WITH the Street Machine Drag Challenge Weekend running in his backyard, Paramount Performance head honcho Terry Seng had some work to do to prepare his famous seven-second VC Commodore. Competing in the Tuff Mounts Radial Blown class, the white sedan had been off the scene for 18 months, as Terry had been using its twin-turbo iron block LS in his tube-frame ’55 Chev.

“It is the same 5.3-litre four-bolt head combo that we had before, except I cracked a main cap out of the old block when I ran it in my Chev,” Terry said on Day One at Willowbank. “We still run the Precision 6266 turbos, methanol fuel when racing, and Holley EFI management, but we had an absolute horror run coming into this event. We were up ’til 3:30am fitting the engine, then tuned it today.”

Arriving at the track after 2pm, Terry then had issues with his harness belts and intercooler pump, before he was able to finally run a 9.3@152mph just before the 4pm cut-off. He then struggled with overheating issues on the way to Warwick, rolling in late.

A 6.2 on the eighth-mile was not enough to put him in contention for the win, but Terry had plans to go large with the Brock lookalike back at Willowbank on the Sunday.

“The wastegates are shut on it,” he said. “Boost peaks at 37psi, but we tuned it on the dyno to 27psi, where it made 1502rwhp.”

On his first pass on Sunday, Terry used all that and more to crack off an epic 7.66@ 179mph, resetting the quickest ET record for a Drag Challenge event.

“It felt slow!” Terry laughed. “I forgot how easy this thing is to drive. We wanted a safe seven in the bag, so it was great to run that time, and now we have really turned it up. It has so much more in this combo; hopefully we can make it stick.”

While the Paramount team weren’t able to improve on the 7.6, the run reset his own PB for that car, scored him awards for quickest ET and fastest pass, and landed him in fourth overall, just half a second behind Ben Vlekken in third.