DENNIS MARWOOD
Alas, I wasn’t resident in New Zealand during the larger part of Dennis Marwood’s motorsport career, really only catching up with his on-track activities when he entered the world of classic car racing in his Alfa Romeo GTV. However, my first personal contact with Dennis came in the form of a fully restored 1975 Datsun – a modified version of the cooking 120Y that I road-tested and wrote about in 1997.
By the mid ‘70s, Dennis was operating Performance Developments based in Takanini, Auckland. Having been offered a Datsun agency, Dennis was moving into car sales and as he’d raced Datsuns in the Group 3 Castrol GTX production series, his company was the perfect choice to carry out performance mods on the standard 120Y. Along with Jimmy Stone and Grant Walker, Dennis came up with the 120Y SSS.
Dennis had decided to run Performance Developments in conjunction with car dealing and thus the Marwood Datsun SSS Centre was born. Through 1973-1977 he raced Datsuns in the smaller capacity Group 3 Castrol GTX production racing series. With Jimmy Stone – of later Aussie Supercar fame – working at Performance Developments along with Grant Walker, they developed the 120Y SSS, building around 120 examples. It was one of these cars that I put through its paces.
During the ‘90s I also visited Dennis’ company Autoquip, which he ran with his old mate Ivan Segedin (well-known as the driver of the Fleetwood Mustang), to buy performance parts and to write up his company for a local magazine.
By the time I found myself chatting to Dennis again it was 2015, and as well as helping sort out a major feature on him (to be written by Gerard Richards, whose reminiscences of Pukekohe can be read elsewhere in this magazine), I was also involved in arranging a story on the 1969 Chevrolet Camaro originally brought into New Zealand in 1970 and subsequently raced by Dennis for several seasons – the car having been fully restored by Tony Antonievich.
In later years, with Dennis having retired from business life, he operated the Nikau Haven B&B in Warkworth where, on his invite, I was welcome to stay at any time. However, I never seemed to have the time to spare and so missed out on what could have been an enjoyable few days listening to him spinning up a whole posse of interesting motorsport yarns – a missed opportunity.
Sadly, on December 11 last year, Dennis passed away peacefully at the age of 90. Later in this magazine you can read much more about Dennis through the words of Allan Dick.