DOUBLE WHAMMY
A genuine EL Falcon GT gets a 1200hp kick in the pants from a twin-turbo Windsor upgrade
IT’S easy to forget a time when Ford and GM-H were throwing everything but the kitchen sink at engines to make them pump out just over 200kw. For Blue Oval fans back in 1997, the EL Falcon GT was as good as it got, with the trusty five-litre Windsor tickled up by Tickford to reach the mark, while the leaning lion fans could sit back and smirk as their stroker 5.7-litre Holden punched out 215kw. These days my wife’s Kluger is rated at 220kw – I believe that’s what they call progress.
Dale Parker’s EL GT has also been a beneficiary of technological progress, with its power output now around six times what it left the factory with. It’s been a slow progression with lots of development along the way – and by development, I mean breaking and blowing stuff up until pretty much everything has been changed. All you restorers out there can sit back down; Dale has kept all of the original stuff, which is a good thing, as the EL GT is a pretty rare beast, with just 250 built for the Aussie market.
Dale bought his Navy Blue version back in 2002. “People look at them as the ugly duckling of the family; you either like them or you don’t,” he says. “I was part of the Tickford Club because I had an XR6, but I sold that and bought a family car – a Ford Explorer. I went into a Ford dealer to buy a T-shirt and they had a GT for sale, so while I was waiting
I WENT INTO A FORD DEALER TO BUY A T-SHIRT AND THEY HAD A GT FOR SALE. I WENT HOME WITH A GT AND NEVER EVEN GOT THE T-SHIRT!
to pick up my T-shirt I went and changed over cars and went home with a GT. I never even got the T-shirt!”
As you can imagine, the wife was absolutely stoked with the new purchase, especially since they’d just started a family. “It didn’t go down well for a while,” Dale admits, but he also says that he’d get divorced if he ever sold the car. I guess they worked out their differences eventually.
It wasn’t long before Dale started tinkering and modifying the car in search of more performance, but he was limited by the technology of the day. “Back then, because of the factory ECU, you couldn’t get much out of a head-and-cam package, so I got a Vortech S-trim blower and it went from 200hp to 400hp [at the tyres],” he says. “I wanted a bit more, so then it went from 400 to 550. Then I put a bigger supercharger on and it went to 650, and it jumped right up when I put the big V-7 YSI on. At that stage it was supposed to be the be-all and end-all. That was the time when [Sean Fardell’s VK Commodore] MRHDT was running one.”
Even though he’s Ford man, Dale’s not ashamed to admit that he was inspired by both MRHDT and another Holden legend, Craig Munro’s TRYHRD VX II Clubsport. “They were standard-looking cars with standard interiors, a good stance, and they looked like true muscle cars but with massive amounts of horsepower.
They were a huge influence on me.”
When you look at how Dale’s car turned out, it definitely meets all of the aforementioned criteria. It looks like a near-stock EL GT. Sure, they never came out with 18x9.5 and 18x11 rims, but thanks to the factory flare kit, they fit under the car with no problems at all. Truth be told, they’re actually more understated than the standard rims, which was precisely the look Dale was after.
But this car’s all about the power hidden under that unassuming exterior, and that journey saw quite a few ups and downs, as Dale tested – and exceeded – the limits of the car’s driveline and, eventually, engine: “The car made just under 900hp at the tyres at 25psi on E85, but we had a massive intake restriction with the supercharger, because I had a waterto-air intercooler on it and you just couldn’t get the airflow through the core,” he explains.
“It was making reasonable power for what it had, and it was reliable – until I started to race it. In the end, the output turbine shaft snapped off and went through the supercharger, bonnet and front guard. My only saving grace was that because I had the intercooler on it, all the big bits of metal ended up in the plenum. It literally sheared the whole back of the supercharger off; they’re spinning at 75,000rpm at wideopen throttle.”
By this stage, everything else had been tested to destruction, so the car was already running