PUKEKOHE

[ERC]

And for buying Puke, well if you look at the facts that Auckland has 40 time the population of Timaru than you should be able to replicate the Sth Canterbury Car Club but with a club membership of 6000 people rather than our 150 and then when you ran your bigger meetings you would be getting somewhere between 200,000 and 260,000 individual paying spectators in attendance.

Not sure where you get 260,000 from! That is 1 in 4 of the whole of greater Auckland. Apart from the Aussie V8s, I don't think anyone has even cracked the 20,000 barrier in recent times. You'd have to be at the Le Mans 24 Hours or the Indy 500 to get anywhere near that. Goodwood festival has a 50,000 a day maximum and I think that Silverstone gets around 100,000 for the British GP.

Remember that Pukekohe as it is now and has been since I first clapped eyes on it, has had a covered grandstand and buying in now is not even the same as the buy in of Hampton Downs on virgin North Waikato farmland.

I can't see Franklin Racing Club letting it go at any price as it is the motorsport track hire that currently probably pays the majority of the bills. If track hire falls off, who knows, but until it does fall off, there is probaby no urgency to change, as they get their track hire fee regardless of whether or not the promoting club makes money.

There are all sorts of cars that can hurt your unprotected ears and it is not confined to V8s either. In the past I have come across Minis and even Vauxhalls that I consider painfully loud. There are also some cars where the resonance is a pain rather than the outright noise.

Currently, it appears that a couple of 2 litre Ford Escorts have been pinged and neither have been noted as excessively loud in the past.

PS: Just had a decibel test at the exhaust on my silenced road going V8 at 3000rpm. 95db...