In this week’s episode of Carnage, Scotty gets to live out a dream and compete in a serious car at the event he has run for 10 years, Street Machine Drag Challenge!

The past year or so has been dedicated to transforming the VS ute we call Grimace from a simple V6/manual machine to an 1100rwhp, mid-eight-second beast to run at DC 2024. This was Scotty’s first time competing in a DC event since Drag Challenge Weekend 2018 in Turbo Taxi, but unlike the Taxi, Grimace is no easy ride with air con and cruise control.

Unfortuantely, Scotty’s DC ’24 dream threatened to turn into a nightmare before the event had even begun. For while Grimace had proved to be a staunch race car, it was a long way from being a reliable streeter, with coolant temps climbing over 105 degrees every time it hit the street. In the days leading up to Drag Challenge, Scotty tried several radiators, multiple water pumps, different thermo fans and more, but nothing really worked.

On the upside, he had his mate Tom Banks Jr riding shotgun for the week. Tom is a very capable mechanic and can-do kind of bloke, and he worked like a Trojan to keep the ute on the road as the pair worked through solutions to the various issues presented.

Scotty and Tom crawled the ute to Calder Park for the start of DC ’24, only to find racing cancelled due to an unsafe track. Although there was no racing on Day One, Scotty and the other entrants did still have to take on a near-600km and minimum five-hour drive from Calder to Mildura.

With temperatures nudging over 30 degrees in Mildura that day, the further entrants drove, the hotter it got. Scotty and Tom also discovered that Grimace was not a fan of 98 PULP for heat management, but with E85 scarce on the road route, it was just a case of managing with what they had.

Day Two at the eighth-mile Atlantic Oils Sunset Strip in Mildura was another challenging one for the pair, with boost pipe and traction issues only yielding a 6.19 best. It wasn’t representative of the ute’s true potential, but it was enough of a banker to hit the road for another big driving leg from Mildura to Tailem Bend, via Murrayville.

The third day at Dragway at The Bend in South Australia was a much better one for Grimace, with a PB on its best run of 8.49@163mph – just a bee’s dick below the 8.50 index for the Pro Street Radials 8.5 Radial class Scotty was competing in.

Enjoy part one of Scotty’s DC campaign below, and keep your eyes peeled this time next week when part two drops to detail the second half of the week, with some surprising results!

A massive thanks to our sponsor VPW Australia for making this all possible. The ute is a rolling testbed for VPW’s products, including Street Pro rims, Dart LS Next block, RTS nine-inch diff with full-floater axles and more.

It is also chock-full of the company’s Proflow gear, including:

• Proflow SuperMax+ intake manifold
• LS3 cylinder heads
• 525L/h fuel pumps
• Billet surge tank
• DBW 102mm throttlebody
• Fabricated aluminium radiator
• Intercooler core
• Water pump
• Boost clamps
• All fittings & hose

We also have to thank Haltech (Nexus R5 VCU and IGN-1A coils), AllFast Converters (amazing Powerglide and converter), Turbosmart (ProGate 50mm wastegates), MPW Performance (tuning and stacks of fabrication, including the exhaust manifolds), and Pulsar Turbos (7375G reverse-rotation turbos).