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Tuesday, 18 May 2021, 4:25 pm
Napier
man Walter Rands-Trevor, primed and ready to begin his
land-speed record bid on Goudies Road, near Reporoa. Photo
by Kit Greer.
There is perhaps
nothing as scary or as thrilling at the same time as
achieving a land speed record on a motorcycle.
With no
chassis or panels to surround the rider, no padding, no
bumpers and no air bags, the adrenaline rush surely defies
description and, in the tradition of legendary Kiwi
motorcycling pioneer Burt Munro before him, Hawke s Bay man
Walter Rands-Trevor certainly now knows that feeling
intimately.
For Napier s Rands-Trevor, a 44-year-old
product manager for a motorcycle insurance company, his
As the almost equally determined Wayne Johnson’s documentary details (surely his own labour of love), Hart dedicated any spare moment he had to creating something John Britten or Burt Munro would be proud of. Taking an engineers eye to his monumental task of building a dragster jet car, the self-styled, would-be “world’s fastest ginger” initially threw himself into 18 months of intense study/Google research, before scouring the world for ways to be able to make his fantasy vehicle on a budget. Thanks to Kiwi ingenuity (which included a soda stream bottle as a shut off, Holden Kingswood wheel hubs and a Warehouse Dora the Explorer ball as a mould for the bullet nose), this potential $250,000 project was able to be crafted for around ⅕ of the price. Not that he skimped on safety. “Everything else can be nasty arse crap,” he tells Johnson, but the parts that allow him to stop and steer it, “those have to be top-notch”.