WAR & PEACE

Five-second street car. Just think about that for a minute. A car that is 100-per-cent street legal and can run the quarter-mile in less than six seconds! It seems impossible, but there are now four of them on the planet — three in the US and now one in the UK. On 13 November this year, Andy Frost joined this elite club with a 5.95-second pass at 260mph, becoming the fourth member and in so doing smashing the old speed record held by Jeff Lutz by 9mph, proving that he has one of the quickest door cars on the planet. To put this elite group’s achievements in perspective, there have been three times as many people walk on the moon as have driven a street-legal car to a sub-six-second pass. None of the cars involved has had a budget like NASA, either! This type of success does not come easily or by accident but through levels of hard work, determination and self-sacrifice that not many could endure. And this is why so few have even attempted building a car like this — not that Andy and wife Deb could have ever imagined what was in store for them when they bought their original Victor for £60 back in 1981.

Its evolution began when the asthmatic four-banger was replaced with a six and then a Rover V8. When the drag racing bug bit hard around 32 years ago, a small block Chev went in, then nitrous, then a big block. At that stage, the Frosts ran the car, known then as ‘RedVictor1’, to consistent low nines at 150mph. The car then evolved into ‘RedVictor2’ with a tube chassis, twin turbos, and EFI. For a while, that was good enough to make it the quickest street-legal pump-gas car in the world. Andy held the world pump-gas ET and speed records on Mickey Thompson 315-section radials with