The recent Fast Fours Jamboree provided the stage where one of the most hunted records in sport compact racing was broken. The long-standing HKS record, where the famous tuner's Skyline chewed up the quarter-mile in only 7.67 seconds, was taken twice during the Jamboree.
The annual Bisbane event is the biggest, slickest and quickest celebration of small capacity import machinery in the Southern Hemisphere. This year's Jamboree saw competition from cars from New Zealand and a trio of Puerto Rican campaigners who took their machinery to Australia to hunt for records.
But it was New Zealander Reece McGregor, in his unibodied R32 Nissan Skyline GT-R that provided the import world with the biggest news of the weekend. In the buildup to the event, McGregor pushed his GT-R to a sizzling 7.59sec at 191 mph-shattering the six-year Skyline record. Then, to the delight of the massive crowd, he underlined the result with a 7.57sec second pass on Saturday night.
McGregor has chased the elusive record for several years, setting a new benchmark in New Zealand's drag racing scene, which features numerous Skylines capable of low eight-second runs. His success came courtesy of fine-tuning the setup to cope with its fire-breathing 1,600hp.
Puerto Rican racers did their bit to keep the Aussie rotor heads at bay-Raul Gonzales, Luis Albero Vivo and Ivan Martinez made the long journey to Queensland for Jamboree, and showed off just how professional and well-prepared they were.
Martinez in his humble Corolla raised a few eyebrows, straight away setting a personal best of 7.78sec at 172.86 mph on his ANDRA (Australian National Drag Racing Association) license pass, and maintaining his good form the whole weekend. He ended up facing off with Gonzales in the Pro Compact class final, shutting out the Aussies and sending a serious message of power and pace to a highly impressed and supportive crowd.
The headlining Pro Turbo class also produced some fantastic racing with top rotor-tuner turned Toyota 2JZ-convert, Joe Signorelli, smashing the class record with a 6.88 pass at 203 mph in an incredible duel with George Rehayem steering the potent 20B PAC Performance MX-6. Last season, Signorelli swapped his powerplant from a 20B rotor to a 2JZ Supra. He recently purchased the Pro RWD Titan Celica and will be transferring his 2JZ into that chassis for the coming season.
The greatest strength of the Jamboree-now in its 16th year-is that no matter what you want to race, provided it passes the rigorous safety inspections and as long as it doesn't have too many cylinders, there's a class to accommodate. This year saw some changes to the class eligibilities, allowing V8 sedans into the Extreme class as long as they were turbocharged and running electronic fuel injection. A new class for hi-tech sport bikes was also added for late model Japanese motorcycles-like turbocharged Hayabusas, which run high sevens.
But Jamboree isn't all about the blacktop-Queensland's amazing weather attracted massive crowds which filtered between the bling bling car show, trade stands overflowing with go-fast goodies, a dyno and the ever popular bikini competition. While most of the crowd was male, a huge number of the country's finest fillies-including the piping-hot Million Dollar Babes, fresh from a tour that included booty-shakin' shows in Las Vegas-were on hand to show just what it takes to make a bikini look good.