Maxing the Walkinshaw HSV on Australia's Stuart Highway

The darkness out here hides things. Important things. Things that, if you're unlucky, might kill you. There are no street lights in these parts. And, 1,000 miles from the nearest major city, there's no residual glow from light pollution, either. Outside the twin headlight beams, the blackout is total. And there are things hiding in the dark.

Pictures: Nathan Duff

This feature was originally published in the August 2014 issue of Top Gear magazine

See, the animals here aren't like the ones you might find in more civilised parts of the world. They don't pose politely for roadside photos. Kangaroos lie in wait like furry suicide bombers, ready to explode out of the darkness and onto your bonnet. Wombats, foxes and rabbits sit half-buried in the red dirt like IEDs, ready to rush a passing tyre. None of which would pose too serious a problem, except that we've just clipped 125mph and we're still climbing: 130 arrives, then 135 and 140. The lights are warping now, seemingly illuminating the future at the exact moment we arrive in it.

It's then that our courage runs out, though, and we find the brakes. We won't be breaking the local speed record tonight. Besides, we're here to prove that speed doesn't kill. And, as such, dying would be something of an inconvenience. Well, that's not entirely true. Speed's quite the homicidal little devil. In the USA, for example, 31 per cent of all road deaths are linked to speed. What we actually mean to prove is that speed doesn't kill out here. In fact, out here (‘here' being nowhere - a near-deserted stretch of Northern Territory highway, some 16 hours' drive from Adelaide), speed actually saves lives. And we're hoping to prove it.

But first, we'll need a car. Walkinshaw (Australia's answer to a semi-official tuning house like Alpina) has been working its race-inspired, after-market magic on Commodores and HSVs in Australia since 1988, but this, the W507, is far and away its boldest undertaking. It helps, of course, that the donor car - HSV's stonking GTS - was already the most powerful production car ever sold in Australia. Powered by a supercharged 6.2-litre V8 borrowed from the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, the GTS already generated a not-inconsiderable 576bhp and 545lb ft of furious torques. Stock standard, it'll clip 62mph in 4.4 seconds, and you'll get one on the road in Australia for around £55,000.

But if you then choose to loan said HSV to Walkinshaw (along with a definitely not-loaned £4,000-odd), it will do dark things to it for you and will return to you a truly terrifying beast. An ECU tweak, along with a new cold-air intake, ceramic headers, a high-flow catalytic converter and a new exhaust step that produces a sound akin to the controlled detonation of a skyscraper, bumps up the power to a vaguely terrifying 680bhp and 664lb ft. It's over-powered. Probably. But that's like being over-rich. Or over-handsome. And it's the perfect chariot for our road-safety education campaign.

So, some background: this 124-mile stretch of Aussie bitumen is the only public road in the country on which it's legal to do any speed you'd like. There used to be lots more. Almost all of the 1,000-odd-mile Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory was once blissfully speed limit-free. It was an unexpected boon for tourism, too. Car companies from all over the world shipped their pre-release models here for hot-weather testing. And all those engineers and drivers needed somewhere to eat, sleep and refuel along the way.

But in 2007, the Northern Territory imposed a state-wide 80mph maximum speed limit. Community outrage followed. This is a part of the world in which its sun-hardened residents regularly travel more than 400 miles every single day, often just to get to work or to buy essentials. Plus it's entirely corner-free. Without the inconvenience of towns, cities or natural landmarks to negotiate, road design was easy. A pencil-straight line crossing the shortest distance between two points was always the answer. And so residents were left with endless miles of dead straight highway, framed on both sides by the monotonous repetition of the outback's scenic nothingness, and several hours of speed-limited driving to get anywhere.

And people died. More than before the speed limit was imposed. In 2006, 42 people died on Northern Territory roads. The following year, 56 people were killed.

And so a community campaign began, one backed by studies and fact (on this particular stretch of road, there have been five fatalities in the past 10 years, and not one of them was linked to speed), to reintroduce speed limit-free highways across the Northern Territory. It became an election flashpoint, and the incoming government promised to reverse the 2007 decision. This 200km stretch is technically only a 12-month study, but it really exists to ease the rest of the country into the idea that their northern neighbours are going speed-free again.

Already, people have taken to calling it Australia's autobahn, but those people are wrong. The autobahn tends to take you from somewhere you were to somewhere you want to be. This derestricted zone of the Stuart Highway begins from what feels like a randomly selected point about 13 miles outside of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, dissects exactly nothing, then abruptly expires exactly 124 miles later. And while the autobahn is a multi-lane, dual-carriageway that crosses most of Germany, the Stuart Highway is a single lane in each direction, with trucks and road trains kissing wing mirrors as they pass. The autobahn is well lit, too. While street lights on the Stuart Highway arrive only when it passes through a microscopic township, of which there are exactly two: the bustling business district of Ti Tree, which 157 people call home, and the somewhat sleepier Aileron, with its seven residents.

One of those seven people is Greg Dick, who has run the Aileron Roadhouse for the past 30 years, and who so perfectly encapsulates the NT residents reaction to the speed issue he should run for mayor. Dick, for the record, has a pet wedge-tailed eagle, a gigantic, predatory bird with a wingspan of more than
six feet. Passing tourists loved it. Until it ate one of their dogs.

"Mate, we couldn't give a s**t. I was driving at 180kph [112mph] when there was no speed limit, and I was driving at 180kph when there was a speed limit. The only difference is that now I don't need to slow down if I think I see a cop," he says.

"It's all you blokes who make a big deal out of it. It's normal for us out here."

It's a feeling that's echoed by the few people we stumble across as we traipse up and down the derestricted zone. Locals like John Farrell, who arrived in the Northern Territory 40 years ago for a two-week holiday and kind of forgot to leave. John is part of a mass-scale road-improvement project that'll see a little more than A$3m spent on making the derestricted zone safer.

"It's excellent. There's something great about coming up on a police car sitting on 150kph [93mph] and overtaking them. Now that's a fun feeling," he says.

"But at the end of the day, it's the fatigue that gets you out here. That or the critters..."

We arrive two weeks after the speed limit was removed, and already a legend has formed in the sleepy townships. A story passed on in the roadside truck stops and petrol stations: did you hear about the bloke who clipped 275kph (170mph) in his Aston Martin V8 Vantage? Turns out that of all the supercar-driving visitors who descended on this usually quiet stretch of road, this chap had set the record. And just like that, we have a target in our sights. In the interests of road safety, of course.

We line up at our predetermined starting grid, framed on both sides by the newly installed no-speed-limit-zone signs. We have 124 miles to knock off Mr Aston. And you can all but see that far on this dead-straight road. It's a little over 36 degrees Celsius, and we have no real idea of what effect hitting 170mph in this heat will have on the Walkinshaw, but we desperately hope it's not a bad one. Losing your ride in Australia's famed outback can be somewhat hazardous to your health. It is, and there's no exaggeration here, the kind of place that straddles the deserted divide with such aplomb that merely getting your wheels bogged can be deadly. Back in 2012, two blokes got their 4WD stuck 10 miles from their house. "What's 10 miles?" they apparently thought, and started trudging back towards home. It was 45 degrees Celsius. One made it back, delirious from dehydration. The other didn't make it back at all.

It's too late to worry about that now. We've got educating to do. With a meaty plume of smoke from the rear tyres, our high-speed run begins. Zero to 60 actually feels slower than in the stock HSV, like the Walkinshaw is fighting to force all that power down, but the irrefutable laws of physics just aren't having it. As a result, the first five seconds or so are relatively composed, but you are left with the impression that its 6.2-litre V8 is preparing for something special. Hit third gear, and that special something shows itself: a wave of torque surges through the rear wheels, guiding the Walkinshaw forward with the kind of constant-but-utterly-unrelenting force of a shuttle launch.

One hundred and fifty kilometres per hour flicks up on the head-up display, then 180, 190, 200. It's less terrifying during the day, but only just. Then, at 250kph, something happens.

The road transforms from the relatively smooth blacktop it was 10kph ago into some sort of insane trampoline. Bumps in the road attack like ninjas: you can feel the car bouncing, and drifting slightly in a cross wind. And the noise: sweet Jesus, that noise. The boom of that exhaust feels heavy in the air. The car's speedo is limited to 260kph (161mph), but wonderfully the digital speedo in the head-up display keeps counting: 265, 270, 275... 276kph (171mph).

We drift slowly to a stop. Hands shaking, sweat pouring, but very much alive. And it's then that it hits us, parked beside this lawless blacktop hidden deep inside Australia's most-remote outback. A place where common sense prevails over national rhetoric. Where people are expected to be responsible for their own safety.

Maybe this is somewhere we want to be after all.