You might think going from 0 to 100km/hr in just over two seconds was fast enough – especially when your time trial clocks in around 11 seconds faster than anything else on the course.
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Not for Mark Trees.
Not when first place is up for grabs at the Oakey Street Sprint at the weekend – the first round of this year’s street sprint series.
Over a couple of beers at the Oakey RSM on Saturday after the first day’s racing, Trees and his team had an idea – turn up the turbo boost to 28 pounds per square inch on a car that, on a casual day will do 300km per hour.
“Maximum attack for Sunday,” Trees said with the kind of grin you would imagine a race driver would have midway through a chicane turn with his hair on fire.
“It proved to be our undoing.”
The pit crew – Chris Manual, Wayne Trees, Jono George, Mitch Anderson, Marcus Deans and Simon White – were on board.
“I reallly like to win,” Trees said. “We were going for broke.”
“There is always something to do to (the car), whether it is major or minor, you are always trying to improve the car to go faster.”
Up goes the turbo boost.
The car was built by Nismo, the racing arm of the Nissan motor company and imported to Australia in 2010.
It was a perfect match for Trees. Its sleek outer shell allows it to race in the sports car class, but underneath it is all-mechanical aggression.
It sits on four, fat, 15-inch racing slicks and, even strapped down on the back of a trailer, it looks angry – a little monster disguised as a car.
Under the body, there’s a SR20 turbocharged motor with a six-speed sequential transactional gearbox and 400 horsepower at the full-floating disc brakes.
“If you had a set of false teeth you would want to glue them in because under acceleration, you'll choke and under brakes, they'll fly out of your mouth,” Trees said.
On Saturday, Trees and his crew had comfortably claimed second place at the Oakey sprint.
But for the man who by his own admission drives the car like he stole it, the thought of second place was not quite as sweet as first.
But the car could not handle the pressure. In an early round on Sunday, a piston blew and Trees and his team was out for the weekend – still claiming a win in the sports car class, and third overall.
“There's nothing like first place,” Trees said, who took up racing again in 2010 after a career as an off-road racer in the ’80s.
Despite the damaged engine, he said he will be back on the track for the next round in July determined to claim the checkered flag.
“The bit of money I got this time will probably help buy my piston, I suppose.”
He said he stopped adding up the receipts when the car topped $80,000.
“It does everything right,” he said.
“It brakes, accelerates, it turns. It makes a bad driver look good.”
The time-trial street sprint pits the fastest cars around against the clock in a two-kilometre race through the industrial estates of several south-east Queensland towns.
“I have a lot of work on,” Trees said.
“A lot of work to do over the next two months, as well as rebuild my motor. But I'm up for it.”