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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.

Racing Mazdas

12 June, 2026

Both Rod Millen and Ron Kendall were rotary racing kings, emanating from the North Shore of Auckland, where I grew up. And the ultimate rotary techno guru was Bill Shiells, who developed the engine into a rocket ship while working out of Gulf Mazda in Takapuna from 1969, and later in his own business, Rotorsport. He began to extract some phenomenal horsepower from the enigmatic rotary engine. Bill was one of the first to race the Mazda RX-2 Coupe in 1971 and achieved immediate success, causing others to sit up and take notice, particularly the North Shore’s racing elite. They included Robbie Francevic, Rod Millen, Ron Kendall, John Woolf, John Le Feuvre, and Rex Findlay.

Range Rover CSK — the original SUV

5 June, 2026

The Range Rover, thanks to Charles Spencer King, went into production in 1970 boasting an iconic shape that would last until 1996. The vehicle that would create the SUV moniker came about because Rover decided it was time to add a bigger four-wheel-drive vehicle, one with a 100-inch wheelbase, to the model range. Land Rover made a 109-inch wheelbase model but the standard vehicle had a 88-inch wheelbase.
The new model would be more suitable for road use than the existing Land Rover, which was considered to be predominantly for rural use. To make sure it could cope on any road it came standard with the Rover 3.5-litre V8 engine. The body design was originally sketched by King and went into production with only a few minor touch-ups by the Rover styling team.
According to King, “The idea was to combine the comfort and on-road ability of a Rover saloon with the off-road ability of a Land Rover. Nobody was doing it.”