BACK IN BLACK
A STREET MACHINE STAR IN 1994, THIS IMMACULATE TIME-CAPSULE XC COUPE IS ONCE AGAIN READY FOR ITS CLOSE-UP
This survivor XC hardtop has been around the traps for a good many years
I WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING NEW, AND MY BROTHER JIM SUGGESTED I BUY HIS XC AND GET IT BACK ON THE ROAD. I COULDN’T BELIEVE HE WAS WILLING TO SELL IT; THE CAR WAS LIKE FAMILY TO HIM
WHEN you consider that this achingly nice XC Fairmont coupe first appeared in
Street Machine waaaay back in September 1994, it’s incredible that people still fondly remember it. “Everywhere I go, people recognise the car,” owner Danny Papa says. “They say: ‘That’s the car from Street Machine.’”
Once you’ve fetched that particular issue from your perfectly collated SM collection, you’ll notice the spec box lists an owner with a very similar name: Jim Papa. Jim is Danny’s older brother, and Danny bought the car off him two years ago.
“I’d sold my 1973 De Tomaso Pantera,” Danny says, “and was looking for something new. Much to my surprise, Jim suggested I buy the coupe and get it back on the road. I couldn’t believe he was willing to sell it; the car was like family to him. It was his first car; he bought it in 1983 when he was 18! As a young teenager, I remember Jim taking me cruising in it down Lygon Street. One of his mates, Con, had MRHEMI, a nice Charger with a hot 265; another had a Landau. They were huge nights – so many cars!”
Looking at the flawless panel and paint, you’re probably thinking the coupe has had a recent freshen-up. Nope, it’s virtually untouched since Jim completed the fiveyear resto in 1993, which included the orange metalflake engine bay and clear Lexan bonnet – a major talking point that attracts lots of attention.
“I personally didn’t like the metalflake; it’s very 80s,” Danny says. “Initially I’d planned to repaint it gloss black and add heaps of chrome and polish – maybe even a blower. Then I started taking it to cruise nights, and everyone kept saying: ‘Leave it as it is.’ They love that it’s survived, untouched all these years.”
And survive it has. Despite Jim having no formal training (he’s a draftsman by trade), he did all the panel and paint himself in his home garage, including the pumped rear guards, laser-straight body and Midnight Black duco. Yep, that’s quarter-centuryold acrylic you’re drooling over.
The engine is the same tough-as-nails 351 the car ran back then. It’s filled with a 4MA crank, 12.5:1 TRW forgies, 4V closed-chamber heads, solid Crane cam and Edelbrock Torker 4V manifold. The 4.56 Zoom gears and 28-spline axles in the shortened factory nine-inch housing remain, as do the beefed-up C6 tranny and big 4200rpm stall converter. Future plans include changing to a 3500 converter to make the car more streetable.
The XC hadn’t been driven much when we featured it in ’94; it was still quite fresh and doing the show circuit. However, Jim boasted at the time that it was good for high 11s – bloody stout for an early-90s streeter. Much to his credit, the black beast subsequently netted an 11.6@127mph timeslip!
“At Easternats one year, the original Lexan bonnet blew off when heading down the back straight at Sandown,” Danny says. “The Lexan split around the bonnet pins and they pulled through; lucky it didn’t hit the body. At the time Jim had an XC Cobra bonnet with the scoop, so a mould was taken off that and the same guy out at Thomastown made the taller
I STILL LOOK AT IT AS JIM’S CAR – I’M JUST THE CARETAKER. IF I EVER DECIDED TO SELL IT, IT WOULD ONLY BE BACK TO HIM
bonnet now on the car. The pins were also reinforced with steel plates.”
Though the car is virtually unchanged from 20-odd years ago, Danny did want to personalise it a bit. “Like Jim, I’m oldschool and love the drag look,” he says, “so I swapped the original 15x12 and 15x4.5 12-slotters for Auto Drags and replaced the Supertrapps with three-inch tailpipes. That’s it!”
Wrapped around those 15x12.5 rear Center Lines are meaty 29x15.5x15 MTS. The coupe was able to swallow such fat rubber thanks to the rear rails and reset GT leaf springs being moved inboard 40mm by John Taverna during the original build. Even that wasn’t enough for the wider and taller 31-inch Pro-tracs the coupe originally sported – that’s why Jim pumped the wheelarches.
“Jim was very fussy, very protective of the car,” Danny says. “He raced it a bit, but did very few miles. Then it developed a fuel issue that he couldn’t rectify. It’d run, then just conk out for no reason. After playing up again at Easternats 2004, it pretty much sat gathering dust. When I purchased it in 2015, it hadn’t moved in over 10 years. Jim’s got a 1970 convertible Mustang now, which is his focus, and I guess he thought I’d look after the coupe for him, as Jim was very worried about something happening to it. Especially after his daily-driver XA GT was stolen from his house a couple of years ago.”
Before driving Danny’s new purchase home, he and Jim changed all the fluids and sparkplugs, rebuilt the rear brakes and replaced every rubber hose, including brake and fuel lines. Much to Jim’s bemusement, this appears to have rectified the fuel issue that originally saw the coupe banished to the back of the shed.
“I love the car to death,” Danny says. “I’ve been driving it all the time. I might own it now, but I still look at it as Jim’s car – I’m just the caretaker. If I ever decided to sell it, it would only be back to him.
“I can’t thank Jim enough, not only for selling me the car, but for all the help he’s given me over the years. He’s always been there with a helping hand to work on my cars. He even painted my first car, a 1976 LTD – black of course!”
This seriously sexy black XC coupe is a bloody credit to Danny and Jim. Here’s hoping it still looks this pristine in the July 2040 issue of Street Machine!