, that it's a can-do organisation."

Mind you, it has not all gone smoothly. In between the successful export deals for Monaro and other models as far afield as the Middle East and Britain, Mr Hanenberger occasionally over-reached himself.

Echoing Max Wilson, his voracious desire to attack every product niche meant Holden's Elizabeth assembly line in South Australia became overly complex.

Quality suffered accordingly. It is an issue Mr Hanenberger's successor, the American Denny Mooney, is still trying to work through.

And when GM hit the wall financially earlier this year, Zeta appeared to have been cancelled.

That is not the case, however, and that is good news for any future chapter in the Monaro story.

But for all Monaro's worth, the underlying fact is that, like its predecessor, it just hasn't sold strongly enough to continue into a new generation. It has actually tracked the traditional Everest-like sports coupe sales path, arcing straight up to satisfy pent-up demand, then sloping off just as quickly. In 2002, Monaro ran at an average 350 sales per month, in 2005 it's down to 180."

It was always in our plan to take the car out of production before the market did," explained Mr Elsworth. "We wanted the car to leave the market the way it came in - with a bang. If you let a car like Monaro die a natural sort of death it's the worst thing you can do for the image of the car, and its resale."

I think if you had a plan for a product of selling it for short bursts ... then I would say that is a pretty good, winning model for a sports car that's a fad product."

That's a reasonable hint that a mooted 2008-09 return of Monaro could be on the cards. That's about three years into what's expected to be a shorter six-year lifespan for the VE Commodore, due in the third quarter of 2006.

The complication is that Holden will never again approve a Monaro business case based on 4500 sales. In this generation it was the US export deal that turned it into a major financial winner.

To make it financially viable, the next Monaro could well be imported. The theory goes that it will piggyback off the next generation US-built GTO rather than the other way around.

If that happens, there's a guy in Detroit who will almost certainly have a role in the next instalment of this legend's story."

Will it (a future Monaro) be the same car and do the same job?" Mr Simcoe asks. "Probably not, but there will probably be another one somewhere in the future."

The many lives of Monaro 

• The name Monaro is of Aboriginal origin, meaning a high plateau or plain. According to John Wright, in his book Heart of the Lion, it was submitted to Holden by design staffer Noel Bedford who saw it on a council building while on holiday.
• The Monaro was not the first pillarless hardtop to be manufactured in Australia.That honour goes to the Falcon XP launched in 1964. Slow sales led to its demise in 1966 but it sowed the seed for the arrival of the Monaro, as well as the Falcon and Valiant Charger two-door hardtops that came later.
• Proving that Holden didn't always get it right was its first attempt at a true luxury model, the Brougham, which was launched at the same time as the original HK Monaro in July 1968. It was a response to Ford's new and highly successful Fairlane, and Holden took the cheapskate solution of simply adding a longer boot to the car, whereas the Ford also extended the wheelbase. It didn't work, and Holden finally got serious three years later with the HQ Statesman.
• The first-generation HK Monaro was launched in five engine grades, three six-cylinders and two V8s.The 2001 second generation Monaro was coded V2 and was initially offered as both the supercharged CV6 and CV8.The V6 was dropped at Series III time in 2003. In the Middle East, a normally aspirated version called the Chevrolet Lumina S was also offered.
• The Monaro is exported to New Zealand, Britain, the US and the Middle East as a Holden, Vauxhall, Pontiac and Chevrolet respectively.
• The Pontiac GTO and Vauxhall VXR are powered by the latest 297 kW Gen IV 6.0-litre V8 engine, but the Monaro here makes do with the 260 kW 5.7- litre.The 6.0 is reserved exclusively for HSV in Australia, including its version of the Monaro, the GTO.
• HSV has had several goes at expanding the coupe body shape, including the aborted HRT 427 Supercar and the GTS/R track special. But the only one to make it to production was the Coupe 4, which features Holden's Cross Trac all-wheel-drive system. It is unlikely to be seen beyond the current generation.
• When he retired in 2003,Peter Hanenberger took a black left-hand- drive CV8 Monaro with him back to his home town of Wiesbaden in Germany.

Brock on Monaro

Champion race driver Peter Brock and Monaro have synergy. He drove at Bathurst for the first time in a HT Monaro GTS 350 in 1969 and finished third in a race he still believes he could have won.

Thirty-four years on, he returned in a heavily modified second iteration Monaro to win the short-lived 24- hour race. It was his 10th endurance race win on the mountain, but his first in a Monaro.

Brock has a strong emotional bond with the original Monaro and fond memories of what it was like to drive."

I remember driving the (HT) road car near home and thinking how heavy the clutch was and that the steering was heavy but it cornered well .But, oh, when you opened the second barrel of that Rochester Quadrajet carburettor, you would hear this visceral roar emitting from under the bonnet, the nose would lift and next thing you know you would be doing 90 mph."

This would bring up one of the major problems the car actually had. It had no brakes. Early Monaros just did not stop, they were built for going. They just wanted to go."

It's clear Brock is just as enamoured with V2 Monaro, starting from the moment he saw it unveiled as a concept in Sydney in 1998."

For a long time that car was not being built, and I remember (designer) Mike Simcoe and I striking up quite a few conversations along the line of, `Brocky you have got to do whatever you can, just keep on telling anyone you can, any chance you get, that this car has got to be built. We have got to build it'."

There was a big chance they wouldn't. So I did exactly that, because I felt this was a flagship car, this was a car that was going to get people feeling good about Australian manufacturing expertise.

It was going to get people feeling good about working for a company that can produce such a beautifully proportioned motor car."

It's not hard to detect from Brock's comments a regret that Monaro's life is ending for a second time. The current cost-cutting regime within Holden, the domination of the beancounters over the creatives, does not sit easily with him. But, as always, he is philosophical."

Things are cyclical, no doubt about it," he says. "We know that there always has to be checks and balances in this world, and you find that people are going to come along and say, 'well, look, I know you have a lot of money invested in new products but we have to start getting some return on our investment', and so the era will come along where there is more of an emphasis on profit and cutting out some of these love affairs that do exist."

But then, going through the same cycle again, invariably you get some people coming along saying, 'we've got to do something about our new product line-up here because the opposition is working pretty well and we've got to make things happen'."

That's when the Monaro can be reborn. When you get someone coming along saying, 'we need a new Monaro, we need to inject some life into this automotive industry, we need to get some column inches, we need to get these journos excited and that's what these cars do'."

So I can see it coming again, but how soon is hard to predict because we are becoming more politically correct as each day goes by."

Specifications

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