We all remember our ‘first time’. Maybe not the date, but certainly the time and the place.
For me it was in 1984. June 23rd to be exact. It was in the Riverhead Forest, and I was only 13 years old.
She was German, and she was timelessly gorgeous!
Yep, that was the day that I saw my first Audi Quattro in action.
Even as a youngster, it was abundantly clear that watching a World Rally Championship event was a massive step up from anything I’d seen before.
My family and I had made our first trip across the Tasman to see the world’s fastest rally drivers in action. Rohrl, Mikkola and Blomqvist in Quattros, Alen in the raucous Lancia Rally 037, and Waldegard and a young upstart named Kankkunen in Toyota Celica Twin Cam Turbos.
Standing on a straight piece of road in Riverhead Forest, I still recall Walter Rohrl blasting past at over 100 miles an hour, the symphony of the Quattro’s five-cylinder engine playing, and the chattering of the wastegate as it went up and down through the gears.
The thrill of my first WRC rally was matched by the fast locals and the intense battle to be “first New Zealander home”. Names like Reg Cook, Tony Teesdale, Blair Robson and “Inky” Tulloch have stuck with me ever since.
Oh, and there was some guy called Peter “Possum” Bourne in a Subaru, way down at car 31.
Memories of that 1984 rally have stayed with me as though they only happened yesterday.
I still remember walking through the Auckland Domain and looking at the cars at the start of the rally, of seeing Mikkola’s battered Quattro after he’d rolled just outside Rotorua, and of the fan-laden tarmac stage around the Manukau City Shopping Centre.
Perhaps my fondest memory is the accompanying grainy photograph of Stig Blomqvist in full attack mode in his Quattro.
It was taken by my dad, and in poster size, sat on the wall of our family home in the years following that 1984 event.
I went back to Rally New Zealand again for the Group B show in 1986, and have returned many times since, and like many, I’m already champing at the bit to get back to Auckland for the 2022 edition.
Next year will mark 38 years since my first Rally NZ, and 10 years since the WRC circus has graced the country. It may still be 11 months away, but the anticipation is already at fever pitch.
Photo: Blomqvist tries desperately to maintain his lead” was my dad’s caption on his 1984 photo of the future world champion.
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