Little ‘Pirate’ up for grabs

25 March, 2015

It was at the first New Zealand Drag Nationals at Kopuka on a dry summer’s day in 1967, where Bob Rossiter’s ‘Pirate’ dragster faced off against the team of Lucas and Saunders in their matching flathead-powered rail job called ‘77 Sunset Strip.’

The Pirate, running on an exotic homemade brew of sodium peroxide, nitromethane, and magnesium sulphide, sat on the start line spitting flames of multicoloured gas out of the weed burners. Neither pilot would inch forward to stage, with some saying it was the longest pre-stage driver psych-out in drag-racing history. But then, just before there was a full meltdown, they both pulled up to the start line and the starter excitedly leaped into the air and dropped his flag.

The cars left in a plume of tyre smoke, clutch dust, and black coal, and the capacity crowd all stood to see the two cars careen toward the finish in the midst of all the dust.

The Pirate won the day and Bob Rossiter was crowned New Zealand’s first National Top Eliminator. All these years later the Pirate (and Bob) still exist, and the rail is lovingly looked after by the good folk of the Southward Car Museum after it was purchased in 1968 by none other than Len Southward himself.

Fast forward a few decades or four and another famous drag racer/fabricator/hot-rod builder by the name of Graeme Berry steps in and does the impossible — he builds an exact model-car scale replica of the Pirate dragster, perfect in every single detail imaginable. This very model, donated to the Scroungers Car Club, will be going up for Auction at the 13th Annual Hot Rod Blowout on Sunday, March 29, 2015. If you want to own a piece of drag-racing and hot-rod history, bring your cheque book and get a bid in on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

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.