True to his word, themed grassroots motor race event organiser, Dr Jacob Simonsen, has created a stop-gap, two-day endurance event – the BadThurst 12 Hour at Pukekohe’s Pukekohe Park Raceway over the December 18-19 weekend – to celebrate the end of New Zealand’s latest, longest, and hopefully last, COVID-19 Lockdown.
With the Government set to replace its current Lockdown levels system with an all-new Traffic Light-based system (which takes into account a person’s vaccination status) on November 29, and to relax the current border restrictions a fortnight later (Dec 15), the BadThurst 12 Hour race at Pukekohe on December 18 & 19 will enjoy the added status of being the first motor racing meeting to be held in the greater Auckland area for over 4 months, meaning plenty of interest since Dr Simonsen first posted word of it on his 24 Hours of NaZCAR Facebook page a fortnight ago.
That, of course was a good 7-10 days before Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed the basic details both of the new Traffic Light COVID-19 outbreak management system and that the strict hard border around Auckland would be lifted.
“It was definitely a risk announcing or plan before we had absolute, 100% certainty,” said Dr Simonsen earlier today. ‘In saying that I couldn’t see ‘Auntie Jacinda’ going back on her promise to ‘let Aucklanders out for Christmas,’ and as it turned out the only (weekend) dates the Pukekohe people could give us were the 18th and 19th so in the end the decision to go ahead was really made for us.”
There is a good reason why Dr Simonsen needed both days of the weekend as well.
The unique format of the BadThurst 12 Hour race sees 2 separate races making up 12 Hours, the first over 4 hours on the Saturday, then the second – covering the other 8 – on the Sunday.
The Government’s hard-line response to the much more contagious Delta strain of the deadly COVID-19 virus proved particularly hard on motor racing event organisers like Dr Simonsen this year – who was forced to re-think his 2021 calendar strategy.
For starters, he was forced to cancel the third and final round of his new NaZCAR 3 and 6-Hour Pro Series, then he postponed the ‘jewel’ in his novelty event crown, the 24 Hours of NaZCAR event at Hampton Downs which he originally planned to run on Sept 24 and 25, then it was postponed until Thursday and Friday October 21 & 22 before being inserted into the 2022 calendar, with confirmed dates of February 19 – 20.
“It was tough, all right, first and foremost facing up to the fact there was something else out there more important than motor racing, then – obviously – trying to navigate the various levels of lockdown to see if we could in fact do any sort of event, Dr Simonsen said.”
“Our plan was to try getting SOME racing in this year, hence the 12-hour BadThurst announcement, but Hampton Downs was out as a venue because it lay ‘just’ outside Auckland’s hard southern border at Mercer.
“Pukekohe Park Raceway always remained a possibility – for Aucklanders because it sits well inside the hard Auckland Supercity boundary – but conversely, lay on the ‘wrong’ side of the border for anyone from the Waikato, Bay of Plenty or points further south who might want to enter,
In the end, Dr Simonsen says, he decided to sit out the Lockdown until such a time that he could see a practical end to the many and varied restrictions on travelling and gathering, then kick off with a special one-off event to celebrate the fact.
As it turned out the catalyst for the tongue-in-cheek BadThurst 12-Hour event – so named because it comes just a fortnight after the itself-postponed 2021 Repco Bathurst 1000 endurance race across the Tasman – was Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s announcement on Friday October 22 that with vaccination numbers nearing 90% all over the country, the Government intended replacing the existing Lockdown system with a new COVID-19 management tool based on the red, orange and green colours of a traffic light.
More information on the BadThurst 12 Hour event at Pukekohe on December 18 & 19 can be found on the 24 hours of Nazcar page on Facebook at facebook.com/Nazcar24
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