Great to be back behind the wheel

ALITTLE over eight weeks after the country went into our Covid19induced lockdown, it’s good to be back, even if it’s a return to a motoring world radically changed, perhaps forever.

In common with most readers, lockdown for me involved a drastic curtailment of personal motoring activity, and with it a pleasant enough opportunity to rediscover my local neighbourhood on foot.

Truth be known, I probably felt the local and international curtailment of motor sport more keenly than the lack of driving itself.

Even so, there was some substitute racing interest as prominent realworld drivers made their mark in the world of online eMotorsport. Several major championships, including Formula One, got behind online racing using highly demanding eSports sims, and many stars of the real world racing scene turned their hands to the virtual one.

First and foremost for us Kiwis, realworld V8 Supercar ace Scott McLaughlin emerged as the unofficial champion of the semiofficial and very well run virtual Indycar eSeries.

The younger stars tend to have the edge over their old rivals in this online world, a fact that I could certainly relate in my own lockdown dabble with motor racing eSports

I tried my hand at my son’s favourite motorsport game of the moment, DiRT Rally 2.0. He can crack out a handy rally win with relative ease driving any one of several cars in this fiendishly difficult rally sim. I stuck to the most basic car on the most basic course, and eventually managed an almostsatisfying top 10 result.

Thank goodness there is now a semigreen light ahead for some forms of realworld championship motor sport, though much depends on how the Covid19 situation stabilises (or not) overseas.

Returning to the Kiwi motoring scene, and in common with just about every other business aside from supermarkets that you might care to name, the lockdown has been tough on our automotive industry. By way of illustration, new cars sales last month totalled just 1039 vehicles nationally, down from more than 33,000 for the same month a year ago.

Thankfully New Zealand now appears to be on the path to finding our postlockdown new normal, and with that comes the return of Drivesouth as part of your weekend Otago Daily Times.

Reflecting the many challenges facing our automotive industry, Drivesouth’s return is relatively lowkey for now, with less editorial content than before. But we make that return confident that, with strong local support, the industry in our region has a strong and prosperous future.