Indholdsfortegnelse for No 389 September/October 2023 i NZ Classic Car

For more than four decades, the little parapluie pour quatre (‘umbrella for four’) soldiered on through an array of models, upgrades, and eye-catching colour schemes, from 1948 right through to 1990. Quirky, and with a rationality of design that sets it apart from any other, the 2CV endeared itself to generations, achieving almost cult status. The only other car that survived longer in production was Volkswagen’s almost equally quirky Beetle, which was also developed in the 1930s. TOUTE PETIT VOITURE In 1934, a bankrupt Citroën, struggling with the lasting effects of the Great War of 1914–’18 and facing the Great Depression, saw as a possible salvation the vast population in rural France still using horses and carts on poor country roads. The company, which had been bought by Michelin, recognised…

The baroque capital city of Valletta was founded and built in 1565 after the Great Siege of Malta. Having defeated the Ottoman attackers, the Knights of the Order of Saint John who ruled the Maltese archipelago decided to ramp up the island’s defences against further attack. Valletta is therefore a walled city built on the promontory between the two natural harbours. The city was planned by Francesco Laparelli da Cortona, an architect and military engineer with extensive experience in the construction of fortifications, and who had also assisted Michelangelo in the building of the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Valetta is named after Grand Master Jean Parisot de La Vallette, who led the drive to strengthen the knights’ bastion, but who passed away in 1568. Valletta became the…

By the time this issue is on sale, Brett will have turned 70. He doesn’t look it, but he’s recently retired and is finally ready to reflect on all the great things he achieved, of chances missed and the importance of being as savvy out of the car as in it. Brett came closer than most Kiwis to getting into Formula 1 (F1). He beat a field comprising a smattering future F1 drivers, including a world champion-in-waiting. That put the just-turned 24-year-old Brett Riley into the headlines – because winning in Formula 3 (F3), motor racing’s iconic proving ground, was as good a sign as any that big things were not far away. That year, 1977, had started full of hope, which soon turned to chaos, before things got back…

MSNZ DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD Bruce Dyer was honoured with Motorsport New Zealand’s (MSNZ’s) Distinguished Service Award, presented at Te Papa, Wellington, on Saturday 20 May. This award acknowledges Bruce’s years of service and dedication, especially to historic motor sport. Apart from his other duties, Bruce is a major social media link for the Historic and Vintage Racing Association (HVRA) and maintains contact with members. The MSNZ citation reads: “Motorsport is something that has been a part of Bruce Dyer’s life since he was a 14-year-old. When his father purchased an Austin Cooper S, Bruce learnt to drive in it which ignited his passion for motorsport. While Bruce never set his sights on world championships, he had tremendous fun participating in hill climbs, drag races, circuit races and rallies. “Bruce’s true…

The Goodwood Festival of Speed was full of drama on its 30th anniversary, which also celebrated 75 years of motor sport. It remains as vital as ever as records tumbled over 13–16 July. There was no shortage of moments, even the weather getting in on the act after both sun and rain on Friday, when organisers reluctantly cancelled Saturday’s events for the first time due to a severe wind warning forecast. The Duke of Richmond opened the 2023 event in his Jaguar D-Type, driving up the hill in the same car in which he opened the first event in 1993. Porsche celebrated its 75th anniversary with a display on the iconic Festival of Speed front lawn. There were plenty of both current and rare road and track examples of the…

Rain may have quietened the roar of the engines somewhat, but it couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm of those attending this year’s Horsepower. The 13th annual display and swap meet from Capital Rodders took place on the puddled tarmac at Trentham Racecourse on Sunday 21 May. An email from the organisers just after 9am said that the show had commenced, so I put on my oilskins, gumboots, and rainproof hat and set off for Upper Hutt, where thankfully the showers were intermittent and lighter than in the dismal lower Hutt Valley. Dodging the occasional showers simply presented an added challenge for anyone snapping photos. It seemed strange seeing no cars parked on the grass in front of the grandstand, but their owners had sensibly stayed on the surer footing of the…

Morrari recreated Our apologies for not getting the Morrari re-creation in this issue, but we can report that the car is now complete, thanks to the efforts of Auckland hot rodder Mark Stokes. Mark has always been fascinated with the Morrari and the era of motor sport it personified. About 10 years ago, he decided to recreate the Morrari. Today, the re-creation is as close as possible to the original and its spirit, and we are delighted to feature it in our next issue. Undeniable modern classic The 2001–2006 HSV Coupe was a product of the intersection of Holden, the designer and manufacturer of the Monaro; Holden Special Vehicles (HSV), which took the Aussie coupé and made it into a sports car; and General Motors, which dropped in the power…

The Americans have given us many culinary delights: the hot dog; the Reuben sandwich; the Big Mac; and, of course, that titanic of poultry delights, the ‘turducken’ – a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey – a white meat masterpiece. The original 1973 GT6 is a little like a turducken. First, take your original Triumph Spitfire, which was cute as a rabbit, then give it a wolf’s clothing and stuff it with a meatier engine, but only slightly meatier, producing a sort of sheep in wolf’s clothing. The result is your standard Triumph turducken: a sheep inside a rabbit that looks a bit like a wolf – sort of. ITALIAN DESIGNED If you don’t know a lot about the GT6, here is a morsel of history to chew on.…

Big families have always required big transport. Back in the ’60s and early ’70s, it was the Holden and Ford station wagons that filled the bill, comfortably fitting three across the front bench seat and four kids across the back. If push came to shove in a literal sense, a couple more could sit in the back storage area. With the advent of compulsory seat-belt wearing for all occupants and cars shrinking in size, families moved into commercial vans that had been repurposed with several rows of seats. The bigger the family, the bigger the van. Most of these were utilitarian but they did the job, if not with good grace, their rubber floor mats and upright seats remaining resolutely commercial in character. This era also coincided with the panel…

Some issues back, (Nos. 375 and 379), I brought you up to speed with my concerns on the feasibility or otherwise of owning an electric vehicle, or ‘EV’, as we’re now expected to call them. On YouTube, you can find a compilation of video clips of various EVs, buses included, bursting into flames; exploding; and, in some cases, setting adjacent vehicles on fire. Meanwhile, the government recently announced that from early next year, road user charges (RUCs) would be levied on EVs. That they have not been to date was simply another short-term ploy to convince people to purchase one. For those who have not kept up with the propaganda, the RUCs, when they are introduced, will be somewhere between $600 to $900 per year, on average. So how many…

I was wrong; I know that now. For years, I thought that doing body work with lead was too old-fashioned and fiddly to bother with. In the past, I managed to get around it by welding in patch panels and using plastic filler. But recently a friend showed me how to body solder, and explained why it is better, even necessary in some cases. I became a convert. I found out that lead work isn’t as easy as spreading on Bondo, and the cost of lead sticks can add up, but there is no mystery to it, and no fancy tools are needed. Of course, there is no compelling reason to use lead in many cases. Plastic filler is great for filling low spots and smoothing unevenness in body panels,…

Heavy overnight rain and threatening skies made for a slow start to the morning’s meet in July, but the weather cleared as the day progressed and the cars started rolling in. By mid-morning, the car park had filled with a mixture of old and new classics. The classics boot sale could be counted as a casualty, as boots stayed resolutely shut due to the threatening weather, but the Jukebox Diner was doing steady trade with its buffet breakfast and hot coffee. The Jukebox Diner award for the winning car went to a nice, original-looking red Triumph Vitesse owned by Jon and Marlene Robbens of Hamilton. The second prize from the diner went to a very original 1957 Humber 80 owned by Bret Dixon. The Classics Museum contributed cash prizes, one…

Attractions Exhibitions, museums and other vehicle-related curios Marlborough OMAKA CLASSIC CARS A unique collection of vehicles giving insight into New Zealand Motoring from the 50s to the 80s. 90 cars on display at any one time. omakaclassiccars.co.nz / 03 577 9419 /Aerodome Rd, Blenheim Coatings Heatproof, cosmetic, chrome, and specialist coatings & water transfer printing Auckland HIGH PERFORMANCE COATINGS Exhaust coatings, piston coatings, turbo coatings, and much more hpcoatings.co.nz / 09 267 1007 / Unit 0/62 Mahia Road, Manurewa, Auckland HP COATINGS New Zealand’s leading performance coating specialists, serving you over 20 years hpcoatings.co.nz / 09 267 1007 / Unit 0/62 Mahia Rd, Manurewa, Auckland Consumables Oils, additives fluids, fuels and workshop consumables Auckland RECHARGE BATTERIES Battery revitalizer and conditioner recharge.net.nz / 0800 36 66 36 / PO Box 350, Pukekohe, Auckland SOUTH PACIFIC…

Ford cars from the years 1920 to 1949 provided the base for the new culture of hot-rodding thanks to the heart of every build, a V8 engine. Whether it was the flatheads or overhead ‘cammers’, other manufacturers simply had to follow suit. American life just wasn’t the same without a V8. In those days, Ford’s trucking division provided another beachhead on its way to global domination. Henry Ford got the credit for inventing the production line, but when he saw farmers cutting and fitting flat-decks to Model Ts, he also went back to the drawing board and invented his own half-and-half vehicle, coining the term ‘pickup’. Stylish and built to work hard, Ford’s pickups were light trucks with car-like driveability. They not only hit the top-seller spots but, over the…

A mate of mine was at a local garage recently and spotted Norm Hammond’s 1957 MGA roadster in an adjacent bay, so he snapped a couple of photos of it. He knew of my fondness for classic British sports cars and thought I might be interested. I was indeed. In my mind, the MGA is still the best-looking Morris Garages (MG) of them all. It has a special place in my heart, and I’m not alone. For Norm Hammond, the car’s owner, it was love at first sight – and that was back in 1957 when he was 16 years old and visiting the West End of London. He had always been fascinated with cars, and, as it happened, he was standing on a corner waiting for the lights to…

I first discovered the Goodwin GT through a 1972 Motorman magazine article. The car received about a dozen words in a story about the New Zealand National Motor and Transport Show in Whanganui. The event was a success, drawing in around 90,000 people over 15 days in May of that year. What caught my attention were two black-and-white pictures of concept, or prototype, show cars. Both cars were being prepared for production. Exciting stuff, but they both vanished without a trace for decades. I came across the Motorman story in the late ’90s and, being a fan of dream and concept cars, I have been trying to track them down in idle moments ever since. The two tantalising cars were the Vampire VK and the Goodwin GT. Back in the…

Things looked a lot brighter in the early days of 1987 than they did at the close of the year. Specialist, luxury, and high-performance cars were on a roll in cash-rich New Zealand, and both sales and values were positive until the final quarter. It seemed like an ideal time to launch a low-volume sporting brand, even if the cars were nothing if not expensive. John Wood – a former advertising executive who had been marketing general manager for Auckland-based Nissan Motor Distributors before moving onto leading roles with Renault and then Peugeot, while also pursuing the Reliant brand for New Zealand – called me to a meeting in February 1987 at an Auckland city hotel with a visiting European motor industry executive. Mario Tozzi-Condivi was general manager for Maserati…

Even without the personalised plates, you knew the car driving up the service road at Hampton Downs was being piloted by motor racing royalty – for one, there was the wee man behind the wheel that you’d first seen racing a Triumph Herald at Pukekohe decades earlier, but also because alongside, as she’d always been, was ‘Mrs Woolfy’. Together, Allan and Colleen Woolf were part of the very fabric of the local motor racing scene – it didn’t seem to matter whether it was a Grand Prix (GP) or a humble club meeting, they’d be there. When I interviewed Allan at the Farewell to Pukekohe dinner only a few months ago, I subsequently remarked to people that he just might be the fittest, most alert and withit 93-year-old on the…

John Zimmermann. Published 2021 by Racemaker Press. ISBN 978-0-9998754-4-5. US$85 We have been fortunate, lately, in seeing so many Formula 5000 (F5000) cars racing once again in New Zealand. This large hardback book from Racemaker Press gives the story of the 1968–’76 seasons during which it was a major single-seater series in Canada and the US. If you were to start at the tail end of the book, the first thing that you’d see is the very detailed statistical information. In addition to full results of every F5000 round – 82 races in all – there are breakdowns by winning chassis, number of pole positions, and so on, plus a table giving the race history for every driver in the series. Impressive stuff – although Jo Bonnier was Swedish, not…

Bill McElwee has been a Morgan fan for most of his life. He has a library full of books about the marque. In his garage downstairs sits the Morgan that he has owned since 1978. When Bill bought his Morgan, $10K was a lot to pay for a car. A new Holden Kingswood could be purchased for around $6K. Not the same thing, by any measure, but paying nearly twice the price of a full-sized saloon called for commitment. But Bill got his dream car, a Morgan 4/4 powered by the peppy 1.6-litre cross-flow Ford engine that proved such a good match for Morgan in its middle period. After many years of happy service, Bill decided to take the car off the road in 2001 and give it a full…

Nichols Cars has revealed a supercar that pays homage to one of the most iconic racing cars of all time: the original McLaren M1A. Led by renowned motor sport engineer Steve Nichols, Nichols Cars has created the road-going N1A, a 900kg rear-wheel-drive sports car for purists, offering minimal driver aids and a naturally aspirated V8 engine. Inspired by the original McLaren M1A, the N1A’s sleek body work panels are made from Formula 1–grade graphene-infused carbon fibre. The iconic headlights and design cues of the M1A have been carefully implemented in the N1A’s structure to ensure that its swooping body is not only striking to look at but, thanks to carefully considered detailing, aerodynamically efficient too. The beating heart of the N1A is a seven-litre all-alloy V8 developed by Nichols Cars.…

Stan Adam’s long association with General Motors-Holden (GMH) led to a multitude of chances but also his biggest slice of luck when he found a rare 1963 EJ Holden with a well-known past. A certain Mrs Woods contacted him in 2010 and asked if he was the man who was interested in Holdens. “Mrs Win Woods of Willis Creek, my hometown at the time, phoned me and asked if I was interested in a Holden car that she had in her garage. She wanted $4K for it,” Stan says. He had moved to the town near Tamworth just two years before. The car was located just 600m from Stan’s house, and he didn’t hesitate to go and have a look at it. “I could not believe what I saw. It…