Bucket List Barra – Scott Taylor Combines Australian Power with An American Car to Take On Sick Summer Presented by Motion Raceworks in 2025!
As the creator of the Street Machine Drag Challenge in Australia, it’s fair to say that cars and drag and drive events get Scott Taylor excited. He’s participated in events in every form, except as a participant.
In 2025, Scott aimed to change that, zeroing in on the Sick Summer presented by Motion Raceworks as his driver debut. But there was a bit more involved to this story, and Scott dropped us the details on his first drag and drive USA event behind the wheel in his own words below.
This article originally appeared in Sick The Magazine’s Fall 2025 print edition. Get the official magazine of drag and drive - subscribe to Sick The Magazine by CLICKING HERE!
I’ve had a long association with drag-and-drive events. I even managed to cover Drag Week for Street Machine magazine from 2015 to 2018 with guys like Povi Pullinen, Matt Reekie and Luke Nieuwhof, and they were some of the best times I’ve ever had. Over those years I met so many lovely and amazing people, but I wanted to do more than watch from the sidelines — I wanted to race.
After an innocent conversation with Brian Ekstrom about the possibility of doing Motion Raceworks Sick Summer happened, a light bulb went off in my head. Brian’s idea was that I use one of his cars, but knowing that anything could happen to someone’s car out on the road, I thought that buying a car would be a better idea.
Over the years I’d tinkered with the idea of putting an Aussie-made Barra engine into an American car, so I started looking around at suitable Fords — namely Fairmonts. We found a 1981 Fairmont Futura in North Dakota for the right money, and the owner was even willing to hold it for me until Brian could go pick it up after the snow thawed.
With the car sorted, my plan was to fly in and Barra-swap the Fairmont so I could take it to Sick Summer. If you’re unfamiliar with the Ford Barra engine, it is basically a four-liter inline six with just over 260hp in its non-turbo form; add a turbo and the horsepower number climbs exponentially. It becomes a case of choose your own adventure — how much horsepower do you want?
But more horsepower isn’t always the answer, because then you need all the supporting mods, such as big dollar transmissions, differentials, roll cages, etc. I could see this getting out of hand very quickly, so I decided to just plug in a standard, naturally aspirated engine and see where that would get us.
The engine was sourced from Dominator Motorsports, who ship Barra engines to the USA by the container load, while the engine mounts, bell housing and wiring loom came from Australian companies such as Tuff Mounts, Torque Power and Hooton’s Harnesses. Some of the items I shipped in via FedEx, other items I carried in via my luggage, such as the massive bell housing.
I have no idea what US Customs thought of it when they saw the housing on the baggage x-ray, but they made no mention of it when I landed in Dallas. In total the trip took 28 hours from Melbourne, Australia to St Cloud, Minnesota, and that’s when everything got really serious. I flew in on June 5 and we got started on the car on June 6, which gave me just nine days to get the job done and get the car to Byron Dragway for tech.
Darin Lenk generously donated use of a hoist and his tools at Lenkster’s Customs outside St Cloud, and in truth I could not have done this without the help of Brian and Darin. We put in some long hours over the next nine days to tear down the car and build it back up again. I naively thought this was going to be a relatively simple task; pull the factory engine and trans, fit the Barra, mate it up to the C4 that came in the car, wire it all up and hit the key. Looking back now, all I can say is: “Oh, you poor deluded fool.”
Now don’t get me wrong, when it comes to conversions, I just done them all: big blocks, blowers, turbos, nitrous. I’ve built multiple eight-second cars and engines producing over 1000rwhp, and yet this nine-day Barra swap was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
When you’re at home with your own tools and part suppliers that you deal with on a daily basis, building cars is relatively easy, but on the other side of the world in rural Minnesota, the job becomes exponentially harder. The term ‘Overnight Delivery’ sounds great, but when you’ve got only eight nights you need those deliveries to be right, and when businesses cancel orders because you used an Australian credit card for items going to an American address the stress levels go through the roof.
Throw in some incompatible parts and all of a sudden that ‘easy swap’ sees you replacing 80% of the car’s suspension and brakes just to get the engine where you needed it to be. By the time we loaded the car on to the trailer on June 14th, it was 95-percent complete, but wiring was only half finished and the transmission lines were non-existent. Finding the right fitting to screw into the C4 proved problematic, and that’s how we arrived at tech at Bryon Raceway on June 15th, with a car that didn’t run.
I had become ‘that guy’ who shows up with a non-running car at Sick Summer. However, there were plenty of helpers, like Shawn who showed up with a spare alternator and bottle of bourbon from his home state of Kentucky, and Jim who drove 50 minutes back to his buddy’s place to get me the right fittings for the C4. Troy helped me until 1am in the morning as we tried to get the car running to no avail. At that point I told him, “Let’s just look at it in the morning with fresh eyes.”
After a few hours sleep in a hotel back in Rockford, I got the Fairmont running in the parking lot of a parts store the next day, then I towed it back to the track where Sick Summer was in full swing. Troy had stayed at the track overnight and he appeared as soon as I showed up and we prepared the car for its first run, still with so much to do. Unfortunately, as we prepared to drive down to the staging lanes, the call came over the PA to announce that the lanes were closed and at that point I knew we were going to miss out on making a pass.
You don’t come this far to give up there. We may not have been on the official results but it’s a week-long event and we didn’t care about the competition aspect, for us it was more about the journey. I had never met Troy before the previous day, but he agreed to join me for a week of hard miles and good times.
We spent the next five hours preparing for the road. The Fairmont hadn’t had a wheel alignment, nor had the engine even turned over in the USA before that day, but we decided to hit the highways and see how it went. For the first time in ten days, everything went smoothly as we rolled out of Byron Dragway.
After our first mandatory stop at Rush Creek Distilling, we decided to grab a room in Harvard, Illinois for the night. Refreshed and relaxed the next day, we headed east towards Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove and we were just nine miles from the track when the radiator exploded. Boom!
At this point we had to make a tough decision: do we get towed to the track where there are no parts but plenty of helpers, or do we get towed back to town where there are parts and no helpers? We elected to get towed back to the small tourist town of Twin Lakes, where we ordered a radiator and then found a bar to drink our sorrows away.
Thanks to Gage and the team at O’Reilly’s Auto Parts we had a new radiator, but we didn’t have a shot of making it onto the track at Great Lakes, so we decided to drive directly to Cordova. We’d missed two days of racing now so we were on our own little adventure, and the Fairmont didn’t miss a beat.
The day’s racing at Cordova was cancelled due to rain, so we followed the route to Poopy’s Biker Bar and joined the traveling circus that is Sick Summer before arriving in the city of Dubuque, Iowa for the night. Three days of Sick Summer finished, and we still hadn’t made a single pass.
Thursday morning we awoke to sunny skies the promise of a great day of racing at Tri-State Raceway. It was my 55th birthday and I was keen to make my first pass down a drag strip in America. I’ve done thousands of passes in Australia, and run as quick as 8.22 at 175 mph, but never been down a strip in the US of A.
We rolled into Tri-State Raceway, got the car ready and played the waiting game. When our group finally got their call, and it was my turn to face the tree, and the timing computer died! God, it seems, has a sense of humor.
Fifteen minutes later, I finally got to make my first pass. With no expectations at all, I put the shifter into ‘D for Drag’ and hit the accelerator to run a very sad 15.6 at 91 mph. I’ve got to say, I was a little disappointed and I knew that to get a better time we were going to have to choose our own shift points.
With ten minutes to go before the lanes closed, I climbed under the car to see if we could short out the shifter linkage before heading back to the staging lanes. The result was an even slower 16.6 at 93 mph with the car stuck in second gear from start to finish. This was definitely not the adventure that I’d signed up for.
Troy and I packed up our tools and headed back to Byron Dragway for the last day. Along with our shifter, we were also dealing with some sensor issues causing an overly rich tune. Our fuel/air ratio started with an eight; we called up our tuner back in Australia to see if he could make some adjustments. Sitting 15 time zones away, Zane from Maxx Performance managed to bypass the offending sensor and pull a bunch of fuel out of the tune.
With a delayed start at Byron due to the weather, we had plenty of time to sort out our shifter issues and now we could reliably get all three gears, even though we only needed two of them to get down the track. The one thing we hadn’t modified in the driveline was the diff, and the 2.73 gears weren’t doing us any favors in the acceleration department.
Thankfully we got called up first for the staging lanes and managed to get a 14.90 at 95 mph on the first run, quickly followed by a 14.65 at 97 mph after I found some vacuum lines installed backwards on the intake manifold. With the performance starting to head in the right direction it was time to try a few things, such as stalling it up at the start line.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work and we only managed another 14.67 at 98 mph. I came straight back around to the lanes and squeezed in for one last pass. With a snail-like 2.42 60-foot time the Fairmont didn’t exactly roar away from the line, but once the revs climbed that six-cylinder Barra came alive. I revved it out as far as I dared with no tachometer, shifted into second and let it cross the line for a 14.55 at 99 mph. Not exactly the kind of times that blow your hair back, but after the fortnight I had, I was on top of the world!
Did I complete Sick Summer? No. Did I travel to the other side of the world and build a car in less than ten days, meet some amazing people, and have an absolute blast? You better believe it!
Will I be back next year to make the Fairmont run even better? Abso-fucking-lutely.
Written by Scott Taylor. Photos courtesy of Sick the Magazine and Scott Taylor.
If you have thoughts / feedback / ideas, please e-mail us at derek@sickthemagazine.com