Laying the foundation
It’s October, 2001, and on a ferry on Tasmania’s Gordon River a bunch of motoring journalists are wining and dining, still buzzed by a day driving some of Australia’s best roads in a car that perhaps only now, nearly 20 years on, is truly gaining the respect it deserves, the AUIII Falcon-based FTE T-Series.
To you and me now it’s simply T3, the last and best AU Falcon powered by a locally-developed stroked version of the venerable Canadian-built Windsor V8.
Upstairs, sitting in a darkened viewing platform, Ford Australia president Geoff Polites is explaining the car’s importance in a one-on-one interview.
“T3 is big in the sense that it’s us saying we are not going to have sand kicked in our face anymore. We are fair dinkum about all this stuff.”
Perhaps it reads cliched now, but sitting next to Polites on that ferry (yes, it was me doing the interview) that night was to believe. Passion for Ford and belief in its capabilities flowed from the man.
The BA Falcon was 12 months from launch, the Territory SUV was years away. Publicly Ford was still burdened by the ugly duckling AU as Holden’s Commodore VT/VX took all before it in the sales race.
But for Polites this was more than about the business case. A blue-blood to his core, T3 was his in-the-metal battle cry to fellow true believers tired of GM’s (it was always GM, never Holden) dominance.
Paradoxically, T3 was spawned out of a business called Ford Tickford Experience that summed up where Ford had gone wrong.
While FTE was intended as a quasi-Holden Special Vehicles competitor it hadn’t landed a blow. But the stroker was the engine and T3 was the car that gave
