Old Bucket street races

[F5 Dave]

Isn’t Google maps brilliant? I can relive my youthful racing years for example by plotting in a street-race coordinates & street view one can negotiate (admittedly very slowly) via the arrows around the track.

Ohakune square for example, Thames, past the Powderkeg, onto Mangawhero (where I ran over Speedpro), into Tyne (avoid the gravel), over the bridge that has now been removed/widened & the bank where Ray fired his bike right up, over the crest into Rimu, avoid hitting Hot Lava Nightclub where we’d been drinking to all hours night before.

It’s all good & can be relived (very slowly). I’m sure in 5 years the interface will be allowing 40second laps with realistic sounds, lean angle & competitors.


Hmm, Foxton. Main onto Union, Harbour. . .

[Skunk]

Share the kml files then...

[F5 Dave]

The who what?

Just fire in any place into Maps
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps/mpl?ie=UTF8&moduleurl=http:%2F%2Fmaps.google.co.nz%2Fintl%2Fen _nz%2Fhelp%2Fmaps%2Fholidays%2Fmapplet.html&mapclient=google&z=6
ie
5 thames ohakune & hit street view. On Tyne you can even see the shadow of the video vehicle.

[wbks]

You raced your bucket around the street? How'd the cops like that?

[F5 Dave]

Dunno didn't see any at Ohakune, but the volunteer Firefighters were helping run the event. All with road closures of course.
Ohakune,
Foxton,
Fielding,
Upper hutt CIT area,
Palmerston North gardens & some misc subdivision.
Tha's 6 street races I can remember not including the ones on Military bases or larger multi discipline events like Wanganui.

[wbks]

Oh I thought you meant a few mates going for a fang kinda thing, not a proper race. Do they still have them?

[Rick 52]

How long ago was this going on? . I bet it was great I would be up for that

[speedpro]

Ohakune . . . ah yes, I remember. The local cop was one of the organisers of the original meetings. He was keen on push bike racing which they organised street closure for and then they included the bikes. Me and Stan Barnett went up and had a chat with him and the guy who ran the ski lodge we stayed at. Everyone got a nice bag of Ohakune carrots at the first meeting. Rather too much was drunk the night before typically.

The skin on my left knee is still patchy and peeling from that prang. The ambulance guys were nice.

[speedpro]

There was a meeting at Whakatane as well. Guys from blenheim made the trip up in a van with a sidecar tied to the roof over the buckets. Pete Sale tossed his GT50 away and took chunks off his hand keeping in front of the mighty AC50LC. One of the Aucklanders got into a fight outside a pub after he looked at one of the locals wrong. That would have been early '80s sometime. The locals had made a bunch of bikes into buckets for the meeting which went pretty good for first attempts but weren't a match for buckets with 5+ years development.

[speedpro]

The palmy gardens - "oh look at the lovely family having a lovely picnic on this beautiful afternoon/evening" . . . . . . . ."what's that noise" . . . . . . . moments later 20 buckets blast past in a cloud of 2-stroke smoke and then a bit later more buckets roar past with a roar of tortured honda 4-stroke engines. rinse and repeat for a couple of hours.

How they ever got permission to do it I'll never know. No cordons, no fencing, no marshalls, great fun.

[F5 Dave]

Sht yeah those races around the gardens was great fun, did it 2 or 3 times before the complaints halted any more meetings I believe. I remember one race, critical for a close run championship where my 50 clutch bearing disintegrated & the clutch lever started to come into the bar without doing anything much. Had the last race basically banging through the gears trying to fend off Laurie on his fast RG (now in the Hands of Fishie if he ever gets around to fixing it again).

They even held the GP at Foxton & at Ohakune shortly after Ohakea airfarce base ceased to be interested in hosting it. If I'm passing by on the bike with enough time I go do a lap of Foxton, . . ok once. This came about 'cause I'm off to Desert storm this weekend & staying in Ohakune, so may go do a lap in the van. Or the dirtbike. . . nah better not.

I dug out some old videos of Foxton GP etc, bit of humour but not exactly well made, more sort of someone with a video camera on the side of the road turning it on every so often. Although I did learn at the time watching it how ridiculously narrow my tailpiece was at ~ 6" wide so I bought a new one (which still graces the back of the 50 10 years on, albeit with a few repairs of late).

[Sideways Sam]

Damn, wish I was there.......... We've still got a beach house at Foxton, I love that place, would love to ride the bucket there!
It's got to be better than the quad bike.........

[F5 Dave]

Walking is better than a quad bike.:sleep:

Well sadly I raced the Ohakune Junction in the weekend,. . but in the van & 'raced' was driving around 3 times obeying the road rules. Still brough back some mems. Then on the way home did the same thing at Foxton, although there was heap more traffic than I remember.

Good for a laugh though.:first:

[Pickle]

The palmy gardens - "oh look at the lovely family having a lovely picnic on this beautiful afternoon/evening" . . . . . . . ."what's that noise" . . . . . . . moments later 20 buckets blast past in a cloud of 2-stroke smoke and then a bit later more buckets roar past with a roar of tortured honda 4-stroke engines. rinse and repeat for a couple of hours.

How they ever got permission to do it I'll never know. No cordons, no fencing, no marshalls, great fun.


And sidecars banging each other all the way round, or POP bugger there goes another piston (you forgot to turn on the water pump again). Fielding street races were great big road cambers which got you sideways as you crested the centre line & heading side ways towards big shop windows. Wellington waterfront was good fun on the sidecar, couldnt keep it on the track, F5 dave knee down in the wet on slicks (think it was you). Supermarket car park in Palmerston North can't remember the name of it, but had boards filling in the drains, have a good picture of Yak Knight highsiding his G4, that was good fun.

[F5 Dave]

Foodtown carpark in Palmy. That was hilarimouse when it dropped a bit of rain half way through the day. I'd just won my first ever race there, then later it started raining. I fell off on that wooden board quick as a flash & got back up, later in the race I was wondering why I was behind Neil & Donald, forgotten I'd fallen off. Raced there quite a few times.

[Str8 Jacket]

What yera/s did you race in Ohakune Dave? I lived on Mangawhero Tce once upon a time.....

[F5 Dave]

Crumbs that's stretching the grey matter. Maybe mid 90s to say 2000/01.

[Str8 Jacket]

Crumbs that's stretching the grey matter. Maybe mid 90s to say 2000/01.

Wait till the lil one comes along.... ;)

We had long moved to the big city of Rotovegas by then. I didnt think that I remembered lil motorcycles coming past!

[Pickle]

Old race track that was even worse than the supermarket in the rain was the old Longburn Freezing works carpark - you couldnt even walk around the track in the rain let alone try & ride a bike.

[speedpro]

I never rode there but I heard that it was even worse than a kart track after a long hot summer and the first little shower, and who hasn't crashed on a kart track under those circumstances?? That's right, noone.

[Skunk]

I heard that it was even worse than a kart track after a long hot summer and the first little shower, and who hasn't crashed on a kart track under those circumstances?? That's right, noone.
Yep, me. Last meeting everyone but me crashed.

[F5 Dave]

Yeah I kinda didn't think of those carkpark races as street races. Yeah Longburn was pretty slimy, seemed better when we first started but when we returned it was totally screwed & garbage.

Around the base in Linton was quite fun. Ohakea GP was the bomb though for street sections through the base proper mixed in with some Tarmac. Big gutter exiting out onto the straight though.

[racer40]

tepuke also had a carpark street event behind the main street, & also the carpark at the frezzing works just north of hamilton, but my best memories are the whakatane streets where i flipped my sidecar 4 times in 3 meetings, they even had catch fencing to stop you going in the stream