Checking out the variety at the Hampton Downs Icebreaker

14 September, 2015

 

September’s an awkward month. It manages to be both deeply ingrained in the dreaded fruitlessness of the mid-year slog, but is still somehow close enough to December 25 for you to start stressing about what you’re getting mum for Christmas. But September is where you find the annual Historic Racing Classes (HRC) Icebreaker meeting at Hampton Downs Motorsport Park — an event that’s popular enough to distract anyone from the weight of a life buckled down with the month’s first-world problems. As an added bonus, it also acts as a yearly reminder that the upcoming circuit motorsport season is just around the corner.

Icebreaker is an event that’s firmly based in grass-roots motorsport, with the 2015 edition supported by 250 race cars of all shapes and sizes. The Historic Muscle Cars, Castrol BMW Race Series, and the Trofeo Series for Alfa Romeos were among the classes represented. Entries ranged from cars scraped together on a shoestring, to cars that would fit in at any endurance event in Australasia; big thumping V8s, to light Japanese coupés, to open wheelers.

It’s also a very relaxing place to be. There are no engineers sprinting up and down pit lane, or promo girls trying to sell things to the innocent — it’s all quite peaceful, apart from the noises echoing from the track of course. Everyone’s open, friendly, and chatty. Not to say that you can’t find friendliness at a tier-one meeting of course, but it’s just not quite the same.

Sadly I didn’t hang around for long, but I did hover for long enough to catch a couple of races — including the final BMW open race, which still held a huge amount of variety despite being relegated to cars of the Bavarian persuasion. At the front was Andrew Nugent’s BMW M3 E92, coming close to resembling a DTM racer, but with a far nastier sounding bark emanating from its exhausts. Behind him duelled the pair of Gull-sponsored 3 Series campaigned by Andre and Warwick Mortimer, as well as Robert Berggren’s well-presented wide-body M3 GTR replica.

While the racing at the front of the field was pretty clear-cut, the mid-order dicing was anything but. Justin Daly’s E30 330i had a great scrap with the E46 of Treva Smith, while a similarly entertaining battle between the E30 Fina Group A replica of Ash Razmi and Dave Lawrence’s 3 Series Compact — a platform traditionally unloved by motor racing circles — didn’t get resolved until the final lap, with the Compact eventually taking the position.

It feels weird to say, but the racing and the competition take a back seat at an event like Icebreaker — at least for me. It’s the kind of event best enjoyed by roaming parc fermé and pit lane, soaking in the sounds and the people. Bring on October!

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.