What to do on Boxing Day has never been an issue for some of us. None of the jostling in malls and big box stores looking for bargains, but rather sitting in a cemetery watching others eat hotdogs and drink beer whilst a crazy bunch of motorcyclists burn off their Christmas dinner racing each other. And so a bunch of us from Palmy gathered together at Manawatu Motorcycles and headed off in a westerly direction towards Whanganui. Its a great feeling sharing the road with so many bikes all heading in the same direction.
We were all very interested to see how one of own (Tim) would do on his recently acquired Honda CBR600. This would be its first outing. Tims previous bikes at Whanganui have been of a 2 stroke kind, but have proved very fragile. You can only loctite and wire up a YZ490 only so many times! He not only completed all his races, but improved his placings as he got used to the bike. Having said all that, we did miss the mighty YZ vibrating and smoking its way around the circuit. The racing is only part of the experience and along with the culinary delights of Hot Dogs and Chips, you can check out the pits and spectator bikes. I was impressed with Alan De Lautours restraint when he and Dion had an interesting discussion with an RG500 "expert" over an RG500s fairing details. Alan is probably the expert in New Zealand on all things RG500. All adds to the colour of the day. After watching the usual smorgasbord of sidecars, motard, F1, F2, Post Classics etc we decided to head home at threeish. Or so we thought! Sir Al managed to misplace the key to a lockup we had all our gear in. We had visions of sitting on the riverbank throwing stones whilst we waited for help to arrive. Luckily for us a key was found and our departure was delayed by an acceptable hour.
The tail wind home was great for fuel economy and upon arrival at home the BBQ was fired up and we had a great turnout of friends, kids, partners etc. Great to see Barry Drummond and his son on the mighty Z1 pop in on there way home. The anticipated fireworks highlight of the evening courtesy of the De Lautour brothers literally fizzed out in spite of there obvious pyromaniac tendencies. Cheap fireworks are cheap for a reason!
