It’s drag racing time! After months of being bound to the workshop with broken cars and restriction handicaps, the Carnage team finally got back out to the drag strip with the Supermang VN Berlina.

Scotty managed to sneak into the Ford-Powered Nationals test day at Heathcote Park Raceway in regional Victoria to do some much-needed testing with the VN, before the car’s real-deal racing debut at the Haltech Birthday Bash in Sydney next month.

In case you’ve missed previous Carnage eps featuring the VN, it now uses a warmed-up, supercharged, 3.8-litre L67 V6 from a VS Commodore, with a smaller blower puller, camshaft and a Haltech Platinum Sport GM ECU tuned for E85. The original VN Turbo 700 transmission has a manual valvebody but is still standard, as is the converter and the single-pegger 3.08:1 BorgWarner diff.

The goals for the test day were to hopefully crack into the 12s and not break anything, as we wanted to focus on improving (rather than fixing) the VN from the day’s findings.

There were two major handicaps, though. First, Scotty couldn’t source a pair of wider wheels to mount our 235 drag radials to in time, so he was stuck with the old 205 street tyres the VN came with. That meant adhesion was probably going to be hard to come by.

The second issue was the intake temps from the blower. It was a fairly warm day out at Heathcote, and high intake temps do not equal horsepower.

The first run was essentially a write-off, Scotty wheelspinning his way to a 14.6@102mph.

A second run did yield a slightly better 13.85@101mph, but Scotty then found out he was running in the lane that had had no track prep done to it for the test day.

After letting the car cool down between runs and some slight driving adjustments, Scotty pulled a 13.22 @103.95mph out of the VN on its final run of the day.

While he didn’t get the 12, Scotty still rated the day a success. Nothing broke, and because he’d already planned to fit the drag radials and the water-to-air intercooler kit we got from Mace Engineering, we can now hook straight into those jobs to get it ready for Haltech’s Birthday Bash at Sydney Dragway on 18 December. The countdown is on!