Yo, thought I'd post up about my trip here due to the huge number of VH powered superstock cars I photographed in the weekend... enjoy!

This weekend just gone were the national superstock teams racing championship, held in the Palmerston North stadium. I've never driven to Palmy before, so I was quite looking forward to the roadtrip. The plan was to meet up with Nyloc and Hamburglar and go to the racing. Only problem is, I had a passenger screw me around right up until I left.



So I set off on my journey on friday afternoon shortly before 2pm (I was meaning to leave at 12), with a 4.1/2 hour drive ahead of me... and I was already running late >_<

I did stop in Taupo for a moment to grab a couple of photos of my car in front of the lake.



With average traffic levels and alright weather, I made it to the start of the desert road relatively easily. Then the heavens opened and released a torrential downpour like I haven't seen for ages!! With nearly no visibility at all, I slowly crawled along through the twisties behind some concerned drivers and a van, creeping at speeds of 40kmh and under.

Soon the rain let up, as did the difficulty of the road... and longer straights became visible. The pace increased, and with a flick to third gear I was easily able leave behind the drivers who had no particular deadline to get anywhere. I got a pic of the mountain shrouded in clouds, it looked pretty cool!



Towards the end of desert road, I was starting to become concerned about my fuel situation. Actually, I was already worried by the start of it, but never mind that... so by the time I rolled up into the gas station at the town at the end of desert road, I was sputtering and about to stall. What an absolute fluke that I made it! Anyway, gassed up & continued on, making good time towards Palmy.

Some of the scenery in the last hour of the drive was pretty impressive, but I couldn't be bothered photographing it as I was having too much fun harassing a couple of old guys in a 3.8 V6 Commodore who thought they could pass me at high speed.

Anyways, I made it to palmy with around 20 minutes to spare, drove down the road of Nyloc's work where he quickly herded me in and around the back of the shop (passing a grinning Hammy on the way around), and parked my car up inside the building.

Straight away, it was into the Falcon, and off to the stadium for a wicked night's racing. Friday night was qualifying night where all 12 teams were placed into groups of three, and then would face off against each of the two other teams in their group. The highest points scorers would then move on to the semi-finals and the finals.

Superstock cars weigh between 1400 and 1500kg, and run a variation of chassis including the tank style superstock, which doesn't handle quite the same as the others, but is armored differently and is very effective at blocking and wasting the other cars. Most modern superstocks run V8s over 500HP, many Toyota and Nissan quad cammers, quite a few Chev smallblocks, and a handful of Ford smallblock V8s & i6's. I got some wicked photos of them in the pits!

Teams racing is pretty interesting, because you have eight superstocks on the track at once. Four vs four. Each team usually has a tank (but not always) which serves as a blocker & a hindrance to the other drivers, allowing their own team members to finish the race in first position. Make no mistake about it, this is a full contact motorsport with 500hp+ armored up cars ramming each other at high speed, pushing the cars up the barrier onto the fence, or rolling them over. Not a sport for faint hearted drivers!!

Between races we were entertained by a speedway clown who was hooning around in a chopped up laser and a 450cc 2 stroke powered rideon lawnmower, stealing the tractors and running over sponsor signs & cones etc. In addition to the clown, we had the BIG ARSE HELMET caning around blasting its flamethrower out the back. Some amusing things to keep the crowd pleased.

The teams racing weren't the only events that night. There was consolation racing, for the teams that were knocked out of the championship but still wanted to hit the track and have a chance at winning some prize money. These races usually had 30 or so cars on the track at once (CARNAGE!!) with 200 bucks prize money for a rollover, 500 for two, or 1000 bucks for rolling over three opponents. Sprint cars were also present and racing... 800kgs with 410ci alloy V8 engines on methanol, producing 850hp!!!

Before the racing on saturday night, Hammy, Nyloc, Hayden and myself went for a drive up to the wind farm on the top of the hills visible from Palmy. Was a pretty cool windy road, and the sheer scale of these wind turbines is insane!! They produce 1650kW which equates to about 2000HP!!! Got some cool pics up there.



Here's a video of a driveby of the GTS-8!

To follow are the pics of the champs from both nights, in no particular order. You'll get an idea of the speeds they get up to and how rough it can get. Hammy and Nyloc may want to add pics, but the majority of these are a collaboration of mine and Nyloc's pics.

The stadium:

Pits, many awesome cars and a lot of interesting custom fabrication and engineering to be seen!

Sprint cars... 800kg, 410ci, methanol, 850HP... insane!

Oh and I nearly forgot... pics of the racing itself, heh!!

And of course, the bigarse helmet!! HAhaha

All in all, an awesome weekend! It was great catching up with Nyloc and Hammy, good bastards, always welcome up in the tron for hijinks and mischief and skids etc _b

Unfortunately... to cap off an awesome weekend... I blew up my motor on the way home at 3:30am on sunday. The road was clear from Taupo onwards so I decided to cruise a bit faster (I covered over 100km in about 40 minutes) and severely overheated my engine. My motor always had a blown headgasket, albeit a very minor case. This sustained load on the motor caused the gasket to let go in a big way (and I didn't notice the smell of coolant until I hit tokoroa), which resulted in the oil being cooked, and major oil starvation to the heads. I needed to be towed home from 5 minutes north of Tokoroa.

Towed my car to my dad's, and went back that afternoon and changed the oil & filter and refilled the water. It was very evidently a blown headgasket, but the engine appeared to work fine... so we tentatively crept back to hamilton with Scotty following in the van. It was not to be, just as I got into hams, something let go in the passenger side valvetrain... probably an overheated valve expanded and lifted a valve seal guide out of the head. This resulted in ****loads of white smoke from my left exhaust pipe. Thankfully, GaR came to the rescue and towed me home.

No trackday for me, but on the bright side, I'm sending my motor off to Palmy to be rebuilt to 4.5 litres with massive cams, inner valvesprings, and some porting etc. When I get it back I'll have 450HP.

The only lesson I learnt is that headgaskets need repairs ASAP, and that I need to run an oil cooler and a fatter radiator if I want to sustain high speeds _b

Those races are always fun, especially in the rain ;o

car looks great too. You didn't happen to show your VH powered car to them did you?

P.S.Why are there so many Confederate flags in NZ? (1st Picture, 2nd Post)

They don't race in the rain, the races get postponed.

Yeh I showed Brian my car, he called it a Commodore killer (Commodore = Holden, typical fanboyed australian manufactured car with old style OHV V8s, now using LS1s).

There aren't heaps of confederate flags, it's just some stockcar teams way of celebrating the Dukes of Hazard.

One of the teams is named the Rotorua Rebels, after their hometown, they adopted the confed flag as a symbol.

Now youve seen the pics heres a compilation video of teams racing from this track, from previous years. Its 40mb download but its worth it:

http://webhost1.inspire.net.nz...s.avi

awesome.... Too bad they don't do rain.The local speedway gets a dirt track every couple weeks and they go at it no matter the weather, oh its brutally hellish racing.

Great pics and a great writeup i love reading about this stuff, as you can imagine...

Some of those headers on those motors= raging wood.

Great video of the GTS-8 in its final days as a "tame" beast... I love the sound of the VH.