Street Machine

DENNIS LOZOV

XE FALCON

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“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. Next 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-andshut 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 270rwkw 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.” Photos: Luke Hunter

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