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The General Lee That Learned to Drift

There are a lot of ways to build a General Lee. I’ve built one with Nathan Warren specifically to make it look like a period-correct Season 2 hero car from The Dukes of Hazzard. Kevin Waterman had a very different idea. He wanted a General Lee that could drift. Not a show car. Not a Charger that occasionally gets sideways. He wanted a purpose-built, functional drift car that looked like a General Lee, could survive the abuse, and actually take people for thrill rides. That car, now known as the “General Drift,” is the result.

Nathan Warren of Warren Customs in Hamilton, Alabama, is no stranger to strange projects or to this show. His shop handles everything from restoration and collision work to custom builds, and Nathan came into the trade the old-fashioned way: working at a Chevrolet dealership, learning by doing and figuring things out along the way. The connection to Kevin started several years ago at Holley MoParty. Kevin is a Hollywood stunt performer and the owner of Dynamic Stunts, and Nathan had already crossed paths with him through the stunt work happening at MoParty in 2020. Kevin also already owned a real 1968/1969 Charger General Lee with a Gen III Hemi, six-speed and drift brake. You don’t necessarily want to take an actual ’68/’69 Charger and use it as a disposable drift-and-thrill-ride machine. So Kevin went looking for something that could deliver the same visual experience without putting a real Charger at the center of the abuse.

Start With a Crown Victoria

The starting point was a Crown Victoria that had already been modified for drifting. It started life as a county Sheriff’s car and had a 4.6-liter Ford engine, a T5 five-speed and front suspension work already in place. Nathan’s job was essentially to remove the Crown Victoria body and build a Dodge Charger-shaped car on what remained. Nathan describes it like building a model car. The original Crown Vic body came off, leaving the floor, firewall and dashboard structure. Then he started assembling the new body from available Dodge Charger sheet metal. And as it turns out, the Crown Vic chassis was a surprisingly good candidate. The wheelbases are within roughly an inch of one another, the Crown Vic has a very similar overall width inside the body, and Nathan discovered some almost absurdly convenient similarities between the two cars. Even the trunk-hinge bolt pattern lined up well enough that he could use the Crown Victoria hardware with the Charger trunk lid. Nathan put it another way during our conversation: the Crown Victoria almost seems like it wanted to be a Charger.

It Had to Be a Real Car

One of the biggest differences between this project and some of the Crown Vic-based stunt cars we’ve seen before was the requirement that this one actually function like a car. Nathan couldn’t simply weld a Charger-looking body over a roll cage and call it done. The rules and intended use meant the doors needed to work. The hood needed to work. The headlights needed to work. The car needed to retain things like the Crown Victoria’s air conditioning and other street-car functions while still being capable of drifting.

Nathan fabricated door jambs and custom hinges, then used fiberglass doors that could actually be removed from the car. The hood was also designed to lift off quickly so the crew could get access to the car at the track. Underneath, it remained a Crown Victoria in some very important ways. The car retains the parts it came to Nathan with, modified front suspension and an 8.8 rear axle with a roughly 4.10/4.11 gear and a spool. That is not exactly the recipe for quiet trips through the neighborhood, but it makes considerably more sense when the job description includes deliberately hanging the rear end out.

Even the Headlights Work

This is probably one of those things nobody notices until somebody explains how much work went into making it happen.

The General has functional headlights and factory-style flip-up headlight doors. The problem was that Nathan had to adapt an electric headlight conversion mechanism to work in an orientation that was essentially upside down and reversed from its normal application.

He worked directly with the manufacturer of the headlight system, went through the electrical details and figured out how to make it work in the available space. The Crown Vic core support and firewall structure remained underneath the Charger bodywork, so there simply wasn’t room to duplicate the original Charger arrangement.

The Crown Vic hood latch remained part of the system, while the factory Charger safety latch was incorporated into the new hood. The inner structure around the trunk and rear of the car had to be fabricated. Nathan even built a firewall between the trunk and passenger compartment specifically to keep tire smoke out of the cabin while the car is drifting.

Version Two Got Even More Serious

Here’s the part that makes the story even better. Nathan actually built the car two years ago, then had to keep his mouth shut about it. Kevin wanted to debut the car himself, so the finished General stayed hidden. During that time, the car evolved. It received an LS3 and T-56 transmission, a certified roll cage, rear seats and other changes as its mission shifted toward giving thrill rides instead of competing in a conventional drift series.

When it eventually returned to Nathan, one of the fiberglass fenders had been damaged and the suspension, wheels and tires had changed. The original fiberglass front fenders were replaced with steel, which allowed Nathan to strengthen the front end and finally get the headlight mechanism operating correctly while accommodating the wider front track. They also made subtle changes to the body to make everything work. The front wheel openings were raised about an inch because the car sits considerably lower than a stock Charger, and the rear quarters received a small amount of additional flare for tire clearance.

Then They Took It to the Track

When the car finally appeared in public, Nathan got to see the reaction firsthand. He rode in the back while Kevin put the General through its paces. Kevin’s real Charger was there too, and according to Nathan, people had trouble telling the two apart when they were seeing the drifting car in action. You can look at photographs and appreciate the fabrication. You can look underneath it and appreciate the engineering. But once it is sideways, tires smoking, engine screaming and chasing another car around a racetrack, the goal becomes pretty simple: it has to look like a General Lee doing something a General Lee was never supposed to do.

Holley Moparty returns to Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, Kentucky, September 18-20, 2026, with drifting, drag racing, autocross, a car show and other Mopar-focused activities. That’s the same event where the story of this car began years ago, and where the General Drift has now become part of the spectacle.

Where Can You Get One?

Nathan says he would absolutely build another one. With today’s reproduction Charger sheet metal available from companies such as AMD, he believes the concept could be taken even further. He sees the possibility of building a Crown Victoria-chassis Charger with substantially more of the Dodge’s original structure and even more functional components. He’d also be happy to build one that isn’t a General Lee at all.

That’s the funny thing about this whole project. It started with a stunt performer who wanted a particular car he’d been imagining for years. It went through MoParty, crossed paths with my own General Lee project, landed with Nathan Warren, and eventually turned a Crown Victoria into something that looks, sounds and behaves like a Dodge Charger with absolutely no intention of staying between the lines. Nathan put more than sheet metal into this one. He figured out how to make the impossible parts work and somewhere along the way, the Crown Vic really did become a Charger.

If you would like to commision your own Dodge Charger Crown Vic creation, or any kind of interesting project from a Fall Guy replica truck to an accurate General Lee push bar for your backroad warrior you can check out the web page Warren Customs , or on Instagram Instagram.com/warren_customs_llc, Facebook Facebook.com/WarrenCustoms, and even YouTubeYouTube.com/@warrencustomsllc.2225, where you can watch videos of Nathan working on the Kibbe Lee.

You can also check out Kevin Waterman and his crew at Dynamic Stunts on Instagram.com/DynamicStunts where you can see great videos of the General Drift in action, and  at Facebook.com/DynamicStunts.

See You At Moparty
– Rob Kibbe

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This interview sponsored by our pals at National Parts Depot – your premier source for muscle car restoration parts!

 

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