Steve Roussis's XY Falcon

Steve Roussis’s XY falcon is a nine-second rolling celebration of the life of a much-loved wife, mother and friend

- Damion Smy

SELLING a 10-second XY Falcon is never an easy thing to do. “You’ll regret it. You’ll regret it. You’ll regret it,” Steve Roussis’s wife Ourania told him. She was right. “I sold it to a local guy, and within months I was saying: ‘Shit, I shouldn’t have sold it!’” Steve admits. But his eldest son, Dean, had a solution. “He said: ‘Dad, my mate’s got one; he never drives it. Do you want to have a look at it?’”

The replacement 1970 XY, Spring Frost in colour, shortly arrived at Casa de Roussis and the family started throwing ideas around.

“It was me, my wife and my three kids – we speak as a family. We discussed things like what colour we would paint the XY. That’s how we got the Raw Orange colour; my wife thought it popped the most,” Steve says. “We had a vision for what we wanted it to turn out like. We started stripping it at home, and pulled the engine out and everything at work.”

One significant part of the vision for this ‘new’ Falcon build was that it had to be even quicker than the old one. “I promised my wife that this car would run nines,” Steve says.

The family had its new project, the XY-sized hole in the garage now perfectly filled. Life was great again – yet the worst news possible came during the Falcon’s build. Ourania, who’d been battling cancer, was now terminally ill. The XY instantly meant more than any car before it.