Drag racer Andrey Kravchenko: “It is crazy fast”

What has 3,500hp, dispatches a quarter of a mile in only six seconds and needs two parachutes to stop it? That’ll be drag racer Andrey Kravchenko’s Nissan GTR-based Promod. When the Motul-backed racer’s not tearing up the drag strips, he’s tuning. And right now, he’s spending a lot of time in the workshop. We called him for a chat.

There is no racing now unfortunately. We hope it will start again in June or so, so right now we have time to prepare the cars. I work on my race car, street cars and customers cars. Unless coronavirus lasts for another three or four months, we have a lot of jobs to do.

How did you get into drag racing?

Well, I was living in the USA in 2000 and I purchased a Subaru Impreza WRX. I started to tune it and participate in street/drag racing. And then, when I moved back home to Ukraine, I brought the car back and started racing it. That’s how I got into the game.

My car, the TopSpeed Promod Outlaw, is an NHRA-legal GTR R35 putting out 3,500hp. It’s powered from a 526 CID engine, 481X AJPE billet, stage-four Garrett Gen2 twin turbos, 16x 800lbs fuel injectors and a Motec M150 ECU. I’ve tuned this car myself. In Abu Dhabi we ran the ¼ mile in 6.11 seconds.

Can you describe the feeling of driving a drag car?

Well I drove many drag cars. If we’re talking in particular about this Promod, it is crazy fast. To give an idea, you can see the leaderboard in Dragy (GPS performance software for timing runs). I put Dragy on my car while racing some runs in Abu Dhabi to record 0-100kph, 100-200kph and 1/4 mile. My car recorded 0-100 in 1.03 seconds, 100-200 in 1.13 seconds and 0-200 in 2.16 seconds! You can imagine the g forces from that.  

Well you need to race and race and race. Keep practicing and you’ll get better if you want to be up there with the professionals, running fast.

What’s your connection with Motul and what difference does it make to your racing?

Motul helps me a lot. It’s been sponsoring me for the past few years and I hope
many more years to come. We have a great connection with its office in Russia
and it’s helped us a lot over the years.

In 2013 I set the European AWD/GTR record, which was held until last year when a car in Russia that I tuned finally beat me to it. So now it is the second fastest time but it’s a good feeling that the car that went faster was tuned by me. I’ve also won three or four Ukrainian championships, and got second place in the past two years in RDRC, the Russian championship. I managed second place in Abu Dhabi this year before it was shut down because of COVID-19. In Abu Dhabi last year I ran 6.11, which was at that time the fastest drag car in Europe. Now I hold second place.

 

My company TopSpeed has been operational since 2005. We sell race car parts, build race cars, and tune them. This is the short story [laughs]. It is a race shop and tuning shop here in Ukraine. but we work a lot with other countries, too.

© Pictures: PR SMP Racing