Motorsport: Greased lightning

Kiwi-designed Synergy V8, inside a Juno racing car, is a blistering drive. Photo / Lance Hastie

Forget home-garage handymen, the Kiwi-designed Synergy V8 powering this Brit-sourced race car is as professional as they come. It's also blisteringly powerful, its delivery so brutal only seasoned racers Jono Lester and Jonny Reid - of Porsche GT3 and A1GP fame - were talented enough to debut it. This paper went along for the ride.

Literally, for the Synergy V8 is tucked into a Juno racing car - a low-slung purpose-built racer with a passenger seat.

Juno Racing NZ managing director Chris Hold spotted the Synergy V8 when researching NZ's racing market.

Its designer, Simon Longdill, got bored with designing particle accelerators, as you do. A speedway fan, he filled his spare time by designing an eight-cylinder powerplant - a low cost, modern engine based on Kawasaki ZX12 cylinder heads.

Three years ago he tucked his V8 into a Midget speedway car, which won its first race, then the Australian championship. It's been winning ever since.

Now Longdill's engine is tucked into the Juno. This is nominally a road car - yes, it has indicators - though its stance is too extreme for real-world roads. But it does have that second seat, in the form of a right-angled fibreglass sheet.

I'm strapped in painfully tight next to Reid, collarbones creaking under the strain, and we're off.

Reid spears into the first turn, the car wriggling out, hard Avon rubber fighting for grip and into the next bends at eye-watering speed; slow for the hairpin - bang through the gears, hurled into the harness, air-blast lifting the helmet and slamming it into the roll hoop. Bang-bang down through the gears and round. Whap-whap-whap up again to 260, smacked brutally into a harness incapable of controlling such force, breath ripped from protesting lungs as we round on to the front straight and scream past a blur of watching faces. Imagine the buzz-saw whine of a high-performance motorcycle on song - then double it. Sit just inches above the ground beside a maniac driving up to and apparently over the laws of physics, and you have some idea of this car's savage performance.

Back in the pits I was still strapped in too tight to breath - yet was bruised back, front and sideways from being hurled about the cockpit by such extreme cornering forces. Reid had clearly had a good time; the Juno is "an eye-opening experience" the seasoned racer says.

Where to from here?

Juno could enter current classes. But Hold hopes to see endurance races, with a gentleman owner/driver sharing his car with an up-and-comer and an experienced racer, to lift their game. "It brings people up for something like Le Mans, for which there aren't any feeder categories here," he says.

Meanwhile, he and Longdill plan to re-export Juno V8s to Britain, and take the new engine to the United States.

For now, they're selling one of the fastest cars on NZ race tracks to anyone with the money, the top-spec Juno V8 selling at around a quarter of a million dollars.