“We first came to LS Fest back in 2018 and raced our drag car,” explains Dario Gaiga of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. “Las Vegas Motor Speedway is a big facility so we did a fair amount of walking around, and I joked that we should put an LS in a golf cart and drive around in that all day next time around.”

You can probably tell where this is going.

Gaiga ultimately decided on something only slightly bigger. “I found this 1977 Austin Mini online, and the guy told me that he had to get rid of it because he was moving, and if someone didn’t buy it, he was going to scrap it. I bought it for five hundred bucks – it was pretty rough. But I wanted to find the smallest platform that you could potentially put an LS in that’s still a car and cruise that around at LS Fest. And I think this has got to be pretty close.”

The project got underway in December of 2018. Miraculously, he had the car converted over to rear wheel drive and tearing up the pavement just four months later.

Blown LS power comes by way of a 4.8-liter LR4 out of a 2005 Silverado. “The bottom end is completely stock; the car is mostly made out of parts that I had laying around the shop,” he says. “Sometimes there are parts that we can’t sell to customers because they’re questionable, so this car is basically made out of those leftover parts. I normally do a lot of turbo builds, but I wanted to do a blower this time around. The year before we started on this build I actually won a gift certificate from Holley, so we used it to buy an intake, which we modified to make it work with the 6V71. It’s got a pair of truck throttle bodies on top. And the mailbox, obviously.”

Fed a steady diet of methanol, Gaiga tells us the combination is good for 565 rear-wheel horsepower. Maintaining the shoestring budget theme, a stock Turbo 350 three-speed automatic handles the gear changes.

Gaiga also drag races a Chevrolet Chevette, which is normally considered a tiny hatchback in its own right when it’s not being compared to a vintage Mini. Still, the subcompact’s tight packaging gave him a template to work off of when building this beast. “It gave me something I could take measurements off of,” he says. “So I measured it and figured out how much I could narrow it, then I bought a Chevette front suspension and narrowed it enough to be able to fit the wheels within the wheelwells of the Mini. After that I basically built everything else to fit around that – it’s got 2x3 tube frame rails like a Pro Street car would have.” A Ford 8-inch rear end was installed out back after being narrowed by eleven inches. On each side.

With no rear brakes installed, he says the Mini isn’t built for the drag strip – it’s strictly for doing burnouts. “I learned from the Aussie guys that if you don’t put on brakes back there it gives you way more room to get the tire out of the wheelwell. If they were there, I’d have to drop the suspension in order to do that, and I change tires way too often to deal with that.”

The car sat for a time when the world hit the pause button in 2020, but Gaiga recently brought his attention back to the Mini, and as if it wasn’t sketchy enough already, he says ready to step it up another notch. “I’m always looking for more power, I just didn’t want to break it before we came down to LS Fest.”

The plans call for more boost and a transmission swap to a two-speed Powerglide. “But I have no plans to paint it or anything like that,” he adds with a laugh. “Everyone likes it the way it is because you can tell that I didn’t try.”