Precious Metal

This factory-fresh bronze wine fairmont packs a sleepy 600hp punch and GTHO flavour

- Kian Heagney 

It's not very often that a factory-fresh, concours-level restoration finds its way into our pages, but when there’s nearly 600hp of stonk hiding underneath all the reproduction dealer stickers, it’s clear that Jazz Desira’s stunning XY Fairmont isn’t just another OEM-spec resto.

“I wanted to restore the car to H-code spec, which is what I think a Fairmont would’ve looked like if it was offered with GTHO running gear,” says Jazz.

Jazz first got his hands on the ’Mont in 2006, buying it as a replacement for his sorely missed XY GS Fairmont that he’d sold three years prior. “I sold the GS when I had my daughter,” he says. “But soon I got itchy feet and then I saw this one on the cover of a classifieds magazine at a servo, so I rang the owner and picked it up.”

It was a six-banger at the time and in really good nick, with barely any rust and average paint. Jazz used it in part as a family hauler for a few years, before deciding to go all-out in 2013. “After I got divorced, I decided to go for the full nut-and-bolt resto, leaving no stone unturned,” he says.

The whole car was stripped and blasted, with Jazz putting in lots of elbow grease during lunch breaks at work and after hours at home to get the Fairmont to his liking. “I even went over the entire wiring loom with a toothbrush and cleaned it up; I wanted everything on this car to be perfect,” he says.

One of the most impressive parts of this build is that Jazz took care of most of it himself at home, only farming out the engine machine work, paint and panel and interior trimming to the pros.