UPCOMING CLUB NIGHTS

Our speaker for this clubnight will be Kevin Porteous (Diane and the late Howard’s son). Kevin now owns an electrical contracting company and is becoming very involved in solar panels for generating electricity.

Come along and listen and watch his presentation which should be very informative.

Wednesday 09 August - Starting 6.30pm

Note the earlier time

This month we will have a mid-winter pot-luck dinner. Come along and enjoy your fellow member’s company whilst enjoying dinner. Bring along some food to add to the pot luck as well as nibbles and beverages.

We will have the clubrooms warm and cosy and the tea and coffee on tap. It was suggested that members might like to have a look at EV, so come along, you might find it parked under the canopy.

Venturers Report - July

Catering for the requirements of vehicles produced in the early days of motoring, and their enthusiasts

Well, wasn’t that 50/50 enjoyable! A good entry (even a good dozen V&V entries amongst the 60 odd cars), good weather and good instructions for a great route through some really glorious countryside, followed by a very pleasant and cosy prizegiving dinner in the evening. So, congratulations and thanks are due to our plotters and organisers.

An event of interest to Venturers (and all Branch members) is our mid-winter Venturers Raid on Sunday 2nd July. We will be leaving from Willow Glen Café far car park, at 934 Gordonton Road on the south side of Gordonton at 11.00am, so get along there earlier to enjoy a good coffee and a chat with fellow members. As it will be mid-winter, you might be more comfortable if you use a more modern vehicle for this run. The distance to the venue is 100kms via mainly country roads with a short stretch of good gravel included. Petrol is available near the beginning of the route and if you would like to car-pool with friends, a suitable place to leave a vehicle might be the car park in front of the church in Gordonton. Our destination visit in the early afternoon is to a large vehicle and general interest collection put together by Knight & Dickey Ltd. in Waiuku, after you have had the chance to enjoy a lunch break in the town. Entry to this collection is $10 per person, so please come prepared. There are several suitable lunch outlets nearby, or bring a packed lunch if the weather is kindly to enjoy down by the nearby waterside.

You will have read that our committee has decided to terminate motoring sections and have all club runs combined, but some events will still appear on the calendar each year marked as suitable for Venturers’ vehicles, of course as well as the competitive class rallies. Suitable is considered to mean not too hilly, not run on main or busy roads and of more manageable speed and distance.

Regards,

Bob: email-hayton.rj@gmail.com or ph: (07) 856 7238, Alan and Terry, Your Venturers co-ordinators.

Library News

Magazine collection boxes have now been repacked to overcome crowding, and relabelling of the boxes is underway. Beaded Wheels and Branch Venture records are to be combined on the back wall, in the first bay.

All ‘Cars by Marque’ sections have now been reorganised to minimise crowding, with space left on the lower shelf for future expansion of each bay. Bays are in the process of being re-labelled with clearer to read black on white magnetic labels. The large number of recently donated books have been sorted, entered into the computer record system and shelved. The Reference Section awaits our attention.

The Library is now trying to catch up on a number of borrowed books which have not been returned on time. Two months is considered a reasonable time, so if you have something on your mind, please get it back to us. Follow-up contact has been made from records of the last two or three years, but after that it is most likely a lost cause, which is a shame for our very comprehensive collection.

This year’s PV rally was an early start for Jon Wenham and myself. Our clocks had been put forward one hour, but when we arrived at club-rooms almost everyone else was there already. So we weren’t early after all! The annual PV rally has been running now for 28 years. The first one was in 1975. Today’s rally was to be the 27th, as the 1976 run was cancelled due to lack of entries.

The first PV rallies were two day affairs – a gymkhana and concourse on Saturday with the run on the Sunday morning followed by a presentation lunch. There were no clubrooms in those days, 1970s, but the event was still centered around Cambridge with the prize giving held in the Cambridge Harriers’ premises in Vogel St. In later years the rally became a Sunday run only, then Saturday only, and now it’s back to Sunday.

Mike Quayle, the third club secretary, a position he held for several years from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, was a keen PV man and used to drive mostly PV MGs. He restored the 1937 MG tourer that Colin Storey bought off Alan Orr some years ago. Mike suggested to the club, back in the early ‘70s that we should hold an annual PV rally, so he organised the first four or five and donated the Quayle trophy to be awarded annually to the overall winner, who accumulated the most points from the gymkhana, concourse and road run.

This year’s rally was great. A full day’s activity - we didn’t get home until 5.30pm!!! Or was it 4.30pm. Daylight savings confusion.

The morning tea at clubrooms seemed more like breakfast due to daylight savings. The scenic run went through Tauwhare over the hill to Tahuroa, through Kiwitahi, Paratu Rd to Richmond Downs to Matai; then to Hinuera for a delicious lunch in the rugby clubrooms. A couple of the picturesque roads around Richmond Downs I don’t remember being over before so that was new countryside.

After lunch we headed towards Okoroire for a while but then swung back and ended up coming through Piarere and across the Waikato River, up the old Hora Hora hill climb, along the back of Karapiro Lake through Maungatautari and into Leamington. Then the fun really started!

There were cars coming and going in all directions around Cowley Ave housing estate. We did it three different ways and each time kept ending up at the same off course check. Or was it on-course? We got an over ruling set of instructions each time and every silent check on both sides of the roads. So we just went back to clubrooms and had a cup of tea and a lie down. We even got caught coming into clubrooms the wrong way – something about turn right and bear right.

After all this we still managed to get second place in our class so you other fellas must have got pretty lost. A great social time back at clubrooms chewing it over with everyone putting their theory in, including the plotter. A very good rally though.

Kathleen Quayle, Mike Quayle’s daughter, presented the overall trophy, the Quayle Plate. Everyone learnt something.

Transport supplied by the ‘Lincoln Zephyr Express’ aka Roy Rowe