Drive It Fast, Make It Last

Arby and his turbo LS1-powered VG valiant made it through hot rod drag week 2017 – and both lived to tell the tale.

- Mark Arblaster

THE 2017 Hot Rod Drag Week is done and dusted. Wow, what an epic event this year; a record 387 cars stepped up to the daunting challenge of five days and over 1000 miles pounding the blacktop across America. Just trying to run all those cars in a six hour window each day was a feat in itself, let alone the valve train-pounding, high-rpm haul on the roads.

For my VG Valiant, POR440, the sorting-out period had started well in advance over the course of a year in Australia. Once in the US, we drove cross-country from LA to Illinois in the lead-up to the event, and aside from a few overheating issues crossing the desert between LA and Las Vegas, it was pretty smooth sailing given the conditions and distance travelled. We were lucky enough to be able to stop at The Car Shop in Independence, Kansas, and give the car a good look-over before driving another 550 miles to the start of Drag Week in Cordova, Illinois.

The car was entered in Street Race Small-Block Power-Adder, one of the most popular classes with over 45 cars this year. With such a massive roll-up, it was crucial we got to the track early on Day One. That way, if things didn’t go to plan, we’d have time for another pass before reloading all our tools and gear and hitting the road.

It’s tough to make a tuning call at the start of the week; if you throw everything at it from the outset, there is a chance that you may hurt it and not make Friday. If you think you will be a class contender you really need to chase the perfect ET every day, regardless of what time you want to hit the road. In our class, for example, Jason Doisher in his turbo LS-powered Mercury Marquis could reel off constant 8.50s. So with a bunch of other guys ahead of us, we decided to back the timing off a few degrees, pull a few pounds of boost out of the combination and run it as-is.