NUTOUT DOES Summernats

It’s 3.30am on Tuesday, 31 December and I’m awoken by my phone ringing. It was old mate Andrew Harrison wondering where the hell I was. Dazed, and confused as to why my alarm hadn’t gone off, I stumbled around trying to get dressed to rush out to the van. As I gathered my thoughts, I realized that he was an hour early. Somehow, the discussion we had had down at the pub maybe 10 hours earlier had been lost in translation — or maybe it was that bottle or two of Woodstock and cola. So it was beginning; something I had been planning for the past six months was finally here, and it had already started with a balls-up!

Rewind to Labour weekend, and the big unveiling of the new ‘NUTOUT’, which tied in with a fundraiser that I had organized for my Summernats trip. The fundraiser was huge, the car community coming together to put on something special. The car park was maxed out with about 140 cars; we had to turn cars away. Well over 1500 people come to have a look. We had food stalls, a colouring comp, and a bouncy castle for the kids. There were raffles; drag car start-ups; merch for sale; and, of course, my own little version of Skid Row, where we had eight cars of different sorts come and put on a display of horsepower, smoke, noise, and feel, to showcase what the burnout world is about. All this in a pub car park in the centre of Wainuiomata! The locals loved it — apart from maybe one or two. We raised about $8K from this fundraiser. I was blown away and can’t thank everyone enough.

However, it was there that we found we still weren’t quite ready to send the car to Aussie; it still needed some tuning. The big problem was that my engine builder and tuner, Joel Arcus, was leaving the next morning for the SEMA Show in the good old US, and, by the time he returned, NUTOUT would be