LIKE ALL RED-BLOODED RACERS, CORY WANTED MORE
bought would not be suitable for the kind of things he had in mind. This was quickly sold and an order for a Dart block and a pair of Dart heads out of Aussie was placed, along with a Callies rotating assembly and a custom Marc Mulholland grind blower camshaft. The now Roots blown small block was built to handle 1500 galloping horses. Cory knew it was more than capable of running the numbers he wanted.
The TH350 was never built for the amount of torque the blown engine could deliver. It just so happened that fellow racer Aaron Thomas had a spare Powerglide kicking around that was only a few meetings old. “If it was behind his twin turbo small block that’s running 8s, then it will be more than enough for me,” recalls Cory. The glide was purchased and quickly bolted up to the new engine. Geoff from NZ Wiring re-wired the car and installed a Max Race ECU while he was at it. Chris at Prestige Tuning and Motorsport built a solid base tune, and on 98 pump the HQ turned the rollers and put out 610hp on 10lb of boost, skids on!
It was back to the track where Cory shook the car down and ran an 11.3 straight off the trailer — he was more than happy with the number, but like all red-blooded racers he wanted more— an 11 wasn’t going to cut it any more. He wanted a time slip that started with a 10. Back to the dyno it went and with a bit more timing, some more horses were found and the big Aussie family car was pushing out 670hp and 850 lb/ft of torque. While the boys were unloading the car off the dyno, Marc from Llama casually mentioned: “That motor is going to wreck your car — you will need a cage and to sort that rear end out, or it won’t last long.” Little did Cory know how true those words would become. Itching to try out the new combo, he quickly found a quiet private road in Mexico and dropped the biggest, fattest skid the HQ had ever done. Just as Marc had warned, the rear trailing arms were quickly twisted up and ripped clean out of the floor. If this was happening on street rubber there was no way it was going to handle a sticky drag strip and slicks! So out it came, everything that could be rose jointed was, stronger axles were slid in, as well as a Strange diff head — now try to break, ya bastard!
The numbers continued to plunge on the strip; 10.9 @ 122mph was peeled off with relative ease. As many of you will know, that’s the danger zone for an uncaged car, as anything running quicker than 10.99 seconds needs a cage. Cory couldn’t help himself though. Rather than tone it down, he did the complete opposite. He raised the rev limit to 7500rpm, released the transbrake off the line for the first time and spun the tyres for 60 feet. After that it hooked up and ran 10.7 @ 133mph. As you can imagine the track officials paid him a visit where he was told to chuck it on the trailer and not to come back until he had a cage.
It was at this time that Cory noticed the HQ was looking a bit tired and some major work really needed to be done to bring it back up to scratch. He didn’t want to turn it into a dedicated drag car so he called on Tommy again to fabricate a bolt-in cage that would be safe to run in Super Sedan, yet be easily removed so he could
still cruise the streets with the kids in the back. The car was stripped back and within the month the cage was all done. It was while the interior was being put back in that it was decided things didn’t look quite right. The old carpet was thrown in the bin and Bruce at Stitch It whipped up some new ones and tweaked the interior to suit the cage. He did such a good job that he continued into the boot and re-did that too.
The exterior was next on the list. Chris Jonker from Capital Refinishing answered the call. What started out as a couple of minor panel repairs soon snowballed into a full rebuild once the car was blown apart. Rust was found pretty much everywhere, but thankfully Cory’s dad is a panel beater by trade, so everything was chopped out and replaced with fresh metal out of Aussie. While the car was blown apart, the rear was massaged and lowered a few inches and the diff was found to be twisted again. Out it came, new axle tubes were welded on by Graham Kidd Engineering and a set of Wilwood brakes were fitted along with a strong back to stop the twisting.