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Targaception: Targa announce two-day rally-within-a-rally for 2015 grand final

9 August, 2015

Organizers have revealed that the final event of the 2015 Targa New Zealand season will now include an additional two-day 14-stage meeting to be completed within the main event, titled the Targa NZ Regional Rally. It will start alongside the main 1000km Targa New Zealand event on October 20 — the second-to-last day of the six-day marathon — with both groups of competitors set to finish in Palmerston North on October 31.

The additional two-day meeting helps complement the already arduous 1000km-long Targa New Zealand rally, which The Motorhood profiled in July.

Event organizer Peter Martin has stated that the new two-day event will cater towards more casual drivers, or others wanting to sample Targa New Zealand before committing to the full six-day rally.

“People are busy, and many tell me that while they’d love to do our event, they simply do not have the time to do the full six-days … [the two-day meeting] gives people either new to motorsport, or new to Targa a chance to dip a toe in the water to see if a Targa event is for them,” Martin explains.

With the full six-day Targa event starting in Auckland on October 26, the two-day Regional Rally event will tag onto the main event for leg four and leg five, comprising of 14 stages in total. The two-day event covers off some of the more memorable stages in the Targa line-up, including Te Aute and Gentle Annie road stages.

More than 50 cars have already signed up for the full Targa New Zealand meeting, no doubt with many more to follow suit after this announcement. Make sure to keep tabs on The Motorhood for more coverage of the historic event!

Design accord

28 March, 2025

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

21 March, 2025

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.