Zesty​​​​​​​ Orange

If you don’t see this XR Fairmont coming, with 690HP under the bonnet, you’ll definitely hear it!

- Boris Viskovic 

BEING surrounded by a family that’s passionate about modifying old cars sure makes it a lot easier when you’re a young bloke looking to build a show quality street machine. If it so happens you have a couple of uncles that work in the panel and paint trade, then you’ve hit the jackpot.

Adam Agius is just 28 years old, but his XR Fairmont has been a labour of love for over six years, so he got bitten by the old-school street machine bug at a pretty young age.

“The XR was a clean, registered weekend cruiser when I bought her,” Adam says. “The plan was to give her a bit of a tidy-up and just enjoy her, and I was warned by many family and friends to not do anything else. But everyone knew that wouldn’t last long.

“I drove the car for a couple of months, and then I started pulling it apart in my garage. As a bit of punishment, my uncles wouldn’t touch the car, so it sat there for a while and I was just bare-metalling panels in my garage – by myself – and etch-priming them so that it would be ready to go. We started slowly, but the last two years my uncle got excited and we went non-stop on the car,” Adam says.

I think a lot of us wish we had an uncle like Michael Agius. He not only helped out immensely with the build,doing everything except the driveline and trim, he also let all of it happen in his back shed. “My uncle has built many show-quality cars, so there weren’t too many problems,” Adam says.

But there were a few blips in the progress of the build as Adam came up with more ideas on how the car could be improved, so it’s sort of been built one-and-a-half times.