Every year at Meguiar’s MotorEx, the halls are heaving with chrome bumpers and candy paint, with every car the culmination of someone’s dream build. In many cases, those dreams consumed thousands of work hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they fill the pages of Street Machine every month.

First published in the October 2026 issue of Street Machine

Tony Marakis from Michael J’s & Son Mechanical Repairs has witnessed the fulfilment of many an automotive dream from the sidelines, but this year it was his turn to be part of the action.

“About 10 years ago, I was at MotorEx for the first time with our shop,” Tony says. “We had a stand for the shop with a few cars, and I went and watched the unveils and said to myself, ‘I’d love to build a car one day to unveil.’ I always wanted to unveil a car, just do the whole experience, you know?”

In the family workshop in Fairfield in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, Tony and his dad Michael service, tune and build all makes and models of cars, but there’s no denying that their personal tastes favour products featuring that iconic Blue Oval. So, choosing what car to build wasn’t exactly rocket science for the pair; it definitely had to be a Ford.

They put the feelers out for a suitable project, and Paul Rogers Sr from Paul Rogers Performance Transmissions was able to point them in the right direction. “My dad’s good friends with him,” Tony says. “We rang him up and he goes, ‘I know of just the car. It’s got a really good body with no rust, and it’s never gonna get put together unless someone like you guys grab it’.” 

While the XY in question wasn’t a genuine GT, it was a desirable silver Fairmont V8 with red trim, languishing out on a farm south of Ballarat. It sounded perfect for what Tony had planned.

“It had been sitting in a shipping container on a farm for over 20 years,” Tony recalls. “It had changed hands twice over the years but had never left the container. So, I’m the fourth owner of the car but the second person to ever drive it.”

The late-1970 Fairmont left the factory with a 302 Windsor and auto combination, but for some reason, the old Ford had been pulled off the road in 1987 before getting half-stripped and buried in a container for the next couple of decades.

When Tony purchased the XY in 2021, the drivetrain had been removed along with all the body panels, but the shell itself was in perfect rust-free condition. Tony had it garnet-blasted before shipping it straight off to Jason Horder at Preston Panels.

And Jason certainly had plenty of panels to choose from. “The deal was that I had to take all the parts, which the seller had at three different locations, so the car came with like 10 doors and two bonnets, and enough stainless to put two or three cars together,” Tony explains.

Originally, Tony had plans for a totally different hue. “I wanted to paint the car Surfer Orange,” he admits. “Jason goes, ‘How about Budget Green?’ He pulled out his phone, and I looked at it, looked at him, and said, ‘Yeah, done!’.”

Budget Green is one of those rare corporate colours that Ford Australia wasn’t afraid to paint back in the day if it meant securing some vital fleet sales. Apparently a couple of XY Falcon GTs left the factory in Budget Green, and as you can see, it’s not a colour for shy people.

However, it’s not just the bright paint and GT stripes that make this Falcon a little bit special. You see, while Jason was working the panels, Tony was busy sorting the engine. To get more than 400 cubes from a Clevo, you’d normally need to go to a four-inch stroke on the crank, but Tony started the build with an Arrow cast-iron block, which allowed him to use a bigger bore with a slightly shorter stroke. Overall, the combo measures up at 417ci with a 3.85-inch crank, six-inch Callies rods and custom CP pistons. “I turned it into a big-bore Cleveland,” Tony says. “So, instead of being 30thou up, it’s 155thou up.”

The combo also includes a custom Comp Cams-grind solid-roller bumpstick, Morel bushed lifters, and a pair of 208cc CHI 3V heads. The matching single-plane CHI intake has been machined for 80lb injectors, which work with an Accufab four-barrel throttlebody, and the whole lot is controlled by a FuelTech FT550. Tucked up in that shaker scoop with the throttlebody is a Nitrous Outlet plate, which is also activated through the FuelTech to provide a dry nitrous hit if the Falcon ever needs it, with the extra fuel flowing via the injectors.

The combo punched out 711hp on the Dandy Engines dyno, and while you could be excused for thinking that this capable Clevo doesn’t need quite that much shove, Tony has a goal he’s aiming for.

“I want to run a nine-second pass with the Top Loader,” he reveals. “In my old car, I held the record for the quickest XY Top Loader car in the country – I went 10.7.”

Naturally, to handle that sort of horsepower and abuse, they’ve had to make some changes to that old box of gears – this is not your average Top Loader. 

“We play around with a lot of Top Loader cars here; we make our own linkage kits for them,” Tony says. “It’s a fully built ’box, and we’ve changed the input shaft, output shaft, and put different synchro rings and hub assemblies inside.”

So, even if the Falcon can’t get the job done naturally aspirated, Tony will spray it until it hits the nine-second zone, and he’s even hinted at seeing how it goes in the Drag Challenge Stick-Shift class – it wouldn’t be the first time he’s done DC in a nine-second Falcon. But he reckons the car needs a few stone chips before he puts it through that kind of torture; right now, it’s still fresh from its debut at this year’s Meguiar’s MotorEx.

“We got the car back in October last year as a bare shell,” Tony says. “I said to my wife, ‘I know we just had a kid, but I can’t have the car sitting in the garage for another year.’ She just looked at me and said, ‘Do what you’ve gotta do.’ So, I got the car back in October and we fired it up for the first time on the Wednesday before MotorEx. 

“The car went to MotorEx on the Thursday, and I really have to thank my dad Michael, my wife Georgia, and Nads from FuelTech for helping me get it ready. I remember as soon as we pulled the covers off, everyone just loved it; people started cheering and clapping. I think it was a bit of a crowd-pleaser, to be honest; I had a lot of people come up and talk to me about the colour – they loved it. I only plan to do this once, so might as well just go big and out there, you know?”

Now that he’s ticked that box, Tony, like most of us, is waiting for Victorian Motorsports Park to open so he can work on that next item on his list. But he does admit that he’s reluctant to abuse the freshly unveiled Falcon.

“I’ve just got to build up the courage to do it,” he laughs. “That first stone chip or scratch is gonna hurt, but at the same time, I don’t want to let it sit in the garage and just look at it. I built it to drive it and enjoy it.”

TONY MARAKIS
1970 FORD XY FAIRMONT 

THANKS
Michael J’s & Son Mechanical Repairs; Paul Rogers Sr; Jason Horder at Preston Panels; Nathaniel Ardern at FuelTech; Wade Jaunzemis at Classic & Custom Auto Wiring; Dean at Straightline Motor Trimming; Jamie Garreffa at Full Flight Engineering; Marcus Cripps, Matt Punteri, Steve and Pierre at Speed Pro; Brett Matthews; Marcos Dillmann at The Race Shop; Ben, Tom and Nikki at The GT Shop; Danny Celano at On-Site Windscreens; Kevin Balzan; John Franco; Paul Hung; my parents Jenny and Michael; my wife Georgia and my kids