The Graeme Wingate
Story One of the legends of New Zealand powerboat racing, Graeme Wingate epitomised the inventiveness and tenacity of the DIY approach.
Powerboat racer Graeme Wingate is one of the late Rex Henry’s most ardent supporters. During the late 1970s Wingate successfully campaigned Chindit, one of Henry’s favourite designs.
In the early 1960s licensing and import restrictions severely curtailed the supply of marine engines and powerboaters were forced to improvise. The son of a Te Kauwhata dairy farmer, Wingate was midway through his electrician’s apprenticeship when he decided he wanted a boat.
Initially he had thought of installing a lawnmover engine into a canoe he’d built which, given the difficulties powerboaters had buying marine engines then, wasn’t as silly as it sounds. Fortunately his future father-in-law, woodwork teacher Bert Lapish, convinced him to build a 4.2m plywood runabout featured in a Popular Mechanics magazine.
“We powered it with a secondhand Ford 10, which was the norm back then. There was no clutch or gearbox, so you had to point it where you wanted to go before you started the engine,” recalls Wingate. “We had lots of fun in that boat.”
Apprenticeship complete, married and living in Auckland,
Wingate’s passion for powerboat racing was stimulated by watching the Epiglass 40 and Atlantic 100 races on Auckland harbour, which in the late 1960s were high-profile events. These two separate events were run on the same day, and as well as prizes for outright speed, there were handicap, economy and fuel-efficiency prizes.
Wanting to compete, he sold his runabout and built one of Jim Young’s Hi Fi 4.4m runabouts, this time powered by a 35hp Mercury outboard. Wingate had managed to get the Mercury through a friend of a friend – “the usual story in those days.”
Wingate entered his first powerboat race in 1968, the Epiglass 40 and Henry was the principal race officer. Interestingly, the results of that year’s race were worked out on an IBM computer, the first time a computer was used in powerboat racing in New Zealand. At the time Henry stated the computer had saved some 270 hours of manual calculations and enabled results to be issued only the day after racing, an unheard of innovation.
While the Atlantic 100/Epiglass 40 handicap events proved popular, there was another group of racers who wanted races based solely on speed. Consequently a circuit developed around the country with offshore races held in Tauranga, New Plymouth, Wellington and Picton.
Wanting to participate in these events, Wingate asked Henry to design a suitable 4.8m, deep V race boat, which when built became Coranto. Powered by a 65hp Evinrude outboard, Coranto was raced in the E Class which could have up to 20 entrants, and Wingate would often finish in the top three.
At the time he had a young family and was working as an electrician for Crown Lynn Potteries, so powerboat racing required a major financial commitment and many hours of driving.
For example, in a Wellington race which he’d won, Wingate’s outboard blew up at the finish line, so he towed her back to Auckland, had the engine re-built during the week, then towed Coranto back to Wellington to catch the ferry for a Picton race the following weekend. And there were no flash four-wheel drives in those days; Wingate’s tow car was the family sedan, an 1800cc Austin.
After four years in E Class Wingate wanted to move up to B Class, which had a 235hp limit. He again commissioned Henry with a brief for an unbreakable boat. This became Chindit, which Henry has always said was his favorite race boat. Wingate built Chindit from kauri frames, Oregon stringers and laminated two-skin coachwood plywood, and to this day her hull has never broken.
When launched Chindit was powered by a Johnson 235hp outboard which, apart from some minor port polishing Wingate left stock. Engine mounts were another issue, and these needed beefing up to handle the stresses and strains of racing.
“Back then our races were true offshore races and we gave
everything a real hammering, whereas today the races are held in much more sheltered waters,” he says. According to him, one of the keys to successful powerboat racing is a boat’s balance, especially when jumping offshore waves.
“It was one of the really good attributes of Chindit. We always felt we had a very well-balanced boat.”
Chindit had twin fuel tanks, one front, one rear, so the balance could be fine tuned underway through fuel usage. Twin trim tabs and trimming the engine were the other tools available to the driver and navigator to ensure the boat left the water and returned safely at speeds up to 65 knots, or 75mph.
Chindit proved a very successful boat, not least because of her reliability. Between 1978 and 1983 Wingate won class B series three times, including in 1982 winning the offshore series outright against all the other classes, the smallest boat ever to do so.
Then in 1983 Wingate again decided to try something different and asked Alan Pepper to design a trimaran race boat. The triplehulled race boat had very low wetted surface area and was suited to a single engine installation, whereas catamaran race boats were more suited to twin engines.
Built in timber the trimaran was fitted with a 300hp V8 Evinrude outboard, the first production V8 outboard. Named Wingate’s Bright Spot after his retail appliance store in New Lynn, the trimaran proved a real handful to drive and very unforgiving of driver error.
“That boat had a mind of its own, it thought it was a submarine at times,” says Wingate.
While he had some success with the boat it wasn’t a happy relationship and ended badly. In 1993 in a race out of Thames, he barrel-rolled the boat at 60 knots. He suffered a dislocated shoulder and, due to the poor visibility at the time, it was 15 minutes before he was picked up, by which time he was suffering mild hypothermia. “My wife wasn’t very happy and I gave it [racing] away after this.”
Wingate’s Bright Spot sat in the garage for as couple of years, until Wingate’s son Peter expressed a desire to race it. Wingate agreed provided it was fitted with a smaller engine. Even so the boat proved more than a handful and was later sold.
Instead of racing, Wingate became active in powerboat racing administration, advocacy and safety. He’s been President of the New Zealand Powerboat Federation; President of the New Zealand Offshore Powerboat Association; a member of the Union Internationale Motonautique (UIM) Offshore Commission for 15 years; and a regular UIM Commissioner.
For those who don’t know, the UIM is the international governing body of powerboat racing. As a UIM Commissioner, Wingate has overseen races not only in New Zealand and Australia but also in Argentina, Dubai, Italy, Ireland, Sweden and Monaco. Sadly, he was a UIM Commissioner during the 1990 Monaco race
in which Stefano Casiraghi, then husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco, was killed.
That high-profile accident ushered in new safety regulations including enclosed cockpits, making the sport considerably safer. While fatal accidents had been fairly common up until 1990, says Wingate, enclosed cockpits introduced a dramatic improvement in crew safety.
The spritely 75 year old and now retired Wingate still enjoys motorcycling, his only concession to age being trading in his Triumph Rocket III 2,300cc for a lighter Speedmaster 900cc. “The Rocket III was lovely, but just too heavy to move around.”
Wingate recalls his years racing Chindit with great affection, and feels good that the boat is back in the family. That happened in 2010, when Peter Wingate saw Chindit come up for sale. He bought her and spent two years restoring her to her original 1980 racing condition. The younger Wingate plans to race Chindit in the Offshore Classic Class, which is limited to 80mph top speed.
And as a surprise last year, Wingate towed the restored Chindit out to the Papakura rest home where Henry was living. The frail Henry was delighted to see the boat he always said was his best ever design, and spent over an hour examining Chindit. He died only a few months later.
Graeme Wingate, Rex Henry and Chindit – another chapter in the rich history of New Zealand powerboat racing. B