If you didn't know what to look for you would miss it – thinking it's just a farm. However, as you drive the Inland Kaikoura Road from the tiny North Canterbury town of Waiau, there's a secret only a few locals have known about till recently.
Australian IT billionaire David Dicker has been quietly beavering away from his air traffic control room-like office constructing an impressive facility on what was once Wandale Downs.
Rural News was lucky to get an extensive guided tour of the 587ha station that has been converted to a state-of-the-art factory and private supercar testing track.
Dicker bought the farm ten years ago with the goal of using it to produce his F Zero track car.
He founded his computing company in 1978 and has the distribution rights for several top computer hardware and software manufacturers such as Samsung, HP, Lenovo, Citrix and many more: it supplies exclusively to 3000 resellers. It's likely if you are using a PC or cloud computing in Australia or New Zealand that Dicker Data has had a part to play somewhere in the chain.
He says his foray into motorsport grew out of his frustration with yacht racing: "It's much better than yachting; there's so much sorting things out before you can go yachting, whereas in motorsport you can get in your car and go."
Dicker has long pursued the goal of building his own car and in the quiet hills around Waiau he is achieving it. Choosing NZ over the heavily restrictive environment in his home country Australia, Dicker has been spending about four-five months a year in Waiau supervising the project.
The track is the most obvious sign of his endeavours; currently two of the three stages are completed and it is almost three kilometres long. It has cost him nearly $2 million to get this done, but in typical Dicker fashion he has achieved it in a sensible cost-effective way.
After receiving quotes of $1 million to complete the stage one and several million more for stage two, Dicker did some research, bought the equipment and hired some locals with experience. He had them build the track; the difference in cost: stage one cost him $100,000 and stage two $755,000.
Having the staff with the skills has allowed Dicker to redeploy them on other tasks while waiting for consent approval on stage three. They are putting in the roads to the guesthouse and home he is building on the other side of the river from the track.
Stage three of the track will include a one kilometre straight and a 6 G corner that will enable them to fully test the F Zero car to its limits.
The track is a challenge for any driver, rising and falling over river flats, with hairpin bends, blind corners and steep inclines. But it is smooth: the benefit of having your own staff build is that it is probably the smoothest piece of roadway in NZ.
Dicker aims to do at least 20 laps a day around the track in some of his top-end sportscars to hone his skills for when the F Zero is ready for testing. He even has a GP2 car to use as a benchmark for the F Zero car.
Whilst the track is impressive, and there's many a petrolhead dreaming of owning their own track, it is in three big buildings onsite where the real magic of Wandale Downs is happening.
Inside these buildings is a full workshop the likes of which NZ has never seen before. There is a Kuka industrial robot, six foot tall 3D printers, water jet cutters, CNC milling lathes, a five metre long carbon fibre autoclave with its own nitrogen supply outside as tall as the building, a chrome plating plant and a suite of computer servers enabling the engineers to tweak design issues.
Whilst happy to let Rural News see the design drawings of his F Zero car and discuss its specifications, no photos were allowed of the plans; Dicker is still finalising aspects of its design.
