All around the Summernats precinct are the bold and beautiful cars, the showy and the shiny . . . and then there's Matt Killen's hand-painted old green Jeep.
Knocked up in the garage at home with a MIG welder, pop-rivet gun and an angle grinder, the Willys Jeep is a world apart from the gleaming, mega-buck metal which will be revealed inside the judging pavilion on Friday.
But Mr Killen, a truck driver from Geelong, doesn't give a damn. He thinks it's a great laugh.
"This project wasn't done for me, it's for my young bloke," Mr Killen said.
"It's his idea and well, I just made it happen."
Mr Killen's home-made creation started when he received the news that he'd gained an entry to Summernats back in January last year.
"I was on the couch at home when the news came through and I punched the air, thinking 'You beauty'! But then I realised we didn't actually have a car we could enter."
However, being handy with the tools that wasn't a huge obstacle.
"I looked around, wondering what to build, and found this old Willys Jeep for sale on Facebook for $800," he said.
"It didn't have a radiator and an engine but it was different.
"And my son, Beau, thought it could make a great rat rod. So it was really his keenness to build a rat rod that started the whole project rolling."
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With the battered bodywork suspended on four milk crates inside his garage, the project gradually took shape using sheetmetal offcuts, ammunition boxes and "anything else useful that was around". A few brush-licks with some Army green paint finished it all off.
"The end result is what you might call un-period correct," he said.
There's some nice additional visual effects, too, including an oxygen mask hanging off the windscreen and for the air cleaner, a skull under an army helmet with a cigarette firmly clenched in its teeth.
For those who have a particular predisposition as to what a showy street machine should look like, then the left-field "rat rod" element of the modified car culture is not one which appears to fit.
Rat rods come in all types of iterations but are loosely based around a particular vehicle type, then modified and deliberately given a unkempt and uncared-for appearance.
If the paintwork looks a bit ratty and/or peels significantly, then all the better.
Under the Jeep's bonnet is a slightly asthmatic Toyota Corolla four cylinder engine. The dashboard is as rudimentary as a . . . well, a World War II Jeep.
It's a difficult climb in and out of the low-cut Jeep doors for Mr Killen's arthritic knees, so he has made the steering wheel removeable.
"It's the ultimate anti-theft device," he quipped.
