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.
1959 Evading the police
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.
