Beau Boucher’s slammed 1965 Ford F100 wins Laurie Starling Award at MotorEx 23

Each year at Street Machine Summernats, we award the Laurie Starling Memorial Scholarship to a young and upcoming automotive worker who’s shown real promise and innovation in the world of building awesome cars.

This year’s scholarship winner at Summernats 37 was 19-year-old Luke Wehbe, who is pursuing his dream as an apprentice vehicle builder with the Ellard family at Image Vehicle Manufacturing.

MORE Luke Wehbe wins the 2025 Laurie Starling Memorial Scholarship

In addition to the Memorial Scholarship, there’s another Starling tribute award that honours Laurie’s unique style of car modification. The Laurie Starling Engineering Excellence Award is given out at Meguiar’s MotorEx each year to a car build that embodies out-of-the-box thinking and clever engineering.

This year, that award went to Beau Boucher’s slammed, Godzilla V8-powered 1965 Ford F100, built entirely out of his Cut Weld Drive business in Geelong.

Congratulations on the award, Beau. How does it feel?

I’m stoked man; it’s pretty special. I never met Laurie, but I did follow his stuff, so to get this recognition is amazing. My phone has been blowing up all weekend. I got the nods from guys like Aaron Gregory and all that, so it’s been amazing and I’m so thankful for it.

What’s the back story on the truck?

It’s an Australian-delivered, factory right-hand-drive car – one of very few left; I think there was only about 300 of them. It was a display truck, so the paint is an XP Falcon colour called Smoke Grey. It was pretty much the only one I could find in this colour that hadn’t been painted again or destroyed. There’s actually no physical rust in the car at all.

So, the whole build was done in-house?

Yep, myself and everyone who works for me at Cut Weld Drive did the entire build. We put the engine in, built the chassis; we even built our own diff for it, because that’s something we offer. This is actually its second build as well.

How’s it go with the Godzilla conversion?

It’s quick, it’s fun, and it’s really torquey. We did a little powerskid out the front of the shop, so it goes well! As for the engine, we ripped the sump off and changed the oil pick-up, but we didn’t do much else to it. It’s getting dynoed soon in Geelong with the Ford Performance ECU, so we’ll get a proper power number then. It uses a Ford 10R80 10-speed transmission on the back.

A 10-speed with a column shifter?

OCD Metalworx in New South Wales built the column for me. It doesn’t click through all 10 gears; it goes back to low and then on the dash it shows plus or minus for up and down gears. We think we can do a Tiptronic for the 10 gears later on if I wanted to.

How did you get it sitting so low?

The frame sits 5mm higher than the sills, so when it sits on the concrete, there’s a five-mil gap from the chassis to the ground. It uses Air Ride airbag suspension. The chassis is obviously all new and re-engineered by us; we spent a lot of time in CAD designing it with the arms and everything. The first build was just a notched chassis, so this time we went to town on it, and the reason it’s red with the different coloured arms is purely to show it off – normally I would have it all one colour and be way less obvious.

So, what’s the plan with it now?

Just to enjoy it, I suppose. I had a vision for this car when we started, and it’s exactly what I envisioned. I wanted to build a car that pushed the boundaries, with the headers facing up, lasered fuel tank – there’s just so much on it where we pushed and did the details to make the difference.