Boy racers have plagued Christchurch for decades but despite crackdowns, by-laws and police pressure pushing them out of the city limits, they are still causing havoc. Nathan Morton reports on the anti-social drivers.
The smell of burnt rubber still lingers in the air.
Leigh Tuuta, 41, drives through the rural Canterbury roads of McLeans Island; the asphalt is littered with skid marks and rubber scraps from burned-out tyres.
Many years ago, Tuuta was part of the community responsible for the debris. His boy-racing mates would meet up in the hundreds, the sound of engines revving would fill the air.
“I have seen a farmer out here, he got his farm truck out and he started slamming into cars, which was pretty full on,” Tuuta told the Herald.
“You’ve got five hundred cars parked up on either side of the road and a thousand people, it’s a massive gathering - basically a dance party with no restrictions.”
Boy racing and Christchurch seem to go hand in hand - it’s a deeply embedded culture that somewhat defines the city’s car scene.
It used to see young men and women in loud cars hooning down the city centre before Christchurch City Council stepped in and introduced measures - including the Cruising and Prohibited Times on Roads by-law in 2014.
They moved to the “Four Aves” - Moorhouse, Fitzgerald, Bealey and Hagley. The layout of the streets made it a perfect racing stretch - queue the sound of screeching tyres and revved engines annoying nearby motel owners.
Traffic lights were staged on each of the avenues, while police cracked down on controlling the spaces, and racers moved on to their next spot. Over the years, the local council has also worked to move them on and the groups have slowly moved from one part of the city to another.
Hornby’s industrial spaces. The winding roads at the base of the Port Hills. Sections of road behind Christchurch Airport.
Again, the city council tweaked its rules. So began a complicated waltz of more parking restrictions, alterations to prohibited cruising times and more revisions to the by-laws, while all the time the boy racers tried to step around every rule to keep their pastime alive.
Now, they’re gathering rurally - the latest in a spate of locations around greater Christchurch which has left upset residents and torn-up roads behind.
One north Canterbury-based family is growing familiar with it after years of enduring a distressing invasion of their privacy; boy racers arrive at their property, revving their engines, and doing burnouts on the driveway.
They pick the same spot each time, a section of the drive outside a separate dwelling on their land. An elderly person lives in the house, he suffers health issues and feels traumatised by the noise and chaos.
“It’s an old farmhouse but it’s surrounded by trees, you wouldn’t know somebody lives there,” said a member of the family who oversees the property.
“They don’t just do it at night, they’re doing burnouts at five o’clock in the evening. We’ve had people in our paddock doing burnouts in there, they have no respect for private property.”
Across the road is a local church, the same group of offenders park on the grass verges and leave rubbish scattered on the ground.
Earlier this year, the resident’s husband travelled through a nearby intersection to find an enormous gathering of members of a boy racing community, blocking all passes for metres on end.
The husband trailed their local postman as the pair drove through the meet-up and were verbally abused.
“I messaged the postie afterwards, he felt intimidated - and he’s a big dude, like six foot something,” said the resident.
“This was at 10am, something ridiculous like that.”
Tuuta, who now has three kids, owns a home and works as a self-employed drain layer, explained the reasoning behind the rural push as one which avoided the public.
“There are fewer people but you have lifestyle blocks and animals,” he said.
“You’ll have a farmer going somewhere and he’ll come across a group of guys blocking him.”
In August, animals of a wildlife park bore the brunt. Orana Wildlife Park, a rurally-based zoo in northwest Christchurch, saw its animals traumatised by boy racers doing skids and burnouts outside the premises.
Police told the Herald the driving behaviour had “adversely impacted” some animals, as well as caused significant stress to staff at the park.
Natasha Rodley, Canterbury’s road policing manager, said police worked with the zoo to find ways of [ending] dangerous driving behaviour in the area.
Operation Gumtree was launched to tackle the anti-social road-using behaviour and 16 vehicles were identified as having been involved in the offence.
“The message for participants is clear,” police said.
“Those involved can expect to be held accountable for their actions.”
Such actions of boy racing will depend on the individual, according to Tuuta, many of whom are merely car enthusiasts wanting a space to give their car a drive around.
But in this hobby, groups are formed and friction between them begins to develop.
“So I’ve seen, and this is the bad side, cars with baseball bats taken to them - windows get smashed and people jump on the roofs,” said Tuuta.
“They’ll send a cop car to 100 cars, they drive straight through with their lights flashing and, pretty fast, bottles start being thrown at the cops.”
Tuuta said racers could have 10 cars to their name - impounding one car will only see them go home to get the next. He spoke of times he and his friends would split the cost of a $200 car on an online buy/sell/exchange forum.
“That was our car for the weekend. Fifty dollars each between four of us, we didn’t care what happened to the car.”
He’d been sent letters by police warning his car wouldn’t be insured if it got damaged from illegal driving behaviour - a “scare tactic” which he said doesn’t really ruffle the community’s feathers.
The stereotype of a “young no-hoper who drives around in a crappy car which isn’t legal”, as Tuuta puts it, has been forged by the public’s experience of the rough edges of the community.
He spoke of a recent television interview with a stereotyped boy racer, which he felt put a negative spin on the wider community.
“The person they chose was the worst person for that story,” he said.
“He wanted to fight the police and cause trouble. Most people out there aren’t into that, a lot aren’t even doing burnouts... 90 per cent of them just stand around talking, only a small group throw alcohol bottles and blow tyres.”
Thirteen years ago, a police work group was launched to tackle boy racing in Canterbury.
Rodley is coy on details about the unit - named the Anti-Social Road User Squad - but explained it’s made up of experienced police operators - many of whom have car backgrounds.
“A really passionate crew who want to serve the community,” she said.
Canterbury is one of the only districts with such a force organised. Rodley said the patch has become the go-to for expertise on policing boy racing behaviour in wider New Zealand.
She’s well aware of the criminal elements of the car community and knows of instances when their behaviour led to drivers losing control and hitting other cars, or pedestrians watching on.
“And that has resulted in loss of life, which is shocking,” the road policing manager said.
“There seems to be a bit of, ‘That won’t happen to me, I’m a good driver,” whereas we’ve seen that to not be true.”
Police generally agree there’s been a boy-racing surge into rural regions of late, but the shifts are cyclical - the groups change their movements based on police presence and traffic disruption.
“It’s like playing Whac-A-Mole,” said Canterbury Police rural area commander, Pete Cooper.
“This is an age-old problem that pretty much disappeared during Covid years but we haven’t seen it this bad in a while.”
Cooper said the public’s reporting of their behaviour to police was more often a waste of time, dispatch units will normally arrive too late to enforce against burnouts and skids.
Instead, the public’s “best weapon” against anti-social road use is through photographing the offending vehicles. Cooper said this leads to the typical punishment handed by police to such offenders - impounding their vehicles for a month.
In January, rural Canterbury police impounded a Ferrari for 30 days when it was photographed breaking road rules.
“Someone doing some stupid, should-know-better stuff for their age - just showing off,” Cooper said.
“They weren’t that young, that’s the thing.”
What New Zealand’s second-largest city believes about reducing, and ultimately eliminating, the criminal components of boy racing will depend on who you ask.
Police are sceptical it’s possible to altogether remove.
“It’s a bit like the Road-to-Zero target, with the road toll, isn’t it?” said Detective Sergeant Luke Vaughan, the Anti-Social Road User team leader.
“You might want to have that goal but achieving it is a complex issue to solve.”
Vaughan’s done enough work in the space to know it’s about focusing on the recidivist offenders - the racers who’ve grown familiar with sitting in the back of a squad car.
The unit has made encouraging progress in the last 18 months. Vaughan’s team has identified a number of offenders and seen apprehension rates climb.
He also boasts about the work done to reduce racing activity on the Four Aves.
“They’re better compared to historical headlines in Canterbury - it used to be a major problem but for now, things are at hand.”
Tuuta, who no longer drifts and skids, believes the council has missed a trick - he thinks a flat pad or racetrack would give police and the public some breathing space.
He points out an abandoned go-kart track just south of Kaikōura where racers frequent the private land and certain members even pay themselves to repair potholes and charred bits of track.
“Up there, it’s working and it works brilliantly,” he said.
“[Build that] and come down hard on any guys doing it outside.”
Stephen Wright, Christchurch City Council’s transport operations manager, said the topic of a council-built flat pad comes up “periodically” - but it’s not considered viable at this stage.
“Health and safety restrictions and the organised nature of a facility have meant [it isn’t possible],” he told the Herald.
“A burnout pad was built in the middle of the Ruapuna Speedway track approximately 20 years ago, but this was understood to be seldom utilised due to health and safety restrictions and the organised nature of the facility.”
Wright said the council had no plans to construct or provide access to a facility like the one in Kaikōura.
And while the Ōtautahi streets appear destined to wrestle with the boy-racing community for a while longer, Tuuta is determined to keep the group’s public perception evenly balanced.
He knows there’s no excuse for criminal behaviour - but maintains not everybody is guilty.
“They can be idiots, they’ll leave bottles around and rip up grass on the side of the road,” he told the Herald.
“But there’s a misunderstanding of them. It would be daunting to drive through a big crowd - if I was a homeowner and they pulled up outside my house, I wouldn’t enjoy it. So there are stereotypes and all, but they aren’t true.”
Police, however, say they won’t let up.
“If the public has evidence of [anti-social road usage] occurring, we’re happy to follow up and enforce,” Rodley said.
“The squad is really passionate about this - preventing crashes on the road and serving the community so it’s not an annoyance.”
The woman was shaken by the incident.