We all remember the story of granddad’s axe; it had five new handles and two new heads over its lifetime, but it’s the best damn axe he ever had. Well, Jason Price’s late grandfather might recognise his old Standard Vanguard ute from the outside, but inside and underneath, it’s literally a different car, because Jason grafted the old ute to a Mazda MX-5 floorpan and chassis!

First published in the May 2026 issue of Street Machine

Unfortunately, Jason never got to meet his grandfather, but the old Standard ute sat on blocks at his grandmother’s place for years. It was the subject of discussion amongst the blokes whenever the family got together.

“I remember my dad and my uncle looking at it on blocks in the carport at every family gathering,” Jason recalls. The consensus was that the old ute was too far gone and couldn’t be saved. “But that didn’t stop the same inspection and conversation happening every Christmas,” Jason laughs.

As the years went by, Jason continued to think about that old ute, and so one day he rocked up with a tow truck and grabbed it with the intention of fixing it up.

“Nan had no problems with me ‘taking the junk away’,” Jason says, but a closer inspection of the ute had him wondering if it wasn’t too far gone after all.

“It was really rusty underneath. I looked at putting a 351 Clevo in there for a while, and even had one sitting in there. I considered putting a HQ chassis under it, but the chassis was far too long and wide.”

The Vanguard sat on a trolley while Jason continued thinking about how to solve the problem, until he decided that shoehorning an MX-5 chassis under the rusty ute might be the way to go. He even put a deposit down on a shell at a wrecker’s.

“The idea was that the wrecker was going to sell off everything I wouldn’t need, like the bonnet, guards, doors, everything, and I would get the rest,” Jason says. But then a better solution popped up.

“I went down to Hoppers Crossing to grab a new interior for my Ford Ranger, and that’s when I met Jan at GG4x4. I told him what I was doing and he said, ‘Man, have I got a deal for you’,” Jason recalls.

Jan – pronounced ‘Yan’ – had an MX-5 drift car in the build and it already had an LS1 installed, so Jason did a deal and delivered his Standard ute to Hoppers Crossing, where Jan cut the floor out and plonked it onto the Mazda.

“Jan dropped the body over the shell and tacked it into place,” says Jason. “Without him the car wouldn’t be what it is, but there was still a lot to do because there were gaps everywhere to fill – the firewall, the sills, the rear, you name it.”

With the basics done, Jason hauled the ute back home to Canberra to get the rest of the laundry list sorted. He and his mate Warwick built and installed a full rollcage, while another mate, Nathan, steeled out the frame in the rear ute tub.

“Nathan forgot his welding helmet that day,” Jason recalls, “so we made a helmet out of an old beer carton and a spare welding visor.” Aussie ingenuity in action!

Jason also enlisted the help of fabricator Tom Stokes to do all the sheet metal work to permanently mount the ute to the MX-5 frame, and Tom also crafted the tubs and did some additional tinwork in the rear.

Up the back, under that custom fabwork sits an Aeroflow tank with an in-tank pump to supply fuel to the LS1 up the front. The alloy 5.7-litre V8 sports a set of ported 241 heads and a Yella Terra Whipple supercharger kit. The latter was intended for an LS2, but Jason adapted it to suit the LS1’s cathedral-port heads using Aeroflow adapters. The whole thing is controlled by a factory ECU tweaked using HP Tuners gear, and with a small pulley, the Whipple 2300 makes around 10psi, giving Jason somewhere around 460rwhp to play with.

Transferring the power rearwards is an Xtreme dual-plate clutch that’s hooked to a T56, a custom one-piece tailshaft, and a VQ Statesman LSD. Getting the VQ diff to work in the MX-5 rear took a lot of “cutty cutty, grindy grindy”, to use Jason’s words. Custom driveshafts were also needed to connect the IRS Commodore centre section to the Mazda hubs. To improve the brakes, Jason went with a Destroy or Die 114.3mm five-stud hub and disc upgrade for the rear, while four-stud 100mm hubs remain in the front. The master cylinder is still the factory MX-5 unit, and there is a drift handbrake fitted inside for on-track shenanigans at events like Powercruise.

The plan was to debut the ute at Street Machine Summernats 37, but the engine had other plans and decided to let go on the dyno the day before the event, which gave Jason a whole year to make it better. With a fresh donk, new standalone Haltech iC-7 dash – which Jason’s 14-year-old son Roman helped fit – and some Speedy Cheetah wheels that showed up the day before Summernats 38, Jason was ready to party – almost.

“I ordered those wheels because they were one of the only ones I could get in 4×100 and 5×114.3 in the same style. Once we got tyres on them, we were bolting them to the car only two hours before Summernats scrutineering,” he says.

The patina-clad ute got plenty of attention at Summernats, including ours, but it only managed a handful of laps due to the high risk of boiling over.

“It kept popping thermo fan fuses on the cruise route,” Jason says. “But we sorted it out later for Powercruise in Sydney. That was my first real seat time in the car and it didn’t miss a beat, until we got taken out by a Commodore on day three. He spun in front of me and I had nowhere to go.”

Thankfully, the damage was mostly superficial, and after some adjustments using ratchet straps, Jason hit the track again for more tyre-frying action on Sunday, taking home the Most Unique award for his efforts.

So, where to from here? Well, Jason has been considering the next steps, and they’re pretty big ones.

“Obviously, the ute could use some paint and panelwork,” he says. “But if I’m going to do that, I’m going to go all the way and take a shot at Summernats Grand Champion.”

Talk about swinging for the fences! That would be amazing to see.

JASON PRICE
1953 STANDARD VANGUARD UTE

THANKS
Jan Mick at GG4x4 in Hoppers Crossing; Tom Stokes; Nathan Short; Roman; everyone who lent a hand on the build when mine were not working. You know who you are, and I’m forever grateful.

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