The Champ Is Here

Ladies and gentlemen, your reigning red centre nats grand champion!

- Andrew Broadley 

IT’S good to be king. And of the 750 entrants who assembled at this year’s sold-out Red CentreNATS extravaganza, Graham Miller’s mega-tough EH Premier, EHMAD, proved most worthy of claiming the crown jewels.

Grand Champion is the pinnacle award at Red CentreNATS, and if you’ve ever been, you’ll know that the event attracts some stonecold stunners. Just like at Street Machine Summernats, the RCN Grand Champion is awarded to the car that kills it in the judging and is then expertly wheeled in the driving events by its owner. Unlike Summernats, a key part of RCN is drag racing, so it was a handy thing that Graham’s EH came into the event with a PB that’s about as close to a nine as you can run without actually running a nine – a 10.002 at Willowbank, to be exact!

And the ever-reliable EH backed it up at Alice Springs Inland Dragway, reeling off another 10.0sec pass to finish first among the Grand Champ contenders. Couple that with an impressive third-place finish in the motorkhana and a second in the grass events, and it’s easy to see that the title went to a properly fast car that’s also a genuine driver. Graham reckons he doesn’t fancy himself as a wheelman, but the results say otherwise!

The EH is an older build – the owner-applied Toyota Ice Blue paint job and leather-trimmed Premier interior have been in place for 13 years – so it was unlikely that Graham could rely solely on the car’s show credentials to get the win, and he knew he would have to bring the noise in the driving events.