EXPRESS DELIVERY

IF YOU'VE ever been to the Bright Rod Run (and you damn well should've), odds are you've seen Joel Beatson lapping in an early Falcon.

- JACK HOULIHAN

He's a native of the gorgeous Victorian town, and his business, JRB Automotive & Offroad, sponsors the iconic weekend every year.

"I've always had a car to cruise around in: a couple of other old XPs and XLs," Joel says. It was one of those cars that set him on the path to the Kurrajong Green XP sedan delivery you see here - though it's well beyond anything he's done previously.

"In 2014 or 2015, I had an XP Fairmont I'd bought from a mate that had hit a deer," Joel says. "I needed some panels, and a guy had them at a swap meet. He asked, 'You don't want to buy a delivery, do ya?' I said, 'Fark, you're kidding me! I've been looking for one for years.' I've always loved them, but you can never find them - they're always chopped up, flattened or crushed. He was moving overseas, and we did the deal; he'd already started what he was going to do with it."

Joel shared a fair chunk of that bloke's vision for the car, so Shane and his team at Bright Smash Repairs didn't have the toughest of jobs. Even so, finding straight and dry panels turned into a slog. "We only had half a tailgate, so we made the other half from three others I found," Joel says. "I've got an endless amount of spare panels now! They'd be full of rust inside, or the aftermarket skins would shrink and the winder mechanism wouldn't work, but we got there in the end. There aren't lots of people around that you can ring to ask how they work."