TURBO Barras have been melting the internet for a couple of years now, and with good reason – they’re awesome. With just a couple of minor mods you can throw huge amounts of power at them with ease, making them an awesome budget way of going from zero to internet hero. However, in the case of Alex Simonetis and Jimmy Morley, a turbo was just too mainstream for their BA Falcon – so they supercharged their Barra instead.

The car was originally owned by Alex’s mum and both he and good mate Jimmy took ownership around two years ago, with the intention of building a properly budget burnout car. They started off by simply bolting a nitrous system to the original petrol Barra, but that didn’t last long, with the donk giving up on life at Tassie Nats 2018.

The old mill was replaced with a fresh LPG Barra, which the boys converted to petrol, and then bolted on a supercharger from a C180 four-cylinder Mercedes.

The process for fitting the new horsepower device was fairly simple, as Alex explains: “We just sat it roughly where we wanted it, made sure all the pulleys were in line with the supercharger, removed the air con and bolted the supercharger mounts in the same spot where the a/c was. We just made the mounts out of some scrap steel at home, and to run more boost we took a pulley off a BA Falcon alternator that was a lot smaller.”

The rest of the car is a standard as it gets. The gearbox is the normal BA Falcon four-speed, the diff has had some treatment from a welder, and even the ECU and tune remain unchanged. The supercharger runs up to 5psi of boost, but the boys have no idea how much extra tyre-smashing power that actually gives them.

You may laugh out how truly budget and jerry-rigged this car is, but there’s no denying its effectiveness. The boys have already claimed two class wins at burnout comps in the past 12 months, with Jimmy winning the Six-Cylinder class at Burnout Madness in 2018 and Alex taking out the Four/Six-Cylinder class at Tassie Nats 2019.

It remains to be seen if the boys will make it over to the mainland for a burnout comp in the future, but there’s no doubt that while the car’s plates accurately denote the cost of the build, they don’t do the same for the amount of fun these boys have every time they get this thing out.