Like all good drag racers, Aaron James is always looking to go quicker, and you can do that two ways: add more power or push less weight. For the past 10 years or so, Aaron’s been happy to go with option #1, which has taken his Drag Challenge-honed VG Valiant from a solid 11-second street car to a drag-and-drive weapon capable of mid-nines. But recently he decided to give the second option a go, and this ’77 Chrysler Centura is the result.

First published in the January 2026 issue of Street Machine

“With the Centura, I don’t care if there’s a dent in it or a crack in the paint, but if I crashed the Val, I’d be gutted,” explains Aaron of his decision to return the VG to street-only duties and transfer its 528ci big block Chrysler driveline to the smaller car.

Aaron had initially been offered this Centura years ago by the car’s original owner, Lee Baxter, back when it ran a Dodge R5P7 NASCAR mill. He’d knocked it back at the time and had always regretted it, so when it turned up on his radar again, Aaron wasn’t about to repeat that mistake.

“Lee messaged me out of the blue and said, ‘I bought my old Centura back and am about to advertise it, but I thought I’d offer it to you again’,” he explains. “I thought, ‘holy shit, this is a sign’.”

The deal was done, and before long Aaron had the perfect – and much lighter – vessel for the stonking big-block his dad had built for the VG. A Molnar crank swings rods and pistons from 440 Source to take the 440 block out to 528 cubes, while Indy SR heads and a matching tunnel ram are topped with a pair of APD 950cfm carbs. A fully manualised, reverse-pattern 727 Torqueflite backs it up.

In the Valiant, the combo made 665hp on a chassis dyno, but with the extra room in the Centura’s engine bay, Aaron’s managed to squeeze in a slightly bigger set of pipes. “The stainless headers are stepped from 2in to 21/8in to 2¼in, and then into a twin 4in system,” he explains. “I reckon it’s making a little bit more now.”

Having been a drag car for quite a long time, the Centura already had a pretty good rollcage, four-link set-up and a stout chrome-moly sheet-metal diff housing, but there was still a fair bit to do to turn it into something capable of handling Drag Challenge. Advanced Race Fabrication got the ball rolling by giving the rollcage some tweaks needed to meet ANDRA specs.

The plan then was to simply drop the big-block and transmission into the Centura, but the decision was made to set the engine back in the bay a little, which complicated matters. As the car had been previously set up for a small-block, Aaron needed to make up new engine mounts anyway, but there was still a bunch of other stuff to do to get it all sorted. “We did the fuel system, wiring, interior and paint,” says Aaron. That might not sound like a very long list, but it becomes a tall order when you start the build less than six months before Drag Challenge!

Aaron’s adamant that they wouldn’t have got the car to DC ’25 without the tireless efforts of his dad, who got everything sorted while Aaron worked his FIFO job and spent time with his young family. One of the most impressive feats of the build was the getting the panel and paint done, which wasn’t part of the original plan. “We went to see Martin Boys Chop Shop to ask them to iron the dents out; we were running out of time before Drag Challenge and thought we’d just wrap the car. They just kept on at me about painting it, so six beers later, we’re in the paint booth,” Aaron says. “Ten different random paint cans later, we ended up with this colour, and six days later, it was painted and ready for pick-up.”

With the freshly painted Centura back in the shed, the James lads embarked on a mad thrash to get the final jobs sorted in time to tow the car across to South Australia for the start of DC at Dragway at the Bend, and while it didn’t end up as light as they had hoped, it was still 550lb slimmer than the VG.

With the rush to get the car done, there wasn’t any time for testing before DC, so the fact that the Centura went 9.30@146mph on its first full quarter-mile pass (compared to the Valiant’s 9.52@141mph best) and finished third in the ITF Hire 235 Aspirated class is remarkable. But the campaign wasn’t without its trials.

“We’d been having problems during the week with what we thought was a carb stumble, but on the last day of the event, Alon Vella and Wayne Smith of Performance Carb Tuning told me that something was wrong with my converter,” Aaron says. “We used the same converter from the Val, but because the Centura is so much lighter, it doesn’t flash up off the line like it should, so that’s why it was bogging down.”

Aaron’s not making excuses, though. If anything, it just shows that, once it’s dialled in and has a bit more testing under its wheels, this Centura should easily run well into the eights.

AARON & ALLAN JAMES
1977 CHRYSLER CENTURA

THANKS
My old man Allan James for his endless hours and building one bad-arse big-block; Brett Whintle for wiring; Ricky Wood for the gearbox; Brodie Mitchell at Advanced Race Fabrication for rollcage mods; Matty at Geelong Diffs for sorting the diff centre; Martin Boys Chop Shop for panel and paint; Nick for the interior; Pro Performance Parts; my sponsors for their ongoing support: Tyrepower Pinjarra, 7 Sins Apparel, Storage Town, Cobram Windows, CJ Metal Works and JD Auto & Detailing; most importantly, my partner for putting up with this hobby!