BROWN FOR GLORY
JASON COOKE HAS SKYDIVED ALMOST 6000 TIMES. BUT HE GOT JUST AS BIG A THRILL FROM DRIVING HIS BIG, BROWN AND BEAUTIFUL XP FALCON COUPE FOR THE FIRST TIME
JASON Cooke doesn’t really consider himself a car guy. Hell, his beautiful HOK Root Beer Kandy XP Falcon coupe is the first V8 he’s ever owned! And as for that plate? “It stands for ‘Eat, F*ck, Skydive’; the rest is self-explanatory,” he laughs.
Yep, Jason is an enthusiastic skydiver. How enthusiastic? He’s done it nearly 6000 times! So what brought about the change of enthusiasm from hurtling towards the earth to hurtling towards the horizon in a sweet V8 Falcon?
“As a kid, there was a white-over-red XP coupe kicking around my area on a set of Center Lines. It looked gangster!” Jason explains. “So I bought this Gumtree special from out west of Brisbane.” He trails off, hip pocket wincing at the memory.
Jason entrusted Pat and his team at Pat’s Pro Restos & Refinishing in Beaudesert, south of Brisbane, with turning the rusty relic into a beautiful brown masterpiece. Pat confirms that the car wasn’t a great base. “Jason’s XP was one of the rustiest cars we’ve ever started with; it was everywhere,” he remembers. “There were no mysteries though; these coupes are all rusty, it’s just a matter of how rusty.”
Pat’s team unstitched the rear quarters, chassis rails, firewall, plenum chambers – pretty much everything. “We knew Jason was keen on some big rubber, so while it was in pieces we moved the rear rails in 125mm and stretched the tubs,” Pat explains. “Of course, the more we looked, the more rust we found; we had to Falconstein three cars into one.”
Not that Jason sat back and let the Pro Restos guys have all the fun. With a trade background in monitoring and telemetry, he knew re-wiring the car himself would be a no-brainer. “I’m good at nerd shit, so I bought a Painless wiring harness; all I had to do was make sure my work was up to the high standard of Pat’s.”
Looking at the finished product – the quality, the attention to detail, and those enormous 22in Schott Accelerator rims – you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s a bunch of custom work in the XP’S body. Not so. Most of the metal, though restored, is as Ford created it, and those long rear arches swallowed the Schotts without complaint. “I told the guys that I’m gonna drive this thing, so if it rubs or scrubs, I’ll be spewing,” Jason says.
“My God, the wheels,” he continues, off on another tangent. “I visited Schott’s operation in the USA and browsed their range. I was very happy with the Accelerators, but when they turned up at home, I dropped my marbles!” You see, Jason’s not a fan of gold in any form, and that’s what his new rims definitely were. “Then I stood them up in the daylight and they changed colour,” he marvels. ”They’re perfect.”
The wheels aren’t the only thing that changes colour; you may have noticed that incredible HOK Root Beer Kandy; one moment black, the next cherry, then suddenly a brown worthy of the Brown Car
I WANTED BROWN FROM THE OUTSET; SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. PAT KEPT SPRAYING UP SAMPLES AND I KEPT SAYING: “GO BROWNER!”
ENGINE: The Ford Performance Boss 302 sits nice and snug in a near-factory engine bay, with just some mild smoothing and a splash of satin Root Beer Kandy making all the difference. The centrepiece is the incredible March Performance pulley kit, designed to not only locate the air con pump, alternator and other ancillaries, but to look great as well. Master fabricator Drew Mackenzie reproduced the style behind the motor when creating the bespoke strut brace INTERIOR: Although it looks factory, the styling is all Chris Bakker from Elite Interiors. Most notably, Chris widened the shoulders of the factory buckets to make them look less tombstone-y. He also suggested going with kangaroo leather, which is strong, but can contain a lot of flaws. “The flaws create character,” Jason reckons. “Just so long as there’s not a dirty great big kangaroo bullet hole in the seat, it’s fine!”