WEEKEND OF BURNIES
THE FIRST STREET MACHINE DRAG CHALLENGE WEEKEND SAW RECORDS TUMBLE AND ACTION APLENTY IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
OVER the four years we’ve run the Street Machine Drag Challenge, it has been a five-day event taking place mainly in the southern states. This year, Telfo and Scotty decided to mix up the recipe by adding another Drag Challenge event to the calendar, a shorter three-day affair that finally spread the love up north. That’s how we found ourselves at Queensland’s Willowbank Raceway on Friday 13 April for the start of the inaugural Drag Challenge Weekend.
The plan was simple: a day’s racing at Willowbank, followed by a road trip to Warwick for a second day of racing at the town’s eighth-mile track, then heading back to Willowbank Raceway for the grand finale on Sunday. Around 80 cars turned up to do battle across five classes, with plenty of heavy hitters among them. Game on!
THE class to watch at DCW was definitely Tuff Mounts Radial Blown, packed with fearsome rides that were genuine contenders to win the whole event outright. Terry Seng’s Paramount Performance workshop had multiple options, including Brad Lane’s immaculate twin-turbo Torana and Terry’s own VC Commodore – the latter after a long hiatus. But by midday on Day One, Terry and the seven-second beast were nowhere to be seen. Would he make it before the 4pm cut-off?
Another favourite to take out the class and outright win was Fabian Huff’s recently finished 1200hp XE ESP Falcon (Urban Warfare, SM, May ’18). Unfortunately, the car tagged the wall on only its second pass, knocking Fabian out of contention. Undeterred, he packed up his XE and took it to Warwick, where he camped with friends, and this refusal to give up saw him win the Spirit Of Drag Challenge award.
By day’s end, Tanya Thompson led Boostane Outlaw Blown with her twin-turbo VH Commodore running 8.59@157mph, ahead of Noel Inman’s T-model Ford’s 10.86@118mph and Greg Mason’s El Camino with 11.47@116mph.
The heavyweights battled in Boostane Outlaw Aspirated, with Stephen Micallef’s 632ci HQ One Tonner (9.29@148mph) leading Rahim Tarr’s Falcon (10.18@127mph) and Steve Reimann’s Dodge 440 sedan (11.82@113mph).
Pacemaker Radial Aspirated saw Al Vella’s 450ci Ford Capri lead the charge with a stonking 8.93@152mph, ahead of Pat O’shea’s XR Fairmont with 9.5@141mph and a 9.85@137mph for Brodie Olsen’s
383ci Holden-powered Torana hatch. Nathan Ghosn’s Drag Challenge veteran Capri was nipping at their heels, running 10.18@130mph.
Competitors in the Turbosmart Dialyour-own class did so many laps of Willowbank they just about wore out the return road and staging lanes. Mitchell Bean’s Camaro topped the DYO standings leaving Willowbank, ahead of Brad Lynch’s HQ Monaro and Matt Walsh’s Mustang. For DYO competitors, Day One was all about setting the benchmark they’d then have to match on the following two days, so the pressure was on before they even thought about the road legs.
As the day wore on, Terry Seng’s absence grew more pronounced. But finally, at 2pm his famous white VC Commodore appeared in the staging lanes, though things didn’t go to plan. A harness mix-up cost him time, and then he had issues with a leaking intercooler.
Terry got it fixed to get a 9.34@152mph pass in the books, placing him seventh out of 13 in the class and a long way behind Brad Lane’s twin-turbo Dart Ls-powered Torana sedan, which led Tuff Mounts Radial Blown and outright after Day One with an 8.01@164mph.
THE Saturday at Drag Challenge Weekend kicked off at Warwick Dragway, a beaut eighth-mile strip that is home of the Sixbanger Nats. Scotty had found a winding 180km backroads route that took entrants past the very scenic Maroon Dam, though the climb through Cunnginhams Gap tested plenty of entrants’ cooling systems.
Everyone seemed bright-eyed and bushytailed on the Saturday morning, even with the skies threatening to literally rain on our parade.
Jon Fulton was one of the first on the track, with his stock-bottom-end turbo 1UZ Datsun Bluebird running a PB of 6.79@102mph. Jon actually parked the car for the day after that run, later watching fellow class competitor Ben Vlekken top the Tuff Mounts Radial Blown timesheets for the day with a 5.66 in his turbo LS VH Commodore wagon.
Al Vella’s Capri was the only aspirated car to run in the fives at Warwick, stopping the boards with a 5.85@118mph to cement his lead in Pacemaker Radial Aspirated over Pat O’shea’s Falcon and Brodie Olsen’s Holdenpowered LX Torana hatch.
While the competitors in the tyre classes had to tame their mega-horsepower setups to find traction on the Warwick strip, the punters in Turbosmart Dial-your-own had to get the abacus out, as their eighthmile times would be multiplied by 1.555 to calculate an equivalent quarter-mile time. This becomes a challenge, because the calculation extrapolates the car’s time as if its performance in the second half of the hypothetical quarter-mile is the same as over the eighth, which certainly wouldn’t be the case for all cars running a real quarter.
It wasn’t like any of the DYO competitors needed more pressure, as the top four were split by 0.004 of a second, with the top two split by just 0.0015!
ON A WINDING 180KM BACKROADS ROUTE, THE CLIMB THROUGH CUNNGINHAMS GAP TESTED PLENTY OF ENTRANTS’ COOLING SYSTEM
Stew Walsh and Dan Case got their HK sedan to 0.005 seconds off their nominated dial-in, while Michael Higgs had an even better day in his VH SL/E Commodore, running just 0.0009 seconds off his dial-in!
Day One’s outright and Tuff Mounts Radial Blown leader, Brad Lane, had a horror day at Warwick. His immaculate blue Torry headbutted the wall hard after getting out of shape, putting him out of the running and Mark Van Der Togt’s XW into the lead of both the Radial Blown class and outright standings.
Dave and Tanya Thompson’s twinturbo early-girl Commodore, PRO VH, also dropped out of the event while leading the Boostane Outlaw Blown class by over two seconds. It left Noel Inman’s centre-door ’22 Ford battling Canberra’s Greg Mason in his Drag Challenge-veteran Chevy El Camino.
In Boostane Outlaw Aspirated, Stephen Micallef’s HQ Tonner built a strong lead, having run 9.29@148mph on the first day and 6.25@112mph at Warwick. Not even an engine bay fire on the road leg to Warwick could stop him!
COMPETITORS had a cool 180km cruise from Warwick to Willowbank at the end of Day Two, via the awesome Scotty’s Garage (no relation to the Youtube channel) out the back of Toowoomba. Although the descent down Silver Ridge punished brakes, everyone made it back to Ipswich, where the tunes were set to kill mode for the last day of competition.
Terry Seng had a tough run at Drag Challenge Weekend, but stopped everyone in their tracks when he cracked off a 7.66@179mph to break the record for the quickest ET ever at a Drag Challenge event in his HDT275 Commodore. However, it wasn’t enough to make up for the slow times run on Friday and Saturday.
Drag Challenge stalwart Alon Vella continued his success in the Pacemaker Radial Aspirated class, with the 450ci Windsor-powered Capri taking a fourth Drag Challenge Radial Aspirated trophy, and finishing sixth outright. Keeping him honest was Queensland local Pat O’shea, whose exquisitely prepared XR Fairmont displayed ultra-consistent mid-nine-second pace all weekend, despite a gearbox rebuild on Day One.
The Boostane Outlaw classes at Drag Challenge Weekend saw some experienced hands racing hard for three solid days. Stephen Micallef’s HQ Tonner was King of the Cubes in Boostane Outlaw Aspirated with a 632ci big-block Chev, and wound up top of the class thanks to a 9.4 on Day Three to back up his 9.2 on Day One. Rahim Tarr’s evil-looking Falcon ute finished a cumulative 1.9 seconds behind Micallef after chasing hard all weekend.
Boostane Outlaw Blown came down to a pair of nitrous small-block entries, with Noel Inman’s wheelstanding ’22 Ford battling for the win with Greg Mason’s El Camino. Inman ended up edging out Mason for the class win by a safe margin of just over two seconds, and picked up the Longest Distance Travelled award in the process.
The Turbosmart Dial-your-own category was taken out by Andrew Dunnett’s CL Valiant ute, powered by a Gen III Hemi, with a 0.00469 split. Stew Walsh and Dan Case finished second in the HK Kingswood they shared, with a 0.00900-second margin.
Mitchell Bean in his ’68 Camaro finished third with a 0.01200 split to round out the podium. Hot on their heels was Alysha Teale in her black HQ and 0.01400 difference, and Bill Martland and his VR SS Commodore in fifth spot with a 0.01553 gap.
Taking top spot in Tuff Mounts Radial Blown was Mark Van Der Togt’s 1600hp XW, though he was incredibly lucky, as the twin-turbo Windsor-powered brute tagged both walls in the braking area on his first run of the day. Thankfully, the 8.07@169mph was enough to cement his win in both the Radial Blown class, and overall for Street Machine’s first Drag Challenge Weekend.