How do you celebrate rallying in New Zealand’s 50th birthday?

5 August, 2016

Fifty years of rallying in New Zealand will be marked in 2017 with a tour of the nation’s most celebrated rally stages. The week-long tours — one in each of the North and South Islands — will traverse some of the most legendary roads in our rallying history, and are timed to coincide with popular international events.

The first tour, starting in Picton on Sunday, April 2, 2017, has overnight stops planned for Reefton, Christchurch, Oamaru, Alexandra, and Invercargill. The final afternoon sees the tour completed in Dunedin on Friday, April 7, in time for the ceremonial start of the Otago Classic rally.

Similarly, the northern tour leaves Wellington on Sunday, April 23, moving up through Masterton, Gisborne, Napier, Rotorua, and Auckland, arriving in Whangarei on Friday, April 28 to view their popular Asia-Pacific Rally Championship (APRC) event.

The organizing committee comprise some of the country’s most experienced officials, responsible for the route plotting of various Targa, Variety Bash, and national championship rallies. 

Event Chairman Rod Peat explains the rationale behind the tours.

“We felt 50 years of the sport needed appropriate recognition, particularly for those who may no longer be competing at the sharp end. The daily tour schedule will be very much at gentleman’s hours, with 8am starts and 5pm finishes most days. The roads will not be closed — and will not be timed — but there should be ample time to wallow in nostalgia with old rivals.”

The tourists will complete the route — with a choice of individual days — or the whole tour, in a loose convoy in their own normal road cars. As the start dates near, prospective entrants are being kept up to date within the group’s Facebook page.

All profits from the venture will be channelled to the new Hayden Paddon Foundation, designed to support and encourage young drivers.

Photos: The Paul Smith Collection

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.