INSIDE THE WORLD’S QUICKEST STREET CAR!
NUTOUT COMMODORE + FIVE-SECOND STREET CAR
ORE D O M M WILD CAOLLTHE WAY! GOES
+ ’57 GASSER
FEB. 2020 ISSUE 177
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MEGA-TOUGH CHEVELLE, PLUMPTON’S 5-SECOND PASS, KIWI-NEW PLYMOUTH, DIY HOOD-SCOOPTECH, AND MORE
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ISSUE 177 ∞ FEBRUARY 2020
NG I Y L F H G HI ’57 CHEV
contents FEBRUARY 2020
The Cars
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26: BLAZE OF GLORY — THE PERFECT ANGRY GINGER 34: FAST EDDIE — HIGH-FLYIN’ ’57 CHEV 66: WAR AND PEACE — WORLD’S QUICKEST STREET CAR 82: A TRUE ’60S NZ SURVIVOR — PLYMOUTH PERFECTION 114: REAL HANDY — 640HP CHEVELLE
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Events
46: SELWYN MOTOR FEST 76: MD DIRT DRAGS 122: ENZED CMC ROUND THREE
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The Other Stuff
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04: SHORT SHIFT 08: NEWS 10: JUST QUICKLY 20: DAILY GRIND 22: IN THE BUILD 24: EVENTS 42: SUBSCRIBE AND WIN 44: STRAIGHT TALK 60: DRAGGED UP 62: NZ’S QUICKEST 64: AEROFLOW RACE DIARY 90: SOCIAL SCENE 92: CONCEPT CORNER 126: CMC NEWS 128: CARGO 132: A DECADE AGO 134: LOCAL SPECIALISTS 136: COMING NEXT MONTH
Special Features
14: SHELBY IS COMING — EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW 54: RECORD-BREAKER — BEHIND PLUMPTON’S FIVE-SECOND RUN 94: GETTING VENTED — DIY HOOD-SCOOP TECH 102: BATHURST BEGINNER’S GUIDE — ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW 108: DREAM SHED — A KALEIDOSCOPE OF V8S
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FEATURE 2000 HOLDEN VT COMMODORE SS CAR
WORDS: CONNAL GRACE PHOTOS: BRODIE GEERLINGS
WHEN HAYDEN WILBY GOT THE OPPORTUNITY TO COMPETE IN THE BURNOUT MASTERS AT SUMMERNATS, HE KNEW HE’D HAVE TO BRING HIS COMMODORE UP TO SPEED, AND HE MIGHT JUST HAVE NAILED IT …
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SPECIAL NZ’S FIRST FIVE-SECOND SLAMMER FEATURE
INTERVIEW: TODD WYLIE PHOTOS: STRONG STYLE PHOTO, LANCE FARROW
THE BIGGEST GOAL IN NEW ZEALAND DRAG RACING HAS JUST BEEN ACHIEVED. WE MEET THE MAN WHO RAN THE FIRST FIVE-SECOND DOORSLAMMER PASS: BARRY PLUMPTON NZV8: First of all, congratulations; you must be stoked! Barry Plumpton: Cheers, yeah we are; it’s a great achievement. You’ve always played down the five-second number as being a goal. Why was that? We just go out there to better ourselves each time; that was one of the great things about when we went racing in Australia. We go out there to learn: run a PB, learn, look at the data, go back again — it challenges us. We all look at the data together and try to figure stuff out. There’s nothing more rewarding than making a small change, going out there, and having what you diagnosed work and you go better. A lot of people get hung up on achieving that five — and it was cool; we’re pretty stoked to have done it, obviously — but there are other things that are more important. You go racing to have fun, and when you do well, have a win or a good number, that’s what makes it all worth it. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, that’s bracket racing and that’s not what we enjoy. Speaking of Aussie, ever since then, the car’s had a noticeable improvement in its PB; what happened over there, and how did you get to that point? We made some changes, got some advice, and worked with it last season. We had Terry Bowden set up the car a bit differently, and just changed a few
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things — not much; we were concentrating last year on 60-foot times. Winning a championship was a bit of a fluke — it was never a target; we didn’t even run the last meeting with the Camaro, we just used the Monte Carlo. That was always going to happen, just to be in support of the Kiwi Thunder series, as I was pushing for that as a stepping stone to the unified series that is now happening. So, really, just the 60-foot education that we had last year was good; we applied that. At Sydney, the track is a bit better further out and it holds the power better. The good thing about the tracks in Australia, Sydney in particular, is the width of the prepared track. If you get a little loose in New Zealand, your run can be over; whereas, if you get a little loose in Australia, you can try [to] just keep your foot in it and drive it back towards the centre line. That’s something both Meremere and Masterton are working towards: Meremere with the reverse rubber, and Masterton with four of their guys going over to Sydney while we were there and spending some time with the track crew; I think they learned a lot. So it’s not the width of the tarmac itself, just the width of the prepped area? Correct, the area that’s prepped and the way it’s prepared. The start line at Meremere on the weekend wasn’t too bad. You’ve raced at every track around New Zealand;
how do you find the difference between tracks, and do you have to change much on the set-up of the car? With nitrous, we’ve got the ability to finetune some things. There’s advantages and disadvantages; the disadvantage for us is that when we have to lift and pedal the car a little bit, our power all shuts down, and it takes a while to come back again. With a blown car or a turbo car, it’s pretty much still there. So, going from track to track, we concentrate on our short times. If we can get the car to move, then we stand a good chance at running the eighth-mile in under four seconds, then hopefully out the back door. We change something in most runs; it’s not like we have a Meremere set-up and a Masterton set-up — those are the only two tracks we can race on now. They’re pretty much similar; it just depends on the day, the heat, the amount and quality of the rubber that’s been down before you, and whether it’s Group One cars or street car tyres ripping it up. We don’t specifically tune for a track, although we have data from both; it’s more about the level of track prep, the heat, and the day. We have a traction meter to give us a guide as to how good the track is, and — without giving numbers out, because they won’t really mean anything to others — it can vary by 50 per cent on the day at the same track. It can change quite a lot with the temperature and the prep and rubber.
You’ve not been around the drag racing scene as long as some of your competition, so it’s been a pretty intensive learning curve for you! Possibly, yeah; I guess I’ve been out there around 10 years, but I used to race a bit years and years ago. It’s about learning your car and understanding your car. I don’t pretend to be a tuner, and wouldn’t touch anyone else’s car, but I do have a good understanding of mine. You get that from repeat passes, recording information, making changes, and learning what effect those changes make. A lot of teams have imported overseas knowledge/assistance, but you’ve chosen not to? Yeah, we have, but I could pick up the phone now and then and ring someone for a bit of advice. If you were to have a tuner, you’d want them at the track. What you see and feel is what you adjust to. We’re lucky, we’ve got a good handle on the base tune — then it’s just the finer tuning to get the car off the start line and out past the 60-foot mark. Once we’ve got that, we’ve got a good tune and it’ll be a good pass.
Would you run us through the specs of the car? It’s a ’68 Jerry Bickel Camaro, built in about 2009, so it’s not a new chassis by any means, but Jerry Bickel stuff is good quality, and I’m told it hasn’t changed a lot over the years. It’s a mediumlength wheelbase; it’s not a 115-inch one, which they all seem to be today. It runs a 959ci Pat Musi nitrous motor with a lock-up Bruno converter drive and Lenco transmission. We have five stages of nitrous in it, but we don’t run five yet. The number of stages you’ve got doesn’t really mean much; you could have 20 stages, but it’s really about how big they are. You could have one big stage, which could spray in more than we do. So, it is set up off a timer? Yeah, timer set-up at the moment; you can do it different ways, timer and rpm, but we run off the timer. Being a nitrous car, you’re the odd one out in Top Doorslammer racing here. What was behind the push towards nitrous rather than a supercharger like everyone else?
I blame Dave Moyle for that. It was just a progression from my HQ street car, which had a supercharger and we added nitrous. It was just what I was enjoying, and when we brought the Monte Carlo in from overseas, it was a nitrous car. I like watching nitrous cars and I love big cubic inch motors, and it was something different. Why do something the same as everybody else? When you first brought the Camaro in, what were people saying? Did they think you’d ever have success with it? We had mixed comments, some very favourable, some not. That motivates me. A couple of people said it would never get off the start line in New Zealand, but we ran a 0.961-second 60-foot last year, which I think is pretty stout by New Zealand standards. We have worked really, really hard at that. The challenges that were effectively made to us by people saying we couldn’t do it is something that I live to; I like challenges, taking them on and trying to conquer them. So that’s pretty much what we did last year, just improving our 60-foots, down into that 0.960–0.970 area. How much of that has been in chassis set-up and how much is engine? Everybody’s got power — there’s half a dozen cars that could run five-second passes — it’s just a matter of learning how to use it, getting it set up right, having a bit of luck, and getting it to stick on the day. So, for us, we’ve got the power obviously, and so have the others; it’s just working on those finer incrementals and getting everything to work right. Since we’ve had the car, we’ve changed tyre size; we’ve changed ratios in the transmission; we’ve changed the timing the nitrous comes on; and stuff like that; we’ve changed chassis height, four links, shock settings — we’ve changed a lot. All those little things, you change one at a time and you learn what it does. So, we try as much as we can to change only one thing at a time, and then see the result. If you change two things, you might be going forwards and backwards at the same time and not notice any difference.
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FEATURE 1972 VAUXHALL VICTOR (REPLICA) CAR
WORDS: KEVIN SHAW PHOTOS: MATT WOODS PHOTOGRAPHY, SHANE T, SHAKER SALMABAD, WAYNE ALLMAN
ANDY FROST’S GOAL WAS TO BUILD THE WORLD’S QUICKEST AND FASTEST STREET CAR. WITH A RECENT 263MPH PASS, HE’S HALFWAY THERE!
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ive-second street car. Just think about that for a minute. A car that is 100-per-cent street legal and can run the quartermile in less than six seconds! It seems impossible, but there are now four of them on the planet — three in the US and now one in the UK. On 13 November this year, Andy Frost joined this elite club with a 5.95-second pass at 260mph, becoming the fourth member and in so doing smashing the old speed record held by Jeff Lutz
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by 9mph, proving that he has one of the quickest door cars on the planet. To put this elite group’s achievements in perspective, there have been three times as many people walk on the moon as have driven a street-legal car to a sub-six-second pass. None of the cars involved has had a budget like NASA, either! This type of success does not come easily or by accident but through levels of hard work, determination and self-sacrifice that not many could endure. And this is why so few
have even attempted building a car like this — not that Andy and wife Deb could have ever imagined what was in store for them when they bought their original Victor for £60 back in 1981. Its evolution began when the asthmatic four-banger was replaced with a six and then a Rover V8. When the drag racing bug bit hard around 32 years ago, a small block Chev went in, then nitrous, then a big block. At that stage, the Frosts ran the car, known then as ‘RedVictor1’, to consistent low nines at
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FEATURE 1961 PLYMOUTH BELVEDERE CAR
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WORDS: ANDREW JOHNSTON (INVERCARGILL)  PHOTOS: CORY VARCOE
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MICHAEL HOOD DIDN’T NEED TO FIND HIS DREAM CAR … IT’S BEEN WITH HIM MOST OF HIS LIFE!
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e are so lucky as car crazies living in New Zealand. It’s relatively easy to import a cool car from almost anywhere in the world — especially from the land of the V8s, the good ol’ US of A. Most imported cars have a cool backstory, but what’s cooler than an American car that was ordered and bought new in the ’60s by your parents and has remained in the family ever since?
In 1961, Michael Hood’s father, Mitty Hood, ordered his new Plymouth Belvedere with a 313 Poly (5.2-litre) V8, through Motor Sales and Service in Gore for £2150. It was a very different choice from all the Aussie and English cars that were coming into the country at the time, not to mention a big investment (you could purchase a 1961 Holden for only £700 and a good house would set you back about £1500). The car began its journey through
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