A hundred grand could buy you any of a number of pretty sweet rides… even in Australia, where prices can be high and the dollar low. So spending that much to restore an old Ford Falcon that had long been neglected may seem to make little sense. But there’s more to this story than dollars and cents.
This 1973 Ford Falcon XA Superbird hardtop belonged to a family Down Under who drove and enjoyed it for some 20 years before it rolled in an accident. Uninsured and too extensively damaged to fix, it sat there on the family farm for another couple of decades, a rusting hunk of metal beyond repair.
But a while back, Tommy – the son who crashed it in the ’90s – set out to bring it back to its former glory. He spent years sourcing the parts and the labor to help restore it. Tommy even bought another damaged and rusted Falcon for $2,500 just to take its roof, and sold the topless shell again for $2,100.
When all was said and done, Tommy spent a whopping $106,300 on the project – or about $75k in equivalent American greenbacks. That may seem like a big chunk of change, and it would be to most people. But the restored muscle car could be worth even more to an eager collector.
That wasn’t the point, though. This was a passion project undertaken for nostalgic reasons. And to see the reaction on the faces of Tommy’s parents makes it all worthwhile. Or at least it did for Tommy.