WITH Drag Challenge around two months away there’s a whole bunch of cars being tuned and prepared for the five-day street ‘n’ strip torture test. One of those cars is Matt Lampard’s LUMPER HZ Kingswood.

Matt bought the Kingswood from Canberra with a big block up front. When he went to tow it home the tow car blew its engine so he used the new Kingswood to tow the ‘tow car’ all the way back to Warrnambool on the south coast of Victoria. Since then he’s decided the big block wasn’t exciting enough so it’s been replaced by this single turbo L98 6.0-litre combo.

The engine itself is basically standard; the guys have just added ARP bolts, a big cam, better valve springs and opened up the ring gaps to a more boost friendly level. Then they’ve built a set of steam pipe manifolds to run a Borg Warner S400 turbo with a 60mm wastegate, and piped up a front mounted air-to-air intercooler. The Shaun’s Custom Alloy intake is a thing of beauty that catches the eye as soon as you lift the bonnet. Set up to run on both Premium 98 and E85 the turbo Kingswood runs a Powerglide and full floating 35-spline nine-inch to complete the drivetrain.

On 98-octane fuel the old Holden made 388kW (520hp) at the rear wheels with just 9psi boost at MPW Performance. Then they drained the 98-octane out and replaced it with a couple of drums of boost friendly E85. Ethanol really likes boost and timing, and it didn’t take long before the Kingswood was pumping out 467kW (625hp) to the treads. The guys are hoping for low nines on the quarter and Matt plans to give the HZ a good test run at the Red CentreNATS in Alice Springs. That’s just over a week away, so keep your eyes opens for plenty of updates from central Australia.