1200 Techniques

John huysmans’s xw ute might look like just a nice, clean streeter at first glance, but he’s found a way to hide 1200 horses under the bonnet.

HAVING owned plenty of strip-only weapons, John Huysmans thought it was about time he built himself a registered one. That’s how this tough-as-nails, XY-fronted XW ute came about.

“Nobody suspects it’s packing 1200hp,” says John, from Orange, NSW. “I can pull up at the servo and just putt around without attracting too much attention.”

The 50-year-old has been playing around with race cars since he was 15. “I just love racing; it started with an 11-second LJ – I was very young and it was way too quick,” John laughs.

A few other cars followed, before John moved onto a 351 Windsor-powered Capri that won a lot of races, running a best of 10.1@134mph. Then John got busy with other stuff, and after not running the car for years, he ended up selling it. But as the Street Machine faithful know all too well, once it’s in the blood, Racer’s Disease is all but incurable.

“Five or six years ago I started following Hot Rod Drag Week in the US,” John says. “I thought: ‘Now that’s a challenge.’”

So shortly after adding ‘Compete in Drag Week’ to his bucket list, a reasonably clean-looking XW ute came along. It was the perfect basis for a Drag Week challenger – a street car he could race!

Back then only a handful of cars at Drag Week were in the sevens; any car running consistent eights was class-competitive, so that’s what John set his sights on.

A twin-turbo, EFI, 429-cube small-block was deemed to be the combo to run the number. Kim Baker from Baker Precision Engines looked after the specs and all the machine work, while John screwed the formidable mill together himself at home in the shed.