RACEWARS WA

RUNWAY RACING IN WA FOUND A NEW HOME WHEN MOTUL RACEWARS HEADED TO ALBANY

The place were old-school muscle cars and exotics duke it out over distances of up 1000m!

THERE aren’t too many car events that take a ‘gap year’ and then come back bigger and better than ever, but that’s just what the organisers of Motul Racewars – WA’S airstrip top-speed challenge – did. After three successful events at Wyalkatchem airport in 2013, ’14 and ’15, the organisers took a year off to find a new venue that would handle the everincreasing performance of the competitors. Since that first event, the terminal speeds have increased from 275km/h to almost 325km/h, and with higher speeds you need more braking area and preferably a run-off area without barbed-wire fences.

It was a pretty brave move to relocate the event to a venue that’s further away from the main population centre, but when that location is Albany – a former whaling town and famous for being the last view many ANZACS had of Australian soil – there were no complaints. The heart of the Great Southern region of WA, it’s a beautiful part of the world, and the 4.5hour drive from Perth – longer if you’re towing a car – didn’t seem to put anyone off. Albany Airport is also a much smoother racing surface than Wyalkatchem, which was notorious for a nasty bump around the 400m mark. It’s also a couple of hundred metres longer at 1.8km, so there was no need for any of the cars to pull parachutes to slow down. Not yet, at least!

There were about 200 competitors and somewhere around 7000 spectators for the weekend, and while many made the trek from elsewhere, the Albany region has a thriving car scene in its own right and a lot of the locals came down for a look, with several competing as well.

Racewars is essentially an event of three parts. Proceedings kick off with a rolling start, side-by-side 400m event. The theory with the rolling start is that people get their cars up to 60km/h, and at the 100m mark that’s when the race is on. It’s a bit more sympathetic to the machinery and also to the racing surface, an important factor as this is an active airstrip and it has to be kept in pristine condition.

The 400m event gives the competitors a chance to feel out their cars and the track and make sure everything is okay. But things start to get serious when the finish line gets moved to the 800m marker. There’s still a rolling start and side-by-side racing, but now you start to see who the big hitters are. Cars that are topping 270280km/h in the 800m are usually a good bet to crack 300km/h in the 1000 Vmax event and join the prestigious 300 Club.

This year a couple of cars – Matt Haines’s Skyline and John Kopcheff’s Gallardo – topped the 300km/h mark in the 800m, so the signs were good for some very big numbers to be run in the 1000m Vmax. This is the real deal – cars

run one at a time and no passengers are allowed. It’s timed from a standing start and prizes are awarded for both the highest top speed and the quickest elapsed time over the event.

My favourite car of the weekend was a ’70 Dodge Challenger owned by Albany local Shane Jordan. The muscular lines of the classic US machine were backed up by the 440ci late-model Hemi stuffed under the hood, but it wasn’t just about straightline performance for Shane. Underneath was all updated as well, in keeping with the pro touring theme of the car, with tubular IFS replacing the torsion bar front end and a four-link and nine-inch out back.

Another local, Mark Sugg, rocked up with his ‘Barrel Racer’, a ’38 Ford barrel-nosed pick-up. It was the polar opposite of the Challenger. Suggy (as his mates call him) pieced it together with stuff he had lying around, so it all sits on a ’95 Mitsubishi Triton chassis. “It handles like shit,” Suggy admitted, but it’s a lot of fun with the LS1 and T56 six-speed. It managed a top speed of just over 194km/h in the 800m and had a crowd around it all day.

While old muscle cars and hot rods always draw me in, there was plenty of latermodel stuff to check out that was equally impressive. While I’m not often exposed to European exotica and wild Japanese pocket-rockets, I still enjoy checking them out and seeing what people do to make them go fast. You have to admire how much horsepower these guys are getting out of their small-capacity Nissan, Toyota and Subaru donks.

While the field was heavily biased towards Skylines of all shapes and colours – no wait, most of them were grey – there was a huge variety of cars to check out, including a decent array of Aussie muscle, old and new. It was great to see Mark Grose and Brad Gardiner in their HTS – a Monaro and a ute respectively, both running nitrous-fed small-block Chevs – cutting laps all weekend. Over the 400m events these cars are tough to beat, but that’s about where they top out. Mark did suggest that the much smoother surface of Albany’s airstrip made him keen to come back next year with some taller gears to see what the old girl can do over the longer distances.

A new addition to this year’s Racewars was a Street Outlaws-styled, no-prep, eighth-mile drag racing event called Cash Days. The brainchild of Jordan Leist, it was a $100 buy-in and there were three