Motor rally: From toy stroller to high roller for Baird girl

Tony, Maree and 2 year old daughter Charlotte from Bay View. PHOTO/Warren Buckland

She pushes a toy baby stroller at the Hawke's Bay Car Club now but Charlotte Baird's parents suspect the minute the age of reason kicks in their daughter will mutate.

Charlotte, who turns 3 in January, will probably turf aside the dolly with blonde locks to seize the steering wheel of a track-savvy beast, broken down like a racehorse, to spurn the advances of tight hair pins and seductive corners of hidden rocks, stumps and ditches at the 800m club track.

"No doubt she'll be into it. She loves cars. You're out working and next thing you have the kid under the car with you, you know, tinkering away," says father and rally driver Tony Baird.

The 39-year-old Hastings District Council parks supervisor and wife Maree, who he met when she had just started racing at the club, are no strangers to the Bridge Pa club where the Hugh Baird Memorial Autocross was held last Sunday and where the Hawke's Bay Rally will be staged on November 14.

With older brother Bruce popping and banging father Hugh's 1976 Ford Escort Mark II from the time they were teenagers, Tony eventually invested in a Toyota Corolla before selling it when "priorities in life changed" with the advent of a wife and child.

On the day his father died on November 1 from a house maintenance mishap, Tony was hoping to start building another car the following day.

"He actually got stuff for me that day and we had had lunch together so we didn't race the next day for obvious reasons," he says of the former Bay Ford service manager who was electrocuted in the roof of a house 12 years ago.

In his will, the sons amicably accepted what their father had left behind for them - Tony the safety gear and Bruce the shell and engine of the Mark II that the younger Baird co-owned with his father.

Bruce drives and maintains the vehicle now which sports the personal number plate of their paternal grandmother.

Just before the end of the Baird memorial rally last Sunday, the pair asked to have a run in their cars.

"My aim was to try to catch him [Bruce] so that's how competitive we are."

Tony has done four Bay rallies and has had a bit more success with it than Bruce, finishing in two of them.

The younger Baird has won numerous club titles but the Bay rally remains elusive.

"Oh I don't have enough money and it also comes down to the machinery."

Tony has won the club championship three times while Marie has clinched the women's equivalent five times.

"Probably the next challenge is when Charlotte's old enough then perhaps we can win all three in the same year, like we've done in men's and women classes," he says.