Alastair and his friends find different ways to avoid the police as they take their racing obsession to the roads.

There was a huge motor racing emphasis in my high school, which meant you were socially dead if you didn’t have a car. All teenage boys saved up by working after school, at the weekends, at Christmas time, and spent it all on buying cars.

Back then third-party insurance was included with the car tax, it was magic system. Most of our friends had cars or their parents had cars: we all borrowed our mothers' cars and our fathers' cars. We were only a one-car family, which was quite unusual because we were middle class and lots of other people had two cars. Everything was about cars: you couldn't get a girl without one. You’d get the car to pick them up, take them somewhere, and bring them back again.

We used to organise our own races. We would leave the town on a Friday night and find somewhere quiet, which wasn't hard to do. The roads would just be square after square after square: the New Zealand pioneers had divided everything up like that. You could just park four cars to block-off the four corners of the grid and race around without scaring any locals. We used to literally line our parents and friends cars up and after 5,4,3,2,1 we’d race.

Eventually, inevitable, some farmer would get annoyed and ring the police. But the police weren’t very smart because they always used to come with the sirens on, like police always do, which means we could hear them coming for miles and all we had to do was stop racing and disperse. We’d pass them on the way back and wave gently to say hello and they’d arrive at the ‘track’ and we’d be gone. They never had the subtlety to turn up without their sirens on.

We used to know the local traffic cops and they knew us and they knew our cars and our techniques for beating them. The rear passenger had to look out the back window all the time to watch for police cars. We were chased by the police almost every weekend.

We were always learning how to evade them. The simplest thing to do was to go around a corner, slam the breaks on to a halt, park, and lie on the floor: the police would always fly straight past.

• 1943 Alastair's early years
• 1955 Licence to drive
• 1957 Alastair's High School years
• 1959 Evading the police
• 1960 Becoming a mechanic
• 1966 The Tasman series
• 1966 Leaving New Zealand
• 1967 Joining McLaren
• 1967 CanAm Door Catches
• 1967 Monza
• 1968 South Africa
• 1968 CanAm
• 1969 Driving the Formula 1 Cars
• 1973 Fittipaldi joins McLaren
• 1973 McLaren Team manager
• 1974 Montezemolo
• 1975 Hunt replaces Fittipaldi
• 1975 Hunt gets paid little
• 1976 Inventing the Air-Starter
• 1976 Six-speed Gear Boxes
• 1976 Misbehaving in Canada
• 1976 Japan
• 1977 Adidas Uniforms
• 1977 Changing Tyres
• 1977 Leaving McLaren
• 1979 Nelson Piquet
• 1980 Skirts on Formula 1 Cars
• 1981 Leaving Formula 1
• 1981 Making Lists
• 1981 Signing on
• 1981 Creating Space Station
• 1991 Highland Fling
• 1991 Classic Marathon
• 1992 Getting the Austin A35
• 1992 El Salvador
• 1993 Carerra Panamerica
• 1993 Centre of attention
• 1993 Nicest car in rally
• 1993 LeJog
• 2000 London to Sydney
• 2000 Porsche Racing
• 2000 Porsche Crashing
• 2001 Ferrari
• 2001 Inca Trail
• 2004 Berlin - Moscow - Berlin
• 2005 World Cup Rally
• 2007 Norway
• 2008 Liège-Brescia-Liège
• 2008 An Icelandic Odyssey
• 2008 North & West Africa
• 2009 West Coast America
• 2009 London to Casablanca
• 2010 New Zealand Festival of motor racing