The Aussies are coming to Texas in 2013 and Hell’s coming with them! By Hell we mean the cars and combatants in the hotly contested V8 Supercar series, Australia’s most popular racing series. The cars race on road courses and are all based on production model Ford Falcons and Holden Commodores. The event in 2013 will be held at the brand new, “Circuit of the Americas” track in Austin, Texas.
The facility was built to attract a Formula One event back in the US, which is has done for 2014, so this V8 Supercar event is a good warm up for the track. It will provide the US with its first ever live look at this wild racing series that attracts more than one million spectators in Oz every year.
One side effect we hope for is a public swell to get Ford to bring the Falcon here and for GM to bring a US version of the Commodore here. (Aside from the police only Caprice). The Falcon and Commodore have been dueling for years in the V8 Supercar series. Toyota and Chrysler are not involved, like they are in NASCAR.
The cars are neat pieces. Based on actual production cars, these are not full tube chassis racers. Yes, they have roll cages in them that use a half mile of pipe, but the production floors and structure are all intact. Engines are 600hp pieces that use pushrods (gasp!) and EFI with eight individual throttle bodies. Both the Ford and the Chevy displace 5-litres. The Ford engine is based off of a Windsor block and the Chevy is based off a block that we have no clue about. We’re guessing it is a hybrid of the traditional small block and the current LS series of engines.
This should be one hell of an event and we look forward to it. Since we have two years to work on press passes for this one! We wouldn’t miss a shot to see these bad boys bang fenders and door handles for the world!
Bathurst rocks! While the cars are more race car than road car these days, they used to be more road based – here’s the start of the 1977 Bathurst which saw Falcon coupes do a nice 1- 2 finish – main competition was the far less sexy but very fast Holden Toranas (the boxy looking sedans you can see dicing with the coupes here) – check out some of the other Bathurst footage linked to the clip below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JvEbtChs4E&feature=related