Quote:
Originally Posted by E36ST
I must confess I've never really understood that meeting i.e. why have more or less the same thing two weekends in a row. If they had one meeting at HD and another at say Pukekohe or something then I'd certainly be keen to compete - get to do two great North Island circuits.
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I think that the answer to that is fairly clear. Initially (McLaren Festival 2010), and I think, 2011, it was indeed at Pukekohe as well as HD, but with so many overseas entrants, having to shift everything down the road was a logistical nightmare, probably only helped by the generous support of Calvin Bonney and a couple of others.
At Pukekohe, the facilities were so bad that cars got swamped/waterlogged even though theoretically, they were under cover. Pukekohe's revamp has made life much more difficult as paddock space is severely limited so for those of us needing to spend time between race control/time keeping on the inside of the track and a mix of cars/drivers located all over the place, many likely to be on the outside, communications and assembling dummy grids for example would be a total nightmare. Having to keep opening and closing the gates and no tunnel for track crossing just shows up why HD is a far superior environment for competitors. Only the covered grandstand at Pukekohe (if you are prepared to pay) has an advantage for spectators over HD.
Fast forward to today and the HD garages now that the upper storey has been built, are watertight.
The Festival has always been an HRC initiative and as the HRC Directors owned HD, they didn't then need to pay out to hire Pukekohe again, as the initial Festival lost money.
Nowadays, there are far fewer overseas drivers prepared to ship their cars to NZ so the F5000 grid for weekend 1 this year was down on previous years, but as posted above, they will be in the Formula Libre grid for weekend 2.
The programme does now vary between weekends with some classes only running 1 weekend and even the other classes may have different cars running each weekend.
Our own grid for weekend 1 was 33 cars and weekend two is a touch over 40 at the last count, with 18 of them who didn't run weekend 1.
There is some concern of a lack of support for some classes and Porsche the sponsors) didn't want any BMW grids - understandably.
If you have suggestions for extra classic/historic classes, then by all means state them as I'm sure the Festival directors will be happy to hear!
Now that Tony Quinn rather than HRC owns HD, although the 2017 Festival honours Kenny Smith, it remains to be seen what will change. Some classes are growing whilst others are shrinking.
Adding Pre-65s to weekend 2 for the first time is one very positive addition to the programme and I suspect that the racing will be as good if not better than weekend 1 - even without me running!