BLUE Diamond

PETER LEWIS'S KAASE-POWERED, ASTILL-BUILT XC IS A TECH-PACKED AND STREET-READY MASTERPIECE

- JACK HOULIHAN

HOWARD Astill doesn’t do daily drivers. He’s chiselled his name into the Aussie street machining hall of fame by turning out a string of revered Ford show cars over the past 40-ish years, so when Peter Lewis approached him for a new build, things could have easily not worked out. But they did, and we have this incredible, engineered-to-the-eyeballs XC Falcon showstopper as a result.

Peter spent a good chunk of his youth hooking around Broken Hill Speedway in LJ Toranas, with his first car, a blue six-cylinder XC Falcon, performing tow duties. So, when the time came for a new project a few decades later, the mining sector worker wanted to combine his first love with some of the best modern stuff money can buy.

“I’d done a lot of research on what I’d like in the build and had a list of things that were non-negotiable: XC, four-door, blue in colour, a Kaase Boss engine, six-speed auto, IRS and IFS, and it had to be able to be used as a daily driver,” Peter recounts. He kicked things off by purchasing a suitable Falcon as a tidy roller while working in Indonesia.