In this age of outrageous social media stunts, it can be tough getting our humble Carnage web series to stand out amidst the sea of influencers and YouTube superstars. To cut through all that online noise, I came up with the idea of driving our eight-second VS Commodore ute all the way from Melbourne to Canberra to make 1000rwhp – or more – on the dyno at Street Machine Summernats 37. It might just be a crazy enough to work!

I’ve followed the Horsepower Heroes dyno comp at Summernats ever since I was the young guy in the front row with a video camera at ’Nats 10. As I progressed through the car journo ranks over the next quarter-century, I witnessed the likes of Jason Gray, Rob Vickery, Todd Wilkes, Eddie Tassone, Craig Munro, Jake Edwards, Bubba Medlyn and many more take home the dyno gold, and watched power levels rise from 372hp in 1997 to a whopping 2504rwhp from the Maatouks Racing VL at last year’s event.

But with the exception of Jason Gray, we’re pretty sure that every one of those dyno winners towed their cars to Summernats, so our plan was to actually drive the twin-turbo, 427ci LS-powered VS ute – affectionately known as ‘Grimace’ – to ’Nats 37, make a cool 1000rwhp on the Haltech Horsepower Heroes dyno, and then drive home.

We hit the road on a cool Melbourne Wednesday morning, but by the time we got to the NSW border, the ambient temps were north of 30 degrees. To help combat the heat, I installed a 25-litre drum with a Bunnings water pump and some plastic sprinkler nozzles, which we controlled through the Haltech Nexus R5 VCU and CAN keypad. That kept the 1300hp engine from melting, despite the 36-degree heat that saw us using 25 litres of water every hour.

It also kept the twin-turbo V8 cool all weekend at Summernats – from the City Cruise, to hot laps around EPIC, to driving back and forth to our accommodation, the ute never missed a beat and never got hot all weekend.

Friday at ’Nats 37 saw Grimace’s moment of truth arrive. The MPW crew hooked the ute up to the Horsepower Heroes dyno, and it reeled off a whopping 1346.6rwhp – or just over 1000rwkW in the new money. That was good enough to put the VS in third place in the Forced Induction V8 class and fifth overall for the day – not a bad start for a car that had just driven 680km!

It also put us into Sunday’s finals, where Grimace pulled out all the stops to make 1362.4rwhp (1016rwkW) on 28psi to finish third in Forced Induction V8, behind winner Lee Povey’s twin-turbo VL Calais with 2109.6rwhp, and runner-up Avyon MacLeod’s 1739.3rwhp effort in his Godzilla-powered XF Falcon. If that wasn’t enough, we also bagged fifth place overall!

Now, we don’t know for sure if our VS is the only car to ever drive to Summernats and make north of 1000rwhp in Horsepower Heroes, but we’re betting it’s the first to drive to Canberra and crack the 1000rwkW barrier– twice!

Thanks as always to our sponsors who help us make this happen, including MPW Performance, VPW Australia, Proflow, RTS, Street Pro, Haltech, Turbosmart, Tuff Mounts, AllFast Converters and Pulsar Turbos. And also to Ford Australia, who supplied the epic F-150 Lariat support vehicle!