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Score a massive prize-pack with Play Dead and Teng Tools

5 May, 2017

Everybody loves a bit of free stuff and thanks to the team at Play Dead, you can go into the draw to win a massive combo prize-pack

Up for grabs is a four-drawer SV-series Teng Tools Top Tool Box (TCM07SV) filled to the brim with Play Dead car care product, AND one-year subscriptions to NZ Performance Car and NZV8 magazines, valued at 600 big ones. To share the love around, we’ll also be giving away Play Dead car care packs for two other lucky entrants.

All you need to do is LIKE the Play Dead Facebook page by clicking the buttom below, fill in your details and you’re in the draw; easy. The winners will be drawn Friday, 19 May — don’t miss your chance!

Win a Play Dead and Teng Tools prize-pack

The butterfly effect

18 June, 2026

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

12 June, 2026

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.