SUBSCRIBE TO THE
MAGAZINE NOW
Facebook-f Instagram
Search
Close this search box.

Factory race cars to headline massive 2016 Porsche Festival

5 August, 2015

Hampton Downs Motorsport Park’s annual New Zealand Festival of Motor Racing is set to be bigger and better in 2016, with this event celebrating our friends from Stuttgart: Porsche.

Following on from the successful 2014 Ferrari Festival and 2015 F5000 Festival, which both produced the largest domestic gatherings of Ferraris and F5000s respectively, the Porsche Festival has a lot to live up to. But with up to 1000 Porsche road cars and race cars expected to attend the dual-weekend event, it already looks like it’s going to be one of the marquee race meetings of 2016.

Photo: Porsche

Headlining the list of attendees will be a number of rare Porsche race cars from overseas, with the best of them to be flown to local shores directly from Porsche’s factory in Germany. While it’s yet to be revealed what the cars might be, it’s suspected that one could be the Porsche 919 Hybrid that Kiwi Earl Bamber helped steer to victory at this year’s 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Photo: Porsche

Bamber and his fellow Kiwi and Porsche factory teammate Brendon Hartley are also potential attendees, which would make this the second consecutive festival Hartley has attended, after he surprised some race fans by popping up at the F5000 Festival earlier in 2015.

Photo: Porsche

Organizers are also aiming to secure a number of Porsche racers that reside in Australia. Historic racing models like Porsche’s 956, 935, GT1, and 917 variants have never been seen in New Zealand before, and organizers are hopeful of securing their attendance.

And it won’t just be Porsches present either. Approximately 20 of the best F5000s in the country will return to battle for the F5000 World Series cup, as well as the Historic Muscle Car series, the Heritage Touring Cars, and many others — all of which will build up to a one-hour endurance race, a fitting inclusion considering Porsche’s endurance heritage.

The Porsche Festival is scheduled over two weekends in 2016: January 15–17 and January 22–24. Tickets are now available to be purchased from the Porsche Festival website website.

 

Almost mythical pony

25 July, 2024

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

17 July, 2024

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.