Video: The Barra MX-5 runs nines at Summernats Slam!

Heathcote Park Raceway was abuzz like we’d never seen it before for Summernats Slam last weekend, with the Australian Top Fuel Championship drawing huge crowds to watch two days of burnouts and drag racing.

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Taking part in the action was Scotty in our Barra-swapped MX-5, which regular Carnage viewers would’ve seen in our most recent episodes where we got the car ready for the event.

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For those out of the loop, we originally built this MX-5 with an out-of-the-bonnet twin-turbo LS1, which ran a 9.9-second PB at Red CentreNATS several years ago. After that, the car sat for a while, until Scotty decided to reinvent it with a budget Barra swap and new ‘Lightning McBarra’ livery.

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To date, we’d never raced the Mazda with its stock-bottom-end LPG Barra-turbo mill, so we decided to use Summernats Slam as the perfect excuse to see what it could do.

The little Mazda came storming out of the blocks straight away, resetting its PB on its first shakedown pass with a 9.89@145mph – much to Scotty’s amazement!

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Things got even better when that PB dropped even further on the second pass of the day, with Scotty clocking 9.65@144mph to the cheers of Street Machine bossman Telfo.

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With those qualifying runs under our belt on Saturday, Sunday saw us lining up for actual side-by-side racing. The MX-5 was entered in the Super Sedan class, which was running a Chicago Shootout dial-in racing format. All drivers would get three runs, with the best-placed cars making it to the final.

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Unfortunately, Scotty missed his dial-in by a fair margin on his first competition pass, running a 9.8 on a 9.60 dial-in. While that effectively took us out of competition, the silver lining was that it gave Scotty the perfect excuse to chase PBs guilt-free, with two more runs to come.

That mentality yielded the car’s best pass to date, Scotty guiding the MX-5 to a 9.62 in its second-last run of the day.

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All in all, it was a hugely successful weekend for us, with the MX-5 running five nine-second passes and doing so without us needing to turn a single spanner on the bulletproof Barra combo.

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From here, the plan is to fit a rear anti-roll bar to the Mazda’s four-link to stop its chronic body roll, and maybe add a touch more power as we set our sights on a 9.50 timeslip. So make sure you keep your eyes on the Carnage train for more MX-5 awesomeness coming soon!