Wellington Update - September 2011

Wellington, 1 October 2011

Good evening from the Capital,

In late August we met up with the local chapter of the FPV Tickford club for a game of Ten Pin. We were a little outnumbered, but it could have been a lot worse had some of the guys from Ebbetts not turned up.

We put together 5 teams made up of members from both clubs. Apart from a couple of technical hitches with the equipment it all went pretty well. The scores were many and varied, of course the high ones were due to skill and practice, the others were due to technical issues.

It was a really good day. We had Todd, Craig & Erika from Ebbetts join us; Craig was very good at this game scoring the second highest of the day. The highest score came from a 14 year old. This wee guy bought his own (bowling) balls. I have never seen a curved ball before, yeah I know the balls are all curved, but this wee guy managed to make the ball curve during its run toward the skittles. Anyway, moving on….

Todd had arranged for the Ebbett Team to build a Trophy for us. It will be known as the Ebbett Trophy and will be used for the annual competition between FPV and us. Unfortunately the FPV crew won it this time. We will just have to try harder next year.

We had hoped to have a photo of the trophy this month, but it was not available to enable us to get photos of it prior to the print deadline. Will try for next month.

The two clubs presented prizes to their members for best scores etc. Todd provided the goodies that were passed to our club winners on the day. Young Craig and his daughter Phoebe received some HSV merchandise for their respective scores.

Early September saw our club meet with three others at Manfield. There were 11 from our club.  Our club members are geographically distributed. We picked them up along the way, meeting our  last member at Manfield.

We had a new member travel with us, (his nice new Green E3 Clubby was only a couple of weeks old) and of course Todd (from Ebbetts) was with us. We may have picked up another new member who we met up at Palmerston.

We met up with Early Holden in Levin and moved on to Palmerston as a group.  Palmerston Railway Station car park was the meeting place. It was crowded!

There were two other clubs there; they were the Holden 05 Crew and a Holden club from the Bay. We were expecting a third, but don’t think they arrived in the end.

We moved from Palmy to Manfield. It started out as quite a long ‘convoy’ however at some stage it appears as though it broke up with parts of the group taking different routes.

We estimate that there were 55 cars from the combined clubs that arrived at Manfield. There was racing already underway at the track, some of our group meandered over to watch the racing while others stayed with the cars and caught up with what was happening in the Holden world, their cars and who’s who.

After the endurance event our cars moved on to the track for a few ‘managed circuits’. As usual there were one or two cowboys, (thankfully not from our club) but all in all, those who went on, (some having reviewed their insurance policies just before) enjoyed the experience. There were 42 Cars who were part of this managed tri-circuit. It would have been good if they had stayed close for a while to enable some good photos. However that was not to be.

The weather was excellent and it was good to catch up with so many with similar interests.

Our Calendar is filling up. Good situation to be in I suppose, but it is very changeable as we are receiving numerous invites to other events.  At present we have a couple of activities planned for October, one at Speed Tech with FPV - Tickford and another trip to Taranaki to catch up with another group of enthusiasts.

It would be great to catch-up with our HSV Owners club neighbours again. We did it last year with mixed success. We would like to give it another go. We have travelled up to Waiouru, which is probably one of our longer trips. Some of our team have travelled up to Taupo and back in a day, so I guess anything is possible when you put your mind to it.  Look forward to hearing from you!!!

Well that’s all from the Capital for this month. Keep Smiling, Take Care.