Legendary Japanese tuning house Top Fuel has vowed to return to Australia with a much more refined and, what they believe, should be a much faster package for WTAC 2013.
The car was effectively “out of the box” last year having only been completed in the weeks prior to shipping to Australia with minimal testing. The “off season” has seen the team make many changes to create a more stable and predictable vehicle. This has included a visit back to the wind tunnel at Mie University to dial in the aero package.
The car will once again be driven by Japanese Super GT and HKS D1 star driver Nobuteru Taniguchi and is a joint venture between Japanese Honda tuning ace Top Fuel (Mie) and Japanese aero specialist and body kit manufacturer Voltex.
The major changes include the turbocharger from a HKS GT3082R to a much larger GCG Garrett GTX3582R which saw power climb to 802ps at a usable 7100rpm. The transmission has been upgraded from a HKS sequential to the latest spec Australian made Holinger RD6S sequential.
The car has also seen substantial changes to the aero in particular the underbody aero in an attempt to make the car more balanced at speed as last year the driver Taniguchi stated that the car was “quite hard to drive and very twitchy” which was not surprising for a newly built car.
Many hours were spent in the wind tunnel with Voltex head honcho Nakijima-san monitoring pressure and changes over the entire vehicle in an attempt to not only increase the total down force but also provide an equal front rear ratio which should stabilize the entire package, greatly increase corner speed and see the lap times tumble.
It is also worth noting that despite limited testing this car ran a very solid 1.29.05 at WTAC 2012 a time that would have seen them onto the podium in previous years but the competition is now firecer than ever before and this time saw them relegated them to fifth place overall in the Pro Class. Clearly this is not where they want to be and have been busily testing at Fuji Speedway and the times are tumbling with the car recording a 1.43 with still much more to come.
In Taniguchi-sans blog after WTAC 2013 he stated “Please Japan, give me something to catch these monsters with” and no doubt the guys at Top Fuel and Voltex were listening!
