Posted by Brian Lohnes
In the realm of, “holy freaking horsepower Batman!” comes this video from Australia where a crew led by Aussie drag maven Darren Di Filippo has created what they call the “Top Fuel Mustang”. Running a blown and injected top fuel motor on 80%, the crew estimates that the car is creating somewhere around 6,000hp and can legit carry the title Top Fuel Mustang. They plan on debuting the machine at an upcoming PowerCruise gathering and then they will race it on a stiffer percentage of nitro at the Aussie SpringNationals which are in a month or so as best we can gather. Di Filippo is no stranger to nitro having run a top fuel dragster in Australia for years. He is also a well know jet car racer down there as well. His company DPE Performance Exhaust is a big brand Down Under and builds some really nice looking headers for a ton of applications. They have to be doing OK for him to have the financial suds to dabble in these projects!
Now, the car is really neat looking with the huge motor in the front and funny car style zoomie headers on it. It is right hand drive, like the vast majority of Aussie door slammers you’ll see down there on drag strips. The most interesting thing to us is the steering tiller. Instead of a wheel or a typical butterfly setup, the car has a control that literally looks like a u-shaped tiller with two necker knobs on it. You can see (who we think is) Di Filippo steering the car around the tight confines of the concrete pad it is on, whomping the throttle. We can honestly say that the design is completely new to us in a a race car and frankly the only thing that we may have seen something similar in is turn of the century horseless carriages. Hey, if it worked on a 10hp Olds back in the day, why not a 6,000hp “top fuel Mustang”.
Lastly, some of you will say, “Well the Super Chevy Show has had nitro coupes for years!” Yes, you are right. BUT, those guys ran like a 30% load and their machines are NOTHING like this car, most of the nitro coupe guys skipped the can entirely and ran alky after the series had been around for a few years, so this thing stands in a class by itself. Some of you may remember Don Wooten’s attempt at running an injected nitro pro mod in ADRL competition a couple years back. That thing was ankled by the NHRA mandating he use only a 50% load of fuel in the car. That makes for a weak sister of an injected car and he scrapped the project.
This car is absolutely effing awesome. From its fuel tank that appears to have about 100 gallons of capacity (exaggeration) to the completely insane and awesome exhaust note from the zoomie headers of a single plug, single mag hemi on 80% we suddenly feel the urge to get to Australia…right now.
. Een wat handiger stuur is dan wenselijk.