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Black Belt Battle: Masterton Motorplex comp season kicking off

27 November, 2018

 

 

The weekend of 8–9 December will see round one of the Masterton Motorplex comp season kick off, and regulars to the track will not only be greeted by the welcome sight of absolutely gigantic timing boards, which where installed over winter, but also round one of the newly formed Outlaw 71 class,we mentioned in Issue No. 162. A full field of 16 racers are expected to run the five-round nationwide series, vying for their share of the $15,000 prize pool, which begins and ends at Masterton.

Outlaw 71 is the brain child of Gavin Doughty and Tod Aitken, and as the name suggests, welcomes any type of race car as long as it runs a belt-driven roots or screw blower with a dial-in between 6.5 and 7.9 seconds. Unique to the class is the reaction-time qualification system to ensure that it’s not always the fastest car nabbing the top qualifying spot. Organizer Gavin Doughty explains: “It’s all about putting on a show!” This is why the class has also adopted another unique aspect in its racer-return format, which means that the full field of 16 cars will contest each of the four rounds during a meeting, and a very tight points format will mean that the competition will go down to the wire.

Clearly it has excited racers, with the likes of Brent Whittingham’s Camaro, Mark Gapp’s Willys, Craig Griffith’s rear-engined dragster, Kendal Smith’s Altered, JD Shepherd’s FED, and Murray Hartley’s brand-new Mustang imported from Australia, all signed up to race.

Motorman: When New Zealand built the Model T Ford

21 March, 2025

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.

Lancia Stratos – building a winner

12 March, 2025

On his own, and later with his wife Suzie, Craig Tickle has built and raced many rally cars. Starting in 1988, Craig went half shares in a Mk1 Escort and took it rallying. Apart from a few years in the US studying how to be a nuclear engineer, he has always had a rally car in the garage. When he is not playing with cars, he works as an engineer for his design consulting company.
Naturally, anybody interested in rallying has heard of the Lancia Stratos, the poster child and winner of the World Rally circuit in 1974, ’75, and ’76. Just as the Lamborghini Countach rebranded the world of supercars, so, too, did the Lancia Stratos when it came to getting down and dirty in the rally world.