Kitfest - Santa Pod - Saturday

It was an overcast and breezy Saturday today (with occasional showers) at Santa Pod but interesting nonetheless . For those who have never been, Santa Pod is a secret location (ie very poorly sign-posted) where they run extremely noisy cars in a straight line along a quarter mile strip to see who can end up with the highest terminal velocity in the shortest time. It is characterised by deafening - and I mean ear shattering - noise accompanied by a smell of burning rubber and if you're unlucky burning clutch as well. It's quite spectacular for about half an hour and then becomes frankly rather boring - but a lot of interesting cars attempting the "Run what you brung" (apparently it's American) for ordinary and not-so-ordinary streetcars.

However the Kitfest element was a new feature and was quite well attended by SEC and dozens of Lotus 7 -type cars and a few other oddities but surprisingly few Cobra replicas. You'd think the Cobra crowd would be only too keen for their V8's to go roaring up the Strip but we hardly saw any. However there were plenty of Yankee V8 motors in other cars making incredible V8 motor noises and generating many hundreds of BHP's

Well both Mark (Redline) and Dave (Str-strat) had a go on the strip and afterwards professed them selves baffled by the "Christmas Tree" lights at the start line - and after the lights had run their multi-coloured sequence had to be shoed off the start -line by the official starter - thus adding seconds to their quarter mile time. I wont embarrass either by quoting their times a) because I can't remember them and b) because I'll leave it to them to report. Suffice to say that once invited to move along by the Starter man, Dave was able to clearly demonstrate that a 380BHP supercharged Toyota GR FE engine is a lot quicker than a 190bhp 2.5ltr Alfa V6.

Thanks to those who attended on the Saturday - it was an interesting new addition to the Calendar - but the Sunday will probably be better because that's when the stall holders are let loose on the site and there will probably be more action for the casual visitor including tyre shredding sessions around a small circuit for the Lotus 7 clones (as per Stoneleigh)

a couple of pics :


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LOL we got off the line eventually. Lucky for us the timer doesn't start until the car moves:D

12.6 Seconds and a terminal speed of 112mph for me, just need to work on the 4.7 second reaction time:confused:


Dave

I remember we tried this at a track day years ago, I was behind a TVR Griffith that did a 13 second quarter. I managed 16 in my VX coupe. I can only imagine how much quicker the Toyota engine is.

It would be interesting to see the difference between all the Alfa variants.