Yep, you read that headline right. There indeed is ‘a dream car factory’ nestled in a valley at Lyford, in North Canterbury.
There, in a verdant landscape of soaring foothills and vast skies you can – as long as you have the $NZ1 million+ price of entry – go and have your wildest go-fast fantasies turned into exhilarating, mouth-drying, finger and arm cramping, neck-aching reality in an F1-esque car you can buy, then take it home with you when the time finally comes to leave and head back to the so-called ‘real-world.’
Welcome to the incredible, fantastic (as in the true ‘imaginative or fanciful, remote from reality’ meaning of the word), and – initially anyway – ‘hard-to-take-it-all-in-let-alone-actually-believe-it,’ life of transplanted Aussie computer industry ‘tycoon’ David Dicker and his current all-consuming ‘side project,’ Rodin Cars (rodin-cars.com).
Now I’m definitely not the first local ‘motor noter’ to write about David and Rodin Cars (named after French sculptor Auguste Rodin whose famous work ‘The Thinker’ is the inspiration behind and provides a stylised logo for the enterprise). Nor, as word of this remarkable man and his larger-than-life passion gets out around the world, will I – no doubt – be the last.
NZ Autocar publisher Mark Petch, for instance, has already written extensively about the man and his machines in his magazine. NZ Autocar has also posted this video on its website of talented young employee, former NZ Kart champion and now racing driver Gene Rollinson, putting one of Rodin Cars’ first F1-style, single seat FZed ‘ultimate track -day cars,’ through its paces around the Lyford test track.
Sky Speed’s Stephen McIvor also spoke to David at length when he and fellow presenter Greg Murphy were invited down to check on progress and for Murph to drive the FZed.
In saying that Mr Dicker has been on my ‘nice-idea-for-a-story’ radar for a good 10 – maybe even more – years; ever since the day I was party to one of those otherwise ordinary conversations which you later realise had something extraordinary in it, with a random friend/mate/racing buddy from Christchurch.
Seems friend/mate/racing buddy was out at Ruapuna one afternoon and literally tripped over a genuine and (then) pretty much contemporary carbon-fibre two-seater ‘Le Mans’ ‘sports prototype car.’
Not the sort of thing you usually see anywhere other than one of the ‘great’ circuits of ‘the old world’ and definitely not typical of the cars that turn up on a week day at a place like Ruapuna and track like (as it then was), Powerbuilt Raceway.
Yet there it was, its ‘mystery’ owner having jetted in (from somewhere overseas) that day to discuss, with John Crawford at Motorsport Solutions apparently, the logistics of getting someone to prep and run it for him whenever he was ‘in town,’
Whether this was, in fact, David Dicker, I’m still not 100% sure. But stay with me here, because it is all part of the rich tapestry which goes with the story on this remarkable man and his truly amazing, ambitious-beyond-belief plan to build the world’s fastest track-day car and sell it – and subsequently a fully road-legal version – from the utterly bespoke factory/test track complex he has built at Lyford, in the otherwise splendid isolation of rural (far) North Canterbury.
As a story it has all the hallmarks in fact, of the sort of fantasy beloved of film directors; I know, when I subsequently heard about ‘an Australian multi-millionaire planning to build a car and track to test it on in the wilds of North Canterbury’ I thought the guy who told me was ‘pulling my leg.’
He was adamant though.
“Seriously,” he said (this would have been about four years ago. “He’s started the earthworks, you can already make out the outline on Google Maps.”
Which indeed you could – and can with much more specific detail now – the factory sheds and stunning looking track nestled in an otherwise undistinguished parcel of land alongside Inland Rd (aka The Inland Kaikoura Route) at Lyford, a few kms north-east of Waiau, a small rural service town between Hanmer Springs and Kaikoura.
So, who exactly IS David Dicker?
That’s the easy bit because, rather than being reclusive, as might or might not fit the ‘Hollywood’ narrative of the story, Dicker is actually a laid-back Sydney-born 66-year-old who is the CEO and Chairman of Dicker Data, a company he founded back in 1978 to distribute computers.
Since then the company has grown and prospered, listing on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) in 2011, generating revenues last year (2019) of close to two billion NZ dollars for an after-tax profit of $57.87 million.
As you will be able to deduce for yourself if you take the time to watch the accompanying videos, David is no recluse either; in fact he is happy to talk – it’s just that he is more the kind of guy who prefers to let his achievements speak for themselves.
Some, for instance, might characterise him as shy. I’m more inclined to see him as almost totally self-contained, with a laser-like focus on the task at hand, rather than being into the sort of media trainer-polished glad-handing and small talk other CEO-types seem to think is a key part of the role these days.
That said, for a while there, he was happy that only a few key people were party to his plans. Since acquiring the Lotus company’s still-born ‘F1-car-you-can-own’ T125 project four years ago now, however, David has acquired a UK-based publicist and started accepting interview requests to ‘sell the dream.’
Which is?
First up is to sell you one of the 500kW (675bhp) V8 Cosworth- powered FZed single-seater you can buy now. His second is to interest you – or a friend – in the futuristic ‘full-body & canopy’ bespoke 521 kW (700 bhp) N/A or 745 kW (1000 bhp) turbo-equipped ‘Rodin’ V10-powered FZero model which is still in development but which, when it is ready, he hopes to sell for something in the region of $1.9 million (each!)
If the cars themselves are impressive it is the various test tracks which – again – David has effectively designed and created within the physical and topographical bounds of the property which really got me hooked on the story.
Initially via YouTube (as it turned out) when into my weekly ‘feed’ dropped a profile on the property by London-based Supercar owner and connoisseur Tim Burton (whose Shmee 150 channel now has over 2 million subscribers and which you can watch below).
Earlier this year, Rodin Cars then put several videos up on their own YouTube channel of a (very much working) visit to the site by inaugural W-Series single-seater champion Jamie Chadwick from the UK (which you can watch below).
Both videos give you a good idea of what David has in mind. And Jamie’s in particular walks you through the process a serious buyer will be put through (In terms of starting in a road car then progressing through an F3 and GP2 (F2) single-seater before being ‘handed the keys’ to their own FZed or FZero track day machine.
The complex consists of two main tracks which can be linked for a combined length of 4,788 metres and 19 turns, alongside a 30m radius skid-pad (Track One).
Track Two is an undulating 2,350m 12-turn circuit of dips, blind crests and varying cambers which has just been widened to 10m. Track Three is the fast, flat and deceptively challenging seven-turn 2,438m circuit on what would once have been called the ‘home’ or ‘front’ paddock (which runs alongside Inland Road) complete with a 900m ‘main straight’ along which an FZed has achieved speeds close to 300km/h.
Alongside the widening of the lower part of the track, plus the addition of a new high-speed left-hand corner similar to Suzuka’s famous 130R corner on Track Three, contractors JCL Asphalt, Cirtex Industries, and BG Cooke Construction have recently finished resealing both with a bespoke mix of imported asphalt to make it as smooth and resistant to cracking or base movement as possible.
Something which was necessary after damage sustained to both original tracks a result of the Kaikoura Earthquake of 2016, the epicentre of which was literally just up the road at the Mt Lyford Ski Resort!
As well as development work on the cars, the tracks and adjacent customer experience centre will be used by the Rodin team to fine-tune each car along with detailed performance data to help their new owner/drivers get ‘up-to-speed’ before they ship their new FZed or FZero home..
If this sounds like a bit of you more information about the cars, the man and team behind them can be found on the Rodin website at https://rodin-cars.com/
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