In the hierarchy of Australian car culture, the Street Machine Summernats Grand Champion sword is the holy grail. Unlike typical global show car awards that reward trailer queens polished exclusively with diapers, Canberra demands a brutal compromise. To claim the sword, an Elite-class machine must back up its immaculate paint and panel points by screaming onto the hot tarmac to survive punishing dynamic driving events.
A historic milestone completely shattered custom expectations. For the first time, a pickup truck took the ultimate crown. The man behind the wheel wasn’t a career automotive specialist, but Adam Bickerstaff a builder who constructs residential houses by trade. The machine? A jaw-dropping, metallic green 1956 Ford F-100 built alongside the maestros at Viking Hotrods.
The Machine: Blown Coyote Modernity
Bickerstaff’s concept was clear: forge a flawless classic truck aesthetic wrapped around modern, uncompromised driveability. While a traditional lumpy big-block V8 was considered early on, the team pivoted to a high-tech heart.
The truck features a quad-cam Ford crate Coyote V8 engine. Because the modern modular engine possesses a massive physical footprint, the entire steel firewall had to be radically modified and fabricated to drop the block into the engine bay. Crowned with a massive Whipple supercharger and controlled by a Ford Performance ECU, the blown combo pumps a reliable 700 horsepower down a two-piece tailshaft into a robust nine-inch rear differential.
The engineering beneath the skin is pure automotive art. The custom-notched chassis rides so low that the rear tub floor was completely omitted during assembly to display the immaculate suspension loops and fabrication work. The metal profile is heavily customized, featuring shaved doors, a reskinned tub, extended sidesteps and widened rear guards.
The Man: Unlocking the Sword at ‘Nats 38
Building a Top 10 Elite masterpiece is one thing; driving it hard on the limits of adhesion is another. Bickerstaff had severely limited seat time before entering the gates at Exhibition Park in Canberra (EPIC), having only driven the truck around the block to protect the pristine metallic green coat from rogue stone chips.
However, when a historic schedule shakeup moved the Grand Champion driving loops to Saturday evening, Bickerstaff didn’t back down.
The Track Attack: Facing down elite, pure-bred track muscle cars, Bickerstaff wheeled the heavy F-100 pick-up with surgical precision, securing a blistering second and third-place finish across the slalom and dynamic Go-to-Whoa events.
This clinical driving performance clawed back valuable aggregate points, catapulting the custom F-100 straight to the top of the leaderboard to officially win the Summernats 38 Grand Champion title. It proved that in the true spirit of Australian car building, uncompromised show-stoppers are still born to be driven.