As has become our tradition here, when the North American drag racing season ends, we start peeking over the fence to see what’s going on in the hemisphere below ours because as you well know, our summer is their winter and our winter is their summer. With the season in full swing there’s plenty of videos hitting the web weekly and some truly incredible cars are surfacing because of that. Take this one from Brazil. Known as a the Caravan Hulk it is a station wagon powered by a turbocharged inline six engine. While we don’t have specifics, the inliner 250i Chevy is a mainstay down there so perhaps this is a variant of that.
To us it is pretty great that the love of fast station wagons is an international thing and this is one fast wagon. Equipped with a manual transmission we have seen it run elapsed times in the high sevens before. On this run it is “only” in the low 8s but the speed is insane. Over 180mph. The best part of the whole thing? This car has a manual transmission in it and the driver is grabbing gears as the car goes down the track and runs these huge numbers. We do not know the name of the strip they were running at but we can tell you that it looks billiard table flat and as smooth as a baby’s tukus.
There was a time when I was dying to get to Australia to check out their scene (and I still am) but checking out the madness that is drag racing in South America has rocketed ahead on my list. There is so much cool stuff down in Brazil, Argentina, and other places that I’d love to spend a week or three down there attending races and visiting shops. Eight second, inline six powered, 180mph station wagons are a rare international commodity and they have ’em!
Brian, this strip is actually a motorsport complex called Velopark, is in southern Brazil. Is a purpose built dragstrip that they later build a reace track around using the straight as a part of it. It has 3 kart tracks, the race track/strip, a driver\’s school and many other things, as an event space and restaurants and such. You can check their website at http://velopark.com.br/velopark/site/. it is in portuguese, but i believe that the google translation works just fine.
Cheers, and thanks for showing the south american scene!