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January 6th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda What do you do if you ding your prized ute just days before Australia’s biggest car festival begins in Canberra?
If you’re 21-year-old Scott Manly from Melbourne you try to make a joke of it – using letter decals.
Manly didn’t have time to take his bright yellow Holden ute to a panel beater before driving up the Hume Highway, so he highlighted the dent with an arrow and the words: “Rough as your mum!”
“Really it’s an eyesore,” Manly says of the dent on his VZ Thunder’s bonnet.
“Everyone can spot it so I wanted to make it a bit of a gag to make up for it.”
Manly is one of 90,000 revheads expected to attend Summernats 25 over four days.
It’s his first time at the sometimes controversial car festival and he’s hooked already.
“I’m loving it,” the 21-year-old says on Friday.
“The atmosphere, the cars and all the girls.”
Manly’s six-litre ute is one of the hundreds of vehicles competing in the Horsepower Heroes competition which, as the name suggests, pits car against car to see which has the most grunt.
The vehicles are strapped on to a dynamometer and then revved – loudly.
A “dyno” is essentially a treadmill for cars, according to the man measuring horsepower at Summernats 25.
“We are actually measuring the peak horsepower that the car makes at the wheels,” Todd Lewis says on Friday.
He runs each vehicle from low to high revs to generate a power curve. The owner usually sits in the passenger seat.
Power is calculated by looking at road speed and torque, but the dyno also measures a car’s turbo boost and how much fuel the engine is using.
It takes 10 minutes to load each car on, strap it down, run three 10-seconds tests and then move it on. A result is the average of the three runs.
Since the event is held inside a pavilion, the exhaust fumes have to be sucked outside by an extractor fan. Cooling fans at the front of the car blow air over the radiator.
While it doesn’t sound like much of a spectator sport, hundreds of people crowd into stands inside the pavilion.
Summernats owner Andy Lopez admits it seems odd that revheads want to watch a static competition.
“The reason people watch is they’re actually getting a fair bit of technical data fed back through the dyno on to computers live on the big screen,” he says.
Lewis says the crowd doesn’t really go wild until it sees big numbers.
“They’re all petrol heads here so they want to see high horsepower numbers and they don’t get excited if they don’t see that.”
Qualifying for the various categories is held on Friday and Saturday.
The top five cars in each group then duel it out before capacity crowds during Sunday’s finals.
Manly entered his Holden ute so he’d be able to quantify future power gains.
“I just wanted to see what I could push from a stock-standard ute,” he says.
“Then I can compare after I’ve put more performance parts in it.”
The VZ Thunder produced a top horsepower of 272.8 on Friday.
Asked if he’s happy with that, Manly replies: “I guess.”
Lewis expects another Holden ute – a souped-up twin-turbo big block – to put out around 2000 horsepower this weekend to win the top category.
Testing cars on the “treadmill” is much safer than running illegal drag races on the streets.
But the car with the most horsepower isn’t necessarily going to be the fastest, Lewis says.
“It’s for bragging rights over who’s got the most horsepower.
“But it’s not simulating who’s going to be quicker down a quarter-mile because you could have a 500 horsepower engine in a half-a-tonne car against a one-tonne car.”
Then, obviously, the lighter car would win.
Summernats 25 runs until Sunday.
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