Indholdsfortegnelse for No 252 December 2017 i NZ Performance Car

Since as far back as the year 2000, when I was a pimply faced teenager, I have been making the pilgrimage to the 4&Rotary Nationals for a two-day blowout stretching over, first, Labour weekend, and then Queen’s Birthday weekend when it made the shift to avoid the rain. For the past 22 years, the format has remained the same, with the show at the ASB Showgrounds on the Saturday and then drag racing on the Sunday at Meremere. It has been the status quo since long before I started attending, and no one would have blinked an eye if it stayed that way. But, if, like me, you have been attending a long time, then you will have noted the everdwindling turnout of pro imports at the drags. It’s no…

Reg Cook and the Cook Motor Racing (CMR) team have completed a successful 2017 Bonneville campaign, despite the third event being rained out. Beginning at Speed Week, the Streamliner, now powered by a Synergy two-litre V8, set the G/FS record with a 260mph run. The NX Coupe, however, ended its Speed Week early with a broken gearbox. The next event scheduled, the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association (USFRA) World of Speed, saw the cars shifted to a temporary workshop in Utah. Some of the Kiwis returned home and others stayed to work on the cars. Reg, wasting no time, got to work on the dyno, “in an effort to understand better how to get the best out of our Synergy engines in the different Bonneville conditions”. The team returned to…

Expect to be a little lighter in the pocket next time you hit Taupo’s Bruce McLaren Motorsport Park (BMMP), with the introduction of a new Repairs and Maintenance Levy, effective October 1. The new levy is in response to rising compliance and insurance costs the track is facing. The fee is $25 for cars and $15 for bikes per day, and for multiple-day events it will be capped at $35 and $25, respectively. A statement released by BMMP stated, “The levy is now necessary to enable TMP [the company that owns and runs BMMP] to continue to provide a safe and appropriate track facility for competitors, promoters and track day users.” The levy will cover the first $1K of damage caused if you manage to crash and damage anything at…

Sadly, last month we lost a legend of the New Zealand import–drag racing fraternity. Arnie Nguyen was a pioneer of the sport here in New Zealand, and was a bigger influence on the local guys than he may ever have realized. His infamous peach-coloured 13B turbo–powered S1 RX-7 and, later, his S6 FD RX-7 were hero cars for many. The stuff Arnie was doing in the late ’90s and early 2000s really helped propel the local scene forward, and when he eventually ran the first ever 10-second pass with an import car on our shores, clocking off a 10.9 at 121mph during the Outlaw Drags at Meremere in 2000, he cemented his place in the history books. Later on, the car came back out with a wild Kiwi-RE 13B package,…

NAME: JAMES DALY // AGE: 23 LOCATION: CHRISTCHURCH // OCCUPATION: TECHNICIAN AT BRIDGESTONE NZ Performance Car: Hi, James. Sweet STi — have you always been into cars? James: Hey. Yeah, I’ve always liked cars and tinkering with engines, as my dad is very mechanical, but I was never really into the performance side of things, apart from a passing interest in intense supercars. That was until a customer of my dad, Stan Redmond, invited us to go to a F5000 race meeting at Ruapuna which he was competing in. The noise and speed of those things are insane, and ever since I’ve had a burning desire to go faster. And the STi was the answer to that? Not really; I wasn’t a huge Subaru fan to begin with, and I…

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NAME: SAMANTHA WIKAIRA // AGE: 27 LOCATION: NORTHLAND // OCCUPATION: ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE NZ Performance Car : Hi, Samantha. How did you get into cars and what was your first? Samantha: Hey, guys. My family are all really into motorbikes and cars, so it was only natural that I ended up with the same interests as them. My husband lives and breathes GT-Rs too, so that has kept it going. First car was a Galant, and I worked up to my first S15, which was fairly standard compared to this one. And what was it that drew you to an S15? I’ve always loved them. The fact that this was a factory six-speed manual Spec R with low kilometres on the clock sold me on it. It needed a bit of…

How you can lose a year in the blink of an eye is beyond me: it really doesn’t feel like all that long ago that I was packing my backpack full of crap and hopping on a flight to Timaru for last year’s V 4&Rotary South Island Champs. It was only my second trip to that big mass of dirt somewhere south of the mainland, and it was where I met more than a few folk that I now count as proper good friends and who I stay in regular contact with today. The event marks a pretty full-on weekend of work, and while I didn’t get to see much of the scenery last year, I was treated to the automotive underbelly that I was itching to witness. This came…

We hoped that we’d be bringing you this kind of news from a little closer to home; instead, it’s erupted from the US. Last month, the team at Extreme Turbo Systems (ETS) ran its own GT-R at the Woodburn Dragstrip in Oregon, achieving not one, but two record passes — one of which proved to be an arse-clenching moment. The record had been held by the team’s closest rivals at AMS Performance with ‘Alpha G’ at 6.937s at 196.27mph (315.86kph). ETS broke the record on its first serious run, then upped boost to levels previously untested on the car for the next attempt. Nearing the end of the quarter, the GT-R lost traction at all fours, sending it on a wild fishtail towards the wall. Luckily, driver Lucas English managed…

Back on July 12, 2008, a world record was set at the Castle Combe Racing Circuit in Wiltshire, England. The record didn’t involve cutting laps or gnarly feats of smoke, though, but it did see the largest gathering of Mitsubishi Evos ever. A total of 273 examples from all generations drove a 3.2km parade around the circuit. Here on home soil, Kiwis are renowned for their love of the mighty fourbangers, and, nearly 10 years on from that record being set, the team at Downtime Entertainment is looking to better the count — so serious it is about doing so, that the crew has created an event just to achieve it. The MOD (Mitsubishi Owners Day) NZ event is set to take place at Hampton Downs, June 3, 2018, and…

IN THE EARLY YEARS, THE RX-8 HAD AN APPETITE FOR GEARBOX DESTRUCTION. COUNTLESS SERIES 6 FIVE-SPEEDS AND HKS SEQUENTIALS LOST THEIR LIVES BEHIND THE 20B. THESE DAYS, THE DRIVELINE IS ROCK SOLID IN THE FORM OF A HOLINGER RD6SS SEQUENTIAL, AN AUTOSPORT DYNAMICS (ASD)–BUILT WINTERS QUICK CHANGE, AND DRIVESHAFT SHOP AXLES AND DRIVESHAFT .... The middle child of any family often gets the short end of the stick. Neither the captain of the ship nor the young one who gets all the limelight, they are often just left to their own devices, fending for themselves in the shadow of their other siblings, regardless of their achievements. In the stables of drifter ‘Mad Mike’ Whiddett, that position is, without a doubt, held by the RX-8 dubbed ‘BADBUL’. It’s not the most…

Tucked away deep within a semi-suburban South Auckland estate is definitely the last place you’d expect to find a race workshop stacked to the hilt with Silvias, but that’s exactly where brothers Troy and Ben Jenkins, aka Team Jenkins Motorsport (TJM) ply their drift trade. The family home is not 50m from the shed, but clearly the Jenkins parentals are supportive of their sons’ activities, allowing their property to act like some kind of drift halfway house, often hosting international drivers and their cars or travelling New Zealand teams. Like all good race shops, it’s somewhat low-key from the exterior, with the only external clue of what lies within the converted farm buildings the mountain of destroyed Jinyus poking out from behind the shed. The property was previously home to…

We like to think that somewhere in the world there’s a big-wig automaker exec sitting behind a mahogany boardroom table yelling, “They can’t handle the truth!” in response to a lowly engineering tech’s suggestion that buyers should be given full capability of their cars. It’s the truth that they don’t want you to know about and the same truth that aftermarket reflashers have been trying to tell us about for years: there’s power to be had out of the box, if you know how to find it. Yep, these days, most of the power scales offered from manufacture are capped by software that manufacturers try to lock away from you, unless you want to pony up your hard-earned dosh. The reasons why they do this vary from factory to factory.…

Teretonga Park played host to its first competitive drifting round after a long six-year absence, when Drift South rolled into town to kick off the 2017/’18 season. Anticipation was high, and the event even drew retired competitors such as Glen Pupich and Paul Tomlin out of retirement — the only two competitors to have run the track before, in rounds between 2009 and 2011. Teretonga would rate as one of the faster drifting tracks in the country, though, compared with other venues, there’s a slower start — you pick up speed through the section that sees most give the rev limiter a good bashing in fourth gear. Track width — or lack of it — combined with high speed made for a real challenge, and, for those drivers who experienced…

While us Kiwis have always been extremely welcoming to the Japanese variety of tin, it has never been quite the same in America, and appreciation for the classics is something that we could call a work in progress compared with back home. The fact that bargain Japanese classics acan be found on Craigslist is a good indication that the level of love has not quite got there. But events like Japanese Classic Car Show — first held in Long Beach, Southern California, 13 years ago by a passionate group of enthusiasts — is doing its best to hike those prices. Why? Because over that time, the show has grown exponentially, to the point that it really has outgrown its location. It has become the biggest Japanese car meet outside Japan,…

They say that humans are creatures of habit, and, after owning a few previously, Llewellyn Giles couldn’t help but crack open the wallet when a MkIV Supra cropped up on Trade Me at a cheap price, as it had been sitting unloved for a number of years and needed a good going over. One of his previous cars was a MkIII drag car that ran 10s some years ago, so, naturally, first on the cards was squeezing some more power out of the 2JZ heart. It’s gone through a ground-up rebuild, with a 3.5-litre stroker kit that makes 10:1 compression, paired with a big Precision 6870 turbo. The auto 4L80e transmission has been rebuilt and modified for manual shifting, delivering power down back to a hard-to-get 3.5-ratio UK-spec diff. “The…

GET YOUR DAILY NEWS FIX ONLINE: themotorhood.com New Zealand’s biggest Honda performance-parts supplier, Speed Science, has officially kicked opened the doors to its new showroom in Kumeu, after long outgrowing its old West Auckland premises. Started in 2013 by self-confessed Honda head Adam Plews, who many will remember from his earlier shop, FBI, Speed Science has grown to become the largest local stockist of Honda performance parts, with over 300 brands and 5000 parts on the shelf here in New Zealand and ready to ship. The extensive range covers just about every brand under the sun that’s worth knowing about, and also includes a bunch of products developed by Speed Science and produced locally. Although predominantly a Honda specialist, the boys are not confined to selling Honda parts. Utilizing their…

Anyone who’s built a car is all too familiar with making sacrifices, and sometimes life gets in the way of garage sessions altogether, leaving a small void — open road fangs and the sweet chimes of a tuned motor can be hard to replace. Luckily, there are other ways to kill the time between trips to the garage — a large number of car people are avid collectors of scale models The latest on the scene, thanks to the boys and girls at AUTOart, are examples from two of the once relatively unknown small workshops–turned– global cult heroes: RAUH-Welt Begriff (RWB) and Tra-Kyoto’s Rocket Bunny. Adding to their already massive line-up of cars, AUTOart has available five colour choices in the RWB 993, each carrying the unique name of its…

There was a late entry into the midsize sedan field nearly three decades ago, in 1988. Back then, models were often tarred with the mundane brush in terms of both function and form, and while this era also saw rogue design teams within Japanese automakers produce, on occasion, versions of these cars that were pumped full of performance goodness and techno-wizardry, those tended to be more sporadic fits of passion, homologation specials, or technological showcases than ultimate driver’s cars. By contrast, the subject of this feature was almost the opposite. The model was plunged into a deadly serious rallying campaign straight out of the womb, got overhauled as the premier model for one of the most revered factory racing-development departments of the time, and saw more performance development throughout its…

If we were to take away one thing from European automakers over the past century, it’s this: the Germans know how to build cars. Especially when it comes to those wearing the iconic triple stripes of BMW. However, not all of the range has been revered for pioneering performance, and reality tells us that even fewer fall within the little slice of modified pie that we operate in. Thankfully, for all of us, there are still a few hold-outs that have reached cult-classic status and continue to be modified extensively — even with values skyrocketing. The pick of the bunch, without a doubt, remains the BMW E30 — the overengineered, lightweight coupe that went from being seen as the pinnacle of yuppie status symbols back in the ’80s to a…

WITH ALL THAT POWER HEADING INTO THE DRIVETRAIN, YOU’LL NEED A STRONG BOX — PER CHOSE A BMW 530D SIX-SPEED, AS HE TELLS US THAT IT’S ONE OF THE STRONGEST BMW MAKES, AND HE FITTED IT WITH A SAMSONAS SHIFTER FOR GOOD MEASURE Necessity is the mother of invention. Kiwis understand that sentiment best when it comes to drag racing. Hot rodders of old were revered for their ability to take seemingly nothing, mash a bunch of parts together, and go out and break records on the strip. This has always meant that as the lust for speed grew, we looked overseas to lap up the styles and trends that evolved out of years of local support and adapted them to form our own unique flavour and availability. Nowadays, you…

NAME: IMRAN KHAN // AGE: 41 LOCATION: AUCKLAND // OCCUPATION: SELF-EMPLOYED NZ Performance Car: Hi, Imran. That’s a sweet GTI — how did you get into cars? Imran: Hey, guys. My dad was a new-car salesman when I was growing up, and I was fortunate enough to get rides to school in all sorts of new cars. So you could say that I’ve loved cars since I was five years old, really. My first car was a 1974 Datsun 120Y, which I loved every bit of. There was nothing it couldn’t do, and it never gave up on me. Old battler, no doubt. How’d you end up with the GTI? [Laughs] well … I actually bought it for my wife as a surprise, but she wasn’t that into it —…

V8 Supercars will finally enter the 21st century next year with the introduction of the Gen2 rules, which allow non-V8 engines to enter the fray from 2018 onwards in the form of turbocharged four- and sixcylinder motors. The first team to have embraced the switch is the most dominant in the category, Triple Eight Racing, which is Holden’s number-one team. The switch from V8 to V6 won’t see Triple Eight start development from scratch, as you might have thought, as Holden called on parent company General Motors (GM) for help. The answer came from the most unlikely race car you’ll find in the GM line-up — the Cadillac ATS-V.R GT3. Its power plant is a V6 twin-turbo race version of the 3.6-litre LF4 found in the likes of the Cadillac…