Bay display: 25 years of the Marineland Hot Rod & Classic Car Festival

12 May, 2017

For those who don’t count duck shooting among their list of hobbies, the Sunday of May 7 may still have held a reason to load the boys into the car and go for a drive. Marineland Street Rod & Kustom Klub hold their Marineland Hot Rod & Classic Car Festival annually at the Meeanee Speedway just out of Napier, and it’s a show that is well worth your time.

Marking 25 years since the first ever Marineland show, this year’s show was a bit of a special one, which also paid tribute to the Ford Model T with a dedicated display to the original people’s car and hot rod base.

As soon as the gates opened at 7am, over 100 cars were ready to pass through the gates, with another 600 soon to join them. In fact, the gates had to be shut at 10am due to the Meeanee Speedway grounds being full to capacity!

In addition to the massive show and shine, the show also hosts its famous swap meet at which bargains abound for the keen treasure hunter, and a number of other entertaining side shows serve to keep everyone entertained. From engine fire-ups through to the spectacular crane-drops, and kids’ entertainment that also kept some of the bigger kids enthralled, the Marineland Hot Rod & Classic Car Festival is always a good time.

Just have a look through the photo gallery below to see what went on, or what you missed out on, and keep your eyes peeled for a full event report in an upcoming issue of NZV8 magazine.

The butterfly effect

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The man on the mountain bike pedalled over, taking it all in. Gazing in wonderment at this small Japanese coupe with butterfly doors, he said, “Wow, I have never seen one of these before. What is it?” When I told him it was a Toyota, he nearly fell off his bike.
The Toyota Sera is unique amongst ’90s Japanese coupes. The Sera, which is Italian for ‘evening’, can trace its roots back to Toyota’s AXV-II concept car. Launched as part of a trio of Toyota concept cars at the 1987 Tokyo Motor Show, it shared its underpinnings with the P70 Toyota Starlet. The similarities ended there, thanks to the AXV-II’s low-slung and rounded coupe styling with butterfly doors. These doors were held upright by gas struts when fully open. Glass covered the upper section of the doors and the rear hatchback.
These features, much to everyone’s surprise, were carried over to the production Sera in 1990. Toyota marketed the Sera, which means ‘will be’ in Spanish and ‘princess’ in Hebrew, as a funky alternative to the much-loved MR2.

Racing Mazdas

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Both Rod Millen and Ron Kendall were rotary racing kings, emanating from the North Shore of Auckland, where I grew up. And the ultimate rotary techno guru was Bill Shiells, who developed the engine into a rocket ship while working out of Gulf Mazda in Takapuna from 1969, and later in his own business, Rotorsport. He began to extract some phenomenal horsepower from the enigmatic rotary engine. Bill was one of the first to race the Mazda RX-2 Coupe in 1971 and achieved immediate success, causing others to sit up and take notice, particularly the North Shore’s racing elite. They included Robbie Francevic, Rod Millen, Ron Kendall, John Woolf, John Le Feuvre, and Rex Findlay.

Bay display: 25 years of the Marineland Hot Rod & Classic Car Festival

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