Buy a Casio Edifice watch and be in to win an ITM Auckland SuperSprint VIP experience

10 October, 2016

Thanks to Casio and its elegant Edifice watch range, you could experience the ITM Auckland SuperSprint in style. The grand prize includes two ITM Auckland SuperSprint three-day VIP passes, and, if required, two nights’ accommodation, return flights, and car hire. It also includes a $200 MTA fuel voucher, plus the chance to meet the drivers and take part in a grid walk.

All you need to do to go in the draw is purchase any Casio Edifice watch from participating retailers between Monday, September 5, and Sunday, October 16. Participating stores include: Stewart Dawson stores, Christies Papatoetoe, Christies Palmerston North, Christies Richmond, Daniels Showcase Jewellers, Wrights Showcase, Baywatch, Skelts, Cambridge Jewellers, Stonex Otahuhu.

Lunch with … Cary Taylor

Many years ago — in June 1995 to be more precise — I was being wowed with yet another terrific tale from Geoff Manning who had worked spanners on all types of racing cars. We were chatting at Bruce McLaren Intermediate school on the 25th anniversary of the death of the extraordinary Kiwi for whom the school was named. Geoff, who had been part of Ford’s Le Mans programme in the ’60s, and also Graham Hill’s chief mechanic — clearly realising that he had me in the palm of his hand — offered a piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten: “If you want the really good stories, talk to the mechanics.”
Without doubt the top mechanics, those involved in the highest echelons of motor racing, have stories galore — after all, they had relationships with their drivers so intimate that, to quote Geoff all those years ago, “Mechanics know what really happened.”

ROTARY CHIC

Kerry Bowman readily describes himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Citroën fan and a keen Citroën Car Club member. His Auckland home holds some of the chic French cars and many parts. He has also owned a number of examples of the marque as daily drivers, but he now drives a Birotor GS. They are rare, even in France, and this is a car which was not supposed to see the light of day outside France’s borders, yet somehow this one escaped the buyback to be one of the few survivors out in the world.
It’s a special car Kerry first saw while overseas in the ’70s, indulging an interest sparked early on by his father’s keenness for Citroëns back home in Tauranga. He was keen to see one ‘in the flesh’.
“I got interested in this Birotor when I bought a GS in Paris in 1972. I got in contact with Citroën Cars in Slough, and they got me an invitation to the Earls Court Motor Show where they had the first Birotor prototype on display. I said to a guy on the stand, ‘I’d like one of these,’ and he said I wouldn’t be allowed to get one. Citroën were building them for their own market to test them, and they were only left-hand drive.”