There were plenty of unusually powered machines in the lanes at Ballarat Airport for the Western Highway Shootout earlier this year (SM, May ’25), including local Scott Jones’s XE Falcon, which rocks a NASCAR-derived V8 and rear turbo set-up. Suffice it to say, we were keen to know more about his force-fed Falc!

First published in the December 2025 issue of Street Machine

How long have you had the XE?

I got it in around 2016-’17 as something to build to take to my wedding. It’s originally a South Australian police car; she was just a basic six-banger GL with a four-speed. With the help of my mates, we tore it down, sent it off for paint and then put it back together for the wedding.

We assume you binned the six-banger?

Yep! I had an aspo 351 for it, so we put that in with a C10 auto and a Borgy diff from a 90s Falcon. We ran it like that for a while, but then I got bored of the power, so that’s when we did the rear turbo set-up with the BorgWarner S475 turbo.

Why mount the turbo under the boot floor?

There’s a few reasons, one of the main ones being that we’d just freshly painted the engine bay at the time. I’d already put a fuel cell in the boot and we had the room to put the turbo under the boot, so why not! Plus, people told me it wouldn’t work, and you never tell me not to do something, because then I’ll go and do it!

The 351’s not in the car now though, so what’s it running?

It’s a Cleveland-based NASCAR block with a Scat 408 stroker kit. Combined with the 40thou-over block, it’s basically a 410ci combo. It was built by Simon Williams here in Ballarat; he’s a bit of a small-block Ford guru. It’s running an 850 CSU carb, and that’s partly for budget; when we originally did the conversion, the idea was cheap power, and I know how to tune a carby. It’s working well so far, and because the turbo is in the rear and with the carby dropping the intake temp, there’s no need for an intercooler.

What sort of grunt does it have?

Last time we had it dynoed, it was around the 600rwhp mark, and at the Shootout I was only running around 10psi. I’ve bumped that up to 15-16psi now, but I’ll need to go to ethanol before we can add any more, because we’re still on 98 right now.

Have you done much racing with it, aside from the Shootout?

I did the Central Victorian Drag & Drive, which is where the old 351 let go. I put a bit too much boost into it, and it didn’t even make it past the 60-foot before she was all over. I haven’t run it down the quarter-mile yet, but I did build it partly to do drag-and-drives, which is why it’s ’caged, so I’d love to do Drag Challenge next year.

Anyone you want to thank?

Chris, Noel and Paul at CNH Automotive; Jeff at HTW Welding for the rear-mount turbo set-up; Matt at MDT Transmissions; Jeff at Body Zone Panels; Simon Williams for the engine; Lucas and Matt at Carline Ballarat, Luke at Quick’s Performance; George and the crew at The Garage on Martin; my employees Daniel and Ethan for their help assembling the car and putting out the small fire it had; and my wife April.