And it’s goodbye from me

By retiring editor Wayne Munro Photos (mostly) Gerald Shacklock

In my happy place – well one of them anyway! At the end of the road on the mail run in the upper Rakaia River valley

T STARTED 22 YEARS AGO WITH AN UNEXPECTED OFFER

from publisher Trevor Woolston to stop merely writing about truck racing….to writing about trucks. Not only writing about them, but editing this new magazine he was planning…. Yep, New Zealand Truck & Driver.

I wasn’t exactly born to it: In what had already been a 34-year career in journalism – first in newspapers, then magazines, then on tv programmes covering motorsport – the closest I’d come to trucks had been the likes of a certain Denny Hulme’s Scanias, Robin Porter’s Eagle Spares Kenworth, the wickedly quick Bedford driven by Avon Hyde, etc. Yep racetrucks all.

I did the PR and promo stuff for the launch of truck racing in NZ, later did the on-track and tv commentating…and covered the racing during its glory years.

But as for working trucks, the road transport industry and all that? Nothing. Zero.

Yeah I’d driven a truck….once! Drove it slowly around the Pukekohe motor racing circuit when we were setting things up for the first Caltex Truck Grand Prix – struggling to get my head around changing gears with this ridiculous, double-clutching gearbox….with 18 gears FFS!!

THE ROADRANGER comes back to haunt me in the early days of NZ Truck & Driver, in 1999. Getting my HT licence is essential – to give me at least some understanding of what it takes to drive a truck.

So a deal is done with DECA Training, for me to join four others aiming to get their truck and trailer licences…in just four days!

I get to do the course free of charge…on the basis I’ll write a first-hand account of the experience. Yep – whether I pass or fail: So….no pressure, right!

Our trainer Graeme McIntosh, poor bugger, somehow (mostly) remains cool, calm and positive as we do our training – all travelling together in DECA’s Ford Louisville tractor unit, with a tanker semi behind.

There is the occasional growled instruction: “Don’t do that – please!.... Come on! Stay left!.... Don’t get off the side here – it’ll pull you right through the fence!” One, barked with urgency: “Power, power! When I say power don’t you dare lift that foot!”

On the very last day before NZ switches to the current graduated licence system, I’m either going to get my full truck and trailer licence….or I’m gonna be publicly shamed – still unable to fathom an 18-speed!

Thankfully, I wrangle the Louisville around the Ngongotaha driving course no probs….and, for the first time all week, manage

To secure publicity for its Ultra Low Crawler Gear I-Shift, Volvo Trucks Australia bravely decides to let journos (me included) drive an FH16 700 up and down a very steep hill....loaded to 203 tonnes all-up!

to reverse the semi-trailer through a 90-degree turn between the road cones in one go….without touching one!

Getting my HT helps set me up for the next 22 years of writing about trucks…and driving them in some amazing situations.

IT’S HOW I get the chance, back in 2006, to jump behind the wheel of an FH16 660 – then the world’s most powerful production truck – at Volvo’s demo track near its Swedish HQ.

I unintentionally give the 660’s I-Shift the opportunity to prove how clever and capable it is – when I get caught out by the severity of the hill test! Leaving the I-Shift in automatic as instructed, I get on the gas pedal for the seriously brief run-up to the hill – but clearly not heavily enough! We lose revs fast and halfway up (right at the steepest pinch)… we come to a halt!

The instructor is very nice about it: It happens to many people, he says kindly. The hill is deceptive, he adds – it is actually a 16% gradient. No problem, he insists: “Noooo! That was good. Because you get the experience.”

The opportunity, that is, for the I-Shift’s Hill Start Aid to recover the situation (which it duly does). Old dumb-arse has given it about as tough a test as it’s ever gonna get!

ONE RICH reward that my HT earns me is the day I spend (in 2012) in the Catalan mountains in Spain – at a driver training and vehicle testing complex with a wide, smooth tarmac racetrack that snakes up and down a steep hillside.…

And a network of rough offroad tracks that wind around the scrubby, rocky hills….

There’s a fleet of 20 different trucks. And, in company with maybe 20 other trucking journos, I’m told to go for it – jump in and get behind the wheel, do a lap of one of three different courses….then drive the next one, and the next…all morning.

It’s the global launch of a new range of Scania offroad trucks…. which will, it says, back up its flagship R 730 to make Scania not only “king of the road…but also king off the road.” The 730 is, by the way, also here and available to drive. Nice.

Best of all – maybe because I’ve come furthest for this launch – I’m invited to stay on for the afternoon session as well. Unsurprisingly, I call that story: “Un dia perfecto” – Spanish for “A perfect day.”

I GET a first-hand feel (literally and actually) of just how fast the future is coming at us, in 2019, at Daimler Truck North America’s Oregon test track.

I swear, the palms of my hands are merely brushing the steering wheel of a Freightliner Cascadia….while its onboard tech autonomously steers us around a sweeping bend!

Cool! Let’s try that again…and again. The Cascadia’s Lane Keep Assist – part of the Detroit Assurance safety package – is a great piece of driver assistance that steers for you when you’re in adaptive cruise control and running in a clearly-marked lane….your hands lightly touching or hovering over the steering wheel.

IT’S A big bucket-list morning in Western Australia’s Pilbara mining region, when (in 2016) I drive a Volvo FH16 700 triple roadtrain for a couple of hours.

Clockwise, from top left: The late Bill Richardson with the 1939 Diamond T 201 which his grandfather owned – and which, he reveals, is what fired up his love of American trucks....me, getting ready for another lesson at the wheel of a DECA training truck.....and me, enjoying one of my biggest thrills – driving a triple roadtrain in the Pilbara

I don’t give a damn that the tractor unit is a strictly-non-macho bright pink (the colours of the remarkable Heather Jones’ Pilbara Heavy Haulage Girls)…nor that we’re running (relatively) light: This is still a combination that stretches out 53.5 metres, after all. And even with the waste bins on the trailers empty, it still tips the scales at around 63 tonnes all-up.

And driving it on a narrowish strip of tarmac through the wilderness landscape still keeps you seriously focused on the job at hand – ‘specially given that the trailers are air-suspended… and the back one has a tendency to flick when it encounters undulations in the road. Happiness is a triple roadtrain.

VOLVO LAUNCHED its Ultra Low Crawler Gear I-Shift globally in 2016 with a great publicity stunt – having an FH16 750 tow 20 trailers loaded with double-stacked shipping containers. They stretched out 300 metres and weighed 750t all-up!

Now, in 2018, Volvo Australia goes on a publicity hunt for its local launch of the ULCG – and, bravely, decides it’s a good idea to allow a bunch of trucking journos to try it out….

Driving an FH16 700 6x4 tractor unit, towing a two-axle dollie and a 10-rows-of-eight transporter, up and down a steep hill….at 203 tonnes all-up! That’s a helluva show of confidence.

So I get to take the combination up the 8.8% gradient at 7km/h, the inter-axle difflock engaged, in the lowest crawler gear (of two), the I-Shift AMT in second gear – and with Engine Control (like a crawler-speed cruise control) engaged. It’s a breeze!

WHEN WE get up to where the road in the upper Rakaia River Valley runs out – at Glenfalloch Station – we’re only 65kms from Methven….but we’re also a world away.

I’m in a Philip Wareing DAF truck and trailer unit – on maybe THE most scenic, most spectacular regular freight run in NZ

It’s a weekly rural mail run up a metal road that runs alongside (and above) the beautiful, braided Rakaia….with the snow-covered Southern Alps slap-bang in your face the whole way out.

When I let out yet another “far out! This is just gorgeous….look at that!” driver Dino Adams says flatly: “Prick of a place to work isn’t it.” Then giggles.

SPECTACULAR TOO – but in a different way ¬– is the visit, in late summer 2010, to Shipwreck Bay, Ahipara (at the southern end of 90 Mile Beach), where I wait with a handful of Mangonui Haulage drivers for the right moment.

The point, that is, when the tide’s gone out far enough that the sand has dried out a bit, and a truck (hopefully) won’t sink into it…

And not too late that the four trucks lined up here can’t each get a couple of loads of weaner cattle from a farm out on Tauroa Point – a place the trucks will access by driving about 5k along the beach. All of this, of course, before the tide comes in again!

It’s an annual job that’s become part of Northland trucking folklore – one of the region’s most challenging livestock pickups.

To do it the drivers negotiate jagged reefs, rocky points, sometimes sloppy sand, and The Gut – a tight rocky inlet that forces the trucks to squeeze between a rock overhang and a rock ledge: “Put it in first gear and let her go,” says Kurt Grace. “The

Clockwise from top left: Enjoying a taste of partially autonomous driving at Freightliner’s test track....a perfect day in the Spanish mountains.... Hamilton operator Robbie Allen’s story of redemption is extraordinary....the upper Rakaia mail run is arguably THE most spectacular trip I get to enjoy..... a meetup with new Volvo Trucks’ global boss Martin Lundstedt....just getting to and from the Daimler Trucks factory in India is one helluva trip!......the nationwide truckies’ protest in 2008 was a standout moment of industry unity....the Tanami Desert is just a “local” run for G&S Transport

trick is not to stop. I think if you stopped here you’d be in shit creek.” We don’t stop.

WE’RE OUT in the Tanami Desert, 400kms northwest of Alice Springs, and the two G&S Transport Kenworth 650 triple roadtrains I’m travelling with still have hundreds of Ks of corrugated dirt road to go before they get to their mine destinations, unload, reload, and head for home.

By the time they get back to Alice, one will have clocked up around 1100k, the other about 1600….in an environment that’s no place for the faint-hearted.

The roads, as G&S co-owner Frank Bilato says, can be “f***ing shocking. Rough? Hundreds of kilometres of rough! Some nights you pull up and you think ‘there can’t be a truck left!’

“Your vision’s going and your teeth are chattering and you walk away from it in the dark and look back at it and think ‘poor thing – it’s just been hammered.’ ”

But this is a place where Frank and his brothers, Robert and Johnny, shine: Their Alice-based, 30-truck, 200-trailer operation specialises in remote area transport.

In fact, this Tanami run is strictly “local,” Frank reckons: “Like, a lot of people get nervous about going out in the country. But we don’t even think it’s remote around here.”

THE BODY-building plant at Chinese bus manufacturer Higer’s factory appears to be ventilated only by open doors and windows – and the smoke and smell hangs thick in the air as hundreds of workers wield welders and gas axes to create bus bodies.

Saying it’s labour-intensive just doesn’t cut it: For instance, as the framework of one coach body sits in a jig, no less than 12 welders are working shoulder to shoulder, piecing it together.

This is a sight, on an eye-opening 2010 visit to Higer and truckmaker JAC, that’s a perfect fit for one of my preconceived ideas: That China simply uses its teeming millions as an unbeatably-cheap source of manual labour to make stuff way cheaper than anyone else in the world.

But…my theory is blown away as soon as we move on to Higer’s engine plant – and find a high-tech, airconditioned, spotlesslyclean and highly-automated production line that looks the equal of anything you’d find in Europe or the US.

It’s a similar story at JAC: It too has a labour-intensive truck factory…..but a highly-automated and robotised car manufacturing plant.

Conclusion: China is an enigma – inexplicable…mysterious.

VISITING DAIMLER Trucks’ factory outside the Indian city of Chennai is one helluva trip. Commuting to and from the plant in the city’s rush-hour is like viewing a slowly-passing kaleidoscope of scenes that are chaotic, crazy, frightening, funny, bewildering, disturbing.

The little group of Kiwis that I’m part of is here (in 2017) to gain some insight into the range of Indian-built FUSOs to be launched in NZ.

In the process we get some Chennai culture shock – experienced vicariously, from inside a comfy coach, with cool air and cold drinks to insulate us from the 35-degree heat, the dangers of the disorderly traffic, the discomfort of being amidst untold tens of thousands of people….the dismay of making your way through an environment polluted with plastic and other rubbish.

The roads are jammed – with cars, motorbikes, pushbikes, trucks, buses, vans, people…even cows. And the roads are, to put it plainly, f****d.

It’s a surreal peek into how life is in a city of seven million…. in a Third-World country of 1.34 billion people. It provokes the question: “WTF! How the hell does this place work?”

And then we arrive at Daimler India Commercial Vehicles. It’s like an oasis of calm – a rubbish-free zone that’s all manicured lawns and trees, open spaces, environmental thoughtfulness (with huge arrays of solar panels) and beautifully-maintained buildings…

Inside there are vast manufacturing halls – clinically clean and state of the art, with a heavy emphasis on automation….robots everywhere.

The whole place looks as though it’s somehow been teleported here, in its entirety, direct from Germany!

IT’S A stinking hot King Country day in 2009 – and the annual Ongarue Ewe Fair provides the perfect backdrop to an interview with Ongarue Transport owners Darryl (DG) Gulbransen and Bryan (Woody) Wood.

In the lull between the rush of getting most of the 13,500 sheep picked up and delivered here for today’s sale…and the next rush, when their buyers will want them carted off to their new homes, DG, Woody and 12 or more of their drivers (plus a bunch from other companies) are parked up at the food and drink kiosk, socialising.

Here Ongarue Transport’s story gets told to lots of laughs, but also respectful attention from the assembled truckies: The colourful Woody (RIP) holds court with stories, including his years as an owner/driver: “It was f***in’ good when I was busy – wasn’t so good in the wintertime when I was seriously in going-under mode, you know!” He laughs uproariously.

When they had the chance to buy the business, DG wasn’t exactly keen, but Woody insisted: “No, no, no – no: The two of us – we’re bloody made for it. Your strengths. My strengths… everything’s right.” He was, says Darryl, “pretty well right.”

ON JULY 4, 2008, I attend a much, much bigger truckies’ gettogether. Yep, it’s the day when the industry nationwide protests the Government hitting it – without warning – with another RUC increase. This on top of spiralling diesel prices, higher interest rates and more.

So the industry, as one, decides to let the Government know just how angry it is. And discovers, happily, that there is widespread public support for truckies.

The unprecedented show of unity results in an estimated 4500 or more trucks joining the protest.

A view of the Auckland protest from a chopper hovering over Spaghetti Junction during the morning rush-hour reveals unprecedented scenes. There are lines of trucks – two and sometimes three wide – stretching as far as we can see down the Southern Motorway.

The Northwestern Motorway is completely empty….except for the city end of it, where a traffic-jam of citybound trucks stretches back a few hundred metres.

On the Northern Motorway a single lane of trucks is backed up in a line that extends up and over the Harbour Bridge.

Above, left to right: Logtruck icon Mike Lambert wryly reckons that “the desk reflects the bloke..” .......Keith Kui was still driving fulltime at 83 – 15 years after he “retired”.....Ongarue Transport owners DG (left) and Woody tell their story in the perfect setting....a truck negotiates The Gut, on Mangonui Haulage’s legendary beach run

And, in downtown Auckland’s canyon-like streets, I count 100 trucks inching along in Queen Street alone….and 100s more already doing circuits of the CBD.

I’VE ALWAYS loved talking to people – trying to find out what makes them tick. And then hoping to catch at least something of that in my stories. I believe that everybody has got a good story to tell….

And so I treasure the nuggets that people pass on – sharing their trucking truths, loves and experiences. Like driver Aule Roko, who I meet in 2011 in Fiji – driving a 700 Series Hino for pioneering startup ZAR Logistics.

He says he loves the truck – and provides some context: His previous drive was an old Nissan….which had a wooden fruit case for a driver’s seat! And the roof leaked so badly “you had to wear the raincoat inside!”

The first time he drove the Hino, he reckons with a giggle, “I thought I was driving the aeroplane!”

EVEN AT the age of 81, when we talk in 2003, Carterton Transport operator Podge Pinfold (RIP), vividly remembers the trucking excitement of his little-boy life – when he’d accompany his Dad, in his solid-tyre, four-cylinder Leyland, on trips across the Maungaraki Ranges, out to the Wairarapa coast.

It could take 14 hours there and back, at maybe 8 miles an hour! Says Podge: “Going out over some of the hills, when she started to get hot, I’d run behind, carrying a big block of wood to put behind the back wheel.” Father and son would wait till the engine cooled down, then “he’d take off again.”

LOG TRANSPORT icon Mike Lambert peers over his glasses and observes a little wryly, during an interview in 2001: ‘They say that the desk reflects the bloke – and in my case that’s probably accurate. You know – just too much happening at once.’ ”

Damn right Mike! He’s sitting in an office cluttered with some of the workings of an $84million operation and memorabilia of 40 years in the business of carting and handling logs.

At the time he and wife Judy have 34 companies, 380 employees, over 100 trucks, 120 trailers, 86 log stackers and loaders, 78 forklifts and eight bulldozers…

ONE STANDOUT day in 1999, I’m privileged to have Bill Richardson (RIP) provide a personalised guided tour of his world-class truck museum – Bill revealing that as a little boy he’d treasured a lapel badge that his grandfather got when he bought a 1939 Diamond T 201 truck for his building business.

The truck, with its low roof and long bullet-nose bonnet, caught his imagination – even though, he confesses: “I can’t remember ever seeing it – he sold it when I was three. But my Mum said I used to ride in it and we had photos of it – and we had all the brochures that he had. You know, it was just something about Diamond Ts.”

That very truck is a now part of his 150-truck collection, and he confirms: “Oh yeah – it has a special place for me. It probably had a lot to do with my father’s and then my preference for American trucks. It’s what fires you up – what gets you lit up: Maybe if it wasn’t for this truck I wouldn’t have a fleet of Louisvilles and Macks,” he laughs.

THE DAY before that museum tour is just as fascinating – interviewing Bill for a profile of the HW Richardson Group.

As I write: “Bill Richardson looks unremarkable, works out of a tidy but unspectacular admin centre next door to his lovely but unpretentious home…and drives an only-slightly-out-of-theordinary Ford V8 pickup truck.

“But, make no mistake, this is an extraordinary man – an intriguing mix of someone driven to do the right thing by a son tragically lost in a car crash, a man with a dry, cutting wit that slices through the bullshit, an honest-to-goodness hard worker pulled-up by the bootstraps in a hand-to-mouth building and transport operation….and a business brain with a love of engaging in the odd corporate skirmish or two.”

Bill tells me that in 1995 – the week before son Harold was killed in a car crash – he had “walked in here….with a grin on his face and said: ‘We’ve made it….we’ve turned over 100 million.’ ”

Four years on, that figure has grown to $160million. But, proud as Bill is of the business’ growth, he reckons there’s another yardstick: “Obviously it’s got to be profitable to be of any use to anyone. But I measure it in its standing in the community and its standing in the eyes of the people who work for us.

“If you’re not a decent employer then I wouldn’t want to be here. Being a GOOD company. I mean, yeah – what else is there?”

IT’S ALWAYS nice talking to people who run the show – I guess because they don’t have to get permission from anyone else to say something: Bosses are often wonderfully, refreshingly open and frank.

The personable Martin Daum, Daimler Truck’s global boss, is the perfect example. At the Australasian launch of the Freightliner Cascadia, he says, straightup, that the Cascadia should have been launched Down Under over a decade ago.

That it wasn’t, he says, was “one big…let’s say failure….an engineering mistake.”

So why has it taken so long to rectify? “It comes down to having

the guts to make the investment,” he says flatly. See what I mean!

MY 2012 interview with Peter Fox, the executive chairman of Australasian transport and logistics giant Linfox, delivers surprising insights into just how much of a family business it still is…. even as it generates $AUS2.5billion in turnover.

Remarkably, the company started in 1956 by Lindsay Fox is not only still 100% family-owned…it also still proudly sticks to his down-to-earth values and homespun philosophy.

Peter Fox says: “The lessons I’ve learnt have predominantly come from my mother and father.”

Such as: “Always try and keep your feet on the ground and don’t forget our humble beginnings.”

I’m amazed when he also reveals an old-school approach to doing business: “I’m computer-illiterate – and I think that’s an advantage for me. I’d much prefer to press the flesh and look someone in the eyes…

“Business is still done between people. And there’s a gut-feel element you still need to have. I think you’ve got to walk through the bowels of a business and get a smell of what’s going on.”

WHEN I interview former Raetihi transport operator Keith Kui it’s 15 years since he sold his half-share in Kui Griffin to Dave Griffin’s sons…and retired, at the age of 68.

But here he is, in 2017, still driving a bulk groundspreader – an amazing 70 years since he first drove a 1936 Chev, with a wooden cab and tray, into the Auckland produce markets… Yep, at the age of 13!

After just three months of retirement he was over it: “Nah, if you’re a workaholic all your bloody life, you can’t just bloody pack up and take it easy – just like that. I caught up with all the things around home that I hadn’t done in 30 years….then I got bored to tears”

So Dave Griffin offered him a part-time job: “Yeah, I’m only doing 50-hour weeks now!” He laughs uproariously at that.

WHEN I get the chance to ask questions of the Volvo Group’s brand-new global boss Martin Lundstedt in 2016, I’m intrigued as to why he’s taken the job….after more than two decades with Scania, ending up as its No. 1.

Why swap sides – ‘specially given Scania owner VW’s ambition to become the world’s leading truckmaker?

In part, he says, it was a heartfelt desire to head a company that is a Swedish icon: “Interestingly enough, there is not one person in Sweden that does not have an opinion on the Volvo Group. You can get everything, from your grandmother’s opinion, to different professional opinions about it. I just love the feeling with Volvo – as a truck lover and as a Swede.” Simple as that.

THE STORY of Hamilton transport operator Robbie Allen’s life is, unquestionably, the most extraordinary story of my time editing NZ Truck & Driver.

On appearances alone, he’s unique – the only trucking company boss I’ve met who (aged 63 when I interview him in 2018) looks more like a gangster rapper than the owner of a Kiwi business running 12 trucks.

There’s the long hair in ringlets, the widespread tatts and a taste in jewellery that runs to a diamond-encrusted Rolex, skull ring, heavy gold chain and greenstone. And then there’s the wild custom cars (the star turn a 2012 Rolls-Royce Ghost V12 twinturbo).

But all of this is just scratching the surface of his life. His unswervingly frank account of his first 30 years is…well, it’s harrowing. A story of horrific abuse and violence visited on him as a child and a teen….

And of him, in turn, growing into a vicious, brutal young man addicted to alcohol and living mostly on the proceeds of a life of crime.

But then, at the age of 30….a transformation: Broke, an alcoholic in rehab, recently divorced and alone, with a 52-conviction record of crime and violence….

He somehow (almost unbelievably) convinced the boss of a major parcel freight company to give him a break – a job as a lowly-paid night worker, sorting freight. He then parlayed that into a role as a contractor – running his own van. Then a couple of vans, then…then a truck…and eventually a fleet of ‘em.

It is quite simply, a story of redemption.

I WILL, of course, miss all of this – the people with great stories to tell, the buzz of exploring some new super-high-tech truck, the trips to cool parts of the country…and the world.

I’ll miss meeting up at truck shows and new truck launches with my old trucking journo mates, like Aussies Bruce Honeywill, Brooksy, Whiting, Thommo, Pete and Timmy – and friendly rivals Dave McCoid at NZ Trucking and Simon Vincent (ex Truck Journal).

And working with good mate/great photographer Gerald Shacklock, friend/associate editor Brian Cowan, other key contributors like Terry Marshall and Dave McLeod, and the Woolston publishing dynasty – Trevor, Sue, Hayden, Olivia and Trudy.

Thanks to them and all of the other good people who’ve made the job of covering this essential, versatile and varied industry a pleasure. Plus, of course, NZ Truck & Driver’s loyal readers: Thanks truckloads.

All that’s left to say is good luck to incoming editor Colin Smith – a really nice bloke and a talented writer (with a great background in motoring and motorsport).

At 74, it’s time to do some other stuff. A house to do up, a wilderness garden to finally help my wife Christine to tame, places to be and to see, at least one mountain to climb, a 50-year-old motorbike to (hopefully) get running again, and an even older guitar to reacquaint myself with. Yeah, and my own tale to tell. But that, as they say, is another story… T&D