Regular followers of our L67-swapped ‘Supermang’ VN Berlina build would have seen that last time on Carnage, Scotty finished putting the freshly rebuilt L67 into the car and got it fired up. Great success!

This time, we’re going back to Zane Heath at Maxx Performance in Melbourne for a health check-up on the new mill. Zane tuned the last L67 we had in the VN using the Haltech Platinum Sport GM plug-and-play ECU, but with fresh E85, a slight increase in boost and a new tune, we were keen to see if the new donk made any more power.

Unfortunately, the same bug that we had last time bit us again. The supercharger creates a lot of intake temp heat, and without an intercooler there’s no easy way to overcome that. We do have plans in the near future to fit the Mace Engineering air-to-air intercooler we have, but for now the best power we managed was 206rwkW (276hp) on 10.5psi without breaking anything.

The other issue we ran into was rising transmission temp. From factory, the VN uses a trans cooler that forms part of the radiator, but it seems we’ve reached the cooling limits of that with the newfound power.

The simple solution is a separate standalone cooler, which is exactly what Scotty went and bought himself. The new PWR cooler got mounted in front of the original AC condenser and radiator. The trans oil passes through the radiator as Holden intended, before then going through the new PWR cooler so it returns to the Turbo 700 ’box nice and cool.

With that done, the VN is ready to race! Obviously, the current restrictions in Victoria make heading to the track a tad difficult, but we’re hoping to hit the strip in the coming months. In the meantime, we’ll keep ourselves busy with the Trolvo, Scotty’s dad’s VE Valiant ute, the MX-5 – yeah, there’s still plenty to do.