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Targa’s confirmed 2015 dates — check them out now

13 November, 2014

Targa New Zealand has announced the first details of their 2015 events, following the unprecedented interest in the successful 20th anniversary Targa event in the South Island completed on November 2.  

The first is a one-day Targa Sprint on March 7, followed by a three-day Targa Bambina held between May 15 and 17, and the 21st Targa New Zealand event will be held between October 26 and 31.

Though all three will be in the North Island, the success of the organization’s first foray into the South Island this year means a return in the future is a distinct possibility.

“The feedback from competitors to councils would certainly encourage us to head back down south at some stage,” says Targa event director Peter Martin. With such positive feedback, he says it was important to announce the 2015 event dates as soon as possible.

Martin has also been upfront this year by listing separately the medical levy every competitor has to pay.

“The safety of our competitors is of utmost importance to us — and wherever we go, St John goes. This incurs a cost, which we have listed separately this year to make sure everyone knows exactly what it is.” There is now just the one common fee across all three competition classes.

 

Design accord

28 March, 2025

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.

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.