Carl Turner didn't want to have just another muscle car like everybody else, and, with a '78 Malibu wagon, he definitely doesn't. "I wanted something different," he said. "You don't see too many of these things around anymore. I first saw it sitting in a field. A guy was going to make a drag car out of it, but he had his own repair shop and always had so much going on with that that he never got around to it, so I talked him out of it."
Turner eventually traded the sleeper wagon for a Jeep – "kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing," he called it – but when the opportunity arose to get it back, he wasn't about to let it slip through his fingers a second time. When he reacquired it, the engine was blown up – "a rod was hanging out of the pan," he said – but that mattered little because he had an LS swap in mind anyway.
After installing a 5.3 LS engine, Turner threw the Holley catalog at it and the rest of the car. By the time he was done, the little truck engine was putting out 266 horsepower to the wheels on the Holley dyno. He took it out to Beech Bend Raceway Park and knocked out a couple of 14.60s at just short of 100 mph on a Tuesday night test 'n' tune.
Turner, 40, built the engine using a single-plane Holley EFI intake manifold with a 1000 CFM throttle body (just the air valve) and multi-port injection. "I really don't tune it that much," he says. "I don't need to – I have a Dominator ECU running everything, so I basically leave it alone. The air/fuel [ratio] always looks good, and it really doesn't ever need anything. I put a base tune in it and made some minor timing tweaks, but I hardly ever even hook a laptop to it. I just drive it." Turner also runs a Holley 7-inch digital dash, Holley water pump, Frostbite radiator, Holley's complete low-mount LS accessory drive, G-Body engine-swap mounts and transmission cross member, and a complete three-inch stainless LS swap BlackHeart exhaust.
When he's not cruising winding back roads of Western Kentucky in the Malibu, Turner is working in the Hooker BlackHeart division as an exhaust design tech. He brings a wealth of practical experience gained from running his own repair shop in his home state of Georgia, where he did extensive custom exhaust work. "It's nice to be proud of the company you work for," he said. "I have to say it's probably the best job I've ever had. When I go back to Georgia and see old friends, it's always cool to say I work at Holley."