DOWN THE PUB

He runs the event “I’m the owner of the Ultimate Rally Group, which is the parent company of the organisation that runs both the Silver Fern Rally and Targa New Zealand, which is the ultimate road race. Targa New Zealand runs in October and is a five-day rally on closed public roads and we also run a three-day event in May. We run up to three Targas each year and the Silver Fern every other year.”

Numbers were a bit low for 2018 “We had just on 40 entries for the Silver Fern last November but we lost a couple of people in the weeks leading up to the rally, mainly due to illness and injury. So the start numbers were down but the event was also unusually wet for that time of the year.”

The weather is usually good “It’s normally a dry time of the year leading into our summer so that’s why it is scheduled in the late November/early December window. That also fits well with the motorsport calendar in the Northern Hemisphere, which is critical in terms of our vision and planning for the event.”

“The 2016 and 2018 events have run under my management and we’ve been playing with the format and modifying it, trying to understand what people want from the event. We want to learn what the obstacles are for people from the UK coming to us. I know it is a long way on a plane.”

He wants to grow UK support “Our ethos is to provide an event that people rave about. We are probably not the best promoters in the world but we provide the best product. I’m conscious that I do not want to be a promoter who overpromises and under-delivers.”

He was at Autosport International “We’re comfortable that we are now at a point where the event is sustainable and in a structure that people enjoy. So now is the time to widen the awareness because I think that is half the problem: there is not enough real awareness of what the product is, so that’s why we were at Autosport. We wanted to talk people through concerns and get them to come to the event.”