It’s our first Supermang episode of Carnage for 2023, as Scotty gives our VN Berlina some much-needed love to get it ready for another year of racing and chasing PBs.

Avid viewers of the show will know that this little beaut is now a mid-12-second car, with a PB of 12.53 from the 280rwhp, supercharged L67 six.

However, with all the work we put through that blower last year, it was a bit worse for wear. The bearings in the snout sounded like a tin of peanuts being shaken by a two-year-old, and it was also leaking its very expensive blower oil.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what’s inside a blower snout and what it takes to rebuild one, in this episode Scotty guides us the through whole process step by step using a kit from Mace Engineering.

It does require a decent hydraulic press like our awesome one from Hare & Forbes, but the process itself is fairly simple.

Once the snout was rebuilt and back on the car, Scotty refitted the 8psi pulley. We do have two smaller party pulleys to try out at some point this year, so we could see some really strong numbers out of the little VN soon.

Scotty also changed the digital Haltech dash in Supermang. The iC-7 that was in there is a beautiful piece, but it didn’t properly suit the Berlina cluster surround, and it was meant for our V8 Lexcen project anyway.

Luckily, we had an older Haltech IQ3 dash lying around from the Mazda MX-5, so Scotty got a new 3D-printed surround to suit that dash and then installed both in the VN. There was a bit of mucking around with the wiring, but once Scotty had the right plug on there, the dash started talking to the Haltech Platinum Sport Plug-In GM ECU the Berlina uses.

With that done, Supermang is ready to rock once again!

Next week, the Carnage action will hit pause while we go off and run the delayed version of Drag Challenge 2022. Although there’ll be no Carnage episode, you’ll be treated to daily update videos from DC all week, so make sure you tune in to the action – or better yet, come out to one of the tracks and enjoy it all in person! You can find all the event details right here.