Main street HOTS UP

Hot rod enthusiasts spend hundreds of loving hours and thousands of dollars tinkering in the garage to produce what they see as a mechanised work of art.

By Sandy Myhre.

There is less than scholarly debate about how the term 'hot rod', defining a modified car, came about. One version suggests it appeared in the late 1930s in California where petrol heads (or gear heads as they're known Stateside) would race their hotted up motors on the dry lake beds around Los Angeles.

The Urban Dictionary, however, gives other references to the term which a family magazine couldn't possibly repeat but that aside the first hot rods were mostly Fords, Model Ts, As or Bs, often modified to reduce weight by simply cutting off the roof to produce the early convertibles.

To the motoring purists, hot rods are bastardised examples of a real car but try telling that to the throngs who spend hundreds of loving hours and thousands of dollars tinkering in the garage to produce what they see as a mechanised work of art. Hot rods are separate and definitely apart from boy racer cars which are mostly poorly modified Japanese imports. Hot rods began as American and have stayed that way and were it not for fans of this motoring genre hot rods simply wouldn't exist.

Take the Kerikeri-based Kurbside Rodders as an example. During their static display in mid March it wasn't hard to hear enthusiasm bordering on obsession over the numerous Yank tanks lined up on the closed-off Main Street. It was bloke heaven. Women seem to be there for baking the scones for a run in the beast but there is no shortage of passion in the garage for what is most likely a joint purchase. Toni Satherley declares openly that she tries not to work on the car.

"Otherwise I get yelled at," she laughs but she's just as keen on their 1932 Ford Roadster as her husband, Peter. The couple, formerly from Kaitaia but now living in Bunbury, West Australia, had the car built in the USA. It's a fibreglass replica with a 350 Chevrolet engine under the hood. In fact they have two.

They've been long-time rodders and to date have driven around 26,000 hot rodding miles in the USA over the last three years. As Toni so aptly suggests, some people have holiday homes, they have holiday cars and in August they'll be at the iconic NSRA Street Rod Nationals in Louisville, Kentucky. After the Kerikeri display they were heading to Whangamata to the country's biggest beach hop where nearly 1,000 cars will be on display and if that doesn't say something about hot rod exuberance, what would?

Meanwhile, over in Waipapa, Warren Pattinson pours his enthusiasm over a 1954 four-door Chev and a 1955 Chev he has owned since he was 18.

"I bought it much to my father's disgust because he thought cars should go from A to B, and I've had it ever since," he says.

On Wednesday nights this man is quiz master at the Pioneer Tavern but there's nothing quizzical about the other hot rod in his garage, a classic 1932 T-Bucket with a 350 Chev developing an astonishing 400 brake horsepower.

During the show in Kerikeri his wife, The Far North's Deputy Mayor, was adopting a low-key role. Like most women in the overwhelmingly male-dominated motoring world, she clearly knew her place was to stand behind the brochure table but possibly as a show of independence she failed, consciously or otherwise, to mention the scones.