We all have our favourite events – the ones that never seem to come around quick enough, or last long enough, yet always leave a lasting impression. We’re spoilt for choice when its comes motorsport  in New Zealand – there’s always something going on and given the size of this country, it’s never all that far away – but for me, it’s the New Zealand Festival of Motor Racing.

Since the first event in 2010, the NZFMR has quickly become one of the biggest events on the motorsport calendar, combining a wide variety of mostly classic circuit racing genres and wrapping it up in a six day celebration spread over two weekends.

Every year there’s a theme and for 2014, Ferrari was the focus.

For spectators through the gates at Hampton Downs Motorsport Park, the event allowed the opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the most desirable classics from the iconic Italian car maker, like this ’74 Dino 246 GTS.

And more modern machines, like this 430 Challenge in GT3 Scuderia specification, and 458 Italia road car.

But most of all, it gave anyone who came along, the opportunity to witness something never seen before in New Zealand – Ferrari F1 race cars on the track. Three of them in fact. And two with turbos. But more on those in a moment…

Thanks in part to the Ferrari Owners Club of New Zealand, some truly beautiful machines – including some that hardly ever see the light of day, let alone be shown in public – were in attendance.

That included this 250 GTE, which had been upgraded to 250 GTO specification, including having the correct body fitted by the Ferrari factory. That doesn’t make it one of the 39 GTOs ever built of course, but the absolute next best thing, and a very special machine in its own right.

This 1955 ex-works 750 Monza on the other hand was as real as they come. In a former life the beautiful sports car was driven by Ferrari factory driver Eugenio Castelotti in the 1955 Le Mans 24-hour race, and later won at Rouen in France and took third place in both the Targa Florio in Sicily, and the Swedish Grand Prix.

On the subject of Grand Prix, lets talk F1 cars. The most famous car of the three at the Festival was the Ferrari 412T1/T1B that Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger both ran four times each in the 1994 F1 championship. It never won a race, but it placed second twice – once with Alesi at the Canadian Grand Prix, and then with Berger at the final round of the season  at the Australian Grand Prix.

Although the chassis started out with an uprated version of the Ferrari Tipo 041 65-degree 3.5L V12 engine – good for 775hp at 15,300rpm – mid-way through the ’94 season the T1 was upgraded to T1B specification, which added revised bodywork and a new Ferrari Tipo 043 engine as pictured above. The 043 retained the same displacement, but its V12 was configured with a 75-degree vee and output increased to 820hp at 15,800rpm. Tipping the scales at just 515kg (1135 pounds) it was wickedly quick: 0-100km/h arrived in just 2.6 seconds.

It might be 20-year-old F1 technology, but with the body panels removed it was still very cool to be able to take a closer looker and savour the finer details – like the the Kevlar intake and titanium-cased, six-speed semi-automatic sequential transaxle transmission.

And let’s not forget the beautiful hand-formed exhaust headers either. I could have easily spent the whole day soaking up the exquisite engineering.

But as awesome as the 412T1B was, there was another Ferrari F1 machine just begging for my attention. Looking at that gauge, I’m sure you can figure out why too…

Although Formula 1 is on the brink of returning to its turbocharged ways, the ’80s era where huge injections of boost raised horsepower levels to almost unfathomable heights, is unlikely to ever be overshadowed.  

Two turbocharged F1 Ferraris were brought over from Australia especially for the event, and both were 156/85 variants, as originally driven by Stefan Johansson and the late Michele Alboreto throughout the exciting 1985 season.

At their hearts, Ferrari Tipo 031/2 1.5L V6 engines with twin KKK turbochargers and good for close to 800hp at 12,000rpm on race day, and with the wick turned right up, four figures in qualifying. 1000hp-plus, 548kg… you do the math!

Generating huge horsepower from the small engine required a compression ratio of 7.0:1 and some serious boost pressure – in this case around 4.0bar, or close to 60psi, of the good stuff.

With such tight space constraints you can see how compactly packaged the whole forced induction set-up is on each side of the engine. A periscope-style intake is used along with a small-faced, but extra thick intercooler core.

Unlike the 412 V12 machine and its state-of-the-art-for-1994 paddle-shifted semi-auto, the older 156/85s makes do with a traditional stick-shifted five-speed manual transaxle gearbox.

One can only imagine how much quicker these Ferrari turbo cars would have been had the transmission technology arrived a decade earlier.

Despite the fact that all three cars weren’t driven at the their utmost limit, seeing them – and most importantly, hearing the naturally aspirated V12 scream, and the two turbocharged V6s roar around the Hampton Downs circuit was a real treat.

I probably overstayed my welcome in the #1 pit garage, but given the fact it was an opportunity that definitely doesn’t come along every day, it had to be seized.

Although you couldn’t venture more than a few metres without running into a Ferrari-badged machine – in this instance a 1970 365 GTB/4 – interesting cars of varied make, model and vintage were in plentiful supply.

Running in the historic touring car field was this E46 BMW 3 Series, which was both built and campaigned by Germany’s Engstler Motorsport team in the WTCC.

In stark contrast, this GM Holden HT Monaro-based New Zealand Sports Sedan that was originally built in the mid 1970s, hadn’t been raced in almost 30 years. I can only imagine that getting back behind the wheel must have felt pretty good for Barry Algie.

Presented in unrestored and mostly original condition from a bygone era of local racing, there’s little wonder the time capsule attracted so much attention.

There’s a pretty cool set-up beneath and beyond all that bar work too, including a Ford GT40 transaxle gearbox and a rear-mounted radiator. It looked like the original coilovers might have been replaced with newer Koni equivalents, but I don’t think there’s any questioning the period authenticity of that seat!

The original, rearward-set engine still features at the front – a 400ci small block Chevy, destroked to 5.8L via an 327ci crankshaft I believe, and running Lucas mechanical fuel injection. Despite being driven with restraint, it looked and sounded absolutely spectacular.

Another car with New Zealand Sports Sedan pedigree that made a return to the track at the Festival was Graeme Addis’s 1972 Chrysler Charger. Unlike the Monaro I just showed you however, this amazing machine underwent a substantial restoration to bring it back up to race-ready condition. And when I say restoration, I mean right down to painted-on sponsor logos.

Despite the way the Charger looks now, it’s hard to think that it spent over a decade inside a shipping container – and reputedly half-buried – on Addis’s farm, but that’s precisely what happened to the car after New Zealand’s motorsport governing body outlawed it in the late 1980s. As you can see, it’s quite a machine with nothing left of the Chrysler’s original chassis other than the exterior bodywork.

And this shot from the completely open rear should give you some idea why… Although the Charger was a race car from new, in the mid ’70s it went under the knife, re-emerging with a full space frame chassis and a 5.0L Chevy V8 engine and suspension from Lola Formula 5000 car. In the early ’80s it was rebuilt again, and this time the engine (which had been replaced with a 6.0L Chevy) was repositioned in the rear with the Lola’s Hewland transaxle gearbox.

As you can see from the on-track shot a few photos back, the Charger featured some quite extreme aero work, which I was unsurprised to learn was a by-product of necessity. It was a pretty trick set-up too, and included that massive rear wing with a blade angle that was able to be adjusted from inside the cockpit via a lever arrangement, and specifically while the car was being raced. Having read about this car a long time ago, it was amazing to actually see it out on the track many years after it was banished.

As far removed as a couple of home-built Sports Sedans are from the illustrious Ferrari marque, it’s one of the great things about the NZFMR – you never know what you’re going to come across…

There were a few cars in the mix that I had seen at previous Festivals, including this ex-Andy Rouse ’98 Toyota Corolla, with a reverse-head 3S-GE good for 300hp, and all the trimmings you’d expect in a BTCC racer, including centre-lock 19-inch wheels and a six-speed sequential transmission. This machine is a true one-of-a-kind; built at great expense (reputedly £200,000) but never actually raced through lack of sponsorship.    

It was awesome to see the iconic Aztec Mazda ‘RX8′ out on the track and mixing it with some fast Escorts, including Paul McCarthy’s Mk1 Zakspeed RS1600 replica and Robert Jack’s blisteringly-quick Chevy V8-powered Mk2 too. Now owned by Dennis Running, the orange Mazda was first built and raced in Australia in CAMS Group C guise with a rotary engine, but ended up in New Zealand in the mid ’80s and eventually was rebuilt with a small block Chevy for the New Zealand Sports Sedan series. These guys definitely weren’t mucking around!

Not every competing car was as extremely modified though. There were some neat cars in the Classic Trials ranks, including this clean and quick B110 Datsun 1200 (Sunny) coupe.

Neil Macfarquhar owns a few special cars, including the 1988 European Touring Car Championship-winning #1 Group A Ford Texaco Eggenberger Sierra Cosworth RS500. This year he brought along his most recent acquisition: a factory-built ’92 BMW M3 Sport Evo in DTM guise. Like the Sierra, this car underwent an complete nut and bolt restoration before Neil started racing it last year.

On the subject of BMWs, I wasn’t actually sure what I was looking at when I first saw this ‘M8′ badged car in the pits. It turns out the newly completed and beautifully detailed race car takes its exterior design cues – including vented rear guards – from a BMW supercar prototype that never made it to production. It certainly looked the part.

The same can also be said for Gordon Burr’s V8-powered Escort too, thanks in part to its front-wheel-cocking exploits. An NZFMR regular, Gordon left his ex-Alan Moffat Ford Cologne Capri RS3100 at home this year, but along with the well-sorted Escort, he brought his Chevy V8-powered ’77 Alfetta and ’80 Ferrari 308 GT4 LM replica out to play.  

Despite all the makes and models represented at the event, given the theme for the 2014 NZFMR, there’s no prize for guessing which marque stole the show. Along with daily parades, on the first weekend more than 140 Ferraris took to the track at once for a New Zealand record-setting attempt.

Given the number of models on show and being demonstrated, or raced, it’s hard to pick a favourite, so I’m going to go with the car that interested me the most – this 288 GTO. While it’s certainly not the prettiest Ferrari ever built, the ‘Gran Turismo Omologato’ gets my nod because of its Group B undertones. Destined to compete on the world rally stage, the GTO featured a fuel-injected 2.9L twin-turbo V8 engine, could go 0-100km/h in four seconds and had a top speed of 304km/h (189mph). Although Ferrari produced the required 200 road-going homologation specials (272 in fact), Group B’s overnight demise in 1986 meant that the 288 GTO rally car never actually eventuated. What could have been perhaps…

Even better than seeing the GTO sitting still, was the opportunity the events afforded to see a car like that, and others like this 458 Challenge, being unleashed on the track.

It’s all part of the NZFMR experience, and one that I’m very glad has grown big enough that it’s now become a permanent fixture on the local motorsport calendar.

In fact, the organisers are now working two years in advance, announcing the 2015 New Zealand Festival of Motor Racing as a nod to Kiwi Formula 1 driver from the ’70s, Howden Ganley, and the 2016 event as Porsche-themed and including Group C 956s. And for that, I’m very grateful…