Over the years, much has been written about the ‘Bill Bourke Special’, the gold-flecked, black 428 V8-powered Falcon XW GT that had been specially built for Ford Australia’s Managing Director at the time, American Bill Bourke. The story has been well told; for those unfamiliar with it, it goes like this: in 1969 the Ford Motor Company of Australia shipped a brand-new Falcon GT to America, where it was to be customised to order by Kar-Kraft (Ford America’s motorsport skunkworks which only a few months earlier had delivered one of its specially-built Boss 302 Mustang Trans-Am racers to one Allan Moffat), before being returned to Australia to serve as Bill Bourke’s company car.
Well, here’s the scoop… This famous Falcon has NEVER left Australia! That’s right: ‘The Bill Bourke Special’ was NEVER sent to America.
Right about now, many Ford aficionados are probably thinking that whoever is writing this story has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about… or they have their facts totally mixed up, or they’ve just gone bonkers! The ultimate truth behind any myth are the indisputable facts, especially when backed up by paperwork. Each verified fact represents a stepping stone towards revealing the ultimate truth behind the real story of how this happened, and why. To describe the ‘how’ means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain the ‘why’ means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others. With this in mind – in a nutshell ‘The Bill Bourke Special’ was built with parts merged from the Candy Apple Red 1968 XT Fairmont sedan that shipped to Kar-Kraft, America (Job #S221), and which was sent along with the Springtime Yellow 1968 XT Falcon 500 utility (Job #S220). Both of these
