Six very lucky Corvette Club of SA members have just attended the 2013 New Zealand Corvette Nationals. Peter & Lynda, Gerry & Lyndall and Ruth & Stuart travelled over together at the beginning of the month and simply had the best time.

The Nationals were held in a tourist town North of Christchurch on the South Island called Hamner Springs. Hamner as it’s known, is a beautiful village with natural hot springs, so there is this huge public bath / pools in the middle of town and which anyone attending the Nationals had full / free use of. The town also had that snow ski field look to it with all the pubs, restaurants, shops etc. within walking distance.

Anyway, back to Corvettes. 108 Corvettes attended and all were of a very high standard. The Kiwis are lucky you know. They can bring into the country from the States any Corvette, leave it left hand drive and register it without any conditions. Because of this, there were a high number of C5 & C6 Vettes there. Plenty of Z06’s and Grand Sports and one new ZR1 C6. Very few C1’s or C2’s.
Ruth & I were handed the keys to our friends (John & Julie) 1970 LT1 370HP C3, and Gerry & Lyndall were given the keys by other friends (Bill & Marie) Big Block C2 for the entire convention. We had a ball driving these cars through the NZ countryside (their roads are a lot better for Vettes than ours) and it was good to be driving a manual again. The only down side – Their petrol is about $2.20 per litre. Makes ours look cheap! Sort of!

One of our jobs while we were there (our only job actually) was to choose a Corvette that we would most want to take back to Australia. Our club had sponsored a trophy - ‘Aussies Choice’ for which I had to present. Not one for public speaking, I wound the old nerves up but managed to get through it. The Aussies Choice trophy went to an ‘as new’ Red Grand Sports C6 owned by Steve & Dagmar from the Wellington Corvette Club.

The whole convention was so well run, we had perfect weather (mid 20’s) and the locals made us six Aussies feel so welcome, it almost bought a tear to my eye – well almost. Even later in our trip when we took the ferry over to the North Island, there was a greeting party at the port for us from the Wellington club. They took us to our hotel and later in the evening out for dinner. They are simply a great bunch of people over there in a beautiful country.
“We’ll be back” .

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