When the club acquired its site at 34 Milners Road in the 1980s a track was shoehorned onto the available land. It was not until after the track was created that the club received its title deeds and realised that it had also purchased 30 Milners Rd. The extra land, which has been mostly covered in scrub since we bought it, provides room for expansion.

In the early 2000s the club had to comply with Kartsport NZ rules in order to obtain a track rating, and the club went through a very trying period where it had to undertake a lot of improvements in order to allow the track to be used at all. The track was closed for a couple of months, but a strong turnout of members at working bees saw work such as improved spectator fences, new intrusion fences and new kerbing completed so a ‘C’ track rating could be obtained. Further work was undertaken in 2005 to lift our track rating from ‘C’ to ‘B’ by extending the back straight. Soon after, the entire track was resealed as the surface had deteriorated badly over the years. The ‘B’ rating allowed us to host the South Island Championships (2006) and NZ Schools Championships (2008).

We generally get on well with our immediate neighbours – No. 18 Milners Rd is a private farm which includes the trees on the hill at the north end of our track; 38 Milners Rd is owned by Fulton Hogan; the Taieri Golf Club owns the land immediately to the west of us, and for the last few years has allowed us to use part of their land for our “upper” pit area and toilet block. Over the last couple of years we have tried unsuccessfully to obtain ownership of some of the golf club’s land, but they have made it clear their own improvement plans place high value on the land we would most like to own – our upper pit area. They do however understand the track rating rules we operate under, and have undertaken to respect our need for run-off areas around our track.

Fulton Hogan intends to extract gravel from the golf club’s land at some stage in the near future. They had expected to start in April 2010, then in September, and finally got underway in January 2011. We don’t know what their current expectations are, but we do know that most of our upper pit area could disappear at any time. Fulton Hogan has indicated they will not require our toilets to be moved, but they will work very close to the toilets. Once Fulton Hogan’s work is complete, they will landscape the area in a way that suits the golf club, and gift their own land to the golf club. The golf club intends to develop two more holes so they don’t have to use the two steep hill holes they have. It is likely the golf club will make a lake near our upper pit area, as they want to store as much water as they can, in order to supply their summer irrigation.

For the last ten years or so the club has been wanting to extend the track, but has had higher priorities to deal with (eg resealing). In 2003 the club agreed on a proposed extension plan, which would see a loop coming off the existing track near flag point 2 with as long a straight as possible over the area currently covered by scrub. That plan is still the one we intend to achieve, although the details of the exact track alignment may change from the picture shown.  We would also like to add some height to the new piece of track to add interest, and enhance spectator viewing.

We believe we should be able to extend the track length to around 800 metres (it is currently 550 metres). We envisage the new track may require up to six flag points, and we are keen to minimise the number of flag points in order to make it easier to run race meetings.

The rules we must work to when extending the track are well laid out by Kartsport NZ in its track rating criteria. For those of you keen to understand more, the Track and Complex Rating Criteria can be downloaded from the ‘downloads’ page on Kartsport NZ’s web site.

Our aim with the extension is to have a track that is capable of attaining an ‘A’ rating, even though the rest of our facilities are not yet at that level. An ‘A’ rating would allow us to run the National Championships. The main criterion for an ‘A’ rating is that our new straight must be at least 120 metres long.

Over the last ten years the way we service our karts on race day has changed dramatically: we all used to arrive with our kart on a trailer, unload the kart and all our tools, and pit all day from one of the marked pit spaces on the concrete area in front of the clubrooms. (After wet race days we had to dry out not only ourselves and our karts, but all our tools as well!) Nowadays, most of us arrive with vans, trailers, tents, etc, and pit adjacent to our vehicles. The pit space we need for even a club day is at least twice what we used ten years ago. No tents are allowed on the concrete area (so that the entire track is visible from the tower), so nowadays no-one pits in that area. Once we lose access to the golf club’s land, we will find ourselves jammed in quite tightly, and in the long term we may have to relocate our pit area closer to the road and possibly shift the dummy grid and weigh shed up that end of the track as well.

There are some moves within karting to introduce drive-through penalties, although Kartsport NZ has indicated it is unlikely to make that a requirement in the foreseeable future. As we develop our facilities, we will endeavour to retain the ability to add a drive-through penalty area in the future.

It would be nice to have permanent lighting so we can run our night meeting without having to hire lighting towers. Provision for future lighting will be considered when we do the extension.

Our toilets are adequate, but we have to pay a contractor to pump out our holding tank every few months. In the long term, we would like to provide better toilets with a septic tank.

We expect that laying the track base and asphalt will cost around $300,000. That is a lot more than we have in the bank! We envisage the main source of funds will be charitable foundations and are mindful that those charities will expect us to make significant contributions ourselves. Charitable foundations are more likely to grant us several smaller grants than one large one. We envisage a lot of the club’s contributions will be the manpower we provide to complete specific projects such as fences via working bees.

Previous track improvements resulted in the club taking on a mortgage of almost $50,000. Mortgage payments are currently the club’s largest expense, and we anticipate being mortgage-free by mid-2012.

Recent funding initiatives include providing taping crews for the 2010 Rally of Otago, a raffle, and the logs in the car park that are slowly being turned into firewood.

In 2010 we received a grant for earthworks from the Caversham Foundation, as the first visible stage of track construction. 

We envisage the following work will have to be done in order to extend the track:
Improve drainage
Backfill for the extension
Provision for lighting
Track base course
Track sealing

Good drainage is essential to ensure our track remains in good condition. Water has been described as the roading engineer’s biggest enemy. A previous flood and subsequent frost started the break-up of the asphalt on the main straight that was fixed during the reseal in 2005.

Several years ago our drainage was improved by the addition of ditch along the base of the bank into the pond. Water drains from the pond and ditches very slowly because the outlet from our drains was restricted many years ago when additional fill was placed on the golf club’s land. Fulton Hogan has now cleared that area, so our drains will now drain away rather than having to rely on slow seepage and evapouration. We also have drain coil alongside the main straight, which passes behind the clubhouse before entering the open drain beside our access road.

We envisage the first significant step toward the track extension will be piping the open drain beside the access road and car park. Once the open ditch is covered we will have additional pit space available.

To maximise the area available for our track extension, we need to fill in the pond and the ditch beside the bank. We have not yet resolved the best way to do that, as the area beyond flag point 3 is very low lying. A piped drain from flag point 3 is not feasible, as the lack of fall would require the drain to be laid with too gentle a slope on it, and sediment would settle in the pipe, eventually blocking it. Instead, we will try to establish a soak pit near flag point 3 and prove its effectiveness before we do anything that would prevent our current drains from working. If a soak pit can not be established, we will probably create a field drain (a region of rock or gravel under the surface which allows water to flow freely along it underground) along the line of the existing ditch.

Our aim is to raise the ground level for the new track. That should achieve three things: make the track more interesting to drive on (ask anyone who has raced at Blenheim or Hamilton); give spectators a good view of the whole track from the main pit area; and make it easier to direct rainwater runoff into the drains.

We envisage fill will come from local contractors, as and when it suits them to dump here. We will only permit solid fill to be dumped, as anything that can rot, collapse, or move has the potential to cause slumps after the track is laid.

We were lucky enough to receive a lot of fill from Fonterra’s new Dukes Rd facility, but were unable at that time to place it where we really wanted it. The earthworks grant we received from the Caversham Foundation is being used to clear some of our land and relocate the fill.

It is likely to take at least a couple of years for enough fill to be placed.

Once the drains and fill are in place, the really expensive bit can start: providing a sound base for the track, followed by sealing and kerbs, etc. This part of the work will be the most challenging financially, as we don’t want to compromise the quality of any of the work by drawing out the process: it must be done reasonably quickly.

The design of the extension is such that we should be able to undertake virtually all work on the new track without having to close our existing track: we want to avoid having to close the track for a long time during extensions.