BLAKE JEFFREYS
BLAKE Jeffreys took a hard-fought win in the K&N Dial Your Own class in his VK Commodore, edging out Daniel ‘Gizmo’ Grima’s ’55 Chev by the slimmest of margins on the final day at Adelaide International Raceway. Blake had the car running with clockwork consistency all week, despite wildly varied weather and track conditions.
The car itself is a seriously impressive piece of kit that’s way more than the sum of its parts. Its carby-fed LS3 engine is internally standard except for an aftermarket camshaft, and while the car has run as quick as 10.18 over the quarter back home in Western Australia, Blake and the VK maintained mid-10-second pace throughout Drag Challenge.
“It ran 10.58 on the first day so we set our dial-in there,” Blake says. “We normally run 4.11:1 diff gears, but we put 3.7s in for the trip so it’d be a bit more comfy and easier with fuel consumption. The car ran faultlessly aside from getting a bit hot on the first day, so we pulled the grille out and it dropped about 20 degrees Fahrenheit – still warm, but it wasn’t overheating.”
Blake’s strategy was to pull some timing out of the car on Day One to leave some headroom to add power back in if he found himself off the pace at any given track. At Mildura it took a bunch of laps to nail the dial-in, but at Swan Hill he managed to land right in the ballpark on the second pass.
“It was really satisfying to win DYO; I was stoked to be honest,” Blake says. “My goal was to get in the top five, but to come away with the win was awesome, and I didn’t expect it. After the second day I was in fifth and I hoped to maintain that; then I jumped to second after Swan Hill and got excited because it’s really hard to bridge that gap. I tried to do as many passes as I could on Day Five in Adelaide before the rain hit, but it was a shock to hear my name called at the presentation because I didn’t know how everyone else did.”
One of the few entrants who competed in Drag Challenge without a trailer in tow, Blake instead opted for a roof rack stocked with tyres, tools and spares. Not only did this make the cruising legs of Drag Challenge far easier, but it also got around the logistics of towing the VK and a box trailer across from Perth.
The win was a genuine team effort, and Blake was keen to thank everyone who contributed: “Massive thanks to my brothers Jay and Scott, my dad, my mate Robin and my mate Blake in Adelaide.”