WE RECENTLY joined Jason Waye of Tuff Mounts fame at MPW Performance in Dandenong, Victoria, to check out two interesting Barra swaps.

The first is one that will be familiar to regular Street Machine readers – the VS Commodore ute dubbed the Barrahore, which Jason built for last year’s Drag Challenge. The car ran 10.50 and cost Jason less than $10,000 to build.

Since then he has rebuilt the motor with FG XR6 Turbo rods and pistons, increased the ring gaps and freshened it up for this year’s event, while also working to have it engineered and fully road-legal. That meant fitting a catalytic converter and big muffler, which has restricted power somewhat; however, Adam at MPW was still able to get over 350rwkW out of the thing on 98-octane, which is roughly the same power the car had last year with a less restrictive exhaust.

To spice things up, the boys then swapped in a Magnafuel fuel pump, removed the big muffler and tuned it on E85. While the Barrahore runs a factory Ford ECU for the engine, an nGauge allows for a couple of tunes to be saved, so Jason and Tropp can have a 98 tune for the street and an E85 tune for sending it at the track without the muffler.

The other Barra project Jason brought down was his new Fox-body Mustang, which currently has a four-cylinder powerhouse but will also be copping the Barra treatment in the coming months. We’ll be following the project with close interest, but first we all wanted to see how much power it made on the dyno. The result was unsurprisingly pathetic.

Jason plans to have the Barra Mustang at Drag Challenge next year and market a full Barra conversion kit once the project is complete, so you too can drop a Barra into your 80s ’Stang.