PURPLE REIGN

DANNY DEBONO'S NINE-SECOND, 975HP BLOWN XT FALCON IS BURSTING WITH PRO STREET ATTITUDE

- IAIN KELLY

THE old adage that a project car is never done can’t ring any truer for Danny Debono. His tough-as-teak XT Falcon spent more than a decade copping plenty of enthusiastic use before he decided to give it a small birthday, which ended up being a rather more extravagant celebration than he’d planned.

“I painted the car white with GT stripes 12 years ago, and after 10 years of smashing tyres off it at Summernats, Powercruise and Supernats, it was due for a freshen-up,” Danny explains. “I spoke with Kresi Basanovic [SM, Aug ’14] and we decided to just give it a quick tidy-up and a fresh coat of white, so I stripped the car in my shed and dropped the shell at his place. That was when he said to me, ‘Why are we painting it white again?’”

More on that later, but first, a bit of a history lesson. Under Danny’s care, PROXT had evolved from an aspirated

11-second cruiser to a blown, nine-second monster. And it had a long history on the quarter-mile before that.

“I’ve had the car for 12 years,” Danny recounts. “It used to be a Hercules drag car and had the ’cage, CalTracs and nine-inch, but it was a roller. The reason I bought it is because I was going to do a huge rebuild on my first car, an XW ute, and my friend Chris Eggleton suggested I look for a roller, as it would be easier than the huge repairs the ute needed. I raced the XT with an aspirated engine for a few years and did an 11.5@121mph.”