GLENN WELLS

“IT’S a basic thing,” Glenn Wells says of Bubba's Holden V8. “It’s just got good-quality components. To be honest I tried to talk Bubba out of building a Holden a hundred times, but he’s a stubborn bastard!”

The saving grace in Glenn’s eyes is the Torque Power block. “If we didn’t have that we’d be stuffed,” he reckons. “Its strength and its size help keep it alive. The problem with the standard Holden V8 is that it’s weak and it’s got a terrible oil system. The Little Paw block fixes all that. I’ve never met anyone who is as hard on engines as Bubba; he used to split the factory blocks through the Welch plugs. We spent a lot of time on factory blocks, constantly chasing our tails.”

Inside it’s all good gear. The crank is a COME Racing billet item with a 3.48in stroke like you would use for a tough 355-cuber. Combined with a bore size of 4.155in, this yields a displacement of a little bit over 370 cubes. There’s a set of Carrillo rods and custom-order forged pistons with a static compression ratio of 9:1. Glenn has John Sidney Racing do all of his machining and the block has been fireringed to seal in the goodness.

The raised cam tunnel has created some interesting issues. The custom mechanical roller cam runs in 50mm roller bearings, and Glenn is keen to keep the lift and duration of the bumpstick to himself. But lifting the cam within the block changes the pushrod angles, and a whole bunch of clearancing had to be done to the pushrod holes in the Yella Terra heads. Because everything is so tight they’ve had to stick with 5/16in pushrods, so they’ve gone with some extra-heavy-duty 110thouwall-thickness pushrods.

“Craig has addressed this issue with his own Torque Power heads,” Glenn says, “so we’ll probably take a good look at some of his heads as an upgrade in the future.”