STRAIGHT TALK

There’s a handful of drag racers somewhere out there — they might even be reading this — who may recall, despite the haze of their youth and the ravages of time, getting locked into Thunderpark Dragway in Hawke’s Bay very late one particular night. It was sometime during the late 1980s or perhaps early 1990s, after a typical Thunderpark competition meeting. They were good days: big fields of race cars, huge crowds, and no one took things too seriously. The casual racing atmosphere made for a great social scene, and, it has to be said, a very different attitude back then towards drinking and driving served to enliven all such after-match functions considerably. After the end of each race meeting, the organizers would put on a huge barbecue in the pit area for the racers, using a massive hotplate that was so thick that the burners could hardly heat it properly, and onto which — as Euan Mark reminded me just recently — bags and bags of frozen chops and sausages would be emptied, which ended up, on most occasions, marginally cooked on the outside but completely frozen in the middle. However, it was the thought that counted, and none of us minded too much. It was on one of those social evenings that the famous (at the time) ‘lock in’ occurred. The crowd had long since gone home, and, with prizegiving completed and the barbecue plate going cold, almost all of the racers and crews had headed off, leaving just a handful of guys — maybe a dozen — who were still drinking, while ignoring the efforts of the clean-up guys to get them to bugger off as midnight approached. The members of Eastside Street Rods were looking after post-race cleaning-up duties in those days, and they, too, had done their work and were about ready to head off. The Eastside lads had a few beers themselves, then eventually headed off home, leaving behind one of their guys, charged with the responsibility of tipping out the overstayers and locking the track’s exit gate once they were gone. Over the next hour, the Eastside member charged with gatekeeper duties coerced, bullied, and threatened the overstayers, but still the last drunken racers wouldn’t go. Eventually, the gatekeeper got fed up, thought, well, bugger you lot then, and left them to it. He drove out the gate, stopped on the roadside, locked the gate behind him, and went home. He set course to his house in nearby Hastings, drove up his right of way to his suburban backsection home, went inside, and — tired from a long day at the drags — hit the hay. Meanwhile, another hour or two had passed, and eventually the overstayers in the Thunderpark pit area decided to call it a night — actually, it was now early morning — and head off. They got into their tow car and drove off through the pits towards the exit gate. They stopped at the gate, and one of them jumped out of the car to open it. “Shit!” he said. “It’s locked.” After a bit more shouting, they concluded that they’d been left behind, and locked in for the night. “We’re bloody locked in”, “You bastard” and “Well bugger you, then” were some of the comments. Quickly discarding the option of sleeping at the track on a cold night, they got serious about getting out of there. It didn’t take too long before they figured out how to lift the gate off its hinges, get the tow car and trailer and themselves out the gate, and then — considerately — wriggle the big gate back onto its hinges again. The story could have ended there, with lessons learnt and probably soon forgotten — but it didn’t. It didn’t end there because one of the guys knew the Eastside member who’d locked them in and knew where he lived. Another of them had a mate who owned a big tipping-tray dump truck and a front-end loader. It’s amazing what can happen, and how quickly things can happen, when you have contacts. Try getting a truckload of topsoil delivered when you’re in a hurry for it! By the early hours of the morning, it was done. The lads who had been locked inside Thunderpark had now locked the gatekeeper … into his own house. With no reversing beepers in those days to alert the sleeping gatekeeper, the lads had quietly backed down the fenced right of way to the point where the drive opened out into the gatekeeper’s section — and lifted the tipping tray. Out had come about 15 cubic metres of topsoil — around 20 tonnes in weight — piled four metres high. Then, as quietly as they’d arrived, they’d driven off down the drive and out into the night again — probably pissing themselves with laughter all the way back to the truck yard. The gatekeeper awoke the next morning to discover the truckload of dirt, and find that he couldn’t get his car out, and couldn’t get to work. One of the guys who knew about this at the time said to me, “You wouldn’t believe how much dirt there is when it’s dumped in a narrow driveway — it was a shitload!” It took a truck and a Bobcat to clear it all, and, while the gatekeeper initially looked on the bright side, thinking that maybe he could use some of the topsoil, it quickly became apparent that the topsoil was so full of clay and rubbish that it was useless — hence the lads being able to take it all at no cost. I asked my old mate Ron Ward — who knows a few Eastside club stories, because he was in on most of them — how the guy took it, and Ron replied, “I think he took it OK — he probably figured [that] he’d earned it by locking those jokers in the track.” It was all a bit of a laugh, and everyone lived happily ever after as far as we know — unlike another time, when some of the Eastside club guys called in to visit another bloke in their club who’d just got his American car going. It was the bloke’s club car and, apparently, his pride and joy. He’d spent a long time pulling out the engine, having it rebuilt, getting everything painted nicely, and then finally getting it back into the engine bay. The big day to fire it up finally came, and the owner, understandably, was well pleased with himself. Just days after getting it going, he went out on a Saturday, and, as luck would have it, the Eastside lads popped in for a visit. Never short on imagination, and always quick to spot a funny set of circumstances when it presented itself, the lads discovered that the stars really had lined up for them that moment: they learnt that the owner was out for the whole day, that they could get into the garage, that the car was unlocked — and that, yes, the owner had a wellstocked tool chest. The owner got home that night from wherever it was he’d been, and when he awoke to a clear blue sky on Sunday morning, what else would he do but take the car out for a drive? Perfect. No, not so perfect, really. The car with the rebuilt engine wouldn’t start. Nothing. Dead as a dodo. Not even an alternator light when he turned on the ignition. As he hopped out and went around the front of the car, he was already thinking through the likely reasons: a dead battery or perhaps he’d disconnected it the previous week, or probably just a battery lead loose on the battery terminal. As he lifted the engine hood, and looked to the battery, he saw that it was none of those things. The battery wasn’t even there. Nor was the engine … “Best we don’t say too much about that one,” Ron said to me, “and probably best that we don’t name names. He never really did come around to seeing the funny side of it. It’s not like we pinched the engine or anything — we just sat it down in front of his workbench and threw a blanket over it!” “Why did you do it?” I asked. “Well, no reason, really,” Ron chuckled, as he recalled the event from some 20 years earlier. “It just seemed like a really great idea — he’d just put the engine in; we just — took it out.”

IT’S NOT LIKE WE PINCHED THE ENGINE OR ANYTHING