Remember those 185i Clubsports? At the time, they seemed like the pinnacle of power and the first-gen HSV owners considered themselves legendary peddlers alongside big names like Murph and Peter Brock.
Now, you meet someone with one of those ageing Commodores and it's incredibly difficult to resist the temptation to point out that the hot hatch version of the Mazda3 has more grunt than their big Aussie eight.
But when you look down the spec list for HSV's new range, the numbers are getting insane. At the top end is the new GTS - with a whopping 430kW pumped out by the monster mill from Chevrolet's widely celebrated LS1. But back down the HSV roster are some equally staggering figures. The "baby" Clubsport has a meagre 317kW, the R8 manages 325, and then the new R8 with a host of "SV" tweaks gets 340kW.
Those are big power outputs, and the SV pack manages to nudge just 5kW over Ford Performance Vehicles' 335kW GT-P. That, according to the HSV engineers, was no coincidence and has made the company very happy indeed. And maybe just a little bit smug.
As Driven goes to print this week, I'm heading out to Phillip Island with a bunch of writers, HSV's genius designers and a few V8 racing stars - including Kiwi legend Greg Murphy - to see just what the company has managed to achieve with the new VF Commodore, freshly launched by Holden.
