As I’m sure everyone knows by now there was a fatality from the weekends racing & my sympathies go out to the family of this young man.

It’s an unfortunate situation to lose a fellow participate at any event, especially one that in the years that I have competed puts a lot of emphasis & requirements on safety, both in regards to competitors cars being fit for purpose & the track side safety personnel.

Obviously an event like this is very special to us racers/gear-heads as it gives us an outlet & something to look forward to every year so that we can achieve & set new goals for ourselves. Even passengers get to experience what it’s like to be in a 1000+ whp car, the experience is something they don’t forget I’m told. 🙂

This year we went to the event with 3 cars with the hopes of achieving 200mph (322kph) for all 3, I got there with my own car running 324kph on my first run sunday morning, my Dad managed to run a very ugly 321 before the incidents occurred & the event was eventually cancelled.

My Dad was already waiting in line for his 3rd run along with my older brother Greg just a few cars behind in my car since “the spare” broke the torque converter bolts on the saturday & we were unable to repair it that night, however before it broke it was just as quick (actually quicker over the 400m) then even my own thanks to it’s smaller turbo’s providing much quicker spool up.

With the event cut short & my early run achieving a decent enough standing, albeit nothing greater then some of the previous day’s 800m speeds achieved by other competitors it was a somewhat hollow victory taking out the 3rd fastest overall & fastest v8 trophies.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded a majority of trimmed down camera footage to youtube already and have them in the Racewars 2019 playlist.

RACEWARS 2018 – event has come and gone & people definitely stepped it up this year with 11 cars going over 300kph over the standing 1000m.

For the Team of TorqueUP cars that attended, there was breakages just before & at RW18 so while we did get some fantastic results. We will be back again next year targeting 200mph (321kph) in a couple of cars.

Breakages: The 1st casualty came in with my vy ss ute a week before RW with the reluctor wheel slipping on the crank, effectively stopping the motor from running at all. It’s now getting dialled back into the correct position and tig welded into place.

It had gone repeatable 750+ whp with a stock 6l80e on a measly 12 psi of boost thanks to a couple of GTX35’s.

However with such little time to pull the motor & fix, we chose to replace it with a N/A 416ci LS3 that was then tuned up to 480whp. We didn’t change diff ratios so it was always going to be a struggle for it to pull high top speeds with the long gearing. But it made it through the event and drove back on to the trailer.

My own drag car with its new All Fast Converter was looking good and very fast until it snapped the input shaft around lunch time Saturday, so we made the decision to come back home (380km trip each way) and swap in a spare t400 gearbox. We left RW at a little over 1pm and were back on the road heading back to Albany just after 8pm.

Unfortunately, the 2nd gearbox was just as weak as the 1st and on the first run Sunday morning on the shift into 3rd it broke the input shaft again, effectively killing any chances of a return to the track.

My Dad’s drag car killed an alternator on Saturday too, but it’s had 3 years of hard living, so we had a spare picked up and delivered to home for me and my brother to bring back when we returned the previous night and was installed first thing Sunday morning.

With my own car out of action it allowed me time to spend tweaking the boost/tune on my Dad’s & other customer cars.

Now the good news:
The stand out of course was my Dad’s drag car, it too was also sporting a new converter from the team at All Fast, identical to my own & with the same tyres & gearing. It proceeded to run a 301.95kph pass over the rolling 800m so it was looking good for the 1000m standing starts.

1000m Results:
Run 1:
308.89 km/h – 18.891 s
Run 2:
308.80 km/h – 19.857 s
Run 3:
310.67 km/h – 19.069 s
Run 4:
311.38 km/h – 18.971 s

Now the thing to take into consideration is that after Run 1, I jumped in and did a pass under my own racing number, well 2 actually but I aborted the 1st run after I smoked the tyres through 2nd gear and ended up in the far-right lane. The good run netted me a 314.96 km/h – 18.593s pass.

My older brother then had a go with run 2 with Dad following up with runs 3 & 4 for the day.

The next big heavy hitter was my friend Roger in his 2010 Camaro, with the car left alone until Sunday for the 1000m event, he did multiple high 280’s then mid 290kph passes before one his precision turbo’s gave up a seal again and proceeded to dump oil straight into the exhaust.

His car runs a built 6l80e with twin 6266’s on a forged ls3 with another All Fast converter.

Next was another customer with a little MP1900, 6lt Monaro taking out the 8 cylinder blown class with a couple of 260kph passes.

The last, but definitely not least cars were Driven to/from the event being that of Rick & Rob with their Blown Ls7 Corvette/Camaro, being stock’ish factory LS7’s they are not exactly happy to take a lot of boost (fuel supply limited also) so both run a max of about 6psi.

The Corvette did a couple of 252kph runs before a rear tyre puncture called the end to his racing & Rob in his Black Camaro also did a PB of 252kph just behind Rick’s Z06.

As for the ute, well it kind of got parked after we had done the 300+ runs, with less than half the power of the drag car, it’s a pretty boring & slow run.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the Racewars 2017 event in Albany & boy was it a great weekend.

Along with my dad & brother we had 3 cars entered, They were:

VE SS A6 with Cam’d & Magnacharge’d 2300 – My Dad’s
VE SS M6 – 402ci LS2/ETP Heads & Harrop 2300 – Brothers
VX Drag Car – 410ci Twin Turbo/TH400 – Mine

My Dad’s car performed flawlessly all weekend & became the stand in when my brothers car died, but there was still a decent photo taken of them together before it did, lol.

Now with my brothers car,  about the 4th or 5th run on the saturday the engine developed a severe miss and shake when running, after pulling the plugs out and finding 1 of them severely damaged (Cylinder 2) we put it on the trailer. 

We didn’t know how bad the damage was going to be until we got it back home and pulled the heads off anyway.

However during the weeks since racewars & between working on it, it was mentioned online that during cleanup the racewars crew had picked up the head of a valve albeit squashed and bent off the runway.

Considering the state of the plug, we were pretty certain it was “ours” & then as sure night comes after day, That’s exactly what we found when we pulled the head off the drivers side. Valve stems still in place by the new springs at least…

Wait a minute, something doesn’t look right….Along with the combustion chamber for that cylinder, the piston had taken a beating. Luckily the bore doesn’t looked to have sustained any major damage, but we haven’t gotten the block off for machining/honing for the new pistons yet so the verdict on the block is unknown.

The annoying thing about all this, is before the event I had just spent a bunch of money on the new valve springs/seats/retainers as the old springs had been on for nearly 8 years or so & since the motor is mine it had been used in 2 of my previous car’s so it was well over due for freshen up.

The pistons i don’t really care about as we had already planned on changing them out after racewars anyway.

So with saturday kinda starting out pretty shit with my brothers car & me originally only planning on doing limited runs in my drag car to save it for the 1000m stuff. I ended up using it a lot more with some passenger rides & testing for the 1000m.

With my brother in the car for a couple of 800m roll-on’s we hit a high 292 & 298 so i was pretty confident of going over 300kph on the sunday. My “idea/plan” leading up to racewars was to get my 300 or more and then put it straight on the trailer, that way i wouldn’t be getting “greedy” with it especially since i still needed the car to compete at another drag racing event on the 22nd of April (3 days away as i write this).

On the Sunday for the 1000m standing starts & with the passenger seat removed the car seemed worse for traction especially for the first 300 meters, I was having to get off or feather the throttle but the 1st run got another 298kph at-least.

Thankfully the 2nd run at 2:29pm got slightly quicker at 302.58kph & with that it went straight on to the trailer.

That is.. When i made it back to the pits… as my battery had gone flat on the return road with the fans on.  As it turns out my alternator even before the event had started to show signs of being on the way out.

1 run fueling would be leaner then what i was commanding in the tune, the next run it would be fine or richer. So i started logging the ecu battery voltage and sure enough the voltage wasn’t consistent.

So i have now put in a new alternator and ran a new sense wire all the way to the battery in the rear & I have 14.6 volts at the battery with the car running vs 12.3v previously which is no good for my fuel pumps & the tune!

Obviously it would worsen depending on how long the car was running for, which at the Motorplex isn’t really that long at each event, but the 8-10 minute drive back through the dirt at Albany was a bit too long to be driving all the electrics.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed reading & watching my sum-what summarized view of the weekend from a racer’s perspective. We’ll be back in Albany again next year with hopefully a couple more of our own 300+kph capable car’s…

Stay Tuned

So the first of hopefully many future events was held over the weekend of the 7-8th of April just gone at a small town called Wyalkatchem about 200km’s east of the Perth cbd.

The event consisted of 2 days of racing at the local airstrip which is approximately 1540 meters long, with a live band for entertainment playing Saturday night at the local bowls club. Most if not all accommodation in town was booked out shortly after the event went on sale with a dedicated area set aside at the town oval for competitors & spectators alike to camp. However my dad, his friend & myself stayed at the Dowerin Pub/Motel a mere 30km’s away, and man do they make a killer surf & turf.

Anyway on with the event, Entries were limited to 200 competitors of which only about 175~180 turned up due to either breakages before the event or just not having vehicles complete in time. There was a regular entry fee of $250 or you could upgrade to VIP for another $250 all of which was non-refundable so as to provide a guaranteed financial kitty. I went VIP for 1 car and normal for the other as it allowed me to essentially “jump” the queue when I went out. Luckily for me I was upgraded to VIP for my second car at no additional cost. Which helped with the logistics side if i needed to work on either car or move camera’s around.

VIP entrants had a paved carpark and also got you a free lunch, access to the main airport building/toilets, tv and power to charge laptops/camera’s etc.

The main purpose of this event was to hold the standstill to 1000m timed event on the sunday, however it also consisted of roll on 400/800 drag racing on Saturday in which you could even have a passenger in the vehicle. Sunday then kicked off with the continuation of the 800 meter roll on racing again as the drivers preferred the roll on racing to the start lights as it meant less waiting time and more track time and helped those with high horsepower vehicles from spinning the wheels off the line for the first 400 meters 😉

Unfortunately during the sunday morning 800m roll on sessions Eddie from Active Automotive & a passenger in his yellow monaro had a roll over at around the 400 meter mark. I don’t know or want to guess what caused it, but luckily this particular car has a very decent roll cage that could take such an accident and both Ed & passenger were rescued pretty quickly by the onsite fire/ambo crews and were both walking around shortly after, However as a precaution they were airlifted back to Perth later in the day via RFDS.

Over both days there was a steady stream of spectators coming in and I’m lead to believe they had over 1700 spectators on the Saturday alone, with an additional 1300 on the sunday which is bloody incredible considering it’s at least a 2 hr drive just from Perth. Some competitors travelled around 1300km’s all up to compete so they were definitely keen.

We trailered 2 car’s there and I drove my VE there and back (including racing) with just an additional 20lt jerry can and still got back into Perth with over 1/4 tank.

Unfortunatly there was some issues with the timing equipment first thing sunday morning so one of my 1000m runs wasn’t timed (bugger as it was cooler and log showed more boost) than the afternoon run. Full results haven’t been released yet either but i asked for my data on the return to the pits. From memory my vy ute went 243kph vs 255kph in the VE, in which i have to take on face value for this year as the ute doesn’t hold a candle to the VE in power nor accelleration to have such a small margin. That and my logs for the same time show a much higher speed.