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Ground Forces, 2006

The New Zealand Army has 105 of these light armoured vehicles, known as NZLAVs, built by General Motors Defense, Canada. It is an eight-wheeled light armoured vehicle, which is crewed by three soldiers, and is designed to carry seven soldiers and equipment in the back. It has a 25mm cannon in a turret and two 7.62mm machine-guns. They have been in use in New Zealand since 13 August 2004, and are also used in the US, Canada and Australia.

It has 8 large wheels instead of tracks and can be driven on New Zealand roads. It can be driven with all 8 tyres flat because of run flat inserts inside the tyres, and it can even still be driven if it has a wheel blown off each side!

Here's a mock battle scene, with a jeep with a machine gun mounted in the back parked outside what appears to be a burned out building.

Some of these scenes were really well set up, and they added to the authenticity and interest of the vehicles and other displays.

This is another mock battle scene, with some World War II soldiers with a German military car (a Kubelwagen reproduction, built on a Volkswagen chassis) outside a wrecked building fascia.

I recently received this information from Richard Sutton of Christchurch: I'm the German soldier with the rifle on the far left of the photo, my partner Lauri is next to me, Daniel (I think) from Auckland is seated in the Kubelwagen (actually it is a reproduction built using a Volkswagen chassis). The three of us are dressed as German Gebirgsjagers (mountain troops). Mario on the far right is an actual Austrian soldier who has recently moved to New Zealand to live and is dressed as a German from the Italian Campaign. The other guy, Phil from Christchurch (I think) is dressed as a New Zealand war correspondent and spent most of the weekend photographing and filming the action for a short film he is making. The building started out as a wrecked building fascia for the WOW 2000 and has deteriorated since then. More information than you required but it is always cool seeing ones photo on the web.

In previous shows there have been various high-speed racing vehicles including: a Formula 1 car, a racing truck, V8s, etc. This year we had a replica of the famous highly modified Indian motorbike that Burt Munro used to set a world speed record. Burt was a famous New Zealander who is the subject of the movie "The World's Fastest Indian". He spent most of his life modifying an ancient Indian Scout to eventually race it at over 200 miles per hour.

This is a replica of Burt Munro's old Indian Scout motorcycle which he used to set speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1960s. He first visited Bonneville in 1962 and set a world record of 178.971 mph with the original capacity of the engine increased to 850cc.

In 1963 a con-rod broke while he was traveling at about 195 mph. In 1967, he had increased the capacity of the engine again to 950cc and set a class record of 183.586 mph. During qualification he made a one-way run of 190.07 mph (his fastest official time). During his visit of 1967 he got the speed wobbles and to steady the bike he sat up. The wind tore his goggles off and he couldn't see a thing. He lay down the bike and didn't do too much damage. At the time he was traveling at close to 206 mph (this incident is illustrated in the movie).

Use the controller above to view the bike zooming down the runway (this requires a modern HTML5 browser which supports the H.264 codec, and is an approximately 140K movie). Thank you to Denise Moulin for providing this video which she captured with her compact digital camera.