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Noonan “wants to have a little fun” at Winternationals

WITH a new car and the hopes of many of his competitors on his shoulders, engine builder and Top Alcohol racer Jamie Noonan just “wants to have a little fun” at the Fuchs Winternationals.

Noonan will be one of 10 Top Alcohol competitors hitting Queensland’s premier drag racing facility from today until Sunday.

He’s in pursuit of a coveted ‘gold Christmas tree’ trophy.

“We are still ironing out the bugs of our new car,” Noonan said.

“I have only made three full passes since bringing it home from the USA so we have no expectations for this event.”

Noonan is director and chief engine builder of Noonan Race Engineering, which is heavily involved in the drag racing and V8 Supercar fields.

At the recent Winters warm-up test weekend for event entrants, Noonan and the team impressed with some big numbers across both Saturday and Sunday.

“The Winters warm-up was a mixed affair for us,” he said.

“We needed to do some final testing of some of our new products which resulted in us running a 5.35 second pass on the Saturday running under the NHRA (America’s primary sanctioning body) rules (the Australian elapsed time record for Top Alcohol is currently 5.410 seconds).

“We made the commitment to compete this weekend following that successful data gathering.

“For sure it would be nice to take home the win, however the field has gotten a lot tougher and we do not have a lot of test passes under our belt with this new car, so if we can go out, get a few more passes done and back up our 5.49 second effort from last weekend we would be happy with that.”