For a self-confessed Holden guy, Rob Giangrave sure has a couple of nice Fords in his collection. We featured his ballistic, twin-turbo XR Falcon ute in the October 2021 issue (see bottom of story), and now he’s built this killer blown Landau coupe for a bit of fun on the side.

First published in the September 2026 issue of Street Machine

“I don’t discriminate,” says Rob of his automotive tastes. “When I was 17, I bought an HQ GTS Monaro, and I got kicked out of home for it. My dad told me, ‘Listen, either you or the car has to go.’ And I just said, ‘Okay,’ and I left.” The funniest part of the story is that when Rob moved out, he had to leave the Monaro behind: “I had nowhere else to put the car,” he laughs.

Happily, Rob still owns the Monaro today, but when he saw this 1974 Landau parked in a side street near Coburg, he knew he had to knock on the owner’s door. 

“The young guy was a paramedic, and that was his daily driver,” he recalls. “It was a little bit rough, but he didn’t want to sell it to me. Then, about six months down the track, my brother bumped into him at a coffee shop, and he goes, ‘My brother knocked on your door about that car.’ The guy goes, ‘Yeah? Well, tell him to call me; my missus is pregnant.’”

That’s how Rob found himself the proud owner of this Landau, but the early-70s coupe was definitely starting to show its age. “It was white, but it wasn’t a factory white car. It was pretty much a standard, rust-bucket XA-XB coupe,” he says. But all that was okay, because Rob had a plan, and it didn’t involve a standard restoration.

Rob had been watching what the boys at Dandy Engines had been doing with the then-new 7.3-litre Godzilla engine, and he liked what he saw. And who wouldn’t – 1100hp from a stock-bottom-end combo with a Harrop blower? Sign us up!

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that. As with all new engine combos, it takes a few test builds before you can finally develop the secret sauce, and Frank Marchese and the Dandy Engines team have worked out how to turn Ford’s basic truck engine into a tyre-destroying monster that rampages across the land – something truly worthy of the Godzilla name.

Rob’s ’Zilla retains the stock pistons, rods and crank, but the cam and valve springs are Dandy-spec items designed to work with the intercooled Harrop 2650 blower kit mounted in the valley. To get the big donk into anything remotely car-like requires a fair amount of modification in the oil pump and sump area, and Dandy’s solution involved a single-stage Peterson oil pump and custom oil pan from ProFab. All up, the combo is good for around 1100hp on E85, and it’ll do that while maintaining street driveability every day of the week.

While all this was going on, Rob was tearing down the Landau at this factory in preparation for an extreme makeover. Rob’s a caulker by trade, so having his own factory space was a massive benefit when it came to rebuilding the big coupe. While Rob was off doing the big caulking jobs, he had his mate – Tony the Maniac, as Rob calls him – in the workshop tearing into the Falcon. It had rust in all the usual places for a Falcon coupe, which is to say everywhere, so the car kept Tony pretty busy for a long time.

Rob also hooked in when he could, and between them, they got all the rust cut out, the rear tubs widened to the chassis rails, and some frame connectors fitted to keep the big girl nice and tight when that blown V8 was dropped into the engine bay.

But on a car like this Landau, that was only the start of the madness. While most people try to shed weight from their street-and-strip rides, Rob was adding it in. Carton after carton of Car Builders sound and heat protection, coupled with all the standard Landau accoutrements, has this ‘fat-bottomed girl’ tipping the scales in the 5000lb zone. That’s a chunky bit of gear, but hey, some guys like them that way, so who are we to argue?

After Tony the Maniac had the coupe looking straight and smooth, the shell was shipped to Carmine at CAD Custom for paint. If you like the colour, it’s called Rothmans Blue, which Rob selected in homage to the limited number of Falcons painted in the corporate colours of British cigarette company Rothmans, a strong supporter of motorsport back when such things were allowed.

Meanwhile, Rob had sent the interior trim off to Wadih at Coburg Motor Trimmers to bring all that Landau luxury up to scratch. Choosing the interior colour was simple, according to Rob: “Every wog’s got to have a brown leather couch,” he laughs. “I haven’t got one at home, so I thought that’s going to be my brown leather couch, you know?”

A darker shade of brown was used for the vinyl roof, which was done in the original material by a guy named Paul, who used to do vinyl tops on the assembly line at Ford. “I was very fortunate to find the guy,” Rob says. “He’s about 80 years old, and he goes, ‘I’ve got the actual brown that we used. I’ve got enough to do three cars, and yours will be one of them.’” 

Even so, getting the roof sorted was a bit of a nightmare, because the moulds were all rusted. Ford only made 1400 Landaus, so the trims were made from mild steel instead of stainless, and after 50 years, they’re all rusty. Rob had to have his remade and then nickel-plated and powdercoated, so they’ll last at least another 50 years.

That attention to detail is definitely reflected in the end result, as Rob’s Landau is now a car that can cruise the streets effortlessly, hold its own in any show ’n’ shine, and hopefully rip single-digit passes when the track opens again.

“I’d like to run an eight with it,” Rob says. “But she’s a heavy girl, so it might be more like in the nines – that’s probably more realistic.”

In the meantime, Rob’s content to just cruise the streets in the striking coupe: “It just starts every time,” he enthuses. “You don’t have to do anything; you don’t have to check tyres.

“Like, you’ve got your wife; she’s your love of your life, which is my XR ute. Then I’ve got my affair – this is myside piece!”

ROBERT GIANGRAVE
1974 FORD LANDAU COUPE

THANKS
My dad John; Tony the Maniac; Carmine and Con at CAD Custom; Ricky M at Gtech: Wadih at Coburg Motor Trimmers; Frank at Dandy Engines; Nads at FuelTech; Marcus at Speed Pro; Stefan at Faultless; Vinny; Gino; Milad; Anthony Van Damme; my brother Anthony; Sammy for all the chicken delivery and helping with tricky bits 

THE WIFE

Rob calls the Landau coupe his ‘side piece’, which must make his twin-turbo big block Ford-powered XR ute his ‘wife’. The gold ute featured on the cover of the October 2021 of Street Machine – and on the T-shirts and hoodies for Drag Challenge 2022, with flames popping and a grille full of attitude.

Sporting a pair of 88mm Pro Mod turbos up the front, the ute’s engine bay didn’t leave much room for cooling, so the tray area became the support system, with the fuel cell, radiator, battery and trans cooler all fighting for space. So, as a ute to haul loads, this XR is about as useful as a five-year-planner for a British prime minister, but it certainly hauls arse, reeling off an 8.20 down the quarter at 168mph on ethanol.

While that sounds pretty decent to us, Rob reckons the lack of an intercooler is holding the Kaase-headed, 540-cube big-block back, so he’ll be making the switch to methanol to run it at Victorian Motorsports Park once it opens later this year, and he can’t wait.

“For me to go and race my XR in Sydney is nearly an $8000 exercise once I pay for fuel for my brother’s semi, but VMP is going to be a state-of-the-art facility,” Rob enthuses. “I was helping the boys do a little bit of concrete work out there recently, and it looks amazing. All the amenities, toilet and shower blocks have been redone.”