The Best of Both Worlds with Troy Kelly
Adelaide’s Troy Kelly reflects on his career with component suppliers and working with Holden until the day car manufacturing died.
Troy (right) and his grandfather (left)
The end of the Holden brand was met with an outpouring of emotion on social media. Some shared on their memories of Holden car ownership. Others reflected on their career connections to Holden, having played their part designing, testing and building the cars that filled the floors of Holden dealerships for decades.
Troy Kelly has a foot in both camps. When we cobbled together and published a tribute to Holden the evening of the announcement, Troy left this comment on our Facebook post.
“After 24 years, I’m shattered. My lover is gone. From the first day in 1989 till my last day, I loved every minute. My 1928 Chevrolet was built at Holden Coach Bodies in Woodville, SA. Thanks Holdens, my career was 🤘.”
That was all the invitation we needed to propose the possibility of an interview to Troy. Responding within an hour, Troy was all too happy to share his automotive story in the wake of the Holden announcement.
And so, on a dodgy phone line that cut the conversation off at least four times, we threw some questions at Troy about his career in the car industry that put him in very close contact with Holden through some of the country’s largest automotive component suppliers.
An Adelaide upbringing
Troy was born into a manufacturing city churning out Holdens and Chrylsers as well as the components that completed them.
“I was born in Adelaide. Growing up, we had a HR Holden until I was about five years old. I can still vividly remember the smell of it inside. Any time I sit inside a HR, it takes me right back to my early childhood.
”We always had Holdens. They were never new ones though!”
The claim to fame
The love for four-wheel machines would come a little later, but Troy’s first automotive passion had half the rubber on the deck.
“My thing was always motorbikes, and I grew up doing motocross. When I was 15, I had the chance to try my luck at Broadford in Victoria. I ended up coming third, and I was probably the happiest third-placed person in the whole world. I was third on a borrowed bike, and to this day, it’s the thing people remember me for.
Troy (far right) competing in Morgan, South Australia, in 1985
“There’s a point to this story, because you won’t believe who was in the crowd. There was a man watching along by the name of Chuck Chapman. I didn’t know this man from a bar of soap, but as it turns out, he was the General Manager of Holden at the time. As the story goes, I told him that one day, that I would be the best mechanical engineer in Australia. That’s where I got the drive to one day work for a car company.”
Edging closer to the car industry
It wasn’t a far-fetched dream, and a year or two later, Troy took a sizable step closer to making it happen.
“The next step was to sit a test to see if I could become a mechanical engineer. I went and sat the test and was offered a job for a company called British Tube Makers. I went there, and in my first visit to trade school, guess who was there? It was Chuck!
“He came up to me, introduced himself again and called me Troy. I couldn’t believe he had remembered my name. He asked what I was doing and I told him I’d gotten a job at British Tube Makers and that I was going to be a mechanical engineer.
“He said, ‘I know you are.’
“I spent that first year working my guts out on my project. He came back during the second year and sat down for an interview we had to do. What a man!”
Love at first meeting
Troy immediately set to work getting Australia’s biggest automotive brand on the bandwagon.
“I set up a laboratory at British Tube Makers. I then approached Holden to do some work for them and fortunately, they fell in love with me. They ended up asking me to become an internal contractor. A lot of this came from Chuck’s guidance.
“My supervisors at British Tube Makers said, ‘Troy, we don’t believe what you’ve done! You’re young, but you can talk to people from a layman’s point of view. Please keep on going to these meetings every week, because it’s going to open a lot of doors for us.’
“I developed a great relationship with Holden because they could come to me knowing that we weren’t going to stuff them around. We built all this equipment for them, and they couldn’t afford to pay for all the research and development. It was a win-win situation.”
Courted by Cooper Standard Automotive
Troy stayed at British Tube Makers for a decade, but the time was right for a move down the road.
“I got offered a cracking position at a company called Cooper Standard Automotive. They were the biggest manufacturer in South Australia and when I went there, they had about 700 people on the books and they were doing over 170 products. About 70 of those were going overseas.
Troy with his R Series Valiant
“They were a Tier-1 supplier and at one stage, they were supplying all four local car manufacturers. They had an absolute stranglehold on the market. My day to day work there was basically running the laboratory, because testing was a big thing there. Their test laboratory was amazing with impulse test rigs, a dyno tune, FFT analysers, noise tuning and power steering tuning. They were doing so much varied work, and the laboratory itself was absolutely off the Richter.
“They also started doing airbags and curtain airbags as well. I was once again paid by Holden as a contractor and told Cooper Standard everything I was doing, and they supported it. Together, we did all sorts of things. Holden were really on the bandwagon when it came to keeping the content local.”
The other side of the peak
It was all running as smoothly as a Holden V8. Then, the car industry dropped a cylinder.
“We had the balance of research and development correct, but if you look at the statistics, 2006 was the peak. We hit around 170,000 cars, and then almost overnight, the numbers started to drop.
“Part of that was a change in what was driving the business. Holden always wanted reliability, and turning away from that is where it all went wrong. They started to chase the mighty dollar because the government was pushing them.
“In response, we went back to two shifts. Internally, we were trying to say that we had built this fantastic test regime within Australia that they could come down and have a look at what we were doing. But the seeds were already sowed for grimmer times.
“I was pulled into a meeting in 2009 and Holden asked whether I wanted to keep working for them. I said yes, and they said I needed to sign the document they put in front of me. I signed it, and then the following year, my manager at Cooper Standard Automotive approached me and said that Holden had asked if I could go to China. He knew that I had signed the document, and I said that I would go.”
Packing the suitcase
With his family staying in Adelaide, Troy prepared to apply his expertise in a very different automotive market.
“I went to China to work for Holden. The project involved taking a whole laboratory over there and installing it into one of their factories. That was because the Statesman was going there. They called it a ‘Buick Park Avenue’.
“It went well. We were able to instill the Australian culture of trying to do better every day. I was eventually offered the opportunity to become a Chinese citizen. However, I just couldn’t do it. I had a family back home.
Troy at the Automotive Science and Technology Precinct in Guangzhou
“When I look back on it, going to China was absolutely life changing. I learned a lot more about car manufacturing than I had ever known. They built 28 million cars a year over there, and it’s not even fanciful for us to try to fight it.”
A fire-breathing Statesman
Troy’s visit to China wasn’t without an ‘unconventional’ tweak to a vehicle designed with elegance and refinement in mind.
“One night while I was working in Chongqing, I took a call from a bloke who had heard I was a bit of a guru with Statesmans. He told me he wanted this Statesman to breathe fire, so I asked him to bring it over to the hotel and I would do some work on it.
“I was standing out the front of the hotel with all my tools and when he arrived, I got under it and started pulling this and that off the car and had it running as lean as I could. I started it up and he said, ‘you’re kidding me’!
“I had to say, ‘if you tell anyone what I’ve just done, I’m going to be in big trouble!’
“He looked a bit confused and said, ‘what do you mean?’
“I said, ‘back home, that’s probably about a $50,000 fine!’”
Returning Down Under
Troy settled back into the car industry upon returning to Adelaide, but it wasn’t going to be a long stint.
“When I returned, I was able to get a job at a company called Woodbridge. I ended up there because Holden were having a lot of problems with seating and needed a new test regime. I helped to build the test rig and spent about four years there until it all fell in a heap in 2017.
“Then, I had to walk away from it all. It was horrid. I’m not going to shy away from this, but I had to go and see a psychiatrist in the end. After all those years working in the automotive sector, that was all I knew. I was really down.
“Every day when I got up, I was so excited to go to work. They all thought I was on something, but I truly loved what I did. When you lose that, you lose everything.”
Full circle
The collapse of the car industry has taken Troy back to where he started.
“I’ve gone back to my roots and I just run CNC machines now. At this stage of my life, this is the best thing. It’s taken me back to my roots. As a kid, I felt most at home making things on a CNC machine. I think they’re amazing things. And I treat them like children, and I was instilled that by Holden.”
The demise
We asked Troy for his view on the end of car manufacturing down under.
“The patriotism died. It’s that simple. When you go to China and see that they can make 18 million cars per year, it’s quite an eye-opener. They’ll go out of their way to buy a locally-built car, and they really make the effort to find out which province it was built in. When I was there, three provinces alone were bigger than Detroit when it came to car manufacturing. Chongqing is three times the size of Detroit and they’re making 1500 cars per day.
“The other problem is that we all watch too much television. Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, it influences the decisions we make. Television has told us that we need to buy an SUV. It’s that simple, and it’s beyond my comprehension.”
A world-class car
Troy shares the highlight of his automotive career in Australia.
“I was involved in the HSV W427. Being a car person, I believe that’s the best car we ever built in Australia. I’m very proud to have been involved in that. I understand that we had to source the engine, but at the end of the day, what we put together was a world-class car. So many people say we never built one, but I couldn’t disagree with that more. I’m not sure how many people truly recognise how much effort goes into building something like that.
“It makes me quite upset that our young kids today can’t go to work in a factory and be involved in those kinds of projects when they finish school. I learned so much from being in that environment, but the next generation won’t be able to get that anymore. We can’t just be a services economy. We need to make things.”
The fleet
Confidently assuming that the answer would be a firm ‘yes’, we asked Troy whether there was any local metal tucked away in his garage.
“You need to keep some things Australian, don’t you? The pride of the fleet is a Woodville-built 1928 Chevrolet that was owned by my grandfather. I will never part with it, because it’s a family heirloom. Before he died, I twisted father in law’s arm to get some money and bought it. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
“I also have a HQ Holden I will never part with. That’s it for Holdens at the moment. However, I also own an R-Series and a VC Valiant, both built at Tonsley Park. That’s why they’ve stayed in the family. They’re old and they’re withered, but one day when I’ve got money, I’ll restore them.”
Troy’s HQ Holden
“In terms of cars that aren’t in the collection anymore, there was a HG wagon that was very dear to my heart. Every year around here they have an event called the Bay to Birdwood, which has around 1500 cars running up into the hills and they have a show and shine. One year, I came to second to a GT Falcon, and we all know the Holdens always lose to them. That might well be the best Holden I have ever had.
“I’ve owned a lot of Holdens and I’m proud of the old-school mentality where when you bought one, you were thinking of the people of the line and the contribution the purchase would make to paying their wages. If enough of us bought just one locally-built car, we’d be able to pay for the people on the line. It was the opportunity to band together as a community, but we blew it.”
Looking back on Broadford
We asked Troy whether the car industry provided the chance to realise the dream he shared with Chuck Chapman as a 15-year-old at Broadford.
“The car industry gave me the outlet to push my mechanical engineering skills further than I could ever have imagined. I thought about going to the forces, or to the mining industry, but it just wasn’t me. I needed to go to work in the car industry, or a component company that worked for a car company.
“The industry gave me every opportunity to grow, and they always gave you a lot of training. In turn, it meant that we all put 110% into it. In my time at Holden, I’d sit in a room and there would be hundreds of years of experience and nobody had any problems teaching me what they had learned.
“The car companies let people shine who wouldn’t have shined in any other industries. I know I wouldn’t have. It was an enchantment with everything we were doing.
“I’m so positive about my experience in the industry. The only thing that eats at me today is the fact that I can’t wake up and go there tomorrow.”
Troy driving his 1928 Chevrolet. A big thank you to Cars on the Coast for the permission to use this photo. Check them out here.