It doesn’t shout for attention, but Chris Loumanis’ 1964 Ford Falcon certainly demands a second look. The car was a four-year, 2,000-hour exercise in patience. Chris fabricated the drag-and-drive machine to his liking from the ground up, refusing to do anything halfway. What started as a clean, original-paint West Coast survivor ended up as a twin-turbocharged, right-hand-drive machine that turns heads and proves that with enough stubbornness and the right vision, you can turn a clean survivor into something nobody else has.

Chris stumbled across the Falcon in a Portland, Oregon car yard back in 2010, recognizing immediately it was something special. “It was an original paint, rust-free car,” he says. “It had only a touch-up on one fender, but otherwise it was just cherry.”

He hauled it all the way back to Australia and used it as a “go-getter” for years before parting ways with it … only to buy it back later, unable to shake the attachment.

Chris brought in Lee Walker of Pro Street Developments, who built the entire chassis and floor structure from scratch. Following Australia’s notoriously strict highway engineering rules, they had to design every inch of the car to be legally roadworthy and a performance car simultaneously. “It’s like building a Pro Stock car. It was just a floppy shell at one point,” Chris explains.

The build became an opportunity to do things differently than anyone else. Every piece, every weld, every bracket was thought out long before the car ever turned a tire. Instead of a slapped-together effort, the Falcon was a deliberate effort to bring his vision to life.

The Falcon’s most radical feature isn’t immediately obvious — there are no turbos hanging off the front, no air inlet or exhaust poking through the hood or the fenders. That’s because the twin Garrett GDX3582 Gen 2 turbos are rear-mounted, tucked discreetly near the rear wheels, fed by hidden airboxes that are located under the rear seat.

“Most people, when they rear-mount turbos, it’s an afterthought,” Chris says. “You see pods and filters hanging off everything. I thought about it before we even started building the car. It had to look like it belonged.”

The whole chassis, the exhaust routing, even the air intake system, was fabricated to support this stealth setup that he had in mind. It’s seamless enough that casual observers might not even realize the car is turbocharged, until they hear it.

Power comes from a 368 cubic inch small-block Ford, built around a World Products Man O’ War block and topped with AFR 205 heads. It’s a well-built, conservative package, tuned initially for reliability over outright horsepower and torque figures. On 17 pounds of boost, the Falcon has already cracked the four-digit mark, laying down nearly 1,100 horsepower. Chris runs a Holley Dominator ECU and a custom-fabricated Jake Bain Racing intake, feeding the engine fuel with Siemens Dekka 220 injectors. It’s a setup that’s primarily built to live on the road, versus just making big dyno numbers.

Backing the engine is a Reid-case Turbo 400, turning a four-inch aluminum driveshaft mated to a custom-fabricated Ford 9-inch rearend with a four-link rear suspension setup. Up front, a Mustang II-style independent suspension has been fabricated to meet Australian roadway engineering codes. Every system, from the driveline to the suspension and cooling, was tailored specifically to make sure the car could handle the quarter mile and then segue to covering the hundreds of miles of road driving Chris plans to throw at it.

Chris has been in the trenches of the automotive industry for decades, from wrenching on performance cars to building drag and street machines. And so he didn’t just stumble into the deep end of fabrication. “It was in the veins by the time I was 20,” he tells. His first job at Northern Tuning threw him straight into the thick of race prep, turbo installs, and engine tuning, laying a foundation for mechanical instincts that would guide everything he built from there forward. That experience shaped his choices in the Falcon’s build. 

From carbon-fiber bumpers to the right-hand drive conversion, which he sourced carefully from Australian Falcon parts, everything was done deliberately, and to a standard few street-driven cars ever reach. Even the dash was re-engineered, cut into pieces, and painstakingly reshaped to fit a Holley 12.3-inch digital dash.

“Nothing on this car was bought out of a box. Other than maybe the radiator cap. Everything else, we had to make,” Chris says.

While the car sits today in white epoxy primer, still awaiting its paint and final body work, it’s fully functional. Chris is already putting street miles on it, hooking trailers to it, running errands … treating it not like a fragile showpiece, but the reliable, yet fast street car it was meant to be. It’s seen rain, been through potholes, served as a test bed — and that’s exactly how Chris wants it.

He’s aiming to run Street Machine’s Drag Challenge in Australia this year, the country’s equivalent of America’s Drag Week. But he’s realistic about his expectations. “I’m not setting out to break records. If it runs low eights, I’ll be tickled pink. I just want to sort the car out, and get some seat time,” he says.

Looking further down the road, Chris even dreams about loading the Falcon into a container and bringing it back stateside to tackle Drag Week. “The American crowd would love it—it’s their car, but the steering wheel’s on the wrong side. They’d freak out.” And they would. A right-hand-drive Falcon, a potent twin-turbo mill for power, cruising the backroads? Instant fan-favorite.

Chris says it’s hard to put into words just how much work has gone into this car. Thousands of fabrication hours, endless headaches dealing with strict Australian regulations. Setbacks, blown budgets, and hard-earned solutions he had to creatively figure out. And yet, he says he wouldn’t change a thing.

“I just wanted something I was proud of. To be able to stand back, look at it, and say, ‘Yeah, I’m glad I built that,’” he says.

Chris’s connection to the car doesn’t hinge on winning races or getting likes on social media. It’s a throwback to a time when cars were built for the sheer love of it, no matter how much time or effort it took. The Falcon embodies all the best parts of hot rodding culture: the innovation, the hard work, the stubborn refusal to settle for ordinary. And if you hear twin turbos spooling behind you on the streets of Australia sometime soon, it’s not your imagination. It’s Chris, grinning behind the wheel of a car he built the hard way, because, for him, there wasn’t any other way.