Fairly unique

Steve Reed is a Holden man. Reed almost always drove Holdens in a lengthy touring car racing career that saw he and fellow Lansvale Smash Repairs proprietor Trevor Ashby make 16 starts in the Great Race. Reed and Ashby (who featured in our Muscle Men section in AMC issue #90) still hold the record for the longest continuous driver pairing in the history of the Bathurst classic. All of those starts were in Holdens – and yet the panel beating pair actually started racing together in Fords, an Escort RS2000 and a Capri in the early ‘80s. 

Reed and Ashby retired from racing in the early 2000s. These days Reed, apart from tending to his own business interests (including a chicken farm in South Australia!), can still be seen at the occasional Supercars race meeting, where he helps out his old mates at Brad Jones Racing, looking after their corporate guests. 

It was at one of those Supercars events with BJR that Reed came across the 1959 model Fairlane 500 you see here. At the time he had been thinking about getting himself some kind of weekend muscle cruiser, something a bit old school and a little bit different – although maybe not something this different, and not something with Ford badges attached.