Trip report from Santa Pod

Not sure how many of you on here are petrol-heads like me but I thought I'd write up about my day at Santa Pod Raceway!

Basically my mate's Dad used to race formula Renault back in the day so has always had a bit of an adrenaline-seeking streak about him but last year he surprised everyone by buying a full blown dragster capable of nearly 200mph and doing the 1/4 mile in under 9 seconds. They've raced it a couple of times and this weekend my mate asked if I wanted to come up, help out on the crew and spend the rest of the day watching all the different classes of cars and bikes going down the strip. Obviously I jumped at the chance!!

I'm pretty gutted I didn't get any pictures (stupid blackberry camera decided to break last week!) but there were all sorts of cars there ranging from modified VW Jettas to Nitro Methane fuelled 300mph dragsters. Here's a clip of one of the top fuel cars that ran today. The video's from a few months ago, and skip to 1:30 if you just want to watch the run and not the prep beforehand. The video just does not do it justice though, the sound is deafening! At least twice as loud as a planes jet engine I reckon, you feel the sound waves hitting you and the ground physically shakes!

What's even more staggering is that they have to rebuild the engine after every single run, costing them about £5k in total each time. It's absolutely insane.
And in case a 8000bhp car wasn't enough, there were some 3000bhp bikes that are just as loud and only a second and a half slower than these cars!!

I haven't got a picture or video of the car we were working on but it's in a class called the wildbunch and looks a little like this:

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Star of the show though was a guy called Eric Teboul who has a bike similar to the ones in the video above but decided 6.7s was too slow....so he strapped an actual rocket to it instead!! Here's a video.....

I have to say, if you're into your cars and a bit of an adrenaline junkie then this is such a good day out. There was other entertainment going on at the same time, some stunt bikers, monster trucks and synchronised stunt drivers so we were never stuck for things to watch. i'd definitely recommend it!!

 

I've seen quite a lot of this drag racing etc in the past. I think there used to be a late night TV programme on for it a while back.

 

Yeah, it's something that i was always aware of but never really into until I saw them up close today.

 

Sounds class mate. My uncle has been before, said it's a fantastic day. Would love to try it.

 

I love stuff like this and one day will take my GTi to one of the GTi Festivals held at Santa Pod. Also, I went to the British Grand Prix in 2008 (the year Hamilton won and the championship) and loved it, going again this year and really looking forward to it!