Love the Beast 2009 - Eric Bana
What if you were a Hollywood movie star with an obsession for cars and racing? You would probably read every script with even the tiniest link to the subject matter, in the hope that you could tell a great car story of the likes of "Grand Prix", "Le Mans" or "Mad Max".Then one day you happened to open your garage door and sitting there, right in front of you, was the film you had been searching for. This is what happened to Eric Bana and this time around, the co-star is his very own Ford GT Falcon Coupe- THE BEAST. Eric realized the story was in fact, about him, his first car, a lifetime of ownership and a lifetime of friendship.
He set about documenting his own 25 year long love story. A simple tale of one man's ongoing relationship with his very first car. After years of precious restoration, Eric and his 3 closest friends, decided to enter the car into one of the most grueling and dangerous motor races that exists: The Targa Tasmania Rally.
This would be a personal Everest for both man and machine, until...on day 4 of the race, tragedy strikes. The man who was hell bent on trying to convey how much he and those around him loved "THE BEAST", had just destroyed it. Eric has now unwillingly cast himself in his own real life drama. We follow him from inside the race car to the surreal world of the red carpet.
This compelling true story follows Eric's progression as a car lover, and as a person conflicted by what he has done. The personal and social pressures mount up in the face of re building a car that means so much to him. Along the way Eric seeks guidance and wisdom from not only the inner sanctum of his 3 life long friends but also Jay Leno, Jeremy Clarkson, and Dr Phil.
Young Eric Bana with The Beast!
Eric says two things attracted him to the coupe's fat, muscular lines: the Mad Max Interceptor and the iconic '73-'74 Bathurst race cars that made a big impression on the 5-year-old as he watched them tear up Mount Panorama on TV. At 21, Eric got his racing license in hopes of pushing the Falcon into a few corners: "I just always wanted to race my whole life, but like most people, I didn't have the money for it. I could barely afford to put petrol in the Falcon. But I just kept my license paid up in the hope that one day I'd be able to afford to go racing, and then as soon as I could, I did."
That was in 1996, when Eric entered the Targa Tasmania tarmac rally where he and his mates "kind of cobbled the car together" before navigating the challenging road course and finishing an impressive Third in his class. By then, the tarmac-rally bug had truly bitten, and there was no turning back for the then-white Ford. This story probably would be far more advanced had it not been for the escalating success of Eric's acting career; it wasn't until early in the new century that he got to race the Ford again.It isn't just the Blue Oval machines that get Eric's blood pumping, however. Despite growing up in a Ford family, Eric found a love for German engineering, punting a Porsche 944 and a 3.3L turbo GT2 replica around Victorian racetracks in the Marque Sports series-good for practicing your race craft and also good for sourcing parts and suspension ideas for your big, heavy, engine-forward musclecar. Enter Steve Tupek, a guy who normally spends his time doing serious restoration work on vintage Rolls-Royce and Mercedes-Benz metal for wealthy, Australian entrepreneur Lindsay Fox. Eric met Steve through racing Porsches, and the pair hooked up with a view to giving Eric's '73 a simple respray. With the car in Steve's workshop, it was soon apparent that a simple respray was to be the catalyst for something far larger than anyone involved could have ever imagined. Says Eric, "The Falcon was in even worse shape than I thought it was. When Steve e-mailed me photos once the top layer of skin was peeled off, my jaw hit the ground."
According to Steve, there wasn't much left of the original body. "The bonnet, both front guards, the doors, door pillars, sills, parcel tray, wheeltubs, lower quarters, rear-wheel arches, back panel, boot edges, and boot floor were completely rusted out. It really needed a new shell." A new shell wasn't in the cards however, as both Steve and Eric felt that Eric's history with the car would be lost by using an entirely new shell. So, with the goal set, Steve went to work fabricating new body parts, also calling on another of Lindsay Fox's metalwork maestros, Brian Tanti, who worked his magic fabricating entirely new pieces to look factory. In all, Steve put more than 800 hours into the bodywork alone, and the result makes Eric's coupe easily one of the finest examples of the marque. While the Falcon is more a result of its 23 years of continued evolution, it is this latest 18-month, ground-up rebuild that sees it looking and driving the way it does now; and it goes a lot deeper than the 800-hour full-body massage, with the entire build taking around 3,000 hours.
Motorvation comes thanks to a John Sidney Racing-built 400ci stroker Windsor small-block protected by a serious dry-sump oil system (sourced from a Dick Johnson Racing V-8 supercar) to prevent another nasty engine failure under heavy cornering load, as was the fate of an expensive race motor that momentarily resided between the XB's shock towers. Thankfully, the top end of the first motor was salvageable, and the ported Brodix heads, Edelbrock Victor Jr. intake manifold, and Holley HP-series 830-cfm 4150 carb top the new stroker bottom end.
There are a lot of trick details in this luscious red Falcon that you won't see or potentially even notice when you look hard, and it's these details that make Eric's car so special. For instance, running down either side of the car are channels that have been hand-fabricated into the floors and under which run the lines for fuel and the dry-sump setup. These are to make the underside of the car as clean as possible, getting relatively fragile parts up and out of harm's way should Eric take an off-road excursion. It's a similar story inside the car. Every flammable surface has been removed, with the floor and roof all smoothed and painted to a similar standard as the exterior panels. All the wiring was torn out and redone from scratch, both to minimize the amount of cabling and to replace the spaghetti of old and potentially hazardous wires.
Those were some pictures and some specifications of the car now lets view the movie trailer below.
Thanks for viewing!
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