MARK Hayes is a bona fide Aussie street machining legend. For more than two decades his true street-legal big-block LC Torana ‘LC4540’ has been one of the fastest street cars in Australia, running in the 7s.

But the LC 763 Torrie Mark unveiled at Summernats 28 is a totally different beast, with a focus on going deep into the six-second bracket.

Back in 2015 Mark told us, “the need for wanting to go faster created this car. This car has come from 20 years of racing my other car, and what that car could and couldn’t do,” the Pro Street legend says. “There are certain limitations when you build a street-registered race car, so I built a car that is drag-specific but looks a bit like a street car. I wanted a car that was of Elite standards in appearance, but serviceable and would be able to run as fast as my budget and knowledge could take me.”

Fast forward to 2018 and the 763ci aluminium Brodix big-block Chev on nitrous has powered the car to PB of 6.99 @ 198mph with more left in the tank. As is often the case with these things, it takes a lot of time and fine-tuning to get the car running consistently where Mark wants it to be. We caught up with Mark at Sydney Dragway’s Lights Out event last weekend to see how this monster Torana was handling the eighth-mile grudge racing.

Mark was running his smaller 33×10.5-inch slicks and initially had a little trouble hooking up, however a couple of suspension and timing changes saw the LC hooking up and running pretty competitively.