Petrol Heads’ Corner - The Hahei Leadfoot Festival

David O’Neill*

We are all suffering from over-work, overconsumption from the holidays and over lockdown (well, that’s my excuse).

Consequently, I haven’t been able to lay my hands on a car to drive. Driving cars and car reviews has, seemingly, been the sole property of mainstream media outlets and not humble barristers writing for the NZBA magazine “At the Bar”.

So, you are going to have to put up with delivery of a missive about a recent event that I attended. I didn’t go in my rally car. It wasn’t a race, but it was something just a little bit special.

Let me give you some background to this “little event.”

Rod Millen is probably one of the best rally drivers New Zealand ever exported. He won just about every conceivable rally in New Zealand back when (some of us) were young, and then went to live in USA to ply his trade on the big stage.

He was well known in New Zealand but became famous in USA because he took on and beat the best of the world at the famous Pikes Peak Hill Climb.

The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is also known as the Race to the Clouds. It’s an annual hill climb to the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado, USA. The track is 19.99 kilometres long. It has over 156 turns and climbs 1.44 vertical kilometres from start to the finish. It used to be gravel and paved but now is fully paved. It has been run since 1916 and is probably the premier hill climb event in the world.

Rod Millen raced for Mazda (Rotary) in USA, winning national titles over there.

When he broke the record up Pikes Peak in the 1990’s, he broke the old record by 40 seconds. His all-wheel drive Toyota Celica developed 2000 pounds of downforce. This may not seem so remarkable, but the car only weighed 2000 pounds and, as he said recently, you could drive it on the ceiling upside down.

This is in Rod Millen’s car barn and this is his brand new Corvette – it has only done 90 miles on the speedo

This is Leigh Hopper in his Subaru Sti which is his Targa car

He has competed in innumerable events all round the world but has effectively retired and owns a 150 acre rural property just outside Hahei on the Coromandel Peninsula.

He bult a magnificent home overlooking Hahei and the Pacific Ocean but decided to make his driveway something different. Word is he fashioned it around all of his favourite corners in the world. It’s only about 1.2 kilometres long but has an awful lot of technical corners, humps and bumps which, if you weren’t being careful, could see you spearing off into the undergrowth or, for that matter, a tree.

Millen first started out running a competition up his driveway to, as I understand it, celebrate his 60th birthday. Apparently, it was such a success for Hahei, the locals asked him to do it again – and he did! It has gone on to become a unique weekend on the New Zealand and international motorsport calendars. There’s a unique mix of classic cars, vintage motorcycles and motorsport legends who all compete for bragging rights about who got up to the top of the drive the quickest.

A number of my friends and colleagues have competed at the Leadfoot Festival (as it has become known) and all of them say the same thing – truly exhilarating.

It has been named the ultimate driveway.

Because of Covid, the 2020 and 2021 Leadfoot Festivals were cancelled.

However it happened, Targa competitors were invited to come along, spend the weekend at Whitianga and have a “sedate” drive up the Leadfoot Festival driveway.

I certainly didn’t have to be asked twice. As far as I was concerned this was an opportunity that I would probably never get again. I couldn’t be bothered getting the race car out of the shed and getting it all prepped up for a 2 or 3 run stint up a driveway, so I took my own car. This meant that I would have to be a little bit circumspect when it came to putting my foot down and ripping around a corner, not to mention the fact that I had brand new tyres and didn’t want to destroy them.

The day was a classic Coromandel Peninsula summer day with not a cloud in the sky. We had a look at Millen’s collection of vehicles in his barn which included the aforementioned Celica, a Porsche Cayenne which had competed in a London to Beijing Rally (or similar – I forget the name), some off-road type vehicles, several of his Mazda rally cars and – to top it all off – a 2020 Corvette which had only done 90 miles.

The start is down by Hahei Road by the entranceway and runs gently along to a narrow bridge with a tight exit going right and then under another bridge with several bumps on the way, enough to get the car not lifting up, but certainly light on the springs and then goes past the barn where all the toys are stored and winds up into the hills around some very tight corners and some steep ascents through the hills and then finally under a bridge to the finish.

To say that it was exhilarating is understating it. Quite apart from the magnificent piece of road that Millen has created, there was also the beautiful bush through which we drove (some of the trees were pretty close to the edge of the road) and then finally popping out at the top with a view out over the Pacific.

This photo is the “I was there” photo. That’s me in my car.

There was an array of cars. There were a couple of competition cars who tried to show the rest of us how the driveway was to be driven and they didn’t do a bad job. We had a Porsche 911 driven by the man who makes all the pies for BP around the country, a Subaru driven by Lee Hopper, who’s probably more famous for smashing Subaru’s up than anything else (but he still drives fast), and then an array of a variety of vehicles from my car through to a BMW X5 which was driven by a friend of mine.

I have to say that the mate in the X5 drove it like he had nicked it and in fact at one stage looked like he might be having a quick visit to the undergrowth but collected it and brought it back onto the track.

I only did a couple of runs because I have found, to my expense, that driving cars quickly over racetrack-type tarmac tends to destroy tyres very, very quickly.

However, I left about lunchtime to travel back to where I came from and the others carried on racing up and down the driveway.

It was a glorious day and I understand finished off with a tour around the Whitianga waterways on a Riviera 65 and a barbeque to finish. Sounds tough…

*David O’Neill is a Hamilton barrister, the NZBA treasurer. He gets to hob knob with racing legends at their homes. He has been the NZBA treasurer in recent years. David works out of Riverbank Chambers in Hamilton.

This is the Ferrari doing its thing – sort of gingerly. At about $600 k you wouldn’t want to stack it into a tree………..