IT COULD be all too easy to get parochial and misty-eyed about the demise of the rear-wheel-drive iteration of the Holden Commodore.

Dropped onto an unsuspecting Australian public by the pragmatic European boss of Holden, Peter Hanenberger, in the late 1970s, the Commodore was – along with the Ford Falcon – the car that truly dominated the Australian market for a good 20 years.

It’s also tempting to label the VF II as merely a marketing department’s attempts to polish up an old nail with a bit of body work and a ‘look at me’ exhaust note.

After all, the VF is not far removed from the previous generation VE, itself more than a decade old now, and you have to squint long and hard to identify the differences between the Series I and Series II VF cars.

It only takes a brief drive, though, to put both notions aside and acknowledge that Holden has managed to piece together quite a special bit of kit in the SS-V Redline, and one that is more than a sum of its parts for those brave enough to snap up Holden’s gloriously fading star.

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