Last weekend I attended the Wellington Hard Park event at Riverbank car park in Lower Hutt. NZ Performance Car magazine have organised similar events in the past but decided not to do so this year. Falgoon Patel and his team from Speedmagnet decided to organise their own event. The turnout was impressive to say the least!
After last year’s event where I queued for ages to get in, I got there nice and early and joined the queue of about 40 cars already at the entrance. As more and more cars started arriving it was clear this was going to be pretty big!
The entrance was opened and we all cruised in. There were plenty of people on hand to direct traffic for parking, which made things much more organised and relaxed than I expected.
Once parked, I hopped up onto the banking and saw that the queue waiting to get in was already almost back to the motorway. It stayed that long for the next hour! In all, over 650 cars turned up.
Eventually the entire car park filled up with a huge selection of cars. American classics, lowriders, four wheel drives, a huge selection of Japanese cars from standard to massively modified, old to new, and the odd Euro. The atmosphere was pretty chilled. There were lots of people, families with kids and dogs, people on drift trikes, all having a good time in the sun.
There were a couple of police walking around, keeping an eye on things but being very friendly. I had a quick chat – they were from the serious accident division so had seen some pretty nasty wrecks in their time. They had some strong opinions about some of the cars on display!
A highlight of the event for me was Nanny’s Food Truck – his jerk pork burger was amazing!
I spent nearly three hours there, checking out the cars, taking photos, chatting to people. It was a great event with a good atmosphere, and above all no-one did anything silly.
