Get your entire car club to Leadfoot Festival 2015

3 November, 2014

We’re fast approaching the Leadfoot Festival, held over February 6–8, 2015 at Leadfoot Ranch in Hahei, and you can get your car club invited to be a part of the spectacle by having an exclusive space in the new Classic & Vintage Club Area. The advantage of this is you get all your club cars in one spot, and every club car through the gate will receive two tickets to that night’s concert. The club’s exclusive area will be designed with special signage to designate each club’s affiliation, all for no added cost!

You can book your club for one, two, or all three days of the event, but space is extremely limited and it is anticipated to sell out quickly. Understandably, cars must be classic, vintage, or unique in nature, and each club must have a minimum of 10 cars to qualify. For more info, or for tickets, go to leadfootfestival.com.

Design accord

You can’t get much more of an art deco car than a Cord — so much so that new owners, Paul McCarthy and his wife, Sarah Selwood, went ahead and took their Beverly 812 to Napier’s Art Deco Festival this year, even though the festival itself had been cancelled.
“We took delivery of the vehicle 12 days before heading off to Napier. We still drove it all around at the festival,” says Paul.
The utterly distinctive chrome grille wrapping around the Cord’s famous coffin-shaped nose, and the pure, clean lines of the front wing wheel arches, thanks to its retractable headlamps, are the essence of deco. This model, the Beverly, has the finishing touch of the bustle boot that is missing from the Westchester saloon.

Motorman: When New Zealand built the Model T Ford

History has a way of surrounding us, hidden in plain sight. I was one of a group who had been working for years in an editorial office in Augustus Terrace in the Auckland city fringe suburb of Parnell who had no idea that motoring history had been made right around the corner. Our premises actually backed onto a century-old brick building in adjacent Fox Street that had seen the wonder of the age, brand-new Model T Fords, rolling out the front door seven decades earlier.
Today, the building is an award-winning two-level office building, comprehensively refurbished in 2012. Happily, 6 Fox Street honours its one time claim to motoring fame. Next door are eight upmarket loft apartments, also on the site where the Fords were completed. Elsewhere, at 89 Courtenay Place, Wellington, and Sophia Street, Timaru, semi-knocked-down Model Ts were also being put together, completing a motor vehicle that would later become known as the Car of the Century.