MOTORSPORT: War and peace in NZ

Just as peace and stability has been brought to New Zealand’s touring car scene, a storm has broken out over the country’s iconic gravel hillclimb – the Race to the Sky.

Unless there are some sudden changes of heart and approach, that hillclimb won’t be run again.

Businessman and racer Tony Quinn has pulled the pin on the event just weeks after bringing it out of a seven-year hiatus.

Driving a Subaru WRX, Ace rally driver Alister McRae won April’s resurrection of the 14km hillclimb in the South Island’s Cardrona area with which Japan’s charismatic Nobuhiro 'Monster' Tajima is synonymous after many victories.

Quinn – the Gold Coast-based Scotsman who owns the Highlands Motorsport Park and now Hampton Downs race circuits in NZ and is the dynamo behind the Australian GT Championship, VIP Petfoods and Darrell Lea chocolates – had scheduled another Race to the Sky for March 18-20 next year.

But now he has scrapped that plan, annoyed that the owners of the land that includes the Snow Farm Road now want only a three-year deal rather than the one he envisaged lasting a decade.

Road maintenance costs also have been projected at $90,000 next year, compared with $35,000 in 2007 and an estimated $50,000 this year.

And Quinn said “opportunistic” neighbours were now looking for “a hand-out for potential loss of income”.

He said he “can no longer invest heavily in the promotion of the event when the ‘goal posts’ are changed in this manner”.

“I will not line the pockets of others in this way, nor be held to ransom,” Quinn said.

“This is not how I do business and neither myself nor my [management] team have the time or patience to deal with this bullshit.”

Quinn would like to find an alternative location to run a major hillclimb in NZ, but his motorsport 'lieutenant' Mike Sentch said that was not easy.

“The Race to the Sky had a history, a hill, a record to break … it was the world’s longest [gravel] hillclimb, so we would need 14km,” Sentch said.

“And it has to be a good road, not a ‘goat track’.

“It sounds easy, but it is not really.”

Meanwhile, the integration of NZ’s rival touring car camps has been formalised and a Premier Racing Series calendar set for 2015-16.

V8 SuperTourers – cars with a similar chassis to V8 Supercars but a generic 7.0-litre Corvette-based engine – failed as a standalone category, while fields dwindled in the longer-established NZV8 Touring Cars.

They have now amalgamated and will race a nine-round series starting at Taupo Motorsport Park in mid-October and including the V8 Supercar event at Pukekohe on November 6-7.

There will be another round in late November, then five successive weekends in conjunction with the summer open-wheeler Toyota Racing Series and a finale at Pukekohe in mid-April.

The series will have several support categories, including muscle cars, V8 and Ssangyong utes and Toyota 86s.