Barra-swapped classic Falcons are a beaut street car, and we’ve seen them run some serious numbers at Drag Challenge in the past. Michael Brown’s XD ute is a killer machine that has been running single-digit times at drag ‘n’ drive events up and down the East Coast, including Street Machine Drag Challenge.

“It’s been doing some miles and some events, with a PB of 9.68@145mph at the All Stars event recently,” says Michael. “I started the build in 2014 when I bought a wrecked XR6 Turbo at the auctions in Brissie and transferred the car over into the XD.”

The 800rwhp four-litre six has been gone through by TBRE with a fairly simple package that runs upgraded pistons and rods, a crank girdle, upgraded main and head studs, a multi-layer head gasket, TBRE Stage 3 cams, a Haltech Barra plug ‘n’ play ECU and a Precision GenII 6466 turbo.

Michael points to the turbo as the choke point of the combo. “There’s more in it if we change that, but we have the M86 diff out of the donor Falcon ute and the ZF six-speed auto, and the risk is we’ll start breaking other parts of the combo,” he says. “If you’re forever fixing it or throwing money at it, then that takes some of the fun out of it.”

Though many stick to a traditional Powerglide or TH400 auto for their drag ‘n’ drive packages, Michael has found real benefits to keeping the ZF six-speed. It isn’t stock, though.

“The ZF was built by Nizpro in 2013 and came out of the donor ute,” he says. “Having the six-speed auto and lock-up convertor makes it pretty comfortable, and you do get pretty good mileage out of it on E85, even though it’s flex-fuel-tuned. It’s actually comfortable in another way as you’re not stressing about fuel consumption.”

Running in the Six Cylinder class Michael will be up against some stiff competition, though few of them will be enjoying cruise control, air-con, ABS and all the other features he enjoys in the XD. Keeping the mechanical package simple also pays dividends in other ways.

“Engine wise there’s nothing maintenance wise that we do apart from swapping the air filter for a Turbo Guard, connect an anti-roll bar, put the drag tyres on, and set the shocks. We get it race-ready in about 20 minutes.”

The bug has definitely bitten Michael now and it sounds like we’ll see his ute at plenty of events moving forward.

“They’re awesome events, and it’s worth towing our stuff all the way down from Gladstone to run them,” he laughs. “It is going to be about 2300km to The Bend from where I live, and it’s s bit of a mission, but there’s nothing else like Drag Challenge.”

The DC madness kicks off kicks off at The Bend on Tuesday, October 28.

2025 Drag Challenge class:

Speed Pro Six-Cylinder