Innehållsförteckning för No 257 May 2018 från NZ Performance Car

The older the New Zealand import scene gets, the more value we are seeing given to what I’d like to call ‘survivor’ cars: the ones that slipped through the cracks and avoided being hacked up, caked in bog, and modified. RX-3s for $100K are a real thing, as are $200K GT-Rs, $70K Escorts, and so on. The prices of such classics are heading one way only, as finding survivors becomes harder by the day. This forces hunters wanting a slice of the action to consider restoring wrecks; shells once suitable for nothing more than scrap heaps. These unrestored wrecks are only going to continue to deteriorate — I shudder to think about the scale of resto jobs in another 10 or 20 years that will be carried out on the…

APRIL 7 If you have an event you’d like to see in the Gig Guide, mail editor@performancecar.co.nz with all the details NEW ZEALAND ROTARY RACING ENTHUSIASTS FINAL HAMPTON DOWNS MOTORSPORT PARK The New Zealand Rotary Racing Enthusiasts (RRE) announced a new single-day format for racing this season that saw the rotary-engine-only class run in conjunction with the Auckland Car Club. The season kicked off on September 2 and covered all North Island tracks. It’s a great entry-level motorsport event for those who want to get into racing, and, while this season is heading into its final round, you can express interest for next season via the group’s Facebook page: ‘New Zealand Rotary Racing Enthusiasts’. APRIL 14 2018 V 4&ROTARY NATIONALS DRAG RACING MEREMERE DRAGWAY By now, you should already know…

6.50 CHARLIE BATES TEAM: Mazda-B8s CHASSIS: RE dragster (20B) PB: 6.50s at 337kph (210mph) CLASS: RRR/D ★ CLASS ET AND SPEED RECORD 6.82 CORY ABBOTT TEAM: Terry’s Chassis Shoppe CHASSIS: Mazda RX-7 Series 6 (13B) PB: 6.82s at 319kph (196mph) CLASS: P/I-C ★ CLASS ET AND SPEED RECORD WON C6 SPORT COMPACT 7.09 REECE MCGREGOR TEAM: Heat Treatments Racing CHASSIS: Nissan 350Z (VQ35) PB: 7.09s at 329kph (205mph) CLASS: P/I-D 7.93 ADAM WIGG TEAM: Wigg Motorsport CHASSIS: Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R (VH45) PB: 7.93s at 280kph (174mph) CLASS: SCO 8.10 SAM KHAMIS TEAM: M&M Racing / Manukau Service Centre CHASSIS: Mazda RX-3 (13B) PB: 8.10 at 254kph (157mph) CLASS: S/M-C 8.54 CRAIG HEDLEY TEAM: Speedy Signs CHASSIS: Toyota Supra (2JZ) PB: 8.54s at 259kph (161mph) CLASS: SS/BB 8.73 JEREMY HEWSON…

For a long time, the desolate red dust plains of the Australian outback served as the land of milk and honey for young Kiwis looking to make some serious coin if they could hack the searing sun and the isolation from all that we love. For many, it’s not the kind of place they plan to stay forever, and a return to the motherland is always in the back of their minds. For Andrew Dremler, in setting his return date a few years in advance, he wanted to make sure he damn well had something worth returning for. No, we’re not talking about the love of a good woman; we’re talking about his dream machine: an RX-3 sedan. Despite having owned a long list of modified vehicles, an RX-3 still…

There was a time in the not so distant past when the likes of the humble Toyota 4K 1300cc with a pair of side-draught carbs, plenty of compression, and a ‘hot’ cam was a formidable weapon for anyone who mashed the right pedal to the metal and danced on gravel, swapping lock to lock. But, as any motorsport stalwarts, rally folk were not perturbed by advancements in technology, and the quest for victory soon saw the likes of the humble 4K superseded by bigger capacity engines and, of course, boost! Some 30 years later, and here we are, blasting up a wet and winding road as the Lampola five-speed screams away under the floorpan, the Stack tacho licks 9000rpm, and the trees and Armco are but a blur through the…

Rallying is nothing new to us Kiwis; in fact, it’s fair to say that we’ve had a long-lasting love affair with the sport. Mostly, this love affair is based on the noise and violence of sliding down a gravel or tarmac road at 150kph, dodging trees. The risk and skill involved in rallying are palpable, and no more so than in the World Rally Championship (WRC), in which the level of car control is superhuman and the machines defy physics, even when conditions are favourable. But once a year, the championship turns up the heat at Rally Sweden and has its very own ballet on ice! Rallying is in the DNA of those in the Nordic states, and Nordic drivers have had an ice-like grip on Rally Sweden for as…

NAME: COREY WORTHINGTON // AGE: 20 LOCATION: NORTH SHORE, AUCKLAND // OCCUPATION: CARPENTER NZ Performance Car: Hey, Corey. That’s a rad E30, are you a big fan of the international and local Euro scenes? Corey: Hi, team. Yes and no. There are a lot of people in the car scene as a whole who choose to spread negativity about things; however, I’ve always found everyone in the European portion of that scene to be very welcoming and genuinely interested in what you have done to your car, and why. I’d always seen E30s around and thought they looked cool, so I started hunting for my own and wound up with this four-door. Told my parents what I was buying, and they weren’t too into the idea of 16-year-old me owning…

Kilowatts, horsepower, newton metres, foot-pounds — these are all units of measurement used to work out power and torque. To some, they are trivial numbers that don’t have a lot of bearing on the value or capability of their cars, while to others they’re the benchmark to measure your proverbial member by, before ecstatically waving it around in everyone’s face. This topples over, however, when tuners use their know-how to manipulate the figures to deliver the results a customer wants, resulting in some cars being built based on perceived acceptable power output rather than usable packages. Hell, not even 10 years ago, rolling 300kW in a street car made you a king, but now, that line has been raised so high that we couldn’t even tell you where it is…

It may be a few rounds short of the season opener, but ‘Fanga Dan’ has finally landed himself his new D1NZ comp car, in the form of a 2017 RTR Spec 5-D Mustang previously campaigned in Formula Drift by Vaughn Gittin Jr. The chassis is a work of drift art, but it’s the Roush Yates Engines (RYE) ‘crate’ motor that makes us go all giddy every time the loud pedal is mashed. Known as the ‘RY45’, the all-aluminium 90-degree small block is a race engine through and through, and shares the same basic block and head architecture as the current iron-block FR9 Nascar engine used by all Ford teams since 2009, with great success. The RY is run in a wide variety of motorsports in its carb, injected, and boosted…

Let’s be honest here, no one ever sets out thinking their build will take them the better part of a decade to complete. That’s especially so if you’re in your early 20s, a time when you’re filled with blind optimism and youthful enthusiasm, and you generally won’t have had enough build setbacks to know any better. It would seem that most of these eager buggers reckon that their build will take no longer than two years, no matter how daunting the task that lies ahead. That’s the exact goal a much younger Simon Andrews Macleod set himself, but there he was, pulling out of his driveway for the maiden test run of his 1300, some 10 years after rolling the moss-covered and much-neglected Mazda into his workshop for the first…

You’ll be hard-pressed to catch Alan and Paretauira Togia saying it, but the brains behind event-promotion outfit Downtime Entertainment have got to be very pleased with the way their annual AutoFest event has grown into the monster it is now — an automotive festival that can genuinely be classed as among the biggest in New Zealand. From the first AutoFest in February 2016 through to the third iteration just gone, held on March 3, the growth and refinement of the show’s formula have been discernible despite the fact that, at a surface level, things have remained largely as they always have been. The Waikato venue of Mystery Creek Events Centre has remained, and the main attractions of a massive show hall and epic burnout competition remain at the fore. It’s…

NAME: SHANNON THICKPENNY // AGE: 40 LOCATION: AUCKLAND // OCCUPATION: OWNER/CNC MACHINIST AT RS WORKS NZ Performance Car: Hey, Shannon. You’re no stranger to these pages, having appeared back in Issue No. 220 with your FJ-powered Datto 1600, but this is something a bit different. Shannon: Hey, guys. Yeah, the Datsun was featured a few years ago now, and this is one of my latest purchases. It’s a genuine Nissan Skyline GTS-R R31 and has only been in the country a few months, as it has taken me quite a while to find a good example. This is car number 643 out of a total 823 units made for motorsport homologation. We understand that there aren’t too many left around these days after being produced in such small numbers and…

With low-down torque and response on his mind, Cam Herbert only saw one direction to head in when building an RB30 for his R32 — running twins. “I’ve always loved [Skyline] GT-Rs, particularly for the twin-turbo set-up. The sound of two turbos, two wastegates, and two exhausts is a thrill,” he said. “When I started the build, it was just a bare RB30E block and series two RB25DET head, which I wanted to make as torquey as possible low down in the rev range, so, naturally, using two small turbos was the way to go.” Two and a bit years on, and Cam tells us that things have escalated beyond those initial thoughts. The package now makes use of a R34 GReddy individual-throttle-body (ITB) system with two steel-wheeled R34 N1…

www.mountshop.co.nz freephone 0508 86 66 86 WHEELS / TYRES MAGS, TYRES, WHEEL ALIGNMENTS, WHEEL BALANCING, AND REPAIRS AUCKLAND MTS PERFORMANCE Lowest price guaranteed on wheels, tyres, and suspension mtsp.co.nz / 021 4 TYRES (021 489 737) / 82 Wairau Road, Glenfield ARROW WHEELS NZ’s leading builder, repairer, refurbisher of alloy wheels for 35 years arrowwheels.co.nz / 09 818 8388 / 6D Westech Place, Kelston, Auckland BRUGAR ENGINEERING Mag wheel repair specialists since 1979 magwheelrepairs.co.nz / 09 486 6832 / 7 Barrys Point Road, Takapuna, Auckland WAIKATO WORLD OF TYRES Hamilton’s leading retailer of tyres, wheels, batteries, and wheel alignment servicing worldoftyres.co.nz / 07 847 0330 / 62 Greenwood Street, Frankton, Hamilton TARANAKI TARANAKI TYRETORQUE LTD Taranaki’s leading tyre/mag specialist, providing automotive services and customization tyretorque.co.nz / 06 757 5988 /…

The internet has been overloaded with rumours surrounding the latest incarnation of the ever-popular Toyota Supra, and it hasn’t been helped by the automaker’s scarce release of details — drip feeding small facts and clues about how it may look; what will power it; and, most important, whether it will be manual. The latter question has been put to rest after Toyota engineer Tetsuya Tada confirmed that it will make use of an automatic transmission. The details aside, the exciting news for us locally is that Toyota New Zealand has confirmed that the Supra will be available here. “Without question the Supra is an iconic Japanese sports car,” says Neeraj Lala, Toyota New Zealand’s general manager of product and new vehicle sales. “This was one of the most loved sports…

For decades, drifting has been prevalent on New Zealand shores, but, in all that time, we’ve never had a venue solely dedicated to its pursuit. We’ve had to make do, using existing circuits as makeshift sportslands with cones and tyre markers to resemble those that we admire overseas, fighting management and racers from other disciplines for recognition as a legitimate sport. It’s been a hard slog, and it’s about time drifters had a proper place to call home. And, thanks to a dedicated bunch of local drifters, now we do. Headed by ex–D1NZ Pro driver Sky Zhao, the Evergreen Drift Park, located within the Meremere motorsport complex, is a 1km long, six-corner hitter that takes its design cues from the most famous tracks in Japan and caters predominantly for the…

BOTH CARS ARE SLATHERED IN CARBON-FIBRE GOODNESS IN THE NAME OF SAVING WEIGHT It’s 2.01am: the motorway network has been reduced to nothing more than the last few stragglers heading homewards after a late shift. Visibility is a luxury permitted only by a few lumens projected mere metres from your front end and the dim fluorescent glow of street lights that do little more than add a semblance of ‘scenery’ against the night sky. The hum of an outdated radio radiates into the oblivion, and it’s so quiet that your mind has only the sound of the air rushing in past degraded door seals to focus on. For most, it’s a tiring place to travel through, one which should be a means to an end in order to reach your…

Now in its 10th season, Motul Honda Cup is a super competitive championship here in New Zealand; one that never fails to provide close-quarters racing. As the years have progressed, so have the cars, and, inevitably, there’s been a corresponding bump in the investment required to be at the pointy end of the field — a fact that did not sit well with the organizers. Sure, super-fast big-budget Hondas are great to watch, but things were getting too far from what the class had set out to achieve. This saw the inclusion of an N1-spec class this season — essentially, a production-based class like those run in Japan, with EG and EK Civics and DC2 Integras going head to head with near-stock engines. Building one should leave you change from…

Concept cars from bygone eras seem to have been the exclusive realm of rogue designers with the full manufacturing extent of an automotive giant at their fingertips. And, with all that potential, a lot of turds were quickly binned before they ever got sighted publicly, though an occasional diamond in the rough did slip through the high-security doors to grace our eyes. So, if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a brand took its mainstream luxury model and let an Italian design company go nuts redesigning it, here’s your answer: the Lexus Landau — a never-to-be-produced hot hatch that packed a very unexpected heart. What you’re looking at here is a 1994 Lexus GS300 (or Aristo, in Toyota terms), but one that morphed into a compact hatchback. Much like…

PRO-SPEC Time is money — and we all want more of that to blow on shiny parts — so don’t waste valuable cash-earning time on polishing your car all day. Meguiar’s has got your back with the DA Power System and Ultimate Liquid Wax combo, which will up your car-detailing game while cutting time. All you gotta do is attach the DA Power System to your drill to machine polish and wax like a pro. Mix that up with the Ultimate Liquid Wax, and you’ve got the most advanced hydrophobic finish in half the time. All the finer details can be had by calling the Smits Group team on 0800 227 422, or head to smitsgroup.co.nz. DIY MASTER When the budget’s whittled down to chump change and you’re looking to…

NAME: JESSEY JAMIESON // AGE: 23 LOCATION: CHRISTCHURCH NZ Performance Car: Hey, Jessey. Your Majesta looks damn comfy. What made you buy it? Jessey: Hey, NZPC. I visited Japan in 2016 and saw a lot of VIP-style cars. It wasn’t hard to fall in love with them there, and, about a year later, I was scrolling online and saw that WS Imports had this one for sale. I instantly said, “I want this car”, and fate would have it that, three weeks later, my boss sent me up to Nelson for work, so it couldn’t have been a better opportunity than to get paid for driving up and collecting my new car. [Laughs.] Who wouldn’t want to roll super lush? Although, VIP hasn’t been your go-to style in the past;…