Photo: SAKAZ Customs
Ask a North American what a Hillman Hunter is, and they might tell you it sounds like the name of some Sherlock Holmes-esque English movie hero from a film series you've never even heard of. Ask a Britt or an Aussie the same question, and you might just uncork a whole slew of childhood memories from when the Hunter was one of the most prolific family sedans in the Eastern Hemisphere for decades.
But even by nostalgia's standards, this heavily modified 1970 Hillman Hunter is a cut above the rest. It comes to us via SAKAZ Customs, based out of Bundamba in Queensland, Australia, a country that's very intimately familiar with the model in its own right. The Hunter was imported from the UK to Australia starting in 1967, doing so through Chrysler's official Aussie distributor, Chrysler Australia Ltd. From the factory, Aussie-spec Hillman Hunters hit dealer floors with one of two peppy little four-cylinder engines ranging from 1,496 ccs up to 1,725 ccs.
Surely decent engines in their day. But let's be real; we've come a long way since the 1970s. We can do a lot better nowadays in no small part to all the four-cylinder pocket rockets native to the JDM scene. Out of all of those, perhaps no star shines brighter than a Honda K24. On a long enough timeline, it's as if everything eventually gets a K24 swap at some point. Happilly, there's a proverbial sea of old Accords and CRVs out there to help facilitate this proliferation.
With the K24 four-banger mounted snuggly in this Hillman Hunter, SAKAZ Customs was free to fit all sorts of goodies as they saw fit. First order of business, as if it could be anything else, was fitting a single Aeroflow turbocharger and ditching the stock fuel injectors with positively chunky 1600 cc units to compensate for the extra boost taken on by the new doner engine. It's all made to work in harmony with an Elite 2500 ECU from Haltech. With a custom E85 tuning job done by FAH Performance in Queensland, this glorified minivan engine is now jetting a healthy 404 horsepower to the tires.
Power is fed not to a notoriously weak Honda transmission but rather a BMW five-speed manual transmission feeding to a BorgWarner nine-bolt rear end that puts down the power considerably better than whatever came with this Hillman from the manufacturer. But for all the power and the new hardware under the hood. You'd never know about it from peeping the exterior of this Hillman. With a baby blue paint job and period-correct dog dish style hubcaps to go along with a blue vinyl interior, this is the meanest sleeper to come out of Australia this year.
Surely decent engines in their day. But let's be real; we've come a long way since the 1970s. We can do a lot better nowadays in no small part to all the four-cylinder pocket rockets native to the JDM scene. Out of all of those, perhaps no star shines brighter than a Honda K24. On a long enough timeline, it's as if everything eventually gets a K24 swap at some point. Happilly, there's a proverbial sea of old Accords and CRVs out there to help facilitate this proliferation.
With the K24 four-banger mounted snuggly in this Hillman Hunter, SAKAZ Customs was free to fit all sorts of goodies as they saw fit. First order of business, as if it could be anything else, was fitting a single Aeroflow turbocharger and ditching the stock fuel injectors with positively chunky 1600 cc units to compensate for the extra boost taken on by the new doner engine. It's all made to work in harmony with an Elite 2500 ECU from Haltech. With a custom E85 tuning job done by FAH Performance in Queensland, this glorified minivan engine is now jetting a healthy 404 horsepower to the tires.
Power is fed not to a notoriously weak Honda transmission but rather a BMW five-speed manual transmission feeding to a BorgWarner nine-bolt rear end that puts down the power considerably better than whatever came with this Hillman from the manufacturer. But for all the power and the new hardware under the hood. You'd never know about it from peeping the exterior of this Hillman. With a baby blue paint job and period-correct dog dish style hubcaps to go along with a blue vinyl interior, this is the meanest sleeper to come out of Australia this year.
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