TICKLED PINK

WANT TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE OVER 400HPAT THE TYRES WITH A NATURALLY ASPIRATED HOLDEN SIX?

- BORIS VISKOVIC

PAUL Burnet is a Kiwi racer with a career in touring cars that goes back to the early 70s. In conjunction with Phil Pagan at Track Sport Engines and Craig Hyland from Engine Dynamics, he’s been developing a billet 202 block for a number of years.

That development is now complete, and the block – topped with a J.ZED head – is now in Paul’s LJ Torana GTR XU-1 race car. The new combination has punched out 422hp to the rear tyres naturally aspirated, which is pretty impressive from a six-pot. The most power they could reliably produce with an OEM block was 390hp – at the crank – so this is a serious step up.

Paul races his Torry in the Northern Muscle Cars Club series. The club was formed to organize races for pre-’83 muscle cars, and what’s nice to see is that they’re not a bunch of historians, so the rules are a little looser than the historic touring car classes, but not quite as free as the Touring Car Masters.

“We built the new car in 2007 and took it to Muscle Car Masters with a cast-iron head, and it went quite well,” Paul says. “Then we went again in 2009 with the J.ZED head on it, but when we got it back home and out of the container we noticed it had split the bore. We sleeved that block, but we were still having problems blowing head gaskets, even though the compression wasn’t that high.