By the time you’re reading this, we’ll be less than 24 hours away from hearing Top Fuellers roaring down the freshly repaved Heathcote Park Raceway surface for Summernats Slam, and boy are we pumped!

Scotty Taylor will be flying the Carnage flag at Slam over the weekend in the Barra-swapped MX-5, so this fresh episode shows the final steps we had to go through to get the car ready.

Avid viewers will remember that last week Scotty got the car IHRA-approved for nine-second passes, and upgraded the dashboard to a Haltech iC-7. With all that ticked off, the final step was one last check-over on the Maxx Performance dyno to make sure the car is ready.

A new spring in the Turbosmart external wastegate finally gave Zane Heath from Maxx the boost control he needed (a long-winded drama we’ve had with this car), and it wasn’t long before the SBE LPG Barra mill comfortably made 579rwhp on 20psi.

That should be more than enough stonk to run a nine, but we also wanted a setting that wasn’t full kill mode for the weekend. Adjusting the boost settings in the standard Barra ECU is tricky on your own, so we had Zane set up a manual boost control system with a Turbosmart tee that bypasses the ECU’s boost control. This let us run a slightly more mellow 421rwhp.

With that done, Scotty decided it was probably best to take a quick jaunt up and down a deserted street to make sure the parachute works. On the strip, we’re anticipating speeds over 140mph, so we definitely didn’t want to wait until that point to find out if it would pop or not!

If you’re heading out to Heathcote this weekend – 21-22 May – make sure you stop by and say g’day to Scotty and the Carnage crew. It’s going to be a ripper event!