DRAG CHALLENGE 2018

MORE THAN 200 ENTRANTS FRONTED AT CALDER PARK TO TAKE ON STREET MACHINE DRAG CHALLENGE 2018. LITTLE DID WE KNOW WE’D SEE SOME OF THE QUICKEST RACING IN THE EVENTS FIVE-YEAR HISTORY.

All the stories, smashed records and stove-hot pace from SM Drag Challenge 2018

IT SEEMS everyone with a keyboard has an opinion of what a ‘street car’ is, so, as the internet rages about who has the quickest street car in Australia, more than 200 punters brought their street machines to Calder Park on Melbourne’s north-west outskirts on 11 November. They were there to go through scrutineering for Street Machine Drag Challenge 2018, a torture test of street-registered cars that sees entrants run at five tracks in five days, with no support cars or car carriers.

Drag Challenge stands as attempt to separate street-registered drag cars from genuine street cars by making entrants race hard before driving hundreds of kilometres over rough country roads, and in the rain or hot late-spring temperatures. Basically, grout-filled blocks and token rego plates won’t last.

One notable absentee was Quentin Feast’s Torana, with the three-time DC champ opting to sit out 2018. However, in his place there was a bumper field of contenders lining up. Heavy hitters going for the win included last year’s runner-up Mark Drew in his ‘Crusty’ Torry, Harry Haig in his ‘Shonky’ big-block HQ, Drag Challenge Weekend winner Mark Van Der Togt in his XW Falcon, and Drag Challenge newbie Frank Marchese in his FAIRXW Fairmont that went 7.00@203mph shortly before DC kicked off.

There were plenty of naysayers who reckoned Frank’s XW wouldn’t last more than a couple of days at Drag Challenge, with the strain of towing a trailer over more than 1300km of rough outback roads likely to break

the lightning-fast, leaf-sprung Fairmont. But this is all part of the challenge, and one reason DC entrants spend as much time as possible testing their combos in the lead-up.

Twenty-sixteen winner Brenden ‘Bubba’ Medlyn was looking to put his engine woes from last year behind him and his VH Commodore was in rude form a couple of weeks out from the event. But then he grenaded a Powerglide while testing at Swan Hill, fragging the converter and trans cooler, and setting fire to the car. A respray of the passenger side of the car was required, along with plenty of rewiring, but Bubba and the All Race crew mucked in, got it done and fronted at Calder Park on Sunday for scrutineering, though he wasn’t the only one who’d thrashed to be there.

A week out from Drag Challenge and MPW Performance’s Adam Rogash looked to be cruising as he prepared his ALLSHOW VK Commodore. But some decidedly terrible noises from the front of the twinturbo LS after a test ’n’ tune on the Friday night saw the MPW crew ripping the nose of the car apart to repair a stuffed gear drive and timing chain, and they made it to scrutineering on bugger-all sleep.

The tweaking and prep continued well into Sunday night as everyone got ready to put it all on the line for five consecutive days of racing and road-trippin’ madness. While it was the fifth running of the event, even a seasoned veteran could not have predicted how close the racing would be!

ABOVE: Chris Imlach raced his 1962 Chevy Nova at last year’s Drag Challenge with a stocker LS1. This year he stepped it up with a pair of turbos but left just about everything else stock, so he did the week with his fingers crossed hoping the thing would hang together. A mid-week switch to E85 fuel and a tune from Mark Drew saw ETS fall to 11s down the quarter and nines in the 1000ft by week’s end Taswegians Marcus Howe and Mark Whitla each have a Bedford tow vehicle and used them to haul their fast Fords to Calder for the start of DC. Both boys ran the entire week without trailers, and after fellow Tasmanian Tim Sullivan (see p169) blew his wild HJ ute up on his final pass at Calder, good guy Marcus drove his Falcon all the way back home so that the stricken ute could be taken back to Tassie on the back of the Bedford. Top stuff!

ABOVE: 2018 was Mark Mills’s second crack at DC in his 2Jz-powered LH Torana, and he came out with a super-strong 10th-place finish in the Haltech Radial Blown class, with a PB pf 9.02@153mph on Day Two at Swan Hill