Info on CT's oval.
The following is written by CT.

My daily driver is a California Look '56 Oval. It sits on a '68 IRS pan.
It was a show car built in Canberra about 10 years ago. Normally I use it as a daily driver. One day my friend Greg Ward suggested we put his spare engine in the car and take it to the drags. We called it an STF project which stands for Sweep The Floor. The idea here is that you use all your spare parts and build something.

One weekend (in theory it actually took 2) we fitted a single side plate L-bug gearbox and a home-made tranny strap as well as some new gearbox mounts. Then we added a big fitting to the fuel tank and ran some 3/8th efi fuel line to an electric pump and the to the motor. Next we installed Greg's engine. The engine has been sitting around in Gregs garage for about 3 years. I don't know when it was originally built but it was a while ago. It's basically a Stan Pobjoy steroid-spec engine. That's a 1916 with 44IDF webers and some 044 heads with 42 x 37.5 valves and one of Stan's special cams. Everything else is stock. Normally this engine would have a counterweighted crank. This one for some reason doesn't so it won't last as long at 7000rpm.

We took the Oval out to Eastern Creek. I let Greg drive because I figured if anyone was going to blow up his motor it should be him. I didn't have time to change the tyres so the car was running on some Ultra Metric (ever heard of them?) 165/15s. They are so crap I told Greg to try and kill them. He tried.

On the first run Greg pulled up next to a 5.7 litre statesman with 2 holley carbs poking out the bonnet. It did a smallish burnout then had to wait at the lights while the Ovals smoked it's tyres. Greg put the rears in the water, selected second gear, took the engine to 6800rpm and dumped the clutch. He didn't think anything was happening until smoke started to come into the cabin. It was huge.

The first video (referring to the two videos of CT's car that can be found on my VIDEO'S PAGE), taken from behind the car, Greg is lined up with a modified 6 cylinder charger that runs 13s. The bug embarasses it in the burnout and in 1st and 2nd gear. And as you can hear the commentator say it's pretty close at half track. But unfortunately thanks to having a standard 3rd gear the revs drop a little in the gearchange and the charger takes the win.

The second video the bug is racing a black Toyota MR2. Lets just say the guy will be selling it after the race. This run was a 14.9@ 139kmph.

It was good fun and the oval really hooks up with molten 165s. Nothing beat it in 1st and 2nd gear all night, not even a turbo liberty 4WD.


CT's favorite pic
Paint looks sweet.

Interior
I want those seats.