It’s not easy hosting a motorsport event in winter; it’s always a dice roll as to how the weather will pan out and what its effects might be. This year’s Chrome Horsepower Festival was no exception — with the Meremere Dragway portion of the event being rained off because the unrelenting weather had turned the place into a bog.
Aside from this bad news and the tricky weather, the team at Premier Events did their best to shuffle a few things around and make up for what was lost at Meremere. The weird thing is, most of the weather for the days where the event actually happened was pretty bloody good, so it left everyone not affected by this change to enjoy the event as usual.
Over the years, regardless of its winter timing, the Chrome Horsepower Festival has cemented itself as one of New Zealand’s largest car enthusiast events. Running for three days at Hampton Downs Motorsport Park, it becomes a hub for petrolheads of all kinds; thanks to the well-rounded mix of cruising, racing, drifting, and burnout activity available.
It’s an event that rewards those with a love for all kinds of cars. Whether you’re into V8s, rotors, four-cylinders, or six-bangers, Chrome has something to keep you entertained. Even the spectator carpark was scattered with interesting cars, with a blown ’72 HQ Monaro, and a seriously mint Ford F-1 pickup among the wide range of cars braving the muddy carpark outside.
But we weren’t there to look at the car park, so we made our way over the track bridge to the centre of the track. Once we walked past the wide variety of interesting food trucks, we started to get a better view of the vastness of this event. Everywhere you looked, there were cars driving around the track, drifting on the skidpan, or moving around the car park. Also a common sight was cars lifted on jacks, with grimacing owners and helpful mates wrenching away at various issues.
The V8s were there in full force, and if we had to guess, we’d probably say they made up a good 30 per cent of the event; which is a great result. Especially at a time when the more fuel-efficient Japanese cars are at their height in popularity. There were a heap of really beautiful V8 builds present during the show — too many to mention all of them — ranging from ’60s classics, right up to the modern day. Here are a handful of interesting V8 weapons that we noticed on the day:
This is a teaser of the full story from Chrome Horsepower Festival, which is about three times as long as this. For the entire story, including multiple other great writeups, you can grab the full magazine here, or at your local supermarket.
