It's radical. And Radical.

December 08, 2020

Shooting at Hampton Downs today for Adrenalin Publishing's Ross MacKay.

Stumbled across Greg Brinck, hadn't seen him in more than two decades. Good bloke. Hell of a pedaller back in the day. Came from the mad world of motocross as I recall, and I reckon he is probably still pretty handy behind the wheel.

Greg is steering the launch of the Radical brand in New Zealand. He invited Ross to come drive one, and Ross invited me to take photos. How could I refuse?

These neat cars are new to New Zealand, but I remember salivating over the first such cars in the venerable Cars and Car Conversions way back in the day. Motorcycle-engined, light and slippery, they were well capable of simply driving past bigger and more powerful machinery in 'run what ya brung' racing.

Fast forward thirty years and that's exactly what the Radicals are still doing. Running on slicks, still with a motorcycle engine and transmission, but much, much more serious aero and a lot of evolution on and under the skin from those early cars.

Driven on the day, and likely the most popular locally, is the SR3XX. 0-100 in 3.1 seconds. 226 bhp pushing just 615 kg down the track. A solid 147 mph top speed. A massive spec designed to appeal to the keen enthusiast racer. An Aim solid-state 'data dash' with colour display in the centre of the formula-car style steering wheel. 1340 or 1500cc Suzuki Hayabusa engine. Six speed sequential transmission with paddle shifters. You use the clutch to get moving and not again during your session.

It's a single-seater race car with a two seats and a lovely slippery skin. It's a motorcycle on four wheels with massive race brakes. It's a slick-shod aero race car. So who better to introduce us to the Radical and ride shotgun on some laps than multiple Suzuka eight hour race winner, longtime Honda WSBK racer and BTCC touring car racer Aaron Slight?

I did comms for Castrol for a decade on my own behalf as a consultant. Before that I did the job in my role with PR and event company Creative Planners (which morphed into 1-4-1 and the faded from sight).

In that time Aaron was in his WSBK career zenith, a factory Castrol Honda rider. The Castrol Honda superbikes were, along with the Castrol Toyota Celica WRC cars, about the most instantly recognisable combinations in world motorsport.

We grabbed, rewrote and pushed out everything we could lay our hands on, and got factory images 'down the wire' (it took ages back then, even though I had the first 56k modem in Bates Advertising's building). Media loved it, especially when we gave them previews and wrap media releases and organised phone interviews for in-depth articles. talk about 'access all areas'. In fact in the copious media clip we monitored it was rare that the words Castrol and Honda were not followed by Aaron and Slight.

And all that time I never met the guy! Phone calls, tolls calls, faxed (email wasn't really workable in that time, especially as Aaron was never on the same continent more than a week).

So it was very cool to finally meet the guy in his new role as driver advisor to the media coming through Greg's Radical launch event.

I will let Ross talk about the drive experience; I just enjoyed the catch-up with Greg and meeting Aaron and photographing such an awesome new race car.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Radical, hitting the track in this country in two versions: SR10 and SR3XX.