Ready To Launch

POR440 Gets Its Arse Into Gear Ahead of Usa Marathon

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THE decision to take POR440 to Hot Rod Drag Week in the USA was a big one. I’ve been down this road before, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that can derail the best-laid plans – EPA declarations, shipping delays, finances, not to mention the obvious one: tearing up junk on the car. But if ever there was a set of wheels that suited the event, this old Val is it. It’s pretty quick, cheap to run, reliable, looks cool, and now with a/c fitted it’s even comfortable to drive. The driveline is solid, the engine is cheap to fix, with parts readily available, and if the paintwork gains a few extra scratches along the way, big deal!

Confident that this tatty hardtop has all the attributes necessary to power through Drag Week, we spent the final weeks before it was packed into the shipping container working towards an eight-second pass.

The car’s best so far is a 9.1@150mph at Street Machine Drag Challenge, so, despite its size and weight, we know eights are gettable. The little stock-bottom-end 327ci combination was making plenty of steam, but there was much room for improvement in the first 60 feet. The suspension was a long way from being junk, with Competition Engineering adjustable front shocks and Calvert nine-way adjustables in the rear, with Gazzard Brothers split mono-leaf rear springs and tractions bars.

Sure, it was working okay – we were throwing 16 pounds of boost at in on the two-step at 3600rpm and it still didn’t turn the tyres off the startline – but with a small engine and big 80mm turbo with 1.08 rear housing, the motor wasn’t making massive torque and the body wasn’t transferring the weight. The rear springs weren’t separating properly on the launch – in a leaf-sprung car you need the rear leaf to separate from the body on the launch rather than compress.