AMERICAN BEAUTY
Jarrod Wood’s head-kicking radial Corvette is set to show the Yanks a thing or two
AS THE sun began to set over Bradenton Motorsports Park in Florida, the golden light caught Jarrod Wood’s Radial vs The World Corvette. To me, it looked like performance as sculpture, an artwork of speed. If drag racing has a reputation for vehicles that move as fast as they look, this Corvette looked ready to enter hyperspace.
Jarrod was first drawn into drag racing when he decided to compete in Street Machine Drag Challenge 2016, and it didn’t take long for the Victorian to make an impression. He built an HQ One Tonner specifically for the event, and by week’s end he’d run Drag Challenge’s quickest-ever pass up to that time (see sidebar, page 63). The bug had well and truly bitten. “I’d had cars, but never drag cars,” Jarrod says, “and after running Drag Challenge I just wanted to go faster.”
The burgeoning radial racing scene then drew Jarrod’s attention. The growth of this wild genre of drag racing has been hard to miss over the past decade, having perhaps the greatest impact on Doorslammer racing since the advent of Pro Mod.
“Radial racing is pure excitement, because you don’t know what is going to happen,” Jarrod says. “There’s no wheelie bars; there’s big power – it’s so good.”
The HQ Tonner had delivered faithfully at Drag Challenge, but at 4380lb, the Quey had too much weight for radial racing, where getting the car moving at a dead hook is the priority. So in 2017, Jarrod went in search of a more evolved race car, and found Kevin Mullins’s Ford Mustang for sale. The car was a former world record holder, having run a 4.11@193mph pass at Lights Out 5 in 2014 – when the record was still a 4.19.
Jarrod tested the car in the USA before shipping it back to Australia. At the time, the race was on for the first three-second pass on radial tyres Down Under. The heavy hitters of the class were all chasing the mark, including Perry Bullivant, Matthew Grubisa and Daniel Pharris in Kyle Hopf’s Camaro.
With some more development from both Jarrod and Mullins’s TKM Performance, the Mustang tore up the record books once again when it delivered the first three-second pass in Australian radial-tyre history with a 3.99@196mph at the Kenda Radial Riot in September 2018.
“That was pretty cool to do,” Jarrod says. “Kevin was there, which made it even more special. It was a bit different in the car because you don’t get to see the startline, but from what I was told everyone was jumping around and going nuts, so it was pretty good to be the first.”
With that item checked off his list, Jarrod was quickly off to the USA to compete in the 2018 running of No Mercy, where he drove Bill Schurr’s mad Hemi-powered Jeep in the X275 class.
He followed up in March 2019 by shipping the Mustang back to the States to take part in the unique Sweet 16 event in Georgia – one of drag racing’s few equivalents of a payper-view show, with spectator tickets limited to an expensive few and the race broadcast online. Since its record Australian pass, the Mustang had been lightened and equipped with a Fueltech FT600, and at Sweet 16 Jarrod clocked a 3.83@205mph in one of the oldest cars in the field. It was proving a reliable steed, but then a deal that was too good to refuse came up.
“Another one of Kevin’s good mates and customers had a new Corvette in the build, and he asked me if I wanted to buy it,” Jarrod says. “He realised it was going to be a bit too much work to run something like that; it’s not a holiday. I said to Kevin that I was keen if he was keen.”
The C7 Corvette was a full tube-chassis build right from the start, providing a modern base for the copious amounts of horsepower
RADIAL RACING IS PURE EXCITEMENT, BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. THERE’S NO WHEELIE BARS; THERE’S BIG POWER – IT’S SO GOOD