Look, if anyone should have noticed that the way ‘we’ as a bunch of car, motorcycle and motor racing enthusiasts were changing the way we ‘consumed’ the many and varied activities which constitute ‘our’ sport, it should have been me.
After-all, I’m as good as anyone else is going to get to being a professional ‘commentator;’ and despite having worked in the media here for the best part of (gulp!) 40 years my natural curiosity and ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ attention span means you could hardly call me hide-bound.
By my own admission I’m also as comfortable on two as well as four wheels and am – in general terms anyway – as happy attending a meeting to report on the various goings on as I am competing at it.
So – and this really is a rhetorical question which I don’t expect any of you to drop what you are doing right now to respond in the Comments section – how come I completely missed spotting the absolute sea-change which has effectively turned our local scene on its head?
You know? The one where huge crowds of keen, knowledgeable enthusiasts turn up at Hampton Downs to catch a glimpse of their YouTube hero (1.78 million subscribers and rising) TJ Hunt when he visited our own Mad Mike Whiddett’s workshop (aka The Mad Lab) 18 months ago.
Or the one where for the first time since the marque and classic Kiwi driver-celebrating festivals of 8-10 years ago there were enough people at the track at the big Chrome Expression Session meeting a fortnight ago now to – if not completely fill, at least make a largish dent in – the grass amphitheatre area which wraps around the circuit’s downhill (now called Porsche I believe) hairpin.
Yet, yet, I didn’t put two and two together until I was thinking about a subject for this column.
While I was always going to write something about the Chrome event, it was only when I was mulling over my thoughts afterwards that it hit me…
Bar Mad Mike’s Driftforce days (which are exclusively run from the second pit area down at the ‘club circuit’) oh, and his big ‘Summer Bash’ meeting held in early December last year, the last time I had been up at the main pit building was at the TRS series round not last summer but the one before.
There – sadly- I had the media suite pretty much to myself as I remember watching absolutely spellbound, two of our brightest and best young internationals. Marcus Armstrong, and Liam Lawson, take it upon themselves to give the rest of the field a lesson in the art of high speed, high stakes gamesmanship.
It was a performance – IMHO – worthy of the same sort of thunderous applause a young Bruce McLaren might have received at Ardmore or Pukekohe, back in the day, when – even on the day before the ‘big race’ – the crowds would number in the multiple thousands.
Yet – this being a Saturday at Hampton Downs there were probably fewer than 300 paying spectators there for me to share the momentous moment with.
Contrast that with the similar moment in time – his time on the Sunday afternoon at the Chrome event when ‘the dude in the late model supercharged big block Chevrolet Camaro’ (number plate SKOOLU) first let rip in a sudden violent thunderclap of noise and billowing clouds of acrid tyre smoke for the drag race part of the Chrome programme on the Sunday afternoon; and the effect on the large crowd gathered waiting, obviously, for just such an eventuality was palpable.
Like something out of the classic Michael. J. Fox movie, Back to the Future, I swear I saw a shock wave ripple up from the track and envelope all the slack-jawed fans (me included) standing like stunned mullets trying to let their brains catch up with what their eyes, ears and noses had just seen, heard, felt and smelled.
Visceral – meaning ‘related to deep, inward feelings rather than the intellect’- is, I believe, the word which best describes that particular ‘moment.’
No one, as far as I am aware, anyway, was transported back to 1955 in a converted DMC DeLorean. Such was the impact of just one car out of well over 500, on the crowd lining the fence, that if someone is reported missing and the last reported sighting of them was at Chrome, well, I know where I’d be looking – and put it this way, it wouldn’t be in 1953, 1954 or 1956!!
I – of course – am a bit of a late convert to these enthusiast-rather-than-competitor-based’ ‘lifestyle-celebrating’ car events; like the Choice Events’ Car-nival one I went to at Taupo’s Bruce McLaren Motorsport Park last year, and the Auckland-based Premier Events’ big Chrome Expression Session at Hampton Downs which – as I write this – I have just got back from.
In fact, before I decided – literally on a whim – to tow my old Skyline to Taupo for a rare chance (at the time anyway) to drift the roller-coaster-like reverse ‘D1 layout at the Car-nival meeting I was probably guilty of ‘looking down my nose’ at these non-competitive, ‘for-fun’ events. Much like I still do with golf, as (and it is getting more and more common, I’m afraid, the older I get) some well-meaning friend gets in touch to enquire as to whether I am ready to ‘join him at Muriwai for 9 holes?’
“Not now maaatee,” will come my pet reply. “One day perhaps…. when I’m old!”
Yet all it took was a day at Car-nival for the scales to fall from my eyes as I joined everyone from my steely-eyed fellow drifters to wide-eyed and always smiling young fellas in their old-skool RWD Mazdas and Toyotas, and grizzled old Silver Foxes in everything from gorgeous battleship size early ‘60s Thunderbirds to late model HSV Holdens and immaculate Barra-era Ford Falcon XR6s in activities as diverse as the track cruise sessions to random line-up drag races.
I even stood as close as I could to the fence and watched – with a mix of equal parts fascination, horror and (was that envy?? I think it was!!!) as blokes who have obviously made a specialty of the ‘discipline’ tortured their poor cars’ tyres, engines and drivetrains in the ‘burnout box.’
I was drawn by some odd primeval urge to do the same at the Chrome meeting and It was there if you like, it all became clear, and my epiphany was complete.
Rather than pay to watch someone else have some fun, these blokes and blokesses were re-dressing the balance.
In their own way, and on their own terms, they were relegating the work of the generations of professional drivers to the side-lines, storming the pitch themselves, intent – if you like – on taking the motorsport world’s version of beach cricket to multi-day test level.
And do you know what? As a plain, simple old ‘car guy’ I am – I think – a convert, despite the odd hint of a misgiving creeping into that last paragraph.’
I am because, like ‘fun runs’ and ‘mini-triathlons’ these are mass-participation events with the accent on fun, rather than out-and-out competition. And the more people we can get involved at this fun, grassroots level the bigger our sport’s ‘footprint’ and the larger the pool of punters keen, once he become involved, to start climbing the ladder….
That said, as a professional working in the media, I can’t help but feel sorry for a bloke like Geoff Short, who runs Speed Works, the company charged with promoting New Zealand’s annual summer championship motor racing series.
Where once upon a time Kiwis were so starved of top-line motor racing that the annual New Zealand Grand Prix meeting at Pukekohe would regularly attract a three-day crowd of over 50,000, today the same meeting at Circuit Chris Amon Manfeild would be lucky to attract 5,000 paying punters over the same period.
Obviously it’s easy to play a blame game – as countless keyboard warriors have in the past.
Some have – and no doubt still do – blame ‘the show.’ Ohers prefer to level their criticism at the bloke in charge. But speaking strictly personally here I think it goes way deeper than that.
Mass participation motor vehicle meeting like Car-nival and Chrome are only possible, for instance, when there is a critical mass of blokes – plus the odd blokesse – who earn enough from their job to buy and run more than one car. i.e. a daily or ‘work’ car or Ute, plus a ‘fun’ car for the weekend.
Just a generation ago, this would have been impossible for all but the odd farmer, car dealer or ‘trust fund beneficiary,’ no matter how hot the fire of desire burned in the pit of your stomach.
So really, it shouldn’t be any great surprise why – when compared to today – there were so few actual competitors and so many keen spectators at all our major motor racing meeting from the early 1950s to the late 1970s and early 1980s.
As motorcycle great Hugh Anderson once told me when I asked him why more talented Kiwi bike racers didn’t follow his example and head to Europe after achieving success here, he – rather ruefully I thought – quipped that most of his mates ‘had to sell the race bike when the time came to buy an engagement ring……’
Suggest that to any young bike/kart/car/sim racer today and the look you would get would say something like …’dude, where are your priorities? ‘
And that is to say nothing of the kaleidoscope-like choice there is out there today for even the most impecunious punter out there to satisfy his or her ‘need for speed’ be it at grassroots or club level in terms of competition, or at one of the fresh new wave of fun, non-competitive mass-participation events.
So, next time you feel like opening our mouth and letting the wind flap your lips about regarding why so few people attend our marquee championship meetings these days can I suggest you keep an eye on the Coming Events calendar at your local track for one of these mass-participation events
Whether you enter or simply go along to watch I can pretty much guarantee that you will have an absolute ball.
Just don’t blame me you suddenly develop an interest in DeLoreans and start insisting your mates start calling you Marty – Marty McFly!
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