Back to the Future

John Webster Memorial
Waikaraka Park




Each year this event is hyped to the heavens as THE meeting to attend and oddly this year it even got some coverage in the NZ Herald which is unheard of unless there has been a death or there is a negative angle at least. The one exception to the rule appears to be whenever a sprintcar races in Auckland it gets some sort of coverage as they appeal to the Speedway 'Nouveau Riche' and are obviously deemed classy enough for TV. Who knows, anyway the original idea for this meeting was to combine the two factions of Auckland speedway, essentially the open wheel classes of Western Springs and the Stockcar and Saloon classes of Waikaraka Park in one big showcase of Auckland's best dirt track racing. It was John Websters baby and after his unfortunate passing it became his memorial meeting. This year the final round of the Ollie Browne SuperStock series was added to the event in a nice tie in as a fitting tribute to another stalwart of Auckland speedway history.

So what was it like? I decided before it even started that I wasn't going to do any sort of reveiw as I just wanted to sit back and enjoy it. I used to be a WSprings regular so the thought of Midgets and Sprintcars with WP's SuperStocks, Supersaloons and Sidecars was the perfect hybrid meeting (I will have one small moan here and say Stockcars should have been involved perhaps at the expense of Sidecars) but it does feel like you are watching the future of speedway. These are the classes that fill stadiums, that get you excited and are ironically the foundation classes that we all got hooked on in the first place.

I really enjoyed the meeting, there were some problems with stoppages for the WS classes, noticeably the midgets and the 'shoot outs' or 'shoot offs' or 'shoot me this is boring' run offs were a bit lame and went pear shaped during the SuperSaloons with the timing but there were moments of brilliance too. 19c Malcolm Ngatai must have a new favourite track after completely wasting the rest of a fairly good field in heats 1 + 3 of the SuperStocks and apart from a well timed spin by 53a Marx and then a malfunction that ended his race in heat 2 (which again he was leading by almost half a lap) he would have had a hat-trick of wins like 33a Graham Standring who also performed brilliantly in the midgets. 99a Shane McInteer was either going to win spectacularly or crash big time in the Saloons and it was the latter unfortunately but he brought the feature race to life when it was becoming a bit of a procession. Hard luck too for 66m Skinny Colson who had the Sprintcar feature all but sewn up when a spinning backmarker took him out. Sprintcars were a little bit of a let down for me but with only 9 on hand on a programme as classy as this I wasn't surprised.

So there was drama, dust, good fields, good classes, good crowd... whether it's the meeting John Webster would have organised I don't know, but I doubt he would have minded and Ollie Browne would have been proud of the Stockcar racing which was more aggressive than usual and an Auckland car won. Kick arse. I can't imagine anyone left feeling unhappy with this years John Webster Memorial.

Meeting rating : 7.5/10