SA Roadtests
South Africa
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This is the home of automobile road tests in South Africa. We drive South African cars, SUVs and LCVs under South African conditions. It also just happens that most of the vehicles we drive are world cars as well, so what you read here probably applies to the models you can get at home.
*To read one of our road tests, just select from the menu on the left.
*Please remember too, that prices quoted were those ruling on the days I wrote the reports.
Historic pic supplied
Current pic by author
Published in The Witness Motoring on Wednesday April 25, 2012, as promotional material for Cars in the Park
“I generally stay below the radar,” grinned Pietermaritzburg-born Peter ter Wolbeek. “I was never wildly successful, usually finishing somewhere in the middle.”
Shy he may be, but ter Wolbeek has proved more than once that persistence pays. He cut his teeth at a grass track event (why is that familiar?) at the ‘Maritzburg Golf Club’s original home at Mountain Rise, in an aged Peugeot 202 during 1960. “Things were much less formal back then,” he says. “You could be an innocent spectator, minding your own business, when the announcer would yell: ’Hey, you with the blue MG – bring it out and let us see what it can do.”
Whatever the case, the competition bug bit and he has remained hooked until today, even though a rollover accident the following year left him with a broken back and a severely damaged car.
Never one to give up easily, he rebuilt it into an open “special,” campaigning it consistently until winning the grass track championship in 1964. A higher profile ride shared with Trevor Lewis saw the pair winning the 1963 six-hour race at Roy Hesketh in a Peugeot 203. According to ter Wolbeek, these endurance events started in 1962 as part of the Easter racing programme.
Like John Truter, he spent time at the spectator-friendly sport of stock car racing, starting in 1966 with a 1941 Mercury V8 in Class B and, later, two cars in Class A – a 1948 Chevrolet Fleetline and a 1963 Ford Galaxie. Success eventually came in the early ‘80s with a championship win in Class ‘A’.
He started Production Car racing in a Ford Anglia 105E, the slanted back window version, during 1968 and campaigned it for about three years at various venues across the country. “I was never very successful,” he says, “finishing as ‘one of the others’ most times.”
In 1971 he opened a garage, TW Motors, in Greyling Street where he built himself a Lotus Seven. This, too, was not particularly successful owing to repeated overheating problems. He also raced a Triumph TR3, an Austin-Healey 3000 and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta 1600 Ti, all of which he shared with other drivers to race and have fun with. The fuel crunch of the early ‘70s heralded an end to such activities, so he sold them all.
In 1977 he bought the ex-Chris Clegg Renault 8 Gordini that stood him in good stead until 1981 when the Roy Hesketh circuit closed for competitive racing. He still owns this car, which will be displayed on the special exhibits stand at Weekend Witness/VSCC Cars in the Park.
Through the years, ter Wolbeek’s experience has been that no-one really specialised too much in any particular branch of motorsport – you might race on grass today, cinders tomorrow night and take part in a gymkhana at a charity fête the following weekend. It was all about the “doing.”
These days, ter Wolbeek maintains his signature low profile; tinkering with old cars, restoring classics and supporting a couple of stock car racers in the series being run at Richards’ Bay. Words for the faithful? He basically echoed Truter’s words: “We did it all for ourselves, we did a lot of different things, but most of all, we had fun.”
Peter ter Wolbeek shows winning form in the Peugeot 202 Special he built for grass track racing
Peter ter Wolbeek poses with memorabilia at the 'Boshoff Street Country Club'
This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.
What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.
Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.
My articles appear every Wednesday in the motoring pages of The Witness, South Africa's oldest continuously running newspaper, and occasionally on Saturdays in Weekend Witness as well. I drive eight to ten vehicles most months of the year (press cars are withdrawn over the festive season - wonder why?) so not everything gets published in the paper. Those that are, get a tagline but the rest is virgin, unpublished and unedited by the political-correctness police. Hope you like what you see, because there are no commercial interests at work here. As quite a few readers have found, I answer every serious enquiry from my home email address, with my phone numbers attached, so I do actually exist.
I am based in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. This is the central hub of the KZN Midlands farming community; the place farmers go to buy their supplies and equipment, truck their goods to market, send their kids to school and go to kick back and relax.
So occasionally a cow, a goat or a horse may add a little local colour by finding its way into the story or one of the pictures. It's all part of the ambience!
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SA Roadtests
South Africa
ctjag8