Indholdsfortegnelse for No 145 June 2017 i NZV8

I had a call recently from the family member of a guy who we’d featured previously in NZV8 magazine. The family was asking for a copy of a photo that we’d taken, which is nothing out of the ordinary. Expecting it to be printed out for the guy, or used for a similar positive purpose, I was shocked to hear that it was for his funeral programme. While I’d never met the guy in person, I’d had a few long chats with him on the phone, and he seemed like a positive type of guy, so you can imagine my shock when it turned out that he’d taken his own life. With a shed full of stuff that most car guys and girls would be eternally envious of, and running…

The recent WD-40 Phillip Island 500 race in the V8 Supercars series gained a fair bit of exposure after race winner Chaz Mostert took to frying the hides in celebration of his first championship race win since August 2015. The huge burnout, which the crowds seemed to love, ended up copping him a $3K fine when race stewards decided it was in breach of track regulations. The burnout, much of which was done at a standstill to get the rear-wheel speed up, was considered in breach of rules on static burnouts — presumably due to the propensity for damage to the track surface. A post-race statement from Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) stewards stated: “Following the race, the DRD [deputy race director] conducted an investigation into an allegation that…

EMAIL YOUR BUILDS TO EDITOR@V8.CO.NZ BEAUT UTE Cayton and the team at Real Rides have been making great progress on Darren Brewer’s HQ ute. The panel and paint side of the project is now complete, and, all going to plan, it won’t be long before the ute heads off to C&M Performance for the mechanical side of things to be sorted, including a full new wiring loom and nitrous oxide. The ute was in a pretty bad way when Darren got his hands on it, needing new pillars, new sills, and various other rust repairs. Darren mentions that when they started stripping it back, they found newspaper and expanding foam below the paint! Seeing the high standard of the workmanship so far, we can assure you that’s not the case…

Happily ever after seems like a myth. Some people will spend untold hours and sums of money in search of it, only to fall disappointingly short. A handful of others are lucky enough to find it, whether by determination, hard work, or some other phenomenon more akin to luck. Whatever it is, Bradley West sleeps easy at night knowing that, against all odds, his ’64 Impala ragtop has somehow given him a happily ever after story. It all started when Bradley purchased the ’64 from a mate. “Brodie Smith was selling her before he moved to Australia,” Brad recalls. “I thought it would be a cool first old car to buy and get on the road, and, after having a look at it, I bought it two days before going…

It’s been almost 30 years since the annual Nostalgia Drags race meeting burst onto the local drag racing calendar, and, although much has changed in the intervening years, the metronomic quality of the event hasn’t. Champion Dragway is now known simply as ‘Meremere Dragway’, the event’s reins are firmly in the hands of the Tauranga-based Bay Rodders car club, and the scope of racing has expanded to include more than just the traditionally ‘traditional’. In enduring for as long as it has, the Nostalgia Drags event has generated a nostalgia of its own — a fitting attribute for what is widely recognized as one of the best drag racing events in New Zealand. Cruising through the Meremere Dragway gate on the morning of Saturday, April 1, we knew that the…

EMAIL YOUR INFO TO EDITOR@V8.CO.NZ STRING OF SUCCESSES Top Street Camaro driver, Ryan Sheldon, has had a monumental season, clocking up not only thousands of kilometres getting to events, but bagging more podium places than any other racer. Running both the NZDRA national series and the Meremere Comp Meet series saw him drag the Camaro no fewer than 7000km, crossing the Cook Strait twice in each direction in the process. Ryan competed at 11 events, where he made it to an astounding 10 finals, winning six of them. Two finals were not contested — one due to Ryan needing to leave Nelson early to catch the ferry back to race at Meremere the following day; he and co-pilot, Mike Reid, drove through the night and arrived at Meremere just before…

We were on holiday in the US, at Hot Rod Reunion in Bakersfield, when I saw it,” remembers Brendon Armstrong. The car he’s talking about is not the beautiful ’34 coupe you see before you — although you’d be forgiven for thinking that it had been imported straight out of the States — but it is a ’34 Ford coupe he’s talking about, and it’s the reason he built the masterpiece on these pages. Although the car Brendon’s remembering was painted a strangely effective shade of blue and rolled on modern large-diameter wheels, there was no way Brendon could ignore the fact that the machine possessed stance in spades. A serial hot rod builder, Brendon immediately thought of an old ’34 he’d built — a car he wished he hadn’t…

We know there are all different types of car fans, petrolheads, and gear nuts. You yourself will probably already be trying to work out which column you fit into. Once you have worked that out, remember that every column can then be filtered by preferences. By this is we mean V8s, rotaries, four-cylinder lovers — you get the idea. Even once that filtering has been done, many fans can still be divided by brand. Now, there’s no need to dive into the history of Holden vs Ford — as we all know, that loyalty runs deep. However, the most hard core Holden fans know that there is an alpha dog in the pack of enthusiasts, that man being Steve Fabish. He’s been collecting Holdens for more than 30 years, taken…

It’s been an exciting 2016–’17 season for Enzed Central Muscle Cars (CMC), and, while there weren’t too many upsets as far as points standings go, nothing was guaranteed. In Group 1, Dean Perkins, John Midgley, and Greg Honnor all fought at the upper end of the points scale to determine who would come out on top. That was a fight in which Perkins easily triumphed, coming in nearly 70 points ahead of Midgley in second. However, Midgley set the pace early in round one, leading to an epic showdown between the two ’80s Falcons. Showing just how close things got was the mere two-point gap between Midgley and Greg Honnor, who rounded out third place. Group 2 was no less dramatic, although the top three made themselves known rather early…

As I write this, it is 9.59am on the print day for this issue. The magazine’s raving designer has thrown his iMac out the window and disappeared on a paddleboard somewhere in the Waitemata Harbour. The 24-bottle box of Lion Red has dwindled overnight to just two lonely brown bottles, and this computer is the last electric appliance still functioning* … Oops, I’ve been reading too much Hunter S. Thompson, but this week has been one of frantic, albeit controlled, chaos. [Mark Gibson has entered text] Dude I went surfing not freak’n paddleboarding you goof! Hey I just accidently deleted that awesome shot you had for your page so we’ll go with this one aye? Haha. FYI Conman this is my 100th issue on V8 so let’s make this one…

DEMON HUNTING As you’ll see on our News page in this issue, Dodge recently revealed a whole load of long-awaited details on the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon — the quickest production car in the world. For more photos and information, search ‘Demon’ on themotorhood.com. ‘LOUT’ REVISITED Just in case you missed the original feature in the magazine, we’ve put the full feature article on Glenn Longley’s chopped Model A coupe online, along with a bunch of other features. The best part is that the online article includes video footage of the photo-shoot burnouts, so you can really hear that injected small block sing! ALCOHOL ON TAP As always, watching high-powered competition cars laying down rubber at the Top Alcohol Challenge at Masterton Motorplex was the recipe for a good…

Matamata Panelworks is known for its highquality automotive craftsmanship, with multiple award-winning vehicles to its name. Now, after being told many a time that he should take some Matamata Panelworks cars abroad, proprietor Malcolm Sankey is doing just that. The goal is Meguiar’s MotorEX, which will be held July 20–24 at Sydney Showground. There, Malcolm and the team will see first-hand just how their work stacks up on an international level. The team will be taking their recently completed custom ’67 Mustang GT500E, which Malcolm says is their best-built car to date. They will be travelling with around 15 people, including the car’s owner, Kelvin Taylor, and are understandably excited about the experience. And, yes, we will have a full feature on the Mustang in an upcoming issue, so you…

EMAIL YOUR INFO TO: EDITOR@V8.CO.NZ MAY 21 WELLINGTON SWAP MEET AND HORSEPOWER SHOW This event, hosted by Capital Rodders, will be held from 7am to 2pm on May 21 at Trentham Racecourse. Seller plots will be $20, and that’ll include entry for drivers. General entry will be $10 for adults, $20 for a family (two adults, two kids), and kids under 12 will be free with an accompanying adult. There’ll be a cash-out facility within the premises. Preferential parking for custom and classic vehicles will make this event far more than your average swap meet. For more info, visit capitalrodders.org.nz, or email swapmeet@capitalrodders.org.nz. JUNE 5 RENEGADE ROD AND CUSTOM’S PARKED UP OUT WEST West Auckland is well known for its car culture; on Queen’s Birthday Weekend, that love of all…

What’s that old maxim, ‘Build a drag strip and your drought will be over’? Well, how about this? You’re in Doha, Qatar, for the final of the 2017 Arabian Drag Racing League (ADRL), and it rains — against all odds, with no clouds on the weather radar, in a desert, outside the rainy season, in one of the hottest countries of the world, at the final round of a tightly contested drag racing season. To put that into context, the average rainfall in the desert of Qatar is approximately 8cm annually. Get your ruler out and have a look at 8cm — yip, that’s for the whole year. Well, early in February, with clear skies showing on weather-prediction websites, down came that miraculous precipitation. Act of God, maybe, or maybe…

If you are a Mopar fan, then Scott Coffin is probably your kind of guy — and I’m not talking in the ‘diversity-is-welcomed-here’ sense. Scott’s love for all things Mopar started about 10 years ago — pretty much the first time he saw this ’64 Polara, then owned by his good mate Kerry-Jo, aka ‘Crazy-Jo’. Scott had owned a few cool Fords, but the sight and sound of the then- 44-year-old Mopar changed his outlook on cars forever, while also generating some conflicting emotions. We all know they are not the prettiest car of the era, but, for a lot of people, there is something about the ’64 Dodges that just works. In Scott’s own words, “It was kind of ugly, but I kind of liked it, and they are…

We live in an era of instant gratification. If you want something, you can have it now, and that certainly also applies to car parts. The power of the internet, coupled with cheap offshore labour, has resulted in an aftermarket saturated with cheap and nasty parts. For some car builders, the words “bolts straight in, with no modification required” are enough to turn their knees to jelly. Of course, not all aftermarket parts are junk. If you’re a smart shopper, it’s possible to experience no dramas with any off-theshelf parts, but what if you are dealing with a custom application, or have a very precise set of criteria that needs to be met? Custom fabrication is the answer, but where this is concerned, you want a job where quality is…

As with most guys his age, Kevin Brooke’s foray into the modified car world began with Jappas. From small-capacity Starlets, he worked his way through the import world, buying, building, and selling his way up to a high-powered Mitsubishi Evo, flushing thousands of dollars away in the process. With three kids, though, and a car too small, too uncomfortable, and too rowdy to take the whole family, sooner or later, something had to give. Of course, being a true petrolhead, there was no chance that Kevin would buy a boring old people mover. Instead, he set his sights on something that ticked the performance box but still had enough seating capacity to keep everyone happy. To make sure he got the seal of approval from wife Marie, Kevin assured her…

The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon might just have been the most eagerly anticipated production car in modern times. With a tantalizing online campaign that fed the punters just enough to get a taste but nowhere near an amount to really sink their teeth into, there was a lot of hype to live up to, but the Demon has delivered. An evolution of the already insane Dodge Challenger Hellcat, it uses the familiar 6.2-litre Hemi with a built bottom end to handle 14.5psi of boost from the huge 2.7-litre supercharger. This means numbers of 840hp and 770lb·ft, and an incredible NHRA-certified quarter-mile time of 9.65s at 140mph and 0–60mph time of 2.3 seconds, making it the quickest production car ever. Before you think to mention COPO Camaros or Cobra Jet…

Special effects — you either love them or hate them. Either way, though, they’ve blurred the lines between reality and make-believe. When watching a movie, or normal TV for that matter, it’s now impossible to know what’s real and what’s been created by a clever bastard on a computer. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Back before computers took over the world, you could believe what you saw on the screen — well, almost. When Mad Max came out in 1979, its petrol-crazed theme was a hit with petrolheads around the globe. In Australia, America, and here in New Zealand, every bloke who watched it wanted his very own V8 Interceptor — ‘the last of the V8 Interceptors’, to be more exact. However, as much as the wildly kitted…

It’s a sport that simultaneously demands the brute force of a bull in a china shop and the delicate precision of an open-heart surgeon. When the two come together, the end result is a zero, and when they don’t — well, let’s just say it usually ends with a roll down a hillside or finishing half submerged in a mud bog. Welcome to the world of 4x4 trials. The sport requires the ultimate of both man and machine, with the crew of two tackling 32 hazards sprawled across natural terrain. Each hazard has sets of pegs dotted throughout it, consisting of three colours — blue, red, and yellow. Blue indicates the start and finish, red marks the right boundary, and you will find yellow pegs on the left. Crews start…

As the dense clouds of white smoke slowly dispersed, a mullet faded into view, hovering above a black Devilskin shirt. It was a fine example of what is widely regarded as the Lion Red of hairstyles, and far from the only one present. However, as easy as it is to play the clichéd bogan card at an event like Lack-A-Traction Motorsport’s Burnouts Taupo, it wouldn’t have been right. At face value, this may have looked like your runof- the-mill burnout competition, with the sole point of difference being a notably tougher line-up than normal. However, what was not immediately obvious was the underlying professionalism that made this event one of a handful working to turn over a new leaf for the local burnout scene. The end goal is to bring…

CONCEPT: CONNAL GRACE ILLUSTRATION: ASHLEY WESTMORELAND — HEROPRINTS.CO.NZ Imagining a post-apocalyptic scenario knowing what we know in 2017, we could envisage a nuclear holocaust having ravaged society throughout the world. With the collapse of any form of economic system, the cornerstones of life as we know it would have been completely destroyed. An innovative man, this future Mad Max would no doubt have taken his existing FG FPV GT and modified it to suit his survival requirements. Go-anywhere capability would be paramount, and this would be the first thing to be sorted. Using whatever tools he had at hand, he would adapt the Ford’s monocoque chassis to a trusty Hilux ladder frame with solid front and rear axles, re-engineered for a substantially increased ride height. Low-offset 15x8-inch steelies would be…

It generally rains so much when Enzed Central Muscle Cars (CMC) arranges a race meeting that MetService is now calling CMC to find out when the cars are racing so it can advise the public that it’s going to be wet. Well, maybe we are saying that a bit tongue in cheek, but, seriously, this season has seen more wet tyres on CMC cars than any other for a long, long time. CMC has used the Easter meeting at Taupo as its finale for a number of years now. Having a public holiday on the Monday makes it a little less stressful for people trying to get back to work. As usual, the Friday was practice day. Most took part, although Paul Clarke’s Mustang was unfortunate enough to suffer some…

WHERE IS IT NOW? 1970 FORD MUSTANG BOSS 302 — BRETT WALKER Brett Walker’s genuine ’70 Mustang Boss 302 was ahead of its time. A pro-touring type of build before pro-touring was a thing, the genuine G-code car was essentially a bare-bones race car that could be driven on the street — the ultimate evolution of the Boss 302. While Brett did race the Mustang in the Northern Muscle Car series, as he’d intended to, the reality was that the car was both too nice and too rare to race. So, when Brett began looking into building a new house in around 2012 and the collection needed downsizing, the Mustang was put up for sale. Still pretty much exactly as Brett built it, the Boss 302 is now owned by…

WORDS AND PHOTOS: ROD DUNN MUSTANG MADNESS! Love ’em or hate ’em, there is no denying the popularity of the Ford Mustang. One of the main driving forces behind the Mustang, Lee Iacocca, probably had no idea just how well the little ‘pony’ car would sell, with 418,812 being sold in the first year of production way back in 1965. Since then, the Mustang has undergone a number of style and platform changes, the current generation being the ninth. On April 17, 2017 — the Mustang’s 52nd birthday — the Canterbury Mustang Owners Club arranged a get-together to celebrate the Mustang. A show and shine was held at the Canterbury Agricultural Park, with 112 of Henry’s finest parked up for the afternoon. The warm autumn day provided a great chance…