Ever since we cooked up the mad idea of bringing Hot Rod magazine’s Drag Week concept to Australia back in 2014 with our own Street Machine Drag Challenge, Carnage’s Scotty Taylor had always longed to compete in the event himself, and in a serious car. He’s had a couple of casual attempts at it in our ‘Turbo Taxi’ FG Falcon, but as the main organiser of the whole DC circus, he’s never had the bandwidth for a full-scale assault. Until now!

“I’ve successfully run 10 years’ worth of Drag Challenge events, but there was always that desire to get in amongst the action instead of just watching from the sidelines,” Scotty says. “We were bouncing around ideas for a major project for our Carnage YouTube show to showcase VPW Australia’s plethora of LS performance parts, so I came up with the plan to build a ute to do Drag Challenge.”

With that, Project ‘Grimace’ was born, named after the strikingly purple-hued VS Commodore ute Scotty bought at auction as the basis for the build. It was a basic-but-clean V6/manual machine, but he was determined to turn it into a Drag Challenge-ready, twin-turbo LS-powered beast.

An overly ambitious plan to have the VS ready for DC ’23 was shelved a few weeks out from that event, so the sights were reset on the 2024 instalment. Scotty spent the next 12 or so months building the car, with plenty of support from MPW Performance & Race Fab and help from Carnage video producer, Matt Hull. 

The ute’s factory Ecotec six made way for a 427ci Dart LS Next, along with a pair of Pulsar turbos, the full Haltech Nexus R5 catalogue, an AllFast Powerglide, an RTS rear end fabbed to suit by MPW, and a whole shopping list of Proflow goodies. We were going to turn Grimace into an eight-second fun machine!

A few months out from DC 2024, the ute made 1129hp to the hubs on MPW’s dyno, and then ran an 8.52@165mph pass during early testing at Heathcote Park Raceway. While that perfectly placed Scotty to take on the Pro Street Radials 8.5 index class, he knew that was only half the battle.

“The truth was that while we had built a good drag car, it wasn’t really much of a street car,” says Scotty. “The coolant temps climbed over 105 degrees every time it hit the street, and over the days leading up to Drag Challenge we had tried several radiators, multiple water pumps, different thermo fans, thermostats in and out, but nothing really worked.”

Luckily for Scotty, he had a true champion in his corner for Drag Challenge ’24. Given that the rest of the Street Machine staff would all be flat-chat running the event, and weren’t allowed to help Scott anyway as he was an entrant, he enlisted the help of 31-year-old Tom Banks Jr from Sydney as his co-driver and mechanic for the week.

Scott and Tom worked their backsides off on the cooling system 24 hours before the start of the event, getting virtually no sleep before the week had even begun. 

With Day One of racing at Calder Park cancelled, Scott and Tom had the whole first day of DC to make the 600km drive from Calder to Mildura in north-west Victoria. However, that supposedly five-hour trek ended up taking the lads around 14 hours thanks to the ute’s soaring engine and transmission temps in the 30-plus-degree heat.

Day Two at the Atlantic Oils Sunset Strip eighth-mile saw the ute only manage a best of 6.19@122mph due to traction and charge-pipe issues. The next day’s racing at South Australia’s Dragway at The Bend proved far more fruitful, with Scotty running as quick as 8.49 – a new PB for the VS! That said, it was just that bit too quick for the 8.50 class index, so he handed in an 8.90@148mph for the day.

Another 600km road trek saw the lads back at Heathcote Park Raceway for Days Four and Five. There, Scotty ran a best of 8.54@165mph on the final day, which – much to his surprise – was enough to land him third in class (behind fellow SM scribe Mark Arblaster) and in 13th place overall!

Despite all the curveballs Grimace threw his and Tom’s way, Scotty couldn’t be happier with how his first DC campaign as an entrant turned out. “The sense of relief and achievement that comes over you when you hand in that last timecard cannot be beaten,” he says. “I couldn’t believe the result – after all, the aim was just to finish and maybe run some eights, but we’d built a real eight-second street car and completed Drag Challenge!”

We’ve gotta give one last big thanks to VPW Australia; Proflow; Adam Rogash and the crew at MPW Performance & Race Fab; Haltech; Pulsar Turbos; Turbosmart; Tuff Mounts; Gonzo at AllFast Converters; Tom Banks Jr; Matty Hull for their help with this mammoth project.