This weekend my father and I took his MR-2 up to Ruapuna for the classic car club meet. I was merely the pit crew, it is my father who has the money and the racing license. We went up on Friday afternoon and stayed overnight in Rolleston. The racing was on Saturday, which was overcast with a stiff north-wester. Fortunately the rain held off until after the meet.
My father was placed in the sports car and single seater class rather than his normal small saloons class. This means he went from near the front to near the back. In classic racing you can’t afford to be too precious about your position because the cars are no-where close to being equal, even in the same class (they don’t bother with timing or even recording winners for just this reason). For example, the 1.6 litre MR2 was up againt a Lola T-70 with a five litre V-8. To my father’s credit he didn’t get lapped.
We came back down on Saturday evening. It was a wonderful drive, there was virtually no traffic, just our two vehicles. Fortunately the Blue Whale (my car) handles just as well with four wheels, two barrels of oil and a jack in the back as it does empty. Well almost, the dog-leg bridge over the railway line near Palmerston was a bit hairy, but I was probably taking that too fast even for empty.
The other bit of good news is that the repaired camera works well, even with the excessive voltage. The bad news is that I haven’t uploaded the photos yet.