STRAIGHT TALK

The year 1986 (might have been 1987) doesn’t sound like a long time ago to someone of my generation, but it always surprises the shit out of me when I stop and think about just how long ago that was — 35 years ago. Soon enough it’ll be 40 years ago. And, good health permitting, us old pricks will be looking back on the things we did in the ’80s, pausing for a moment, and saying, “Damn, that was half a century ago.” Where the hell has it all gone?

Anyway, over a third of a century ago, one of the hot rod events that us Whanganui car guys liked going to was the New Plymouth Street Drags. New Plymouth Rodders held them every year back then when lots of hot rod clubs would gain a road closure from the local council to close off a section of public road and hold a properly organised event on a Saturday or a Sunday. It was commonplace then, but nowadays I think they’re only held in Whanganui (by my old club Wanganui Road Rodders), and the well-known Port Road Drags in the industrial Wellington area of Seaview. Red tape has intervened during the past few decades and made road closures more difficult, and the logistics of providing decent crowd protection has made it logistically too hard and too expensive for a lot of clubs. That’s a shame, but I really think we had to get more sensible about crowd protection. Look at the single strand of plastic tape in the background of the photo acting as the only line of defence between hundreds of people having a nice day out and an out-of-control mechanical monster. As young blokes, we never gave any real thought about what could go wrong. But plenty could go wrong. In 2007, Troy Critchley, an Australian drag racer living in Texas, drove his drag car in a street parade in a small town called Selmer in Tennessee, not far from Memphis. No different to that photo, the driver did a burnout, but in his case, something did go wrong — the car turned sideways and before Critchley could get it under control and stop it, his machine had careered into the crowd, killing six people and injuring 22 others.

During the 1990s, I was part of the movement to introduce rules under the New Zealand Hot Rod Association to mandate crowd protection in closed-road drags. My old Whanganui club, I’m proud to say, actually pioneered the idea of Armco-railing-connected 44-gallon drums,

filled with water by the local fire brigade. It was a huge step forward in safety from that piece of plastic tape.

Having such a system mandated wasn’t universally loved however, and some clubs elected to stop holding their closed-road drag events because they couldn’t afford, or couldn’t be bothered, setting up crowd protection, which was a shame. I’ve always felt bad that I was part of the fun police back then, but I felt a whole lot less bad when the horrific Troy Critchley disaster unfolded a decade later.

Anyway, back to simpler times and the

New Plymouth Street Drags circa 1986. With a healthy tunnel-rammed 396 big block Chev under the hood, my Vauxhall Viva street-and-strip car had zero traction for most of the eighth-mile on its hard bias-ply road tyres, and so, after a few slippy-slidey-sideways runs down the industrial street, I bolted on some skinny road tyres and entered the burnout competition. I think we got two shots at it. The first one was a beauty; top gear, more revs than a big block should ever produce, and so much smoke that I had to stop a number of times to let the smoke clear a bit so I could see which direction I was pointed in. It was a pretty good effort if I say so myself, and, if I was smart, I would have stuck to just that one skid. But I wasn’t smart. Of course I could do better a second time.

There was a young bloke in the Whanganui hot rod club at the time by the name of Paul Reoven (Paul, if you’re reading this and I’ve misspelt your name, my apologies, mate!) who was a nice young guy, and a few of us used to take him away with us on hot rod runs and stuff to keep him fizzed up until he got his own car going. Paul was at the New Plymouth Street Drags that day, and I told him to jump in when I went out for my second burnout to give him a bit of a thrill. Did that all right … skid number two started out just fine, and young Paul was probably thinking, It

doesn’t get any better than this. I noticed as we were doing loops and doughnuts that the smoke seemed to be getting thinner and thinner. Again, if I was smart, I would’ve clicked that something was wrong, rolled out of the gas, and given up on it. But the brains of a 20-something-year-old suggested that more rpm should fix it. It didn’t take long before the automatic transmission fluid pouring out of the split trans cooler hose hit the headers, ignited like the fourth of July, and set the front of the car on fire.

I didn’t much like it, but it sure scared the hell out of my young passenger. Before I’d even stopped the car, he was getting out. Right then. In a spectacularly fluid motion, he’d flung the door open and almost expertly launched himself sideways out of the car onto the road. I say ‘almost’, because he was in such a panic to get the hell out of there that he forgot to undo his seatbelt, with the result that he managed to get all of his lanky body out of the burning car except for his head. The seatbelt had got caught around his helmet, holding his head and shoulders in the car while the rest of him was mostly out the door. With some more frenzied fumbling, he got the seatbelt unhooked from around his helmet and got himself out of there at about the same time as the New Plymouth club guys arrived with their fire extinguishers and put the blaze out. We all lived happily ever after except for the paint job, which was so roasted at the front that the ‘River Rat’’s show-winning custom paint job was toast, and I despondently painted it a plain red. My injured pride was wounded a little further at prize-giving later that day when I was awarded the Hard Luck Award. Getting that award was bad enough, but the prize was a crate of Lion Brown beer (big bottles) that was covered by a layer of dust a quarter of an inch thick because, clearly, no one in the New Plymouth Rodders Club ever found themselves quite that thirsty. Can’t say I blame them a whole lot for that.

I SHOULD HAVE STUCK TO THAT ONE SKID …