PYE IN THE SKY
> SUPERCARS DRIVER SCOTT PYE IS BUILDING A PRO TOURING F100 DAILY DRIVER
REPCO Supercars Championship driver Scott Pye may get to thrash a 300km/h V8-powered ZB Commodore on weekends, but we’re more interested in seeing his new daily driver come to fruition. The Team 18 racer has a pro touring-flavoured ’56 Ford F100 in the build, set to become the shop truck for his business, One Nine Media.
Erebus Garage, the street-car arm of Melbourne’s Erebus Motorsport, is handling the build, which features cool hardware like a Magnum independent front end and parallel four-link rear end from United Speed Shop. United’s Ryan Carter has whipped up a tasty rendering (opposite page, top) that shows where Erebus is heading with the build.
“We started the relationship with Erebus after James White, the head fabricator there, rang up because he wanted a front end for a personal project,” Ryan explains. “James recently mentioned that Erebus Garage was building a shop truck for Scott Pye, so we started talking about potential set-ups.”
The build will include a quad-cam 5.0-litre Coyote and 10-speed auto up front; 18x8 and 20x12in wheels; Pedders coil-over suspension and big brakes at each corner; a heavily updated chassis; and plenty of attitude.
“Scotty told James what he wanted, and then James and I told Scotty what he needed,” Ryan laughs. “Scotty wants something that looks oldschool and tough, and isn’t too modern or pretty. I had already made a Magnum front end to suit the Coyote, but James got one scanned so we knew it would be perfect.”
Pick-up truck purists may click gears when they learn how peachy the F100 was that Scott used as the base for his project, as Erebus’s James White explains: “It was so good we could have got it roadworthy and driving easily, and it was the best pick-up body I’d ever seen. Then things escalated quickly, as they often do!”
Scratch Built Co 3D-scanned the body and engine bay for James, which greatly speeded up the build process. “Scanning makes it so much easier to work with Ryan at United, who is 1000km away, because then we have all the data and exact models to go off,” says James. “I then drew the chassis up in CAD and had Ryan send me his CAD files of the United parts, so we could tweak it all together and design the chassis in one complete unit.”
The drivetrain was sourced through a contact in the Supercars paddock, Rob Herrod, who has long ties to Blue Oval street machines. “Scott gets along quite well with Rob from Herrod Motorsport, so he sourced a brand-new Coyote, 10-speed automatic, ECU and wiring harness from Rob,” James says.
“The aim with the Coyote is to have something that is capable of delivering massive power, but reliably,” James continues. “We want to set it up so he can turn it up in two years if he wants, because he is a bit used to having massive power under his foot. But he still wants to use it, whether that is driving to meetings or throwing dirt bikes in the back.”