Search
Close this search box.

Flashback to Leadfoot Festival

22 March, 2015

Set in the idyllic countryside of Hahei is Rod Millen’s farm — the aptly named Leadfoot Ranch. Every two years, Rod opens it up for the Leadfoot Festival. This is the North Island’s version of Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, and action takes place up the ranch’s 1.6km tarmac driveway, starting from the gate, where it is relatively flat farmland, making its winding way up into the pine trees through a series of tight hairpins.

Several different classes of cars were invited to attend by Rod Millen — including rallying, open-wheelers, 4x4s, sports cars, karts, motorcycles, and what appeared to be a crowd-favourite; drift cars. In attendance were drivers such as Richard Mason, ‘Mad Mike’ Whiddett (a renowned drifter), Anne Thomson in her 1906 Darracq, and, of course, Rod Millen himself. Rod, in fact, raced three of his cars over the weekend — a Mazda RX-3, the Toyota Celica, which he raced at Pikes Peak, and the Toyota Tundra, which his MillenWorks Racing was contracted to build for the Championship Off-Road Racing series.

The Leadfoot Festival is held over three days, with the Friday being a non-competitive day, allowing the entrants to set up their cars and familiarize themselves with the course. This day of full-on practice made for a hairy moment for many, and lots of hay-bale destruction.

We’ve put together a gallery of images, shot by Steve Ritchie Photography, to take us back to the latest Leadfoot Festival held over February 6–8, 2015. Check it out below:

Almost mythical pony

The Shelby came to our shores in 2003. It went from the original New Zealand owner to an owner in Auckland. Malcolm just happened to be in the right place with the right amount of money in 2018 and a deal was done. Since then, plenty of people have tried to buy it off him. The odometer reads 92,300 miles. From the condition of the car that seems to be correct and only the first time around.
Malcolm’s car is an automatic. It has the 1966 dashboard, the back seat, the rear quarter windows and the scoops funnelling air to the rear brakes.
He even has the original bill of sale from October 1965 in California.

Becoming fond of Fords part two – happy times with Escorts

In part one of this Ford-flavoured trip down memory lane I recalled a sad and instructive episode when I learned my shortcomings as a car tuner, something that tainted my appreciation of Mk2 Ford Escort vans in particular. Prior to that I had a couple of other Ford entanglements of slightly more redeeming merit. There were two Mk1 Escorts I had got my hands on: a 1972 1300 XL belonging to my father and a later, end-of-line, English-assembled 1974 1100, which my partner and I bought from Panmure Motors Ford in Auckland in 1980. Both those cars were the high water mark of my relationship with the Ford Motor Co. I liked the Mk1 Escorts. They were nice, nippy, small cars, particularly the 1300, which handled really well, and had a very precise gearbox for the time.
Images of Jim Richards in the Carney Racing Williment-built Twin Cam Escort and Paul Fahey in the Alan Mann–built Escort FVA often loomed in my imagination when I was driving these Mk1 Escorts — not that I was under any illusion of comparable driving skills, but they had to be having just as much fun as I was steering the basic versions of these projectiles.