VW Nationals 2009
2009 VW Nationals
Bigger, Bigger, BEST! That’s all I need to say. Twenty two years and still getting stronger! What a great weekend, and perfect weather; apart from the early rain at the Super Sprint at Wakefield Park on Saturday morning.
Firstly, Wakefield Park. What a blast! If you entered a car and had a drive, what a great experience. Well done to all our officials, flaggies and scrutineers on the day. It’s a thankless job but I am sure they enjoyed themselves watching the proceedings and racing. From an entrant point of view it ran very smoothly, and sometimes I got a little impatient waiting for my turn, but that was only me. All in all I had 5 runs with a practice as well, great value for money. Our own Rudi Frank took out fastest car on the day, showing up some pretty serious competition. Well done! We took off early in order to get back to Fairfield for the 7.30pm set up time.
The set-up went smoothly and quickly, thanks to all our helpers. But Brian Walker and I had a sleepless night, due to the function happening in the main grandstand at the showgrounds. A couple of people were going to walk off with some of our equipment during the night, until I caught them. The function was supposedly going until 4am, but the police came along and shut it down around 2.30am; then there was clean up of the car park (all the liquor bottles), followed by the garbage collection at around 5.00am, so we didn’t get much sleep on the Saturday night.
This year we had our traders mud-map pencilled in, thanks to Ken Davis’ accurate architectural drawings, so I could stay on the front entry gate until 11.30am. This kept a lot of people out of the show arena who weren’t supposed to be in there. We definitely required this extra room to allow the 190-odd entries into the show area parking.
This year the water-cooled categories were peer-judged for the first time, whereby every entry gets to choose their favourite cars and the results tallied by computer. This system is much preferred by the younger enthusiasts and got much discussion on the VW forums. It seemed to work well but we’ll stick with normal judging for the air-cooled categories for the time being.
Thanks to the club members who turned up on Saturday night to help set up, and worked tirelessly throughout the day, and followed up by cleaning up and leaving late on Sunday afternoon. They are the backbone of our club, and the committee really appreciated the effort that it took to have the most successful Nationals to date. This is testified by the positive comments and emails that have been received after the Nationals. Job Well done!! Couldn’t have done it without them.
Don’t forget to support our show sponsors this year. They are all listed on the back page of each month’s magazine. These people help us out, so if you’re looking for something for your VW, go along and see them. Thanks to all our sponsors on the day, without whom there would be no show.
Once again Volkswagen Group Australia supported our show. We had several loan vehicles for the show day display, and VWGA also set up a stand and shop manned by two lovely ladies. Karl Gehling from VWGA helped us with the presentation of the trophies for the car show – thanks Karl.
The food was once again excellent this year, with the people from Parramatta Rotary Club doing a great job of pushing the meals through. I did notice that we had a queue during the busy lunch period, but was informed that this went through quite quickly and it was only a short wait for the tucker bag. The queues were also long at times for the ice creams and coffee, so thanks for your patience. Sorry I won’t be attending the June meetings, as I will be on holiday in England.
Keepon Kruzin,
David Birchall
