Automotive industry helps raise $200,000 for Camp Quality

15 June, 2015

The sixth annual Camp Quality Dinner and Auction held on Wednesday, June 10, was hosted by John Andrew Ford and Mazda, and saw the more than 260 guests in attendance raising a total of $200,000 for Camp Quality New Zealand.

In attendance on the night — and vigorously bidding on the range of 25 major auction, and 45 silent auction, items — were a cross section of the motoring industry, including motoring personalities, vehicle distributors and suppliers, publishers, and enthusiasts. Alongside Parkside Media’s donation of New Zealand Classic Car and NZV8 books, and ten one-year subscriptions to a magazine of the winner’s choice, the range of major auction items included a Hampton Downs track experience, Highlands Motorsport Park track experience, which also included flights and accommodation, dinner at Botswana Butchery with Greg Murphy, a KTM motorcycle, a trip for two to Tahiti, including flights and accommodation, Bledisloe Cup tickets, and guitars signed by BB King and Eric Clapton.

Executive Director of AHG Motor Group Bronte Howson summed up the success of the night. “It is amazing what we can achieve when we aim to do some good each day, look what happens when we do it together.”

Camp Quality is a non-profit, volunteer organization providing a support programme for children living with cancer that is all about hope for the future.

Image: Camp Quality volunteer Neerali Parbhu

Performance art

Shelby’s targets were Superformance — a South African company that wanted to sell its versions of these cars in the US — and the US-based Factory Five. Their defence was that the name and shape of the Cobra car were abandoned when Shelby American ceased production of these particular models back in the 1960s.
Shelby countered with: “We spent millions of dollars creating the name and the car and winning the world championship. These knock-off-car guys don’t deserve the credit or the profit for what my team and Ford accomplished in the ’60s.”
Superformance painted an even bigger target on its back by also producing a version of Shelby’s Daytona coupé. Other cars in its production stable were Mk1 GT40 and 1962 Corvette Grand Sport replicas, but we’ll focus here on the Daytona.

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.