Fresh Shipment Of Much-Needed Leaded Petrol Arrives In New Zealand

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

The New Zealand Government has done some good this week and secured a precious shipment of leaded petrol while the small island nation grapples with this latest crisis caused by forces well outside their control.

Images of the government's 1961 Thames Trader being loaded with barrels of good red petrol have been beamed all over the country to cheers and friendly backslaps.

Prime Minister Chris Luxon took to the government's social media pages to share the good news.

"Fucken how good is this? Liquid gold. So fresh, you could drink the stuff!" he said, shortly before his chief-of-staff had to physically restrain him from drinking some of the petrol.

For the past two weeks or so, the Government's Thames Trader has been run exclusively off kerosene, which it has not enjoyed.

Running the old Ford side-valve four on straight kerosene turned it into a miserable, loping, coughing monster. Cold starts were a drawn-out affair of grinding the starter and waiting for it to reluctantly catch, then sitting through a few minutes of uneven hunting and spluttering before it settled into a rough, soggy idle that sounded like a handful of bullets exploding after being thrown in a bonfire. Under load it cleaned up enough to keep moving but you could hear the difference. Flat, laboured, none of the usual bark, with the odd backfire through the carby. Meanwhile inside the engine the kero was washing down the bores and thinning the oil in the sump, the plugs were fouling up with carbon every few days and the combustion chambers were caking up with the residue of all that half-burnt fuel. It didn't wreck it, these old lumps are practically indestructible, but you'd fuck it eventually. It's happy to have good Super running through it again, that's for sure.

On the other side of the kiwi fuel crisis coin, Timaru man Robert Bruce told The Advocate that he's been forced to run his 2007 Holden Barina on avgas that he's been helping himself to at his employer's base near Pleasant Point. It's understood by our reporter that he is employed by a local helicopter business.

"It's been a bit grim but the avgas makes my Barina go like a shower of shit," he said.

"I can get from Watlington to work in 13 minutes. I'm getting wheelspin dropping it into 4th at 140. I've gotten to work once so quickly the thing sounded like a boiling jug when I got to work. The whole exhaust under the car was red hot, you couldn't even stand next to the thing!"

"Now it's back to leaded petrol again, back to my old 20 minute commute. No good."

More to come.