It’s been touted over the last few years as New Zealand’s premier motorsport category and it would be hard to dispute that. The NAPA Central Muscle Cars have slowly built themselves into a formidable group that appeals to a wide variety of racing fans. This status doesn’t come without its issues though, and it is hard to maintain, but the upcoming season has some changes that should enable it to remain on top.

At its roots the NAPA Central Muscle Cars is still just a club. It is filled with car and racing enthusiasts who share the same goal – to thrash around in high horsepower classic muscle cars and have fun doing it. The only problem is, when you’ve grown to a level of stature that crosses the line to become more than just a club you need to have controls in place to keep things grounded.

While the club races to official rules they also have their own internal ones. They have their own judiciary system for racing incidents – and it’s brutal. If you cause an incident, if you trade paint with another car, you get hammered in the points and over the years it has dramatically changed Championship standings. 

But there is an advantage to this, it dramatically reduces the bash and crash that often happens in other categories, and that is a good thing when you consider that pretty much every machine is basically a showroom hot rod that is raced.

But the club also has to keep in mind that racing is racing, and sometimes rubbing happens. The judicial team looks at these things closely and their decisions are not casually made. The drivers are out there having fun but they are also intensely competitive and they all want to win, but they also have to remain calm knowing that it is not an FIA Championship win at all costs scenario.

There is one part of the recipe that is difficult to monitor though – the rules in regard to the machinery itself. While all the mechanical segments are easy to analyse, the engine is not, and there is a major change happening.

From this season on, all the cars will have a category supplied and sealed ignition box with a controlled loom to the distributor with an RPM chip to control the engine revs. To top it off they’ve added a small twist by removing 200 RPM from cars that win any non-handicap races. Then, if they don’t win scratch races in the next two rounds, they get their RPM back. It’s an intriguing decision made to challenge the drivers and teams – especially the regular front-runners like Angus Fogg, and current Champion Craig Boote.

However, for this new season it’s not just the rev rules that will have a major say on the Championship, because so too will the handful of new machines coming out to play. 

Among them is long time racer Steve Noyer who is doing a full rebuild on his Mustang to convert it from an underpowered standard Group 2, into a Nascar-engined, 3-link suspension, big braked Group 1. He’s not alone though, his colleague Mark Holland is also making the full switch and so both will be pedalling around 900 HP – almost double what they ran in Group 2.   

Then there is Andy Knight who has retired the Oldsmobile Starfire that almost won the Championship and will be returning to the fray with a purpose built Camaro, along with Hugh Gardiner will be turning up in a brand new fire breathing TransAm.

There is no question that the season will bring new and exciting challenges to the drivers, tactics will play a major part, but the fans will still get the same presentation – stunningly prepared classic machinery with that high horsepower rush.