Motor sport of another kind - Wigram

Motor Racing at Wigram – Part 3

As a harbinger of things to come, in 1928 Wigram (at that point of time, still called ‘Sockburn’) was an historic host to the first of what decades later would be a steady stream of overseas motor sport enthusiasts. On this occasion it was an aircraft that crossed the Tasman, not a racing car, as an Australian pilot, Charles Kingsford Smith, and his crew of three made the first flight from Australia to NZ, touching down on these shores at the Sockburn aerodrome.

At 9.22 am on 11 September, after a 14 hr 25 min. direct flight from Richmond, Sydney, a distance of 1,660 miles, the three-engined Southern Cross landed at Sockburn. Christchurch citizens had been alerted to this at short notice by radio from Wellington (the trans-Tasman flight had passed over the Capital at 7.15 am, en route to Christchurch) and a crowd of 30,000 arrived at the landing site, awaiting the plane’s arrival. Another 21 years would pass before a crowd of similar size and excitement would gather in that same place to witness motor driven events of a different kind.

Kingsford-Smith and his crew had been escorted from a point near Amberley in North Canterbury by four Bristol Fighters of the NZ Permanent Air Force. As the plane taxied to a halt the unrestrained crowd surged towards it. It took men mounted on horseback to clear the mass sufficiently for the 4-man crew to alight. They were then carried shoulder high from the aircraft through the waiting throng.

In crossing the Tasman Sea a severe storm had been encountered causing the plane to lose all short-wave radio contact. No word of their progress was available to watchers and waiters in New Zealand. Only that early Spring-morning sighting as the plane flew low over Wellington alerted the anxious population to their successful entry into New Zealand air space.

Interestingly, the average speed of the Southern Cross on that historic flight just topped 100 mph – a speed that ground-bound racing cars would not reach on that same Sockburn site until exactly 40 years later.

One sad task of the crew was to drop two wreaths in the Tasman in memory of an ill-fated attempt earlier that year to cross the Tasman from Australia by New Zealanders Moncrieff and Hood.

Part 2 – At First a NZ Air Force Base – Wigram

Part 3 – Motor sport of another kind

Part 4 – Wigram, the Motor Racing Circuit

Part 5 – Wigram Motor Racing: The First Decade

Part 6 – The Hey-day of International Motor Racing at Wigram