The Summernats formula couldn’t be taken all the way to the United States without a few of our headline, big banger heroes there to show the yanks how we get down. Heath Waddington and the boys from the Castlemaine Rod Shop flew their blown WARBIRD XP Falcon over for the weekend, but as you’re about to read, it wasn’t all peachy.

The weekend didn’t get off to a good start. Issues with the car had Heath Waddington and his team tearing their hair and several motors out in an effort to find the gremlins. They took out the first engine, swapped in a spare. When that didn’t want to play the game, the first engine went back in, but that still didn’t fully solve their issues.

Enter a couple of fellow Victorians, Adam Rogash from MPW Performance and John Pilla from Powerhouse Engines, who jumped into the fray on Thursday with some fresh eyes and helped get the car running and ready to make the Pro Burnouts qualifying round.

“We went through hell with it, but I didn’t want to let Summernats down,” said Heath. “If it was back home, I would’ve just put it back in the trailer. But Andy Lopez put a lot of time and money into this car with the promotion and stuff, so we knew we had to put a show on.”

Heath praised the efforts of everyone who came together to assist. “The best thing about it was everybody chipping in to help. Rogash spoke over the phone with Frank [Marchese] back home, and they made it work. That was great. You had two opposing engine builders coming together to help a car overseas, and I can’t thank Dandy Engines, MPW and Powerhouse enough for what they did”

The mammoth team effort got the car ready for the first round of qualifying for the Haltech Burnouts, Heath and WARBIRD getting the job done.

“It was fairly decent, the car was super fat, I nearly had it buried and we had 1000rpm left on the table,” said Heath after the run. “We’ll adjust the tune, and get some more revs into it for tomorrow.”

The second qualifying burnout the following day was a lot better, and yielded Heath and WARBIRD a spot in the finals. After a mammoth effort, a piece of silverware would’ve been one hell of a way to cap off the weekend, but a minor error in his final burnout of crossing the white line cost Heath a dream result.

“There was one rule, it seemed like there was only one rule, and that was don’t go over the white line, and I went over it by about half a metre,” says Heath. “I mucked up, but I tell you what, it was a killer skid. It was definitely right up there, we revved it to the moon,” he continues.

“It was disappointing, especially after spending four days trying to get that bloody thing going. Summernats is heading to Indianapolis in September, so maybe we’ll have to head there and pick a cheque up there.”