Home-Grown Hero

Morris Markovic built a humble xe falcon into a summernats top 20 showpiece in his garage

- Kian Heagney

BIG, loud, fast, tough – there are plenty of words that come to mind when you first lay eyes on Morris Markovic’s XE Falcon, but ‘understated’ is certainly not one of them.

Eighties Falcons have been in Morris’s family for as long as he can remember, so it comes as no surprise that an XE was his car of choice for this project. “My dad is a Ford man through and through,” he says. “When he came over here in the 70s his first car was a Falcon, and we all grew up in an XD Falcon. My brother owns one of the cleanest ESP Falcons in the country, and they’re a car I’ve always loved. So I wanted to build one of the toughest XE Falcons in Australia.”

That said, an elite-level, Summernats Top 20 stunner wasn’t initially part of the plan. “I originally just wanted a tough street car with a big engine, but when we started to strip the car back for paint I found some rust and a few other issues,” Morris explains. “So that’s when I lost my mind and decided to go all out.”

Even though the standard for the project stepped up to another level, that doesn’t mean Morris merely handed off the XE to a workshop to do all the hard yards. “I built 70 per cent of the car at home in my small garage,” he says. “I did all the plumbing, bodywork – everything pretty much, other than the engine and tubs.”