Justin Walshe didn’t build this insane VX ClubSport R8 to scratch some kind of horsepower itch. He’s got a nitro-burning Funny Car with over 10,000hp on tap for that! He certainly didn’t build it to fill a spot in his garage, either; the Walshe family already has a sizeable collection of awesome vehicles, including an HK Monaro, a ’64 lead sled, a VK Brock Director, a few insane racing boats, and Justin’s first car, an HQ SS. So, with plenty of heavy hitters already at his disposal, why was it that Justin simply could not live without a tubbed, blown Commodore?

First published in the April 2025 issue of Street Machine

“Perhaps it’s a mid-life crisis!” Justin chuckles, before revealing that the build actually came about when a change in his usual National Drag Racing Championship (NDRC) schedule gave him the opportunity to attend this year’s Street Machine Summernats. “I’d previously been pestering Andy [Lopez, NDRC co-owner] about not running a race meeting on the same weekend as Summernats so that racers could attend the ’Nats,” Justin says. “When the 2025 calendar was announced, I saw that the long-held New Year’s meeting had been moved to mid-January, and Andy sent me a tongue-in-cheek message immediately, asking which car I was bringing to Canberra!”

Despite having one of the meanest garages on the Gold Coast, Justin couldn’t bear to subject any of his current collection to the rigours of a weekend in Canberra. He decided a purpose-built ’Nats cruiser was the go, but with only 12 weeks (including a Christmas break) between Andy’s message and the big dance in Canberra, he had to get his skates on.

“I had been contemplating cutting up a 2004 HSV Grange that I’ve owned since 2005 and turning it into a tyre-frying event car, but it just holds too much sentimental value to the family, so I jumped on Facebook Marketplace,” says Justin. “I ended up finding this VX ClubSport R8 as a rolling shell. The previous owner had done the tubs and built it as a skid car but had hurt the engine on his second outing.

“My race team is 15 of the most dedicated, selfless people you’ll ever meet, so the concept from the outset was to build a car that we could all enjoy as a team while being part of events like Summernats, Rockynats or Powercruise,” he continues. “Safety was the highest priority, hence the ’cage, seats and harnesses.”

With that goal in place, Justin delivered his newly acquired Clubby to Andy McConnell at Fireball Kustom Fabrication just 10 weeks out from the ’Nats, tasking him with updating the safety hardware and redoing some parts of the existing tin and chassiswork that Justin wasn’t quite happy with.

In the meantime, Justin made a quick phone call to Aaron Hambridge at Advanced Performance Machining (APM) to sort out an engine and driveline for the car. “Like most good shops, Aaron is booked out months in advance, but I’ve known him for a long time through the racing program, and as luck would have it, he was about to start on one of my boat racing motors,” Justin says. “So, I slotted the Clubby’s LS build in its place.” That explains how the team managed to get a screaming, dry-sumped 427-cube LS built in only 10 weeks!

Justin’s connections at Aeroflow and Rocket Industries gave the team access to one of the nation’s most impressive parts warehouses, with everything from the Dart LS Next block to the rotating assembly, cylinder heads and blower kit sitting on the shelf ready to go.

To help meet the deadline, the decision was made to stick with mechanical injection. “The team and I are really familiar with mechanical injection, so it made sense to stick with what we knew, and the guys at Rocket assured me it was the fastest way to get the combo into the car and make the Summernats deadline,” Justin explains. “It also meant that Aaron could load a safe tune into the engine on the dyno, as evidenced by the car firing up first time without any dramas.”

The rest of the driveline is just as tough, with a fully optioned, 2000hp-capable Powerglide filling the tunnel and a nine-inch with 40-spline floating axles and 4.11:1 gears hanging off the ladder-bar rear end.

If the car looks insanely over-engineered, it’s because Justin and the team want to spend their time at events behind the wheel rather than poking around in the engine bay. “We rebuild Funny Car engines after every pass and service every mechanical part on them in a two-hour window between rounds – we don’t want to be doing that with the ClubSport,” Justin explains.

On its debut outing at Summernats 37, the Clubby torched a whopping 700 litres of methanol lapping the Canberra cruise route, but Justin is yet to really stretch its legs. “To be honest, driving this car with 1100hp seems more daunting than driving the Funny Car!” he laughs. “We’ll do a few driving events to get a feel for it, then pull it down for a freshen-up ahead of Summernats 38. I’ve now got a big hunger for driving events and a little taste of the show scene, and I reckon with a tidy-up and a fresh coat of paint, we might even have a crack at being judged in Tuff Street. To win a trophy at Summernats would be sick!”

FUNNY BUSINESS

Apart from both being blown, mechanically injected V8s, it’s fair to say there aren’t too many similarities between the 1100hp LS-based mill in Justin’s Clubby and the 10,000hp heart of his Nitro Funny Car.

The team’s carbonfibre-bodied Nitro Funny Cars run a 500ci Hemi-based billet Top Fuel engine shoehorned into a 125in-wheelbase chassis. The driver sits on top of the diff, their view through the tiny windscreen almost entirely obscured by the injector hat.

The end result? A 320mph ride down any track in Australia, and a quarter-mile ET quicker than most cars get to the 330ft!

JUSTIN WALSHE
2001 HSV CLUBSPORT R8

THANKS
Rocket Industries; Aeroflow, Performance; Fireball Kustom Fabrication; Advanced, Performance Machining; Illicit Auto Electrical; TCE Converters.