Watch a Pair of Turbocharged Lamborghinis Dominate an Airport Race

Big horsepower and clean aero wins at Pump Gas Invitational in Texas.

As airstrip racing has grown, enthusiasts for it have found a handful of particularly effective platforms. That’s no different than most other forms of racing, but when racing on airports for more than a quarter-mile, people have increasingly turned to Nissan GT-Rs, mid-2000s Ford GTs, and Lamborghinis. At the recent Pump Gas Invitational in Texas, 1320 Video caught two Lambos ripping across the runway.

The yellow Gallardo’s PGI story comes across nearly magical. Competing in the E85 class, the car was running around 1,700 horsepower from its twin-turbo setup. Amazingly, Dallas Performance finished the engine installation around 4 a.m. the day of the event. As a result, the Gallardo made its first test passes just a few short hours after the engine had been put in.

That first run? An even 200 miles per hour with a second run at 203. As you might expect, a 200 mph car on E85 cleaned up in its class. The braking from 200 came across as pretty dicey with just 2,000 feet to work with. Nevertheless, the driver pressed on and neatly took home a win.

That wasn’t all for Dallas Performance. Another of their tuned Lamborghinis competed in the 93-octane class. That twin-turbo Superleggera makes “only” 1,100 horsepower. That was enougn, it turned out, to win that class with best runs well into the 180 mph range. The black Lambo had to work for its win with a narrow victory against the Calvo Motorsports-built General Lee Viper.

Texas Speed Syndicate hosts the Pump Gas Invitational, which includes side-by-side roll-racing events at an airfield. Unlike Speed Syndicate’s normal Texas Invitational, the PGI requires competitors’ cars to show up with empty fuel tanks. Their cars must then run on either 93-octane pump gas or E85 from the event’s vendor.

The Caddo Mills Airport course runs with about 1,500 feet of racing room plus another 2,000 feet of shutdown area. That makes for runs of a little more than a quarter-mile at full chat.