Coachella Valley Street Racing

THE WORLD'S most powerful street registered car, with 3000-plus horsepower from its supercharged V12 aero engine, will make its international public debut in Canberra for Summernats 16 in early January.

The machine is called Final Objective and is the culmination of five years of work by Australia's premier street rod builder Rod Hadfield at his Castlemaine Rod Shop.

The 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air Sports Coupe has been a labour of love, sweat and gears for the vastly experienced Hadfield, who aims to have the Guinness Books of Records officially verify the car's status within the next six weeks.

After leaving Canberra, Final Objective will begin its touring schedule which is certain to take it and its owner, plus its custom-made trailer and merchandise, all around the world.

Particularly eager to see the completed car are street rod show promoters in the US, because Hadfield has tapped a rich vein of aviation heritage by using the same engine that powered the famous Lancaster bomber, and the Spitfire and Mustang fighters.

It's an extraordinary machine in every detail, with the task of making it street registerable providing its own set of challenges and bureaucratic red tape.

"We bought the car back in '89 and started collecting the bits we needed from then on; I scoured the swap meets, on the Internet and spent hours on the phone to the States hunting down specialist parts," Hadfield said.

He chose a Chev because from a promotional perspective, the popularity of that car and particular model in the US is unsurpassed. Taking the car on tour Stateside was always a primary goal in order to recoup the enormous time and costs in building The Final Objective.

"No car creates as much universal interest as a 1955 Chev two door. If you're a street rodder, that's everybody's dream car," Hadfield said.

"And the Rolls Royce Merlin is one of the world's most famous engines.

"We wouldn't be a free country today if not for the Rolls Royce Merlin," he added. He secured the rare engine as a spare from a Melbourne race boat called "Aussie Connection".

He started the project using a non-supercharged engine and then switched to forced induction when a suitable unit became available about five years ago.

Trying to find a gearbox which would handle the power was the first problem. He uses a Lenco that's customised from a Top Fuel drag car.

"We had to hand-make almost everything on the car, from the headlights back."

The V12 engine fits in the engine bay in a reverse direction. Since there was no fan belt drive off the enormous Merlin the aircraft, of course, didn't need them so all the necessary brackets and ancillaries had to be designed and carefully modified to fit.

He took the car for its first drive up and down his own driveway two years ago "just to prove the concept and the conversion".

"With all the stress and the strain and anguish of the building process, it was a relief to hear it running," he said.

"We had to get a permit to drive the car on the road and prove that what we'd done would work as a street car, then we had to pull it apart again and detail it.

"There are some silly people out there building cars that detail and paint as they're going along; what if you had to change something?"

And as expected, the bureaucrats in Victoria didn't exactly warm to the idea of a machine this awesome being given a rego sticker and licence plates. "I wrote them [Vicroads] a letter explaining what the car was about, what it was for, and didn't pull any punches," he said.

When the engineers wrote back saying they didn't think the car would be eligible for registration, Hadfield went straight to the top. He wrote direct to the office of the Minister for Transport stating his case.

"I explained that I'd been knocked back for rego on a car they hadn't even looked at and I think once they realised how serious I was about this project and that I wasn't going to go away, that seemed to get things happening," he said.

After the engineers visited his shop to see the car and picked their jaws off the floor they had to approve it.

"Why couldn't they? Just because it's got 3000 horsepower doesn't mean it's not safe," Hadfield said.

"It's not as though this engine has been plonked into some flimsy little chassis. This is a very strong construction.

"It's got huge power disc brakes and six pot calipers off a Pontiac Trans Am race car, power steering, windscreen wipers, headlights, treaded road tyres, seat belts, heater demisters, indicators everything you'd expect in a road car. Even a horn." He hasn't yet cruised through Castlemaine in Final Objective and he'll be sure that when he does, it'll be a very cautious outing.

"Crikey, if you flattened the throttle in her, you'd change lanes. It's got a torque output that's almost immeasurable."

And just like the Mustang of old, the starting procedure is extremely complicated. Firing up the Chev sounds more like an excerpt from a Biggles book.

"It almost takes a pilot's licence to start it," he said.

"It's no different to starting an aeroplane; you have to turn on the pumps, prime it, get fuel pressure and oil pressure up, set your idle mixtures to full rich, open the air bleeder, prime the fuel as the engine turns and boost the starting coils together until she fires up."

The cranking is achieved by a heavy duty starter motor from a Ford truck.

And the power output is an estimate only. Hadfield says that "by the time we monkeyed around with it in the workshop" the real numbers were likely to be much more "but we'll never know for sure".

Five years of full-time construction, six days a week with one or two people working on it means that the build cost is incalculable. As yet there's no insured value, either.

The air-brush paint job alone is a masterpiece, the colour scheme "borrowed" from a Mustang P51 fighter. Each of the 7000 rivets is hand-painted, every single one tape-masked and redefined four times. The painting process alone took six months by Marty Everitt, from Alphabet Signs in Melbourne.

"Marty imaged a Mustang plane on to the car, the shape of the wings, the machine guns and incorporated every tiny detail."

The colours chosen for the car are the same as those used for the D-Day invasion of Normandy when on the night before the event, the rear fuselage of every aircraft which was involved in the invasion had to be painted in a specific stripe pattern otherwise it would be shot down.

The striking blue nose belongs to one of the world's most famous and successful US Mustang fighter groups of World War II the 352nd popularly known as the Blue Bastards.

A comprehensive book about the car's construction and a spectacular T-shirt design are among the merchandise that will be on offer when the car goes on display here in January.