Thunderpark, 1976 to 1997: the Hawke's Bay strip that came and went

Most New Zealand racers know Meremere. Fewer remember that for two decades the country had a second purpose-built drag strip, in Hawke's Bay, and that the Nationals moved between the two. Its name was Thunderpark. It opened in 1976 and closed in 1997, and the story of its life is a short lesson in what it takes to keep a strip running.

What follows is drawn from published sources, mainly the New Zealand Drag Racing Association's history. The record is thinner than we would like, and we say where it runs out.

What the record says

The NZDRA's history gives Thunderpark three sentences. It describes it as New Zealand's second purpose-built dragstrip, opening during 1976 and located near Hastings. It says Thunderpark "struggled to attract enough spectators" and closed in 1997. And in its section on the Nationals, it records that from 1976 the national meeting was held at either Champion Dragway at Meremere or at Thunderpark, until Thunderpark closed.

That is the documented core. Everything else here is context, and where it is our reading rather than a recorded fact we say so.

Why a second strip mattered

In 1976 Meremere had been open for three years and the sport was growing. A second permanent strip did several things at once.

It gave the lower North Island a home track. Before Thunderpark, anyone racing seriously from Hawke's Bay, Manawatū or Wellington faced a long tow north to the Waikato. A strip near Hastings cut that trip substantially for a big part of the country.

It gave the Nationals somewhere to rotate. A national meeting that moves between venues spreads the travel burden and gives two regions a turn at hosting the year's biggest event. The NZDRA history records the Nationals alternating between the two strips across Thunderpark's lifetime.

It made results more comparable. With two permanent strips, more of the season's racing happened on prepared, fixed surfaces with permanent timing, rather than on aerodromes and borrowed roads.

Why it struggled

The NZDRA puts it plainly: not enough spectators. We do not have attendance figures or accounts to add to that, and we will not invent them. But the general pressures on any regional strip are easy to list, and it is reasonable to assume Thunderpark felt most of them:

• Population. A drag strip near a regional city draws on a smaller local crowd than one within reach of Auckland.
• Weather. Drag racing cannot run on a wet track. Every rained-off meeting costs a strip its gate takings while the costs stay the same.
• Fixed costs. A strip has to be maintained whether it races or not: the surface, the barriers, the timing equipment, insurance and staff.
• Competition for the weekend. Spectators who go to one motor sport event a month have plenty of choice.

None of those is specific to Hawke's Bay or to 1997. They are the reasons any track has to be run as a business as well as a place to race.

After 1997

With Thunderpark gone, the NZDRA history records that the Nationals were held at Meremere, under its later sponsor names, almost every year, with one exception: the 40th Nationals, granted to the Masterton Motorplex to coincide with ten years of racing there on the Hood aerodrome.

The loss of a southern North Island strip also helps explain the importance of the airstrip venues that followed. Masterton, Tokoroa and other aerodrome meetings fill part of the gap a permanent strip once filled.

What is still missing

We would like to know more about Thunderpark and we suspect plenty of readers could help. What we do not have from published sources:

• the exact opening date in 1976 and the last meeting in 1997;
• who built and operated it, and how it was funded;
• the length and layout of the track and its shutdown;
• attendance at its Nationals;
• what happened to the land afterwards.

Some of this may be in regional newspaper coverage of the time, and the National Library's Papers Past is the first place to look, though its digitised coverage of the 1970s to 1990s is far from complete. Club histories and old programmes are the other obvious sources.

If you know of a published account, that is what we would like to read. We would rather update this piece with a citation than with a guess.

The lesson

Thunderpark lasted about twenty years. That is long enough for a generation of racers to have learned on it, and short enough that many younger racers have never heard of it. Its story is a reminder that a strip is not a permanent part of the landscape. It survives because enough people turn up, through the gate and in the pits, to keep it open.