Meguiar’s Car Crazy Charity Cruise is back!

16 May, 2017

Is your ride itching for a mid-winter cruise? Is your ride a hot rod, modified or a god damn big-rig?!? Well Meguiar’s have something coming up you’ll be into.

Alongside Meguiar’s Annual Car Crazy Charity Cruise, they will also be running a Rislone Big Rig Truckin’ Charity Cruise.

Saturday the 22nd July will be for the Big Rigs and Sunday the 23rd for the cars. All registration fees will be donated entirely to the Starship Foundation.

Both events will be departing at 8:30am on their respective days from Smit’s Group/Meguiar’s head office at 23 Greenmount Drive then taking a lazy scenic route through to CRC Speedshow.

For the car cruisers, registration is $50 per car and includes a ticket to the CRC Speedshow for the driver and all passengers as well as a Smit’s Group voucher and plenty of Meguiar’s goodies as well as your chance to win the ultimate prize in the Show and Shine (every legitimate vote received for your ride will get 50c donated to the Starship Foundation by Meguiar’s). Check out meguiars.co.nz for more info.

The Big Rig’s registration is $50 and once again includes you and your passengers tickets to the CRC Speedshow as well as a Smit’s Group voucher and plenty of Rislone goodies to take home. Check out lovemycarnz.co.nz for more info.

The Meguiar’s Car Crazy Charity Cruise and Big Rig Truckin’ Charity Cruise are limited to well-presented vehicles only – which could be customs, classics, hot rods, imports and street machines (and of course, Big Rigs for Saturday’s cruise). So get them out and looking their best so you get lots of votes in the People’s Choice Award.
 
Due to the popularity of this charity cruise, places will not be confirmed until payment has been received, and is strictly on a ‘first in, first served’ basis.
 

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.”