In Drag Racing•February 15, 2023•6 Minutes

Street Machine Drag Challenge with DC Tuning – Day 2

Its still raining

We woke up fairly early on Monday morning to the result of an unbroken night of rain. Rain and Drag racing are like Mexican food and tight jeans – a disaster waiting to happen. With nothing but grey clouds in sight we hopped, full of hope into our rides and headed off on our way.

See ya Albury. We’ll be back.

In good news, the rain that had saddened us all night seemed to exist purely over Albury. Almost as soon as we crossed outside the town border, it was a sun-fest and definite mood booster.

I don’t really remember how long we were driving for before we got the call but it wasn’t that long. It was something along the lines of “i’ve lost one of the wheels on my trailer.” The caller was Whit, and this was the first of a series of unfortunate events for him over the next few days.

Its hard to tell someone where you are on a highway! After some back and forth as to where Whit and Jake actually were, we found them pulled over on the side of the road missing not only the tyre and wheel but also the studs. Where were they? Well, they left the trailer at 110 km/h, so probably in orbit by now.

Roadside repairs

Whit’s trailer is double axle, so 4 wheels. Each wheel has 4 studs. Using some pretty advanced mathematics, 4 x 4 = 16, but we’d lost all 4 on the houdini wheel giving us a remainder of 12. Being that 12 wheel studs evenly distributes across 4 wheels 3 times, we set about removing a stud from each of the remaining wheels. The math checked out, the safety however was very questionable.

Our plan was to, at a bare minimum, get to the closest Supercheap Auto or <insert seller of wheel studs here> so that we could un-bodgy what we’d bodgied and get safely back on our way

With each wheel rocking 3 studs, we were off!

After successfully making it to Supercheap Auto (but parking in front of an Officeworks), with a newly acquired full complement of wheel studs we were back on the road!

The next few hours were pretty uneventful, apart from hitting a large pothole which caused the HJ to shift sideways on the trailer. We ugga'dugga'd it down a little better. Onward.

Some time later

So, I didn’t really take many more photos for the rest of this day, but that wasn’t to say nothing happened.

We arrived at Heathcote Park Raceway all in one piece. Hooray! First order of business was to take the cars off the trailers and drive them over for scrutineering.

Here we encountered a problem. The HJ wouldn’t start, or if it did it was for a few seconds at most. We spent a few hours at the track trying to diagnose this. The boys from Serrone Motorsports came to help, along with Kyle with his 2JZ Cressida, who I learnt were part of our crew. More photos of them later!

To condense this story into only a few lines, the rain that we’d experienced heading into, and out of Albury had made its way fairly significantly into the HJ’s interior via any means it could. To be honest though, there were plenty of means available. A lot of the interior had been gutted (because Drag Car) specifically behind the dash, which gave the scuttle panel on the outside of the car, direct access to the inside of the car. Water is sneaky.

We were lucky enough to be able to tow the car through scrutineering and get it passed with the intent on fixing the issue afterwards.

We took it back to our accomodation and began a plug-by-plug drying session with the assistance of Whit’s onboard air compressor. I do not want to underplay this event. This was many, many hours of loom cutting, splicing. plug drying, plastic insert inserting and JD Double consuming. Any previous rain access was removed with the 8th wonder of the world, duct tape.

It worked. She fired up and a celebratory 2 step test was performed. Everyone at the caravan park that was there for Drag Challenge was excited. The poor souls that were there for a holiday probably were not.

Dinner at the local club.

Bed.