Birthday Travel with Massive Oomph!

Gen’s birthday is not to be taken lightly, so Robert planned a surprise where the rubber hits the slick track at Eastern Creek Dragway. 

A foretaste of the fun in store was when we stayed at a nearby hotel and in the evening heard and watched the floodlit speedway with screaming muscle cars spinning doughnuts in clouds of burning rubber smoke.

Straight after brekkie, we shot off to the Dragway, just five minutes away, where we signed our lives away with an indemnity form, then got to see and hear the 1000 horsepower, 8 Cylinder, 9.2 litre, 565 Cubic Inch, monster dragsters warming up. 

Our driver gave us a walk on the dragstrip, showed us the first spot where we wet the tyres, followed by burnout or spinning them wildly to get traction, then advance onto the specially lubricated track, nice and slippy with some special stuff courtesy of NASA research.

The starting lights run through amber stages, flicker wildly, then as they go green, all hell breaks loose as the dragster hits 0-200 kilometres per hour in 6 seconds!

I bet you don’t associate bakery with dragsters, well, as we suited up, we donned a frilly health and safety shower cap that went under our helmet.

Next, we swung a leg over the side of the 3-seater big block, Chevy-powered machine and got strapped in tight like a Christmas parcel.

Visor down, thumbs up, and the driver blew thunderous raspberries from the beast of a motor. We rolled to the spot with water, spun the tyres in a cloud of smoke, then did a fast forward and reverse to be in pole position for the lights to go amber, then a few milliseconds to green: we punched with a mighty roar like an arrow down the track. In a second, we had hit 1.5Gs and there was just a blur of the spectator stands flashing past, plus my hysterical laughter as we slowed enough to turn for the sedate return on a sidetrack that had a 20kph sign we passed at 60kph.