“I KNEW I wanted to build something cheap, turboed and fast. I’d had three XE Falcons years ago, so I went looking for one that wasn’t full of rust and found this. It was a dead-stock ‘grandpa pack’ XE from an old farmer at Horsham. Everything still worked and it was clean in the body, but the paintwork was looking pretty dull.

But after I got it home and cut and polished the original paint, it came up fine, and the body was mint. As soon as I got it cleaned up I pulled out the 250 crossflow and started converting it to Barra power. The motor’s a stock FG turbo motor with BF2 manifolds and bigger (60psi) injectors; it runs a manual boost controller so I can play with the boost. I cut-and-shut the factory turbo hoses to fit, and it runs the fly-by-wire throttle set-up.

All the factory XE gauges work in the dash, and the speedo is fed from the ABS sensor on the diff. I bought a modified loom and wired it in myself, and the factory ECU is flash-tuned to remove the security system.

On the dyno it made 270 rwkW on 8psi, but it’s now running 14psi. Luke from LS Engineering in Wodonga did the tune, and also made up the 3.5-inch stainless-steel exhaust with a Di Filippo muffler. The T56 six-speed manual makes it a lot of fun to drive, and the diff is a disc-brake BorgWarner out of an ED Falcon, with 28-spline axles.

The wheels are widened 14-inch chrome 12-slotters with the XE’s original centre caps and trims. We drove the car up to Powercruise in Sydney, and it was even good on fuel.”