Against The Odds

Owner:            Maurice Conrad Engine:            289 Windsor Trans:              C-10 Auto Diff:                 9"  4.3:1

If you know anything about Queensland's tough rego laws, you'll know that theoretically, Maurice Conrad's knockout XK Falcon ute shouldn't be wearing plates. But you haven't met Maurice, or his wife Kathryn. With a trayload of perseverance and hard work, this dynamic duo battled the bureaucrats and won. "I don't know of another fully legal V8 powered early model Falcon in Queensland," bricklayer and lifetime Ford man Maurice says. "Lots of people say there are others, but I'd like to see the paperwork."

Chances are, you won't see another XK ute like this anywhere else, either. Apart from all it's other attractions, it's built up from an XP chassis. It's also been built to seriously get on with it, already running regular mid 12s at Willowbank, clocking up 5000 odd miles a year and starring at heaps of shows. Maurice knew he was up against it when he first started work on his ute. He'd built other tough Fords over the years but the early ute idea had kept swimming around in his head. "I've always liked the XK ute shape, and I wanted to build one for quite some time," Maurice says. "I figured everyone does pretty much the same thing when they build a car, so I'd do something different. Every engineer I went to wouldn't touch the idea. They said I couldn't put a V8 in it because it wasn't an approved conversion in Queensland but I built the car anyway and tried to get it registered myself.

The desk drivers on the Gold Coast had no problems with Maurice's engineering, the razor sharp paint work, XK bodywork or the race prepped, 4500 stall C-10 but the game was up as soon as they took one look at the 5 litre Windsor. A V8 ? No way. But neither Maurice nor the suits reckoned with Mrs Conrad.    "She's the one who really got the ute registered," Maurice says. "She wrote to everybody and went right to the top. I think they just got sick of her giving them a hard time, and ended up asking me to submit a set of plans which eventually got the nod." Phew.

The car actually started life as an XP ute, which suited Maurice's purposes better, anyway. "I wanted to do an XK but they're not as strong as the XP," he says. "The early Falcon front ends fell apart, and they fixed all that with the XP and made them a stronger car." There was another factor that made the XK panels the go - Maurice wanted bold scallops in the paintwork which he figured needed the XK's curvier panels to look right. Maurice had alot of XK bits and pieces stocked away from years of going to swap meets, and he knew where to get the rest of the bits he needed. For paint and panels, he took the car to Neil James.

Neil, who still works out of Maurice's old stamping grounds at Yamba, on the NSW north coast. Neil had done trophy winning cars for Maurice before and the Dulux acrylic Powder Blue and custom pink results speak for themselves. So do the dozen trophies from 13 shows. A fan of small block Ford V8's, Maurice sourced the Mustang HO Windsor engine from Brisbane based American Auto Supplies, which also built it into a snarler. The result is a 30 thou over, Holley650 double pumped, Edelbrock 6025 alloy headed grunter running 12.5:1 TRW lump top forged pistons on avgas. "You can run it on the street on super but you can't give it to it, it just pings," Maurice says.

"I put the car on a chassis dyno the other day but I only let them take it up to 5500rpm. It ran 240 horsepower at the rear wheels but I called it quits because I was worried about it running of the rollers."    Maurice's ute is driven hard, harder than you would expect of a car that stands up and gets counted at the shows. You've only got to look at the way Maurice has distributed the weight around - stuff like the fuel tank offset behind the Hyperformance - modified, 4.3:1 nine incher, to appreciate that the guy's serious about his times.    "It's pretty good but I need to tub the car because I am not getting all the power to the ground," he says. "It's running 12.41, but it'll do better. I can only fit 8 inch slicks under the back, but it needs 10's. I've already seen the engineer about it."    And what's the future for this tough trayback ? "I wouldn't even think of selling it," Maurice says. "Kathryn agrees. She said she fought for it and it's going nowhere."

Feature used with thanks to Street Machine magazine.   Story by Chris Gable, Photos by Tony Rabbitte Copyright ACP Action 1997