USE THE FORCE!

CLINTON LEAYR'S XL FALCON MAY LOOK LIKE A SWEETLY RESTORED CLASSIC CRUISER, BUT ITS UNDER-BONNET POWERS HAVE BEEN GIVEN A BOOST

- KIAN HEAGNEY

CLINTON Leayr's 10-year journey with his beautiful, home-brewed XL Falcon started rather frantically. "I'd been looking for an XL for a while, and one afternoon on my way home from work my brother-in-law let me know this one had popped up for sale," he says. "There were already three other people looking to buy it, so we raced down there with the cash and managed to grab it."

That purchase unintentionally kicked off what would become one epic home-built street machine. But it went through a number of changes before culminating in what you see today.

"I drove it around for a while in its original blue paint and with the 221ci six-cylinder, but then that spat the balancer off one day," Clinton says. "A mate of mine had my old Vortech-blown AU XR8 ute that'd been crashed, so I grabbed the running gear from that and started a V8 conversion on the XL."

After Clinton had mocked up the V8 in the engine bay, the car went in for its first colour change - a grey pinched from a Renault van. "I just wasn't a fan of the blue," he says.

The AU motor ran in aspo tunnel-rammed form for a little while, and then Clint tried to squeeze the Vortech blower kit into the XL's tight bay. That didn't go too well: "The headers in particular were a real nightmare," he says. "The log manifolds for a turbo kit fit a lot easier, so the decision was made to go turbo."