From a coal mine to Meremere: how drag racing started in New Zealand

Every sport has an origin story that people half remember. New Zealand drag racing's is better than most, because it starts somewhere nobody would choose to race: the floor of an opencast coal mine.

Kōpuku, 1966

According to the history published by the New Zealand Drag Racing Association, the New Zealand Hot Rod Association sanctioned what is believed to have been the first drag meeting in the country at an open cut coal mine at Kōpuku, south of Auckland, some time in 1966. The quickest run of the day is recorded as a 17-second pass by a 1937 V8 coupé with a supercharged flathead engine.

Two details in that sentence deserve a pause.

The first is "believed to have been". The association does not claim certainty, and neither do we. Informal acceleration contests on roads and paddocks almost certainly happened before 1966; what the record gives us is the first sanctioned meeting that anyone wrote down.

The second is the distance. That 17-second pass was timed over a quarter mile, 1,320 feet or a little over 400 metres, which is still the classic length for drag racing. A quarter mile run from a standing start is the whole sport in one sentence: two vehicles, a straight line, a timer at each end.

A note on jargon before we go further. A pass is a single run down the strip. The elapsed time or ET is how long that run took from the start line to the finish. Supercharged means the engine has a mechanical air pump, a blower, forcing more air into it than it could draw on its own. Expect those words a lot on this site.

A mine floor is not a racetrack

The association's history notes that the early Kōpuku meetings ran on clay and that racing continued there for about three more years. The New Zealand Nationals, now the most important meeting on the calendar, were first held in the 1966/67 season on that same mine floor.

Then the mine did what mines do. The history records that the site was "eaten up" by the expanding workings, and for the 1969/70 season the Nationals moved to a three-sixteenths of a mile course at Matahina. The sport had lost its first home to the very industry that had lent it.

The borrowed years

What followed was a long stretch of making do. The NZDRA lists the venues of that period: Ardmore aerodrome, Baypark, the Dunedin Oval, Napier airport, the military airstrip at Waiouru and a number of closed roads. Some courses were a quarter mile; others were three-sixteenths, because that was all the tarmac available.

The most famous of the closed-road venues was Kerrs Road in Wiri, south of Auckland, used for two seasons. The association records that the country's first ten-second pass was made there, in a fuel-burning altered (a short, light, heavily modified car running on nitro rather than petrol). From 17 seconds at Kōpuku to ten seconds on an industrial road in a handful of years is a big jump, and it tells you how quickly the machinery was developing.

Racing on borrowed ground has obvious limits. You race when the owner says you can. You set up and pull down timing gear every time. Spectator fencing, run-off at the far end and a surface that is the same from one meeting to the next are all things you improvise. Anyone who has been to an airstrip meeting since will recognise the atmosphere: plenty of goodwill, cones, trestle tables and a long walk.

Meremere, 1973

The change came in 1973 with the opening of Champion Dragway at Meremere, recorded by the NZDRA as New Zealand's first purpose-built dragstrip. The Nationals had a permanent home, and the history says racing "took off" from that point.

A purpose-built strip changes the sport in practical ways that are easy to overlook:

• The surface is consistent. Teams can tune a vehicle for a known track instead of guessing at a new road each time.
• Timing gear can stay put. Permanent beams and a fixed start system make results comparable from one meeting to the next.
• Spectators get proper viewing. Grandstands and fencing make it possible to sell tickets to more than a few hundred people.
• There is somewhere to stop. A shutdown area beyond the finish line, with room to slow from high speed, is as important as the strip itself.

The Meremere strip has carried several sponsor names since. It now trades as NAPA Auto Parts Dragway, the name most current racers know it by. Strip names change; the patch of ground in Waikato has been the centre of the sport for half a century.

The South Island and the second strip

The history also notes that in the South Island most racing was held on the front straight of Ruapuna Park in Christchurch, with some meetings at Teretonga near Invercargill. That pattern of sharing circuits with other motor sport continued for a long time.

New Zealand's second purpose-built strip, Thunderpark near Hastings, opened in 1976. It is recorded as struggling to draw enough spectators and closing in 1997. Until then the Nationals moved between Meremere and Thunderpark. We will come back to Thunderpark in a piece of its own.

1993: a new association

For its first quarter century, New Zealand drag racing ran under the hot rod association. In April 1993, the NZDRA history records, the drag racers split from the NZHRA and formed the New Zealand Drag Racing Association, which sanctions drag racing in New Zealand today. The New Zealand Hot Rod Association continues as the national body for hot rodding.

A sanctioning body sets the rules, issues competition licences, approves tracks and keeps national records. When you read that a time was "recorded" or a meeting was "sanctioned", it is that body's paperwork that makes it official.

What the record leaves out

The association's history is short and written from the inside. It gives dates and places, not the arguments, the near misses or the people who ran the gate. Some of that detail sits in newspaper coverage from the period, and the National Library's Papers Past collection is the obvious place to look, although its coverage of later decades is patchy.

If you were there and know of a published account, a club newsletter or a programme that adds to this picture, that is exactly the kind of source we want to read. What we will not do is fill the gaps with guesses. Where the record says "believed to be", so do we.

The short timeline

• 1966: first sanctioned meeting believed to have been held, at Kōpuku; quickest pass recorded as 17 seconds.
• 1966/67: first New Zealand Nationals, at Kōpuku.
• 1969/70: Nationals at Matahina over three-sixteenths of a mile.
• Early 1970s: aerodromes, an army airstrip and closed roads, including Kerrs Road in Wiri.
• 1973: Champion Dragway opens at Meremere.
• 1976: Thunderpark opens near Hastings; it closes in 1997.
• April 1993: the NZDRA is formed.

Fifty-odd years from a mine floor to a permanent strip and a national association is not a long time. Plenty of the people who raced at those early meetings would still remember the clay.