Turn 8

The moment a passion was reawakened, and a road racing journal was born

MotoFest at Hampton Downs looked a doozy.

The penultimate round of the 2026 Star Insure NZSBK Championship had it all: Rogan Chandler and Luca Durning seemingly fighting for every corner in the Superbikes, close scraps across the support classes, the promise of sexy new releases at a street bikes exhibit, a free pit lane walk at lunchtime. Probably an old-school hotdog on a stick too, if I was being honest with myself.

Heck, I’d go for the sidecars alone given my soft spot for those crazy buggers on three wheels. That’s a fascination deep fried from early childhood when, shadowing my Dad at the Wairarapa engineering business he worked at, we stopped one evening to chat to a colleague tinkering with his homebuilt outfit.

Sadly, though, weekends - and by default summers - don’t belong to you when you derive your mortgage working in the sports industry as I have since I left school.

There’s always hope in the habitual search for a road race weekend just like Motofest to provide the kind of sensory fix only motorbike racing can. But anticlimax has surely followed over the years as high profile race meetings clashed with work, family or fiscal commitments, or a combination therewith.

Ah, well, maybe next year. This won’t be the last time work gets in the way of having fun.

Then, unexpectedly, Saturday fell free after all. Boom. A favourite fold-out chair biffed into the boot, I was off down State Highway 1 for a day of full-throttle immersion.

I’d claim a quiet patch of grass at an elevated vantage point, enjoy practice and qualifying, race one in each of the nine classes and call March 7 an unqualified success. Bikes screaming. Scratch itched. Back to the real world on Sunday. Crack on with life.

Except that wasn’t what happened.

First, it was a kid, Hunter Charlett, smoothly riding away from his Supersport 150 and 300 rivals in every session. As it transpires, the 15-year-old was beaten by pint-sized New Plymouth pilot Billy MacCrae in the final 150 race of the weekend, the only blip across both classes and 24 races all season long.

Charlett’s peerless riding begged a background check and the official MotoFest programme duly helped connect the dots between the Papanui High School speedster and his Dad, Canterbury legend Dennis. But the trail soon ran dry when I searched for the family story online. Hmmm. Frustrating.

In the penultimate race of the day, the veteran Smith brothers, Barry and David, were powering to victory in the sidecars only to come unstuck on the final lap, passenger David spat off the back of their Carl Cox Motorsports outfit.

I hadn’t seen it, my view obscured by a large tire wall, but the off didn’t sound good. Surely there’d be an update soon, alongside the revised Superbike standings following Durning’s impressive race one win moments earlier?

But after the breathless action and day long roar? Crickets. Double and triple hmmm.

It was a sobering conclusion to my intoxicating day at Turn 8 but not half as perplexing as lunchtime.

Before my pit lane walk, peek in the legends garage, all that eye-candy in the street bikes exhibitor marquee and the food trucks, I waited to take in the three-lap ‘Street Riders Track Cruise’.

Wait, why am I suddenly choking up over this slow-paced procession? Like, genuine moisture behind my sunglasses kind of flustered?

Sure, the cacophony of chromed high bars, ADV’s, streetfighter nakeds and road-legal sportsbikes were an awesome assault on the senses.

But there was none of the speed and associated danger provided by the flying two and three-wheel gladiators in the just completed practice and qualifying sessions. So why the palpable discharge of emotion as 200-odd weekend warriors completed pace car-controlled laps around the undulating Waikato circuit?

What had triggered this most unmanly of moments at a congregation of blokes who were tattooed-on tough, plus plenty of women rocking slightly intimidating full-length black leathers too?

Psychologists call it a ‘social elevation and inclusion response’, apparently. That much I ascertained as I struggled to compose myself over lunch, a more substantial cheeseburger trumping the saucy sausage I’d initially imagined.

Turns out I was reacting to the permission given to ordinary, everyday humans to flirt in the playground of their heroes, however fleeting and controlled it might have been. Real Kiwis with inside access to something extraordinary.

It was the complete antithesis to the increasingly woke high performance sports world I normally inhabit. How can you not be moved by riders who make a deal with the devil every time they swing a leg over? And for what? At grassroots level, little more than a bit of weekend fun wrapped up in a cold, communal brew on Sunday evening. And then a long drive home. With work or school tomorrow. And a repair and consumables bill no one else is going to foot.

Crickets
The uneasy/energized feeling I left Hampton Downs with was the birth of The Final Sector, before I knew it was even a thing and well before it had a name.

I just couldn’t let the frustration sit after MotoFest, the irritation of not being able to delve deeper into NZSBK and its combatants.

The storyteller within took over and dialed Dennis Charlett with a crazy concept. You don’t know me from a bar of soap, but would you mind if I follow you to Taupo International Motorsport Park for the final round next weekend? I’ll swing a camera about and do a wee story, a keepsake for you and Hunter worst case scenario.

The upshot is Heir to the Throttle, a mini documentary showcasing one of the country’s most promising talents and the father subtly instilling the secrets of “16 or 17” national championship wins (“I’ve honestly lost count”) into that project

The video gives hint to the depth TFS intends to explore, telling the stories of the factory riders, the plucky privateers, their mechanics, the family pit crews and paddock rats who make motorcycle racing one of Australasian sport’s best kept secrets. The extraordinary tales too often lost somewhere between the official programme, the podium and the ride home up SH1.

Passion. On Ice
On reflection, Turn 8 wasn’t where TFS was brough to life. It turns out my passion for bike racing was merely reawakened there, no longer dormant under 35+ years of mortgage payments, work commitments and missed race weekends. Hampton Downs just reignited the flame.

A V8 mad mate calls racing motorbikes ‘central muscle cars’, sans roll bars of course.

I flirted with the freedom of the road till an incident in my early 20s when my noob bravado collided with roadworks at high-speed north of Masterton in my early 20s. Nothing but pure luck saw me survive the ensuing fish tail on loose gravel I should have seen coming and very nearly ruined lunch at my sister’s place. Christmas lunch that was.

That NSR 250 was irresistible in the dealership window as I romanticized my boyhood bike heroes – Rainey, Schwantz, Gardner, Doohan – but was a terrible two-stroke choice for my first road bike. It was sold shortly afterward but the admiration for riders, on street and track, and the lust for the rocket ships they pilot, was clearly just chilling on ice.

The weekend immersed in the Taupo paddock stirred that unmistakable knot-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach tension I felt as a kid racing the mini-motobike my great and now sadly late Dad built me. It was powered by a Briggs and Stratton lawnmower motor and I rocked yellow and black ‘buzzy bee’ mittens Mum hand-knitted (what health and safety?) to match my dream machine’s paint scheme.

I even won a race in Masterton - Aaron Slight country - once. In the wet no less.

I recall falling off at least twice on the greasy lime track and only winning because a kid on a factory-built motocross bike took a short-cut right at the end of the race after also crashing, a desperate attempt to keep his unbeaten season record intact. The little cheater’s DQ only made my mud-splattered moment sweeter.

I graduated to a second-hand Honda 75 and must have driven the neighbours crazy ripping around our little 2-acre lifestyle block, cutting out a track that was complete with a jump over a dirt mound Dad had piled up digging out the foundations of the house he was building us.

Dad’s ‘turn his hand to anything’ skills bypassed me and the closest I ever came to being in an elite paddock was at Manfield as a cub reporter assigned to cover Slight, NZ’s young star, at one of what must have been the very first rounds of WorldSBK in the late 1980s.

TFS can’t wait to follow Hunter in the Yamaha Blu Cru R3 Asia Pacific Championship and the plethora of other Kiwis and Aussies ripping it up at home and abroad. It’ll take the platform a while to fully get off the grid, but we hope winging it to Adelaide for the third round of ASBK 2026 at The Bend illustrates the intention. After that, who knows?

What is clear is all those missed weekends are now not-to-be-missed weekends.

Turn 8 saw to that.