The final race for Goblin at Santa Pod Raceway is over.
We lost the first elimination round against Marck Harteveld at the European Finals 2026 in England. 6,039 to Marck´s 5,884. Mats was faster off the line with 0,144 Sec. Experienced a tendency for tire shake. Did a very quick pedal to prevent the car from doing the same thing as in Tierp in early August, when it stood up on two wheels. After this quick pedaling, however, the car became very aggressive and shook again. During this shake, the driveshaft lost momentum and the driveshaft RPM dropped slightly, failing to return to the RPM needed for a 5.8-second run.
With that, Harteveld brought Goblin's career in the FIA European Drag Racing Championship to an end, with a margin of only 0.0102 seconds at the finish line—translating to a theoretical difference of 1.08 meters at 237.74 MPH (382,60 km/h).
Since our nose is actually 0.6 meters too short according to the rules, the actual difference could have been only 0.48 meters if we hadn't chosen to keep the car's original lines and instead had a longer nose in front of the front wheels. When staging at the starting line, it's measured by the front wheels, whereas at the finish line, it's measured against the bodywork.
Congratulations to Harteveld´s team, and it was unfortunate that you didn't get the chance to continue racing when the event was called off due to rain. We would like to congratulate Andres Arnover with team in Pro Modified and all the other winners in the European Drag Racing Championship 2026. We also congratulate everyone else who participated—you have all fought hard to get where you are. And a big thank you to the track crew, the spectators, and our fans for all our years at Santa Pod Raceway.
Mats started his drag racing career in the 1970s, which is now 50 years ago. Mats then started driving Pro Mod in 2001, 25 years ago. In 2003, we visited Santa Pod Raceway for the first time with Goblin. Since then, we've been there between 1 and 3 times per year. For many years, we went there 3 times a year: the Easter event, the test weekend before the Main Event, the Main Event itself, and the European Finals. We ran Europe's first 5-second pass there in 2009 and won the European Championship that same year. It was a real shame we couldn't finish it off with a new personal best there.
As usual, you always want one more pass to fine-tune things. We started this event with a converter failure, which forced us to put in our old converter—which isn't quite the same. So we had to start adjusting the car based on that in the second qualifying session. However, we found other things to adjust as well. Because of the new converter, a new supercharger, and more supercharger overdrive for this season, we had to adjust the fueling to avoid burning pistons before the finish line. Since we haven't gotten many full-throttle passes, it's been difficult to adjust this to a good level.
Before the first elimination round, we discovered that the engine was getting too much fuel at launch RPM, causing it to hiccup right when the tree dropped, and we struggled to get the wheels spinning right at launch—meaning during the first 0.15 seconds. We improved this significantly. However, that made the engine even stronger further out at around 0.5 seconds, where it spun a bit too much, leading to a tendency for tire shake that Mats pedaled out of.
If we had been given another chance, we would have pulled more timing for a slightly longer duration here to tame the engine so the car wouldn't spin as much. We're talking about tenths of a second here, which makes all the difference in this situation. The margins are tiny in this sport, both when tuning and when facing competitors. So it isn't easy. Very big respect to everyone who runs consistent and fast times week in, week out.
We will now do one absolute final event with Goblin, taking place at the SpeedEvents Finals at Tierp Arena on September 25–27. We would be very happy to see you there to witness it, so go and buy your tickets today! There will be no livestream for this event, as it costs too much and there are too few participants registered. In any case, we hope to finish off with a few nice passes.
See you there!
https://www.nortic.se/ticket/organizer/3927
You can find the final pass and the other passes on SantaPodTV on YouTube.
The final pass is at 28:25 in this clip:
FIA/FIM Euro Finals 2026 - Sunday
You can also find an interview with Mats here at 4:17:50 in the clip:
FIA/FIM Euro Finals 2026 - Friday
