BLUE Diamond

PETER LEWIS'S KAASE-POWERED, ASTILL-BUILT XC IS A TECH-PACKED AND STREET-READY MASTERPIECE

- JACK HOULIHAN

HOWARD Astill doesn’t do daily drivers. He’s chiselled his name into the Aussie street machining hall of fame by turning out a string of revered Ford show cars over the past 40-ish years, so when Peter Lewis approached him for a new build, things could have easily not worked out. But they did, and we have this incredible, engineered-to-the-eyeballs XC Falcon showstopper as a result.

Peter spent a good chunk of his youth hooking around Broken Hill Speedway in LJ Toranas, with his first car, a blue six-cylinder XC Falcon, performing tow duties. So, when the time came for a new project a few decades later, the mining sector worker wanted to combine his first love with some of the best modern stuff money can buy.

“I’d done a lot of research on what I’d like in the build and had a list of things that were non-negotiable: XC, four-door, blue in colour, a Kaase Boss engine, six-speed auto, IRS and IFS, and it had to be able to be used as a daily driver,” Peter recounts. He kicked things off by purchasing a suitable Falcon as a tidy roller while working in Indonesia.

Buying parts for the build proved straightforward enough; finding the right guy to put it all together was trickier, so Peter got chatting with Paul Crossley at Anything Racing and Tim Bartrop (aka Dr Tim) to look at the practicalities of building and engineering his ultimate XC. “Once we’d established the concept and theory that it could be done, it was a decision as to who could do the build,” he says. “Being a Broken Hill boy, I was aware that Howard Astill would be the obvious choice to do justice to the build, but I wasn’t certain if he could take it on, as he was deep into the Cobra 400 build.”