BITTEN BY THE BUG

eing a farm boy all his life, John ‘JD’ Shepherd never really knew much about cars. This all changed at the young and impressionable age of 17, when his brother-in-law took him on a “mystery trip” to the Hawke’s Bay and a place called ‘Thunderpark’. It was here that John got bitten by the drag racing bug bad — really, really bad! John says that it was a day that, “Would change my life forever, as it did for a lot of us experiencing Thunderpark for the first time”, during the golden days of drag racing in New Zealand. It also happened to be the year that ‘The Phoenix’ and ‘LA Hooker’ from the US were touring the country. What a year to pop your drag racing cherry! A couple of years later, in the early ’80s, a 19-year-old John, with a spring in his step and a sparkle in his eye, returned to the hallowed turf in the Bay for another hit of the drag racing drug. Wellington legend Russ Clarke was campaigning his V8- powered Volkswagen at the time. John witnessed one of his wild, lurching, out-of-control passes down the quarter-mile and thought, . So, in 1984, he purchased Volkswagen number one, and, over the next couple of years, set about building his own street-legal V8 Bug that he in turn would take to the drags to, “see how fast it was”. Things were OK for a short while, but, as is often the case, John yearned for more