Some of the world's rarest and most valuable classic and historic cars will be on display
The first of two weekends of historic motorsport heaven fires into action tomorrow when the inaugural New Zealand Festival of Motor Racing, celebrating Bruce McLaren, gets under way.
The new Hampton Downs Motorsport Park will officially be opened in style with up to 11 cars designed and built by Bruce McLaren on display.
This will be the largest collection of McLarens - M1, M1A-B, M2, M8A, M10B, M12, M16B Indy, M22, M23 F1, and M26 F1 - seen anywhere in the world at one time.
The weekend, however, is not just about the McLarens. More than 400 cars will take part over the two days and a majority of them are rare and valuable examples that will be in New Zealand for the first time.
The value of this fleet would easily run to tens of millions of dollars. Approximately 120 cars arrived in 20 containers from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Dubai and Germany.
The event will also be the world's biggest gathering of F5000 cars with up to 46 expected to make the grid. Drivers of the many and varied classic and historic machines range in age from 20 to 80.
With some of these rare cars fetching up to a million dollars, and possibly more each, it would be easy to be preoccupied by repair bills. But the value of these magnificent race cars comes in their provenance, not their physical attributes. That is, their place of origin and ownership trail.
Duncan Fox has been tracing, building, fixing and manufacturing bits for McLarens and F5000s, to name but two types, for many years.
"When it comes to provenance, the heart and soul of the car is generally the chassis," said Fox.
"When it's replaced in period it's regarded as period and the car moves on. But if replaced these days, people like myself frown on it. You should repair the original chassis, not build a new one, and the major bulkhead components should be kept to retain the soul of the car.
"Otherwise you're almost just creating a replica and the old bits drift apart and you get other cars springing up out of the other chassis and you get two or three claimants to the same chassis number.
"Chassis stamp numbers can even get out of kilter. Provenance is the chain of ownership of the major intact car. You can't create a chain of provenance with just parts. That's where the worth of the car comes from - being able to ask the owner the car's history and his chain of provenance matches your understanding of it."
All the cars on display have an interesting history and none more so than the orange No 66 McLaren M12 driven by Barry Kirk-Burnnand. A number of years ago Fox and Hampton Downs managing director Tony Roberts discovered the car in a restaurant in Tokyo, Japan.
The M12 had been in a glass case for nearly 30 years as a shrine to CanAm driver Hiroshi Kazato, who had died racing in 1974. The car had been sold to the restaurant by Tadashi Sakai, a kingpin in the Japanese Yakuza, who had raced it successfully in the early 1970s. Sakai died in a house fire after the car was brought to New Zealand.
"When Tony and I started, there wasn't a running McLaren in New Zealand. The interest in McLaren started to grow from there and I got involved in the Bruce McLaren Trust in the early days.
"I've been working on the restoration of the M8A car the Trust owns, which is the car Bruce won his last race in before he died, and that's got to probably be worth a million dollars when it's finished. It's the only one left in the world of the two built and even McLaren international don't have one," said Fox.
This rare example of a championship-winning car (Denny Hulme won a CanAm title in 1968 and McLaren clinched his title in 1969) will be on display at the festival, but not running. Fox ran into a few problems getting it ready - chief among them a casting for the gearbox.
One of the reasons a bank robbery is not required to repair damage or engine dramas is that they're not full of high-tech wizardry, and engine parts are still available somewhere in the world.
"The nice thing about repairing the engines is they were based on common passenger car-derived components and there's still a good source of that stuff around.
"I mean, those engines are used in off-shore powerboat racing, hot rods, dragsters, you name it," said Fox.
Gearboxes, on the other hand, are a bit different and a lot harder to come by and cost in excess of $30,000. Fox solved that problem by making certain gearbox components himself and sometimes sells parts around the world.
Even body repairs are no problem, according to Fox. "With race cars, as long as it's got provenance and the repair is done tastefully, it will still be the car. As far as provenance is concerned, body work is regarded as an expendable component," he said. "However, some other bits are quite expensive. I've been in eBay auctions where fuel injectors bits have gone for $5500 to $7000."
