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Factory race cars to headline massive 2016 Porsche Festival

5 August, 2015

Hampton Downs Motorsport Park’s annual New Zealand Festival of Motor Racing is set to be bigger and better in 2016, with this event celebrating our friends from Stuttgart: Porsche.

Following on from the successful 2014 Ferrari Festival and 2015 F5000 Festival, which both produced the largest domestic gatherings of Ferraris and F5000s respectively, the Porsche Festival has a lot to live up to. But with up to 1000 Porsche road cars and race cars expected to attend the dual-weekend event, it already looks like it’s going to be one of the marquee race meetings of 2016.

Photo: Porsche

Headlining the list of attendees will be a number of rare Porsche race cars from overseas, with the best of them to be flown to local shores directly from Porsche’s factory in Germany. While it’s yet to be revealed what the cars might be, it’s suspected that one could be the Porsche 919 Hybrid that Kiwi Earl Bamber helped steer to victory at this year’s 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Photo: Porsche

Bamber and his fellow Kiwi and Porsche factory teammate Brendon Hartley are also potential attendees, which would make this the second consecutive festival Hartley has attended, after he surprised some race fans by popping up at the F5000 Festival earlier in 2015.

Photo: Porsche

Organizers are also aiming to secure a number of Porsche racers that reside in Australia. Historic racing models like Porsche’s 956, 935, GT1, and 917 variants have never been seen in New Zealand before, and organizers are hopeful of securing their attendance.

And it won’t just be Porsches present either. Approximately 20 of the best F5000s in the country will return to battle for the F5000 World Series cup, as well as the Historic Muscle Car series, the Heritage Touring Cars, and many others — all of which will build up to a one-hour endurance race, a fitting inclusion considering Porsche’s endurance heritage.

The Porsche Festival is scheduled over two weekends in 2016: January 15–17 and January 22–24. Tickets are now available to be purchased from the Porsche Festival website website.

 

ROTARY CHIC

6 September, 2024

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.”

Tradie’s Choice

30 August, 2024

Clint Wheeler purchased this 1962 Holden FJ Panelvan as an unfinished project, or as he says “a complete basket case”. Collected as nothing more than a bare shell, the rotisserie-mounted and primed shell travelled the length of the country from the Rangiora garage where it had sat dormant for six years to Clint’s Ruakaka workshop. “Mike, the previous owner, was awesome. He stacked the van and parts nicely. I was pretty excited to get the van up north. We cut the locks and got her out to enjoy the northland sun,” says Clint. “The panelvan also came with boxes of assorted parts, some good, some not so good, but they all helped.”