No better place to kick off 2015 than Whangamata

23 January, 2015

If you ask a gearhead what the best way to see in the New Year is, there is an incredibly high likelihood they’ll tell you there’s nothing better than the annual Whangamata New Year’s Day car show at the Whangamata Club.

With more than 183 vehicles of both the four-wheel and two-wheel persuasion, as well as the brilliant summer weather, 2015’s show was the largest yet with people travelling from all over New Zealand to attend.

Organizer Noddy Watts reckons, “We sure kicked off 2015 in style raising over $1500 for our local youth group.”

For many this was their first chance to check out this year’s Repco Beach Hop giveaway car — a 1950 Mercury Coupe mild custom, direct from the USA, complete with a hopped-up flathead V8 under the hood.

It was also the first public showing of Neil Surtees’ latest from Whakatane. Based on a Model A roadster pickup with an all-aluminium, hand-formed body held together with over 5000 rivets. The tray slides back to reveal the rear-mounted radiators for the Ford flathead V8, and the underslung chassis is innovative; All owner built and oozing coolness.

Another new car was the bright yellow ’32 Ford Coupe of Matamata’s Bill Fryer which was cloned after the Mike Poole ’32 Coupe which carved up the quarter mile in the ’80s. Bill is a Beach Hop regular with a blown Ford Y-block-powered T-bucket.

The show attracted a diverse mix of hot rods, customs, classics, muscle cars, street machines, and motorcycles, and the atmosphere was buzzing to the tunes of the Recliner Rockers. Roll on Beach Hop!

Congratulations to the winners:

Best Ford — Peter Kidd, Kapiti Coast, 1955 Mercury Sunvalley
Best Chev — Nigel Brown, Matamata, 1939 Chev Pickup
Best Other — Robbie Metcalfe, Whangamata, 1957 Oldsmobile
Best Hot Rod — Bruce Carter, Riverhead, 1933 Ford
Best Street Machine — Steve Green, Ohaupo, 1963 Holden
Best Nostalgia — Neil Surtees, Whakatane, 1928 Ford Model A
Best Original — David Leask, Morrinsville, Kawasaki
Best Bike — Roger Kemp, Te Kauwhata, Suzuki

Janspeed recreates the Jaguar sports car

29 September, 2026

Thankfully, a few of these cars made it to New Zealand, the odd one being imported from the UK over the years. However, the 1988 British Racing Green example owned by Bill Slater in Upper Hutt was originally sold as a standard car but converted using the full Janspeed kit by the first owner within a couple of years of buying it.
Bill has owned a few other Jaguars. In fact, after he sold his Jaguar XJ12 in 2018, he found himself pining for another and, when the XJ-S came up for sale, he could not resist it. Having just sold the V12, he was not expecting much from the six-cylinder car other than more reliability and it being cheaper to keep on the road. Naturally, he had heard of the influence Janspeed had on the marque, but it was not until he took the car for a test drive that he became aware of just how superior it was to the car he had just sold. The price of a second-hand Janspeed XJ-S and that of a standard 3.6 XJ-S is quite comparable, making the Janspeed version an incredible bargain, even more so in comparison with other performance classic cars — or even modern cars, for that matter — which cost far more bucks for the bang.

The writing on the wall

25 September, 2026

Deven, a digital content producer in his 20s, says it was the rear-drive Nissan and Toyota drift cars that fired his imagination in his not-so-distant youth and soon had him wanting one of his own. However, like most of us, he had to start in something less glamorous – in his case, a 1997 Mitsubishi Galant. After that, he bought a four-litre V8 1991 Toyota Soarer, a big change from the Mitsubishi.
“It was my daily driver, and it wasn’t that bad to run back when petrol was affordable,” he says.
When he got fed up with filling it up, Deven bought a 1989 Ford Laser sedan, a 1.3-litre five-speed manual, to be his daily driver. It’s in very good condition, bought from a careful older driver, and he still runs it – although he will occasionally also drive the latest in a series of Nissan Laurel sedans. His current one, from 1993, has done the lowest number of kilometres yet, at 183,000. It has the single-cam version of the engine in his Skyline.
“I’ve had four different versions of that car. It was just a car I always liked. It’s really comfortable, quite luxurious. I bought it from a 90-year-old in Hamilton. It’s in mint condition, and everything is standard.”

No better place to kick off 2015 than Whangamata

Contact us

Sign up to New Zealand Classic Car's newsletter