NZ Classic Car

By the time you open these pages, Christmas will be mere weeks away. As always, the build-up to the festive season can be a stressful time for everyone. Leaving everything to the last minute seems to be the norm — for most of us, anyway — despite our best intentions not to make the same mistake again. For those of you more organised than I am, a simple list makes everything so much more manageable and can help alleviate all those unpleasant things that can come with Christmas if you don’t prepare early: stress, debt, and chaos. I’ll learn one day! You will no doubt have noticed an all-time Kiwi favourite on the front cover of this issue; a trusty old Hilux workhorse still in service and going strong. Used by…

From now on, New Zealand Classic Car will be a bi-monthly magazine and this current issue will be titled January/February 2023. The following issue, March/April, will be on sale 27 February 2023. With the huge cost increases we are currently experiencing in relation to printing, paper, freight, and other business costs, we have reluctantly taken the decision to publish the magazine bi-monthly. If you have subscribed for a year (12 issues), don’t worry, you will still receive those 12 copies. However, from this issue forward, a new 12-month subscription will mean you receive six copies annually. We have reduced our subscription rates to account for this. We are seeing this new bi-monthly magazine as a real opportunity to bring you even more articles. Next issue, you will see an increase in the number…

Early 1940’s Repco provided pivotal contributions to the war effort, helping to maintain motor vehicles at home, while also manufacturing pistons for the Avro Ansen, piston rings and valve sets for legendary V12 Merlin aircraft engine and the bearings for Ford V8 military / trucks. 1948 Repco supplies parts for the very first Australian-made car, the Holden 48-215 which rolled off the production line at the state-of-the-art Fishermans Bend plant near Melbourne. Quality Repco components that underpinned early Holdens included piston gudgeon pins and rings, propeller shafts, starter ring gears, plain main bearings and bushes, brake cables, exhaust gaskets and clutch assemblies just to name a few! 1959 Repco launches their first fully designed and built futuristic sports model car the ‘Repco Record’. With a top speed of 120 mph it was only ever used…

Toyota’s tough and powerful Hilux was a top seller in nearly every one of the 180 markets worldwide that the Japanese company pursued, and it was manufactured in a number of countries outside Japan. It was a market leader in New Zealand through seven model series and only in recent years has rival Ford and its Ranger been able to match its success. Once the Hilux arrived, people needing a utilitarian vehicle no longer had to chose between the robust but basic four-wheel-drive American Jeeps and the British Land Rovers, or the Aussie half-car, half-pickup, two-wheel-drive utes. Japanese manufacturers now offered vehicles with many more car-like creature comforts, handling, and performance, along with Japanese reliability — vehicles that were equally content in either role as workhorse or family vehicle. While other…

When a friend invited me to go for a drive one Sunday, I had no idea what a treat it would be. Our destination was a group of former small factories, perched on the side of a hill in Miramar with the vista of Wellington and its beautiful harbour visible from every window. It was owned by Jamie McCoy and at one stage it was used for his automotive dismantling business focussing on Fords. Over time business got so good that he was able to diversify into property, until he got to the point where he wound down the dismantling business to focus on property. The space used for wrecking cars and storing parts became an area to carry out the exact opposite. Rather than stripping cars to sell the…

Imagine an elegant Italian lady shopping for a new car in 1960 Milan, Italy. Even if a Ferrari or Maserati was beyond her budget, she would have still had the choice of various homegrown stylish Fiats, Alfa Romeos, and of course, Lancias — a marque that had a long and illustrious career in its homeland but which was still largely unknown here. Lancia had been a maker of innovative and well engineered cars since being founded in 1906. In the very beginnings of Formula 1 motor racing it had collaborated with Ferrari to produce race winners. Some of the great drivers of that era had raced Lancias, Fangio among them. He had piloted a Lancia-badged car to one of his world championship titles. To this day, if the internet is to…