WE’VE seen our fair share of crossover builds over the years – people making fusion blends of Ford engines stuffed into Holdens, for instance, usually with the goal of making easy power and ruffling a few feathers.

If there’s one community whose feathers are easy to ruffle, it’d be the Mopar crew. Don’t get us wrong, we love a good Mopar, but there is something about riling up that crowd that gets the juices flowing. And Daniel Ward’s name has surely earned a place on any Mopar enthusiast’s blacklist, as he’s chosen to use a turbo-fed LS1 from the GM family in place of a Chrysler donk in his VG Valiant. “I weighed up all the options and this was the most budget-friendly, so I mostly did it for that. It was also so I could piss off the purists a little bit,” Daniel says gleefully.

The LS1 is a stock-bottom-end $500 engine, with a simple top-end renovation with a new camshaft, springs and so on. The real party piece is the BorgWarner S475 air-mover, pumping around 8-10psi of boost to get the Val up and boogying.

The rest of the driveline consists of a Powerglide and Ford Explorer 8.8-inch diff. Using Holley EFI, the LS1 mill is capable of running on both PULP 98 and E85, making it a decent street car/strip-muncher.

Daniel’s best of a 10.5@128mph means this unassuming sedan is no slouch, and for the money (or lack of) spent in building this machine, it’s a conversion that’s hard to argue with.