Originally Posted by
Spinaway
Have just read thru all this thread and enjoyed it.
Sorry to revive this Pat Hoare thread but just a wee anecdote to add.
Back in the mid 60s in Temuka as a high school boy my mate and I were dead keen on building slot car tracks and slot cars etc. So we knew what Ferraris were, and they were pretty cool. But we had never seen one.
An advertisement appeared in a local magazine or newspaper advertising that there was a Ferrari agency opened in Christchurch and they were eager for business. This is about 1966 I am guessing. We thought wow! how come there are Ferraris being sold in Chch, just up the road, in little old NZ ... can’t be true. So I thought I would write to this company. I sent off a general enquiry letter just seeking a bit of Ferrari info, in a naïve manner I guess. Waited a few weeks, and expecting no reply, then this big envelope arrived at our house addressed to me. It looked very fancy and official.
Opened it up and it was from this Chch Ferrari importer company. Must have been Pat Hoare's company I guess.
There was a beautifully typed long letter outlining all the different model Ferraris that I could buy, delivery times, and prices etc. Included were 5 or 6 multi-page A4 colour brochures of the Ferrari models mentioned. I had all the information I needed to buy a Ferrari haha. My father gave me a flea in my ear for writing away wanting to buy a new car.
But included under all this new Ferrari stuff there were two colour pictures taken of a used red Ferrari parked in Pat Hoare's garden. And with the pics was a hand written note from Pat Hoare saying that he also had available this used Ferrari right now, and a few details on it, plus price etc. It looked magnificent to me, and it was the rebodied 246/256 of course. It was all dreamland stuff of course, but I could score a few points with my slotcar mate.
My teacher at school used to say that my writing was terrible but it must have been good enough to convince Pat Hoare !
Anyhow that died down, and maybe 6 months later a car show was advertised as being held in Timaru soon. And the star attraction was going to be a red Ferrari sports car from a Mr Pat Hoare of Chch. Of course this was the rebodied single-seater and the Timaru Herald had an article that gave a bit of background on its history. The car show arrived, and amazingly my Father wanted to go in to it to check out a new car (not a Ferrari). So I did get to go and have a look at my first Ferrari and spent all my time there checking it out while my father was doing exciting stuff like trying my buy a Morris 1800 without overseas funds.
However I did get to have some cool Ferrari pics to stick inside the lid of my slotcar box.
Des Spillane