1968 FORD XT UTE

Travel west from Brisbane for a couple of hours, through the rolling landscape of the  Lockyer valley and past the large country town of Toowoomba and you’ll come across a pleasant little place called Pittsworth.

It’s a small town of no more than 3000 souls, with a main street and an old hotel the like of which you have very likely seen on one of those TV travel shows.

The agricultural industry is big out here and it is a place where it is easy to imagine a rodeo being a natural form of entertainment.

Which it is, although Pittsworth has two kinds of rodeo – the one showing off the power of the four-legged horse, the other all about four-wheeled horsepower. For it is here that the Pittsworth Sprints take place – an annual gathering of petrolheads from around the country who, for a couple of ear-splitting days and nights, tear around the roads of the industrial estate on the edge of town, setting hot laps, fastest times and leaving as much rubber as physically possible on the road.

Brad Hudson is the track coordinator for the Sprints, the man responsible for looking after the course that winds its was through the industrial estate that is also home to his business, Hudson Panel Beaters.

Being involved with the Pittworth Sprints clearly marks Brad out as a man interested in speed and his 1968 XT ute confirms it – now fully-loaded with a 351 V8 stroked to a 383 it’s not difficult to imagine a fair bit of tyre-destroying burnouts in its future.

Restoring the ute to its current condition has taken a while – Brad got his hands on it in the early ’90s and for many years the vehicle spent its life as a workhorse for the family and the business.

“It was bought from the Ford dealer in Pittsworth and the people who owned it lived right across the road from me,” says Brad. “I’d seen it from brand new and remember seeing it pulling into their driveway.

“One day I saw a white car parked behind it and saw that it was coming and going rather than the ute. So, I went over and the owners said they had decided to retire it.

“They were the original owners and the ute was immaculate It had done only 36,000 miles from new and they said they’d be happy getting $100 for it! I bought it, reversed it out of their driveway and straight across the road to my driveway!

“We used it for fishing trips – I’d put the boat on the top and motorbikes in the back and away we’d go,” adds Brad. “And I built toolboxes in the back of it and used it as our business vehicle for perhaps 10 years. It was my work vehicle for picking up parts and all that sort of stuff.”

Originally fitted with a six-cylinder 221cubic inch engine, Brad changed the engine to a 250 cubic inch crossflow XF engine after nearly 20 years. Then, a few years ago, he decided it was time to do some serious tinkering and spent a number of years accumulating the parts he would need.

“I slowly built the parts up until I had enough,” says Brad. “I bought the radiator quite a while ago, the extractors I bought at a swap meet a couple of years ago – I’ve been planning it for a while.”

Brad sourced the new engine – that monster V8 351 stroked to a 383, with a new C4 quick-shift auto transmission and 9-inch diff – partly to give the ute the ‘grunt’ it deserved.

“It always sounded a little weak with the six-cylinder,” he says.

“That’s what prompted me to put the V8 into it, so that it sounded like it looked – tough!”

Leaving the interior fairly untouched – “It has a bench seat and I wanted to keep that because it’s a three-seater,” he says – Brad decided that the ute’s colour needed an update, opting for an unusually-named, but legitimate Ford colour called ‘Toxic’.

“We kept it the original blue for a number of years before deciding we wanted something ‘out there’,” says Brad.

“I liked the vibrant colour instead of bland blue. And I like the name ‘toxic’ – it’s a little bit different.”

‘Different’ just about covers it, and the public would seem to agree.

“It does get a lot of looks,” laughs Brad. “At the traffic lights people do wind down their windows to take photos with their phones. That’s happened a number of times.”

Interestingly, that’s kind of the point behind the vehicle’s look, and the ute is now as much a work vehicle as it has ever been, though rather than being used for lugging about material for the workshop, it has become a marketing tool, even becoming a major part of the business’s logo.

“We use it to promote the business,” says Brad.” People see it and recognise it as coming from Hudson Panel Beaters.”

Using the ute as a promotional tool is pretty clever, but it is extremely unlikely that it will be used for just that purpose.

“I want to take it to the track, to Willowbank Raceway perhaps, and give it a run on the quarter mile,” Brad says with a grin. “And then there are the burnout comps.”

Pittsworth sprinters beware.