A Globetrotting Trip to Find a Guy
Called Gup, a Car as Big as Elvis and the Greatest Show on Earth.
Did you know…?
Holden is the Australian subsidiary of
General Motors.
The VB Commodore first went into production
in 1978.
According to DumbLaws.com it’s illegal to
walk on the right side of a footpath in Australia, and taxicabs are required to
carry a bale of hay in the trunk.
Australian actor Eric B. produced a
documentary title Love the Beast, which was about his relationship with his
first car, a ’74 Ford Falcon XB.
In
true Roadkill fashion, when the 727ci engine in Gup’s Holden got too hot, we
yanked the hood and kept on motoring. Burnouts were too easy in this thing.
There must be a law in Australia
stipulating any used-car purchase must include a Roots blower, because half of
the hot rods at Power cruise had aluminum lungs busting through the hood. How
do we know this? Because we were there. How did we get there? Good question. It
all began innocently enough: We wondered what would happen if we stuck our
1,160hp drag-boat motor into a hot rod and then drove it on the street. What
would 900lb/ft of naturally aspirated torque feel like if the tires managed to
hook up? Would the brute force break the rear tires loose on the freeway and
send up straight into the guardrail with a mix of sheer terror and joy on our
faces? We had to know, but we didn’t have a car to install the engine into that
wouldn’t twist into a pretzel from the shock of quad-digit power. Our engine also
runs on 118-octae Rockett Brand race fuel, so the experiment would be expensive
and short lived even if we wrecked the car immediately.
The idea went the way of the buffalo,
mostly gone but not forgotten; unit Marlan Davis interviewed Sonny Leonard of
Sonny’s Racing Components about his SRE 1,005ci engine (“Gaint!”, Sept. ’11).
Sonny mentioned that he had just built an all-aluminum, Hemo headed, 727 ci
big-block that made 1,275hp on pump gas and that a lunatic from Australia had
stuffed it into a Holden Commodore (think Pontiac G8) and was driving it on the
street. It gets better. This lunatic also supposedly put on a car show where
burnouts were the main attraction and that if we flew to Oz, he would let us
drive his freak show of a car and check out the Hot Rod culture Dorn Under,
firsthand, and on both coasts. It was a once-in-a-lifetime invitation, so we
packed our bags, grabbed our cameras, and braved the 20 hours of bad airline
food and zero legroom. It was an epic adventure that is now one of our Roadkill
Videos found on our company channel, YouTube.com/MotorTrend.
The man
We deplaned in Brisbane, Australia, after
watching the entire Batman movie trilogy and season 1 of Family Guy because we
couldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep during the redeye flight from Los
Angeles. We had no contact info for our host and didn’t know his real name,
only that people called him Gup. He met us in the terminal, maintained his
alias, and we apprehensively piled into his pickup. During the drive from the
airport to a local racetrack, we learned that Gup used to be a plumber, then a
real estate investor, and a drag racer, and a show promoter, but mostly he just
shows off like Bo Darville in Smokey and the Bandit, but without the “Look at
me, dammit!” attitude.
The hour-long drive to the Queensland
Raceways road course gave us plenty of time to jump out the window at the first
sign of trouble, but we stuck around to see if Gup was for real. The red
Commodore with the Sonny motor was on the other side of the continent, but his
even more famous car was waiting for us here. It’s a bright-green ’74 Holden HQ
four-door with a turbocharged, 540ci Chevy that makes 1,275hp to the tires.
That was a good sign. The block-long smoke show he put on for us at the track
sealed the deal. Gup was one of us, and this would indeed be the trip of a
lifetime. This first racetrack excursion would prove to be a mere layover
before our next uncomfortable flight across Australia that same day. Six hours
later with no sleep in 30-plus hours – we were in Perth on the west coast, home
of Babagallo Raceway and Power-cruise, the event that turned this plumber,
investor, racer, and show-off into an automotive god in Oz.
The show
Gup has managed to capture all the elements
of a Friday-night boulevard cruise and package them neatly into a weekend event
so everyone in Australia with a hot car can enjoy. This is by necessity because
the laws regarding vehicle modification in Oz are more oppressive than we’ve
encountered anywhere else on Earth. Tub your car and it’s considered a race car
that cannot be registered for street use again. Get caught doing a burnout and
your ride will be impounded. Do it again and the car gets crushed at the local
wrecking yard. Ouch. This ridiculous onslaught of anti-run laws prompted Gup to
seek out local road course owners who wouldn’t mind a few hundred hot rodders
laying some rubber on their racetrack. How popular is this deal? There are 13
Powercruise events across Oz and New Zealand each year, and Gup also brought
the shoe to Brainerd, Minnesota, in 2011, just to see it Americans could hang.
He said the Yanks were a bit stodgy on Friday and Saturday, but by Sunday they
got the hang of how to really drive their hot rods.
2009
HSV Clubsport R8
What’s the big deal? It’s just another car
show, right? Wrong. Imagine cruising you rod with friends hanging out the
window, trolling for chicks on a warm summer night. At the a stoplight, a chump
throws some revs, and when the light goes green, you hit it and see who’s got
the hotter car. After that, it’s back to the drive-in for some bungers and
burnouts. That’s Powercruise, but with a twist. There are no cops here, just an
open road course and hour-long cruising sessions. The cars hit the track in
waves, cruising next to each other and drifting around the corners with
passengers buckled in and shooting videos out the windows. As the cars approach
the last corner before the front straight, they slow down, pair up, and have an
impromptu drag race right in front of the crowd, then make another lap and do
it all over again. Some guys go fast, others see how far they can haze the rear
tires for the crowd, and others are legitimately drifting classic Australian,
American, German, and Asian four-door iron.
In between the cruising sessions there are
other events to keep things moving. The power skid is a contest to see who can
do the longest rolling burnout without touching the brake pedal. It’s a test of
power and control because you get more props from the crowd and the judges for
keeping your car moving in a straight line without using you binders. There is
also an arm-drop drag race down the front straight and freestyle, donut cutting
burnout contest where the winner is usually the driver who ate up the most real
estate in the infield and ended up on fire. At some events, the winner gets 50
grand cash! (At the time we were there, an Australian dollar was worth $1.05)
Gup
bought this monster-size turbo for his other Holden and named it Elvis for
obvious reasons.
The difference between this event and an
American car show is that everyone participates. The norm is to show up with
multiple spare sets of rollers to burn up, and nobody spends any significant
time with their Arse in a lawn chair. When the cars are in the paddock, they’re
serviced for the next cruise session or event not polished for a judge. When
they’re out on the track, they are sideways and destroying cheap rubber for
fun. It’s the ultimate expression of vehicular violence, and it’s not for the
faint of heart. We saw a Roll-Royce race a Datsun 240Z around the chicane and
then nearly saw off the 240 on the front straight, if that gives any indication
of the variety of metal at this deal.
The car
In a move that showed enormous trust, Gup
tossed us the keys to his ’06 Holden Comodore HSV VE Clubsport R8. This is the
platform the Pontiac G8 was based on, and moniker denotes the optional brake,
suspension, and appearance upgrades on this car versus a stocker, and it’s not
cheap at $70K. On its own, the HSV is a big deal in OZ. Turbocharge the factory
LS3 engine, and you’ll get noticed. Stuff a Sonny Leonard engine into this
particular model of automobile, and you have achieved something never before
seen. The 727 gives this car mythical aura in Australia, and car nuts will
break their necks to get a glimpse of it. It’s styled like a modern tuner car
but somehow stops pedestrians in their tracks like nothing we’ve ever driven,
which is interesting because nothing on the outside of the car scream, “Hey!
Look! There’s a 727ci Sonny Leonard motor in this thing!” except, maybe, a pair
of stickers if you can decode the numbers.
This
is Powercruise. The norm is four-doors and a big blower producing enough smoke
to choke a dingo. In the background, you can see the line of cars coming down
into the final before they pair up for the front-straight drag race.
Hi Torque Performance required a mere three
weeks and $80,000 to handle the drivetrain installation, wiring and plumbing mods,
suspension upgrades, and chassis fab. The stock six-speed was swapped for a
Power-glide with a 2,000-rpm lockup converter, and the engine and trans combo
were mated to a 1-inch dropped front cross member. Fitting the custom 27/8-inch
header primary tubes around the factory steering was not easy; the rack had to
be lowered and the intermediate shaft modified. The monster, 41/2-inch
collectors just barely fit under the floor. The shop also upgraded the factory
IRS with a Strange 9-inch center-section and custom half shaft. A custom
aluminum radiator barely keeps up with the engine, and most of the original
computer systems are still in place. The ABS module is hidden behind one of the
headlights. The stock gauge cluster is there, and the traction control system
curtails some of the fun if you leave it engaged. Rolling stock is 22s for the
street and 20s at the track with 20x8-inch VE GTS wheels and Nitto 245/35s up
front and 20x9.5s out back with 305/30 Mickey Thompsons trying to keep up with
all that power.
This
was the scene at every stop during our trip. Pop the hood to check on the beast
and local climbed all over each other to get a look at the SRE engine.
The engine
There’s only so far you can bore a
big-block Chevy with conventional, 4.840-inch bore spacing before it leaks
water (cast-iron block) or the sleeves go out of round from the intense
cylinder pressure (cast-aluminum block) in a boosted or nitrous application.
Depending on whom you ask, that max bore number is about 4.6150 inches for most
aftermarket blocks. Beyond that, the best blocks aren’t likely to maintain a
good ring seal, which leads to power loss, possible oil contamination in the
combustion chamber, and eventually, detonation and an untimely death for the
engine. The obvious solution is to increase the thickness of the cylinder walls
to prevent leakage and distortion, but the only way to do that is with a trick
interlocking cylinder liner arrangement (NewCenturyPerformance.com offers this
trick for its blocks) or by increasing the space between each bore, which is
how the aftermarket ended up with 5.0- and 5.3-inch bore-space blocks, and
ultimately, “mountain motors”. Sonny Leonard is one for the pioneers of the
mountain-motor movement, building Chevys up to 1,000ci in displacement for
tractor pull and Outlaw Pro Mod racing machines. These are the biggest, worst
car engines on the planet, with bores you can stick a grapefruit inside of and
cams that resemble baseball bats. He also builds a “street” engine, if you can
use that word for a 727ci engine that won’t fit in most muscle cars, and it
produces almost 1,275hp on 91 octane gas without a power-adder.
The
stylish is decidedly European, and were it not for the 727 under the hood, we
wouldn’t have taken a second look at this Holden. That would have been a
mistake because it’s a really well-sorted car, and even with the stock LS3
under the hood this HSV would be a hoot to drive.
The block is a cast0aluminum piece from
Brodix with a cam tunnel raised 1.00 inch above the stock Chevy location to
provide clearance for the 7.220-inch-long Carrillo steel rods. The bores
measure 4.750 inches in diameter, and with a 5.125-inch stroke, the Sonny
Bryant crankshaft has big enough swing to stop Earth’s rotation. The pistons
are from Diamond and feature a 1.200-inch compression height, Total Seal rings,
and a 0.032-inch top ring gap and a monster 0.040-inch second ring gap, which
sounds really large until you consider the giant bore. Compression checks in at
11.0:1 and it will run on junk 91-octane gas. A Moroso wet-sump pan and
external oil pump keep things lubed, and although a power steering pump, and
A/C compressor and a Meziere electric water pump are mounted to engine plates,
there is no vacuum pump present.
The heads are CNC-machined from a billet of
aluminum and feature 2.660-inch-diameter intake valves and 2.00-inch exhaust
valves. T&D 1.7:1 rocker arms combine with 0.500-inch-diameter Trend
pushrods, which measure 10.82 inches long for the intakes and 12.275 inches for
the exhaust, and yield more than an inch of valve lift from a 60mm LSM solid
roller. The cam specs out as follows: 283/300 degrees of duration at 0.050-inch
lift, 0.625-inch lift but installed at 114.75 degrees. The lifters are
0.937-inch0diameter keyway Iskys.
The
pinnacle of hot rodding: stuff the biggest engine you can afford into your car
and go have fun whether or not it makes sense.
An MSD Programmable Digital 7 box, a Jesel
front-drive distributor, Autolite AR3933 spark plugs, and MSD wires light the
fire. The induction system is topped off with a plastic intake, which SRE
designed in-house and had Forcast 3-D manufacture in Carlsbad, California. The
crown jewel is a four-barrel, 3,500-cfm throttle-body. RC Engineering injectors
spray the fuel, which comes from a surge tank plumbed to a MagnaFuel Electric
pump, which is plumbed to the factory fuel tank. A BigStuff3 computer manages
the ignition and fuel maps. The MSD is just there to work with the crank
trigger.
The high-tech wizardry culminates in a
727ci V8 that displaces more than two 350ci small-block in a ’76 Camaro. The
hemi is 35 inches wide and makes more than 1,200hp at 8,500 rpm. Not many cars
will swallow a bullet that big or do much with it if they could contain it.
The drive
Here’s the skinny: it runs hot, the
charging system is insufficient for long periods of idling, and the electric
exhaust cutouts castrate the hemi when they’re stuck closed. It’s a pooch to
drive on the street, though; the HSV is quiet and docile enough to roll up to a
gas pump and feed the tank swill without The Man taking notice. But it doesn’t
like to fire when the coolant temp breaks the 200-degree mark, which it does in
traffic, thanks to the trunk-mounted dual batteries, and the hemi did shut off
completely on us several times due to low voltage.
We
got used to driving on the wrong side of the car and the wrong side of the road
just in time to go home and nearly crash our truck on the way home from the
airport.
Aside from those indiscretions (and they do
detract from the Holden’s street-car status), this thing is a beast, a rocket
in a red candy wrapper capable of out-accelerating any other muscle car on the
road – if you’re already going 70 mph when you encounter a contender and roll
into the throttle during the race. Crack open the cutouts, and anything more
than half throttle at any speed turns the 20-inch Mickey Thompson ET Streets
into a tire that the local volunteer fire department couldn’t fight. It’s the
most unmanageable arrangement of torque application we’ve ever encountered and,
unless you’re trying to drag race the thing (we did, and we lost to a slower
car because this thing just won’t hook), it’s a hoot to wheel. The coilovers
and brakes are well sorted, so corners are a blast, and the drivetrain is
integrated into the car so well you’d swear it came from the factory that way.
Only the skateboard ramp on the hood gives you a clue that something violent is
happening below. It even has air conditioning, power steering, and the factory
six-speed shifter is still intact and operating the Power-glide trans. From
inside the cab, the only giveaway that something is amiss here is the momentary
button for the starter and a few randomly blinking gauge cluster idiot lights.
We did it!
Oh, and we found out the guy’s real name.
But we’re gonna stick with Gup.
We
left our mark all over Perth.
They
have 98-octane gas at the pump in Perth, which makes us want to run over every
gas pump in California when we have to fill up with 91. Then again, we aren’t
paying $7 a gallon for gas in Cali-yet.
Hit the Power-cruise in the U.S.!
The Power-cruise series has the kind of
action we’d love to see at Stateside shows, but promoters don’t seem to have
the guts for it. Expect Gup, who hosts one Power-cruise in the U.S., which
takes place July 12 – 14 in Brainerd, Minnesota. It’s one show where no one’s
gonna bust you for doing hard-core burnouts on the track.
