Eric Thompson: Sights and sounds of yesteryear

Grand Prix and Sports Car Legend Chris Amon with his car, the Amon F101 at the Hampton Downs NZ Festival of Motor Racing. Photo / Janna Dixon

I have been a massive fan of all forms of motorsport over the years and have been privileged to cover the sport both here in New Zealand and in Europe.

As much as I enjoy and appreciate the skill levels of the motor racing in the 2000s, there is something about standing trackside and hearing the behemoths of yesteryear thunder around the newest international circuit in New Zealand.

I spent Sunday at Hampton Downs Motorsport Park for the final day of the New Zealand Festival of Motorsport celebrating Chris Amon.

Putting aside that the festival was in honour of one of our most accomplished Formula One drivers, and a Ferrari works F1 driver to boot, the stuff that was fizzing around was truly outstanding.

It's at these sort of meetings you get to see some of the most spectacular, weird, wonderful, oddball, hugely expensive and the best-named models in the world.

At the top of the list was a Maserati 250F Formula One car from the 1950s with chassis number one - God knows how many millions that must be worth.

Although not racing it was thundering around with Amon at the wheel. What a glorious sound, none better in the world.

To me, and probably to the dismay of many of the aficionados, one of the most spectacular sights was witnessing the best-named car, and probably the largest, giving it to some of the more "race orientated" sorts.

Watching the Mercury Comet Cyclone (magnificent moniker) weave, wobble and slew its way around a race track was truly something to behold - and at the front of the field.

Folks, this thing was so big it had an H in a circle painted on its bonnet and boot for helicopters to land on. And to see things like this mixing it with Minis, BMW 2002s, Mustangs, Vauxhall Vivas and Ford Anglias is bloody marvellous.

What got me also was the noise. In today's modern racing just about everything sounds the same and it takes a whiz engineer to tell the difference between most cars in a class.

Not so at festival racing.

The big V8 engines may all be pretty much the same configuration, give or take the odd difference, but the booming sounds are completely different.

You can watch any one of a number of cars of the same model thunder past and each engine note is different. The sound just reverberates up through your feet into the soul of your motor racing heart.

Even the F5000 cars, racing in the MSC NZ F5000 Tasman Cup Revival Series, are all different looking and sounding.

There's something pleasing about being able to work out who's racing whom and in what by the sound and shape of their car, rather than trying to work it out by a colour scheme or a number obscured by sponsorship stickers.

By no stretch of the imagination am I advocating a return to the perceived "good old days", for they weren't good, just different.

What I think every motorsport fan or racer wants to see is a bit of variety, both visually and aurally, in a race and this class of racing provides it in spades.