John McM

Thanks Peter for taxiing rims and tyres plus me home.

It must be my Scottish genes that have me hoarding old stuff. There is no way any of the old tyres are road legal. They lasted well - 12 track days and 5,500 km in total.

No doubt I'll end up throwing them out at some stage. Right now they can go under the house.

Next job is buy some black plastidip so I can wear the Frankenstein D90s without wincing.

Macca

John. This is the good thing about having limited space. I biff stuff like that. Can I store my spare Targa tyres under your house please? ;-)

O2GO

Yes I'd be interested. Pikes Point is only about a mile from me and the people there always seem to be nice and friendly. If we sweet talk them would they not do it?

John McM

If they are covered, then sure.

John McM

We could try. Waitakere say they charge $10 to weigh vehicles but they just let me go around with two weighs for free. I'll check Pikes points website.

O2GO

Lola is there too now.

John McM

Spending the night with a RS and Turbo 3.6. Springs arrive tomorrow. Herman should turn up on Saturday with a new stance.

CS Mende

As an outside perspective I find a lot of the architecture of both road rules and construction to make driving more dangerous than it should be, and then ***-backwards approaches are used to try to fix them. Here are my top examples:

1) The asinine rule of yielding to right-turning traffic that crosses the flow of traffic when you are turning left while not crossing any flows. Yes, thankfully repealed while I was gone - about time.

2) Danger!! This is a crash-prone zone and plastered with all sorts of extra signs. Just lower the speed limit like anywhere else that needs it.

3) Posting a 100kph sign within 50metres of a stop sign, give-way or where then road suddenly turns into a beach -- any of which are usually around a blind turn. Heck, the 3kms to my place has a 100kph sign just before the Great South Road intersection. I find locals don't interpret that just seeing a sign for a speed means you can do it at that moment - but most places I've lived you do expect a reasonable length thereafter to be safe at that speed. Why waste money on the sign?

Below is my dedicated section to passing zones.

4) Creating a passing zone AND raising the speed limit from 50/70 to 100 at the same time. Hello, legalized drag racing. Good and fun for those capable of it, but crazy for the majority of drivers. Throw in a right-turn lane at the beginning of the passing zone while the road curves left for fun & extra style points.

5) Ending a passing zone over the crest of a hill, around a blind turn or better yet - a combination of both. Entirely misses the point of creating a safe passing zone. Fire that engineer and send him/her back to Civil Engineering 101.

6) And here's my favorite piece of all - and most who grew up driving in NZ probably don't even notice it's an issue. We all think our normal is normal, don't we? Passing is always the responsibility/job of the one doing the passing. Cycle paths, mountain bike trails, skiing, motocross, track, residential, motorways... But not in NZ passing zones. Passing zone starts, and Grandma and everyone else is guided to the left by roading stripes. Then the end of the zone comes and suddenly it's Grandma being passed who is expected to merge into the flow. The passing traffic is rule-wise allowed to zip up next to traffic being passed as the lane expires forcing them into the shoulder, stab the brakes or drag race it. Add this into 5 & 6 and you've got a really lousy set of rules. Just flip the merge signs & restripe the end of the road, please.

We had a property on SH2 at Mangatawhiri
where we watched 5 & 6 come together resulting in a helicopter extraction almost every weekend. The number of memorials popping up on the verge got a bit old. Drivers were endlessly scolded about how dangerous it was until money was finally stumped up to fix the issue with the properly built bypass.

I didn't mean to turn this into a novel, but do have a better written letter to the editor ready for the Herald and whoever will listen. Each country has it's road quirks - these I find to be NZ's.

I feel the same about the speed issue as mentioned above. Build roads a bit smarter. Being narrow & chipseal is far from the biggest issue.

Living in both Germany & the US where high speed, easy flow roads are recognized as being key to economic advantage (despite failures in several large metros), I fail to understand how the argument of too hard, too expensive keeps us from improving the main roads. Forget about how much more we'd enjoy getting to work or a meeting faster - think about how much it would grease the skids of commerce to connect Auckland & Wellington with a safe, smooth, smartly built highway. I still remember the disbelief I felt 10 years ago when the motorway ended at the bottom of the Bombays.

The B roads will always exist for us. Anyone remember the song Red Barchetta? Hell, it involves a red Ferrari, one-lane bridge and an aptly-named Motor Law. Maybe Neil Peart was thinking of NZ.

CS Mende

Need to get an RSG-only section of the lot created!

John McM

NZ passing lanes are one of the joys of having a Turbo 3.6. Pull up behind granny doing 95km/hr in third. Anticipate the passing lane start and pull out. You will hit 160km/hr before she can even think of getting to 105km/hr. What the heck, take Granny plus the four cars backed up behind the milk tanker.

John McM

Certainly helping keep the mechanics in work. Starting to lose track of who's working on our cars. I see that as the biggest danger longer term. It's great they are so accessible and generally reasonably priced, plus are keeping a core of air cooled experience in play, but we wouldn't want it to go downhill. Hate to think how much I've spent there since March last year. Unfortunately it's not the only cost right now. I have a gutted bathroom needing $20k put into it. At least cars leak where you can see it. Showers do it in a far less obvious way.

Macca

Chris. Very well constructed points. Points 5 & 6 ring a particular bell for me. In all my years of driving (I think Ive now driven fairly extensively in 19 countries) I have never (even on my old Enfield in India) neared the certainty of death as closely as I have on three separate occasions on NZ roads. All three involved over taking lanes or simply overtaking on the North Islands antiquated single lane "highway". I will confess one of those three was entirely my misjudging the speed of an oncoming motorist during an over taking manovour (or did the guy I was overtaking speed up? or was teh car approaching be doubling the speed limit?? ha ha). The other were the results of someone else making similar mistakes. I cant help but absolutely agree with you that a multilane national highway that stretches the country is long over due and with a little driver education mixed in for good measure would halve the annual fatality statistics.....doubt it will happen in my lifetime unfortunately...

Macca

Cant say the thought hasn't crossed my mind especially recently. Im watching turnaround closely this time. I prefer not to use "muscle" to get things done but have started to apply subtle leverage of recent. Its easy to get forgotten when you arent hanging around the doorstep....

CS Mende

Heard a racket at the mailbox & went outside to find this. Again - open invite to anyone who wants to spectate from my place. Close enough (400m) that we could walk to the actual start on the Ramarama side. I'm going to be there with beer & BBQ all day in either case. Yet another pre-SITT meeting?

If anyone running on the day has a need to stage anything at my place I do have spare garage & driveway space...

John McM

They try their best, and people like me don't help. I told them I was coming in at some stage and rocked up today. In the 30 minutes I was there they moved your car, a gt3, a gt2, the RS etc. The 959 has been there a ridiculous amount of time. Other cars seem to stay awhile as well. The 993 and 993 Turbo have been there at least one week. A good problem to have no doubt. I'm surprised no none has backed themselves to set up another shop. My current dream is my own lift. Get one of those and your scope for work increases greatly.